Boar Island by Nevada Barr

twining in her hair; the light refractions from the sea were as sharp as the salt smell. Suddenly she felt very alive. Leaning her head back, she looked up a hundred and fifty feet to the top of the old lighthouse. The base had to be at least forty feet in diameter, and the walls fourteen feet thick, at least at the bottom.
    The lighthouse was the single bit of architectural grace. The rest reminded Heath of the Winchester House in California, as if each owner had been driven to keep on building regardless of how haphazard the design. Forming an awkward V, with the lighthouse at the point, two wings—one of them two stories, the other three—blew back from the original tower, then petered out in drunken angles to finally die in piles of stone and timber. A century of winds had piled the debris along the skirt of the high granite wall on the northeast side of the island.
    “If this place isn’t haunted, I want my money back,” Gwen said.
    “I’m afraid we’ll turn out to be the evil spirits,” Heath said, thinking of the sudden—and to her, inexplicable—changes in her daughter. “Elizabeth has gone from Junior Jekyll to Rising Senior Hyde. It’s like she’s turned into a different person in a matter of days. Did I ever act like that?”
    “For a year or two. You went through a bad patch when your dad remarried.”
    “Everything I do is wrong.” Tears of self-pity and frustration flooded Heath’s eyes. “Wind,” she said, wiping them away. “I haven’t a clue how to respond to her this way.”
    “Do what she asked you to do about a million times,” Gwen said.
    Her aunt’s sharp tone offended Heath. It was as if Gwen thought she was a fool, or worse. “And what is that?” Heath snapped.
    “Give her electronics back,” Gwen said.
    “You’re joking,” Heath said, aghast. The night of Lady Schick and the tub, Heath had taken everything of E’s that needed a charge to run.
    “That’s what she wants. I think she’s made that clear enough,” Gwen said.
    E had complained bitterly for a few days, then quit speaking of it. Why? Heath asked herself. Because she accepted that Mom was right? Decided her cyberlife sucked and she was glad to be out of it?
    “Give her back her iPad, iPod, iPhone—whatever-all teens carry these days. Life as she perceives it is in the toilet, and now you’re forcing her to go through withdrawal. Electronic media is an addiction of E’s generation,” Gwen said with exasperating patience.
    “Addiction my ass!” Heath grumbled. Cocaine was an addiction. Heroin was an addiction. A telephone was not an addiction. It was an affectation.
    “You saw the crap she’s getting on her phone and laptop,” Heath said.
    “So did she. She knows what is there; is it any worse imagining what’s there? Not being able to communicate with friends because it is there? Because we don’t understand being addicted to social media doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Addicted isn’t even the right word. It is the new normal. She feels like you’re punishing her for something she has no control over,” Gwen said.
    Heath resented the intrusion into her maternal bailiwick as much as she wanted her aunt’s advice. Lose-lose situation. “The last time I checked, there was one of a threesome with her face Photoshopped over the woman’s. I can’t bear the thought of her looking at that stuff,” Heath said.
    “How do you think she feels having you see it? Or me? Though I’ve delivered hundreds of babies, she sees me as a little old lady who doesn’t know where babies come from.”
    “She doesn’t see you that way, you know,” Heath said.
    “Elizabeth is drowning in shame.”
    “She’s been through worse, real threats, and she was so strong,” Heath almost wailed, and cursed herself for being a weakling. For respectable mothers, children are Achilles’ heels.
    “But she can’t fight this one. You can’t fight this one. The enemy has no face. The enemy might be her friends. Her