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wagon that smelled like …Clare tried to think of what it was. The Cape Cod Canal? They weren’t that close anymore, but it smelled as if they were.
    â€œIt would be nice if we could get back before dark,” said Richard, suddenly. “It’s always something to come to the bridge and look out over the marsh.”
    â€œI thought we already crossed the bridge,” said Clare.
    â€œWe crossed the Canal bridge. This is the bridge to the island. It’s a small bridge, wooden.”
    Clare thought he’d continue talking, but he didn’t. Eventually they turned off the main road onto a road that headed towards the bay, a road that got narrower and winding. They emerged from the woods, and the paved road ended. Richard stopped the car and turned off the engine.
    Clare looked at her father. He gave her a smile, and then gazed ahead, his hand outstretched, as if he was offering the view to her. In front of them was a marsh—a huge, flat, open space, that went on and on. The sun had just set and the sky was that trembling, soft pink before evening turns into night. It was absolutely quiet, as if sound itself did not exist. They sat there for a while,looking at the still marsh, and Clare let herself sink into the quiet. I’ll remember this, she thought. I’ll remember this quiet and the way this looks, this enormous marsh, and the sky at dusk. I’ll use this sometime in a story. The first job of a writer, Peter had told her, was to be an observer. And she was training herself to do that. Not just observing things, but finding a way to translate them into words in her head, storing them up to use later. That’s what Peter did, for the stories he wrote, for the novel he was working on. It was reassuring now to be thinking of a story, to imagine herself as a character in a story, instead of just herself, a girl in this bare, open place, with a man who was her father, but a man whom she didn’t know at all.
    After a few minutes Richard started up the engine again. “Time to cross the Blackfish Island Bridge,” he said.
    The bridge was, in fact, wooden, and it was just wide enough for one car. They drove up one side, across a creek, then down to the marsh on the other side. The car’s tires thumped on each plank.
    â€œWhat if someone’s coming the other way?” Clare asked.
    â€œDoesn’t happen too often,” said Richard. “And if it does, one car waits on the side till the other’s crossed over. No need to worry. No cars in sight.”
    â€œI wasn’t worried,” said Clare. “I just wondered.”
    â€œUnless, of course, it’s one of those washashores, in one of those monster houses on the dunes, tearing over this bridge in their SUV.”
    â€œWhat’s a washashore?” asked Clare.
    â€œIt’s what they call newcomers, around here.”
    â€œI guess I’m a washashore,” said Clare.
    â€œYou? Not you, Clare. You’re third—no, fourth-generation Blackfish Island. It’s your great-grandparents who built the original cottage out here.”
    â€œBut I’ve never been here before.”
    To her surprise, Richard stopped the car, stopped the car right where they were on the sand road, in the midst of the darkening marsh. He turned to her.
    â€œWhat made you think that?” he asked.
    Clare shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. She felt a little frightened. Not that he was angry, but that it seemed as if he might become angry.
    â€œYou came here every summer, when you were little,” said Richard. “Vera didn’t like it out here, so wecame for only a week or two. But you were certainly here.” Now he sounded more sad than angry.
    He started up the car again and continued driving. The road was so rutted Clare grabbed onto the seat to steady herself for the bumps. It didn’t seem as if they were on a real road, just a worn path through the marsh