The Lost by Jack Ketchum

short at least and Nin wrote about her fiction so much in the Diaries —which she far preferred to this stuff—that she’d thought she’d ought to give it a try. Now, though, she was bored with the thing.
    She glanced across the beach and saw that Bess was faced in her direction and caught him watching her. Damn this kid! He was making her uncomfortable. Which also made her angry. Couldn’t a woman just lie on a beach without some dipstick kid gawking at her, wishing he could crawl all over her?
    Go get yourself laid for godsakes .
    His eyes darted away. They’d be back though. She’d bet the farm on it.
    Okay, schmuck , she thought. I’ll give you something to gawk at .
    She dug into the bag for the suntan lotion and took off the cap and set it beside her on the blanket. Then she reached around in back of her and unsnapped the clasp to her halter and slid the straps down off her shoulders. It was the first time her breasts had seen the sun this year though not nearly the first time they’d seen the sun. But they were pale and they’d burn quickly without the lotion and besides, she had the feeling that watching her smooth the lotion over them would unravel Bess completely so she did it slowly, taking care not to look at him, Bess wasn’t even there , feeling the nipples stiffen under her fingers. As in more ways than one, she rubbed it in.
    When she was through and her breasts were glistening she lay back on the blanket and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Shutting everyone out. Feeling the nipples slowly soften again. She wondered how many women went topless here. It was no big deal in California but it might be here. She wondered if word would get around. She wondered if he’d tell Ray and if he did, what he’d think.
    She decided she really didn’t give a damn on any of these questions and took the sun.

Chapter Twelve
    Schilling
     
    Evenings were the worst times, not the nights.
    Nights he could lose himself sitting in front of the television set with a couple of beers and it was fine even to fall asleep that way sitting in his chair, feet up on the hassock. He didn’t need the bed.
    But evenings like this after leaving Teddy Panik’s the sheer goddamn emptiness of his days would wrap around him like a dull soft glove. The glove concealed a fist. One that could hurt him. He made it a rule not to have more than three or four tops at Teddy’s bar because more than that and he knew he’d be nothing but a drunk again. They were calling them alcoholics these days but that was bullshit. What they were were drunks. The problem was that three or four wouldn’t get him past the glove, that sense of uselessness that had settled over him since Lila took his son Will and daughter Barbara to Arizona to live close to her parents in Mesa.
    Will was eleven when that happened and fifteen now. Barbara had just turned seven. It struck him as very interesting that Barbara was Elise Hanlon’s mother’s name too and he wondered if that had anything to do with the bug up his ass on this one. But he didn’t know from psychology and it probably didn’t matter anyway one way or another. The bug was there. Sometimes he thought since Elise died it was just about all that was there.
    Ed Anderson called it obsession but there you went with the psychology again.
    He’d been a lousy father, he knew that. A slightly better husband. Slightly . There had been so much physical going on between him and Lila that it had the power to smooth out a lot of the rough spots. The sex was wonderful, had been ever since they met in high school. And so was the tenderness. Their sensitivity to each other’s touch remained a constant between them no matter why they were doing the touching, whether it was for reassurance or just holding hands or foreplay. The touch. They’d never lost that. Not until the distance between Jersey and Arizona made it impossible to touch.
    He remembered seeing her off at the airport. They were wildly early getting