But he was gone.

“C’mon, Mama. It’s so hot.” Lucy swung her legs over the side of her bed. The little girl stretched and rubbed her eyes. She wore only her panties, and her baby skin was already moist.

She wanted to hug her, because she was the only thing in this world that was really hers. But it was so hot. And the pain behind her eyes so great…she just didn’t have the energy.

Lucy crossed the room to look out the window. She leaned out as the music from the ice cream truck swelled as it neared their building.

“It’s the ice cream man!” Lucy turned to her mother. “Mama, it’s the ice cream man! I want some ice cream!” Already, she was rummaging in her drawers, looking for shorts and a shirt to throw on so she could run downstairs.

She put a hand to her forehead, trying to hide the wince from her daughter. “Honey, you can’t have ice cream for breakfast. C’mon, I’ll fix you a nice bowl of Cheerios.”

“I don’t want Cheerios! I want ice cream!” Lucy bounced up and down, features creasing with desire. Her lower lip was out and beginning to tremble.

Her mother shook her head. She had no money for luxuries like ice cream. Lucy would have to get used to that. She had money for hardly anything since he had left.

Lucy began to wail, staring out the window, arms outstretched beseechingly at the children and truck below her.

“Honey, c’mon.” She placed a comforting hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Her reward was Lucy shrugging the hand away. She turned to her mother, with tears glistening. “I hate you.” Lucy rushed into the bathroom and slammed the door.

She collapsed on her daughter’s bed, pulled the pillow over her head and lay there until the sweat trickled down her face to dampen the sheets. Wearily, she got up, crossed the hall to the bathroom door and tapped.

“Lucy? Better hurry up in there ’cause we’re goin’ to Coney Island!”

* * *

She put a hand to her own forehead, where her own headache was beginning. It was so easy to imagine them. Why did she want to, though? Why couldn’t she get the little girl and her mother out of her mind? She found herself thinking of them on her way to work in the morning, el train rumbling beneath her. She would think of them at her desk at the agency, thoughts drifting off for minutes at a time, imagining them, almost feeling as if she were coming to know them.

She didn’t want to think about them. Didn’t want to imagine a scenario in which she could make sense of what had happened. Who were they anyway? Why should the death of a child affect her so much? Was it because she had been about the same age as the little girl back in 1965? Her own mother never had the strength to spank her, let alone…

Oh God, the image rose up again. Her little lips parted, perhaps to draw in her final breath.

* * *

At Coney Island, heat shimmered off the sand. The beach was crowded, but not as bad as it would be on the weekend. She moved through the oiled bodies, the umbrellas and the transistor radios blaring songs like, “Alley Oop” and “Downtown,” hanging on to Lucy’s hand. The little girl had so much energy. Already, she was bouncing up and down at the sight of the Atlantic, pointing at the waves rolling in. “Look, Mama! Big waves today.”

She had only enough energy to nod at her daughter, giving her a wan smile.

They managed to find a space big enough for them to spread out the blanket they had brought from home.

“How about right here?” she asked.

But Lucy had eyes only for the sea.

She threw down the blanket, towels and beach bag. The heat was adding a twisting nausea to her gut, to keep company with the headache no amount of aspirin would alleviate.

Lucy let go of her hand and started running toward the surf. “Lucy! Lucy, come back here! Aren’t you going to help me put the blanket down?”

“You do it!” she cried, and ran, splashing, into the water.

Normally, she would have dragged the little girl back for sassing her like that, but she just didn’t have the energy. She began to unfold the blanket.

* * *

There must be a way, she thought, to rid herself of this imagining a dead girl and her mother. Perhaps she could go to a hypnotist and have the memory excised from her brain, like a growth. She knew she couldn’t do what she wanted most: turn back time to the day she went into the bookstore and listened to her own voice of reason when it told her not to look inside the book of crime scene photographs. But if we could do that, she thought grimly just before putting out the light next to her bed, everyone would be going back in time to correct his or her mistakes. She let out a whispered snicker in the dark: there would be no one in the present.

She wondered if the little girl’s mother had rued the day she had strangled her daughter. Had it been some horrible scar she had borne the rest of her life? Was she still alive in prison somewhere, able to see that same picture in Technicolor memory over and over, tormenting her so much she would want to die? Did she too wish she could turn back time and change the one thing on that day that led to her killing her own child? Or was she a sociopath with no feelings, not even for her own little girl? Had she died in the electric chair? What were her last thoughts? Were they of her daughter? Had she been relieved to die?

She turned over and closed her eyes, but the image from the book was there: imprinted on a matte of black inside her eyelids.

* * *

“Why?”

“Because I said so!” She didn’t mean to snap at Lucy. She realized just as her little girl was all shehad that all Lucy had was her mother. She deserved kindness.

But she could be so exasperating! She had never been an easy child: loving one moment, impatient and demanding the next…and always so active. What she wouldn’t give for just a small sample of the energy her daughter had. She had been trying for the last half-hour to get Lucy to come out of the water so they could go home. Her headache had only gotten worse. The heat and the sun had already caused her to vomit in the women’s restroom what little she had eaten that day.

And she had tried to give Lucy a nice day. It was nearing six o’clock. Many of the people on the beach had gone home to their suppers. The wide expanse of beach was no longer crowded, but dotted with just a few people, unwilling to leave.

She pushed the towels down into the beach bag, threw away the brown paper sack she had brought the apples and the cheese sandwiches in and returned to Lucy. She had run back into the water and was standing up to her neck, turned away from her mother.

“Lucy! Lucy, I am counting to five, little girl…”

But Lucy started a dog-paddle out toward the bright red buoys bobbing on the waves. Oh God, she’s going to make me come in and fetch her. Angry now, she began padding across the sand, feet coming down hard. She was tired to her bones and felt so sick she was beginning to wonder what was wrong with her. She couldn’t tolerate this behavior. This ingratitude.

She reached Lucy, who turned and giggled, splashed her mother, soaking the front of the blouse she had changed into for the ride home.

“You little bastard!” she cried, and then bit her lip. When he was around she had never even allowed himto use bad language in front of Lucy.

Lucy started dog-paddling away and, in order to follow her, she would have to get the bottom of her clam-diggers wet and she wasn’t about to let that happen. She grabbed onto her daughter’s ankle and tugged…hard. Lucy went under the water and came back up gasping and sputtering.

She pounded her back, then tucked her under her arm like a parcel and moved as quickly through the surf as she could, ignoring the stares of strangers that her daughter’s wails inspired. She set Lucy down hard on the sand, ignoring her tears.