My shitbox Ford Pinto jerked to a stop on Ebb Tide Way, with Sadie in my headlights, ocean winds whipping her hair into some frenzied thing—fully alive with ferocity, seeking escape, her eyes uncertain that I was going to stop.

I wasn’t sure either.

Sadie clenched a paper-plate taco brimming with beach pizza that she’d bought at Fia’s on the Boardwalk, probably with her last dollar bill.

Thin, crispy crust like a communion wafer, worshipped as devoutly, a conduit for delivering a holy cesspool of cheese and grease straight to our thighs. Its sweet, red sauce kept it honest, covering a teepee of salt, smashed flat like Wiley E. Coyote himself, pancaked under some immense weight from the Acme Corporation.

“Open the fucking door, Charlene,” Sadie snapped and pulled up on the door handle so hard that she rocked that tiny shitbox. “We got to go.”

I wanted to keep it locked and peel away.

But I leaned into the passenger’s seat until I could see my grandmother’s pearl necklace swinging inside the wide neck of Sadie’s peasant blouse. Beth had given her that necklace.

The knob came up with a thunk. Sadie had become that last link to Beth, a lost cause my big sister had adopted before she herself ultimately became the lost cause. Overdose. Sadie had been there that night.

I hadn’t. Sadie called me from a payphone. I didn’t pick up. Beth died.

Now I picked up every call.

Sadie held one slice of pepperoni pizza between her teeth and spun the other frisbee-style onto my denim skirt, burnt cornmeal gritty like beach sand against my skin. She slid into the car, casting the spent paper plates to the night’s sea breeze. Like seagulls, they floated away in my rearview, vanishing into the ghostly black and white swirls of mayflies that drifted through a flickering streetlight struggling to stay lit.

She was wearing Beth’s blue flip-flops too, with the scrut of the two years since “the overdose.” It happened at Ferreira’s Funpark, in the shadow of the broken-down Ferris wheel, a hulking corpse that rose above the salt marshes that lined Route 1.

“It’s good, right?” Sadie asked—more said—catching a trickle of tomato sauce with her finger before it could drop from her chin and soak into the denim of her cut-offs, bleached white by summers of seawater. “What?” she asked when I didn’t answer.

I wasn’t eating my pizza.

“Where’d you get the money for this pizza?” I asked. Sadie was nineteen, but she’d never held down a job.

She shrugged and adjusted the side mirror. She was checking her thick lashes and the even thicker lines of her eyeliner in the moonlight. Channeling Farrah Fawcett, Charlie’s Angels. Beth’s favorite show.

“Friendly guys.”

“Sadie, stop it with the guys already.”

She dangled an arm outside the open window, her fingers tracing the wind as it picked up with speed. She had polished her nails the same color as the Pinto’s cheap, wine-red vinyl seats.

“They’re going to think you’re loose,” I said.

“You sound just like Beth,” Sadie snarled, the beach-at-night whirling by in flurries of sounds and lights.

She’d said her name. Neither of us knew what to say next.

When the silence finally burst under its own weight, Beth’s ghost had receded to the still depths of our thoughts.

“What kind of guy this time?” I asked.

I eyed the rearview, watching for the blue flashers of the Seaborough Police Department, the wideset headlights of their Plymouth Fury cruisers. Sadie came to the beach to cocktease guys, but she targeted cops. She reveled in the challenge—the danger of those powerful men who demanded obedience.

With a sharp finger, Sadie poked me out of my thoughts. “You don’t want to know,” she said to my question and all the other questions I didn’t ask.

She turned away and flung open the door. Wind, wet with seawater, swirled in. My stew of receipts and parking tickets—prayer cards from Beth’s wake—rose to form small tempests, writhing, grasping at our hair.

“Sadie!”

She slammed the door shut, too hard, and the whole car shook.

“Relax, Charlene. I wasn’t going to jump. Door didn’t shut all the way.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter and turned to me. “This guy had ten bucks,” she said. “Enough for the pizza and to fill Beth’s gas tank.”

Every fucking chance she had, she reminded me that I got Beth’s car. And she hadn’t.

I didn’t take the bait. She just rolled her eyes and grabbed a ‘Gansett from the cooler. Beth’s ghost grew quiet again.

“What happened to your shirt?” I asked.

The royal blue linen had been ripped so high that the white lacy cup of her bra poked out.

“What happened to your shirt?” she moaned and then ripped away the tab on the beer, tossing it to the night air outside where it flew away on the wind like a firefly flickering red in my taillights. She’d mocked my voice since I was little. They both had. “You still miss all the details,” she added.

“What details?” I asked.

She picked at the torn front of her shirt with a nail that wore its history in a rainbow of old polishes. “This,” she said, “for starters. And with Beth too,” she added, with her trailing-off voice. “We both missed the details … when the end started coming.”

The smell of drying seaweed assaulted my nose. Somewhere in the darkness, waves crashed against the shore. Sadie held the cigarette lighter, fidgeting, red-hot circles floating amidst the twilight hues of blues and greens cast by the dashboard’s lights.

“No.”

“Charlene … you’re even still driving her car.”

“You’re wearing her necklace, her clothes.”

“Fucking stop, Charlene,” she said. “Alright?” She ripped a Sears catalog from the backseat, Beth’s name typed across its yellowed mailing label.

She opened to the section with bathing suits and slid her last dollar bill along the page as if she were trying to keep her place in an early reader book.

Under her fingers, women lolled on fake sand in bikinis the color of bluebells. Did they have pasts? Like we did? Or had they written simpler once-upon-a-times, like we had, when we were three little girls, making first communions in tissue-paper dresses, racing back from church to build sandcastles on the beach, our only worry when the high tide would come to obliterate them?

“Did you try yours on yet?” Sadie looked up and ran her finger along the binding between the pages.

I nodded, but I was lying. We had bought two bathing suits the week before, with a twenty-dollar bill we got from Sadie’s last time ripping off cops. “They could have done more to save her, Charlene,” she’d say, if I asked, so I didn’t anymore. We both knew she was right.

“Bette Davis Eyes” came on ‘RKO. Beth’s favorite song.

At the morgue, after the overdose, after the cops didn’t do enough to save her, after she was gone, her eyes were still open, staring blindly out into the world she had just left.

After there was nothing else we could do for her, she was just lying there, under a cheap white sheet, unseeing in the absolute silence of death. After she had been waiting for me. After I hadn’t come.

I came, but I was too late.

I twisted the volume knob until Kim Carnes’ voice filled the car.

But Sadie spoke over it. “Pull over here,” she said, shoving aside Beth’s ghost, who stared into the ocean of my grief, with the same glazed, dead eyes I couldn’t unsee from the night of the overdose.

“Get out,” Sadie said as she flung the catalog into the back seat. Like a dead bird, its pages fluttered like feathers against the cheap vinyl.

“Come on, Charlene.”

I stepped out into the tall grass on the side of Route 1. A catamaran’s lights cut across the calm waters far out on the ocean. I squinted into the canopy of stars overhead, searching, and not finding—not knowing what I was even looking for.

“Charlene,” Sadie said. Her stare was going to burn holes into me.

I looked at her.

“Come on,” she beckoned again.

She led me away from the surf and into a wall of salt-sick evergreens that some gardener had tried to shape into a privacy hedge.

“I’m not sure we’re supposed to go in ….”

“Come on, Charlene…” she nudged me in the small of the back. “Don’t say anything, ok? It’s important.”

And I didn’t.

The sticky needles of stunted evergreens pricked my arms.

The light was dim, and I just had Sadie pushing at my back to lead me forward.

My feet swept easily over the scrub, tan grass. Five steps in and then ten.

Somewhere, beyond the ring of hedges that defined that awful place, the shrill mew of a sick cat broke the silence; a machine clicked on. I jumped.

But Sadie pushed me on.

Then she tugged the waist of my skirt. I stopped.

“Are you ready to talk about the night it happened?” she asked.

I looked at her, comprehension waking in my thoughts, unease flaring inside me. Sadie had brought me to the threshold of hell, Ferreira’s Funpark, where a hundred demons hid in the shadows of the Ferris Wheel, raining flakes of rust into our hair.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“To face it, Charlene. Beth’s not coming back.”

My hands clenched, my nails digging half-moon welts into my palms.

“I should’ve been there, Sadie.”

“Oh, Charlie,” she said, voice breaking, using the name Beth called me, they both had called me, when we were little. “I was there. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“I should’ve picked up the phone when you called.”

“We can’t hold onto the past if we want to keep living, Charlene. That’s what death is. Staying in the past.” Sadie kicked at a chain link fence that once kept people away from the moving Ferris Wheel. Moonlight illuminated the specks of chrome that hadn’t been lost to time. “If we keep holding onto the past, we’re trapped with her, and she wouldn’t want that.”

“I can’t leave her behind, Sadie, I leave her. Beth doesn’t exist here.”

My eyes adjusted to the clearing. I searched all its dark forms, trees, hills, grasses for Beth, but she wasn’t there. I always thought she would be, if I came, that somehow, she’d be alive again. We’d have some serendipitous meeting. She’d be young, beaming, happy—like she was before the drugs—restored like Jesus rising from the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Sunday morning, ready to hand out endless, everlasting I-forgive-yous like the miracle with the fishes and loaves of bread.

“Do you know what she was thinking about, Charlie, at the end?” Sadie asked. Her hair smelled of seawater and cigarettes and baby oil when she hugged me. My cheek pressed against the sunglasses she was using as a hairband. She smelled like Beth.

“The beach,” Sadie said, in the hushed tones of whispers struggling against sobs. “She was remembering coming here, the three of us, building sandcastles, you with your little pink bucket. Carrying the seawater up to wet the sand, asking if the sandcastles would stand for a thousand years if we never left. If we stopped the waves from coming to wash them away. Do you remember, Charlie?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“We couldn’t stay forever, any more than we could stop the waves, but, you know what we do have, Charlie?”

“The memories,” I answered.

“Fucking right. Memories,” Sadie said, waving an arm at the ghosts of the Funpark surrounding us, “This happened. She happened. Memories don’t die.”

We held each other, until a cloud crossed through the moon, crying away all the bad, but grasping like hell at all the good.