Read St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves for Free Online

If you were eight, and nearsighted, and nostalgic for places that you’d never been.
    But if the Glowworm Grotto actually exists, that changes everything. Olivia’s ghost could be there now, twitching her nose with rabbity indignation—“But I left you a map!” Wondering what took us so long to find her.
    When I surface, the stars have vanished. The clouds are turning red around their edges. I can hear Wallow snoring on the pier. I pull my naked body up and flop onto the warm planks, feeling salt-shucked and newborn. When I spit the snorkel out of my mouth, the unfiltered air tastes acrid and foreign. The Glowworm Grotto. I wish I didn’t have to tell Wallow. I wish we’d never found the stupid goggles. There are certain things that I don’t want to see.
             
    When we get back to Granana’s, her cottage is shuttered and dark. Fat raindrops, the icicles of the tropics, hang from the eaves. We can hear her watching
Evangelical Bingo
in the next room.
    “Revelation 20:13!” she hoots. “Bingo!”
    Our breakfast is on the table: banana pancakes, with a side of banana pudding. The kitchen is sticky with brown peels and syrup. Granana no longer has any teeth left in her head. For the past two decades, she has subsisted almost entirely on bananas, banana-based dishes, and other foods that you can gum. This means that her farts smell funny, and her calf muscles frequently give out. It means that Wallow and I eat out a lot during the summer.
    Wallow finds Olivia’s old drawings of the Glowworm Grotto. We spread them out on the table, next to a Crab Shack menu with a cartoon map of the island. Wallow is busy highlighting the jagged shoreline, circling places that might harbor a cave, when Granana shuffles into the kitchen.
    “What’s all this?”
    She peers over my shoulder. “Christ,” she says. “Still mooning over that old business?”
    Granana doesn’t understand what the big deal is. She didn’t cry at Olivia’s funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia’s name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors’ garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: “Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.”
    “Wasn’t much for drawing, was she?” Granana says. She taps at stick-Olivia. “Wasn’t much for swimming, either.”
    Wallow visibly stiffens. For a second, I’m worried that he’s going to slug Granana in her wattled neck. Then she raises her drawn-on eyebrows. “Would you look at that—the nudey cave. Your grandfather used to take me skinny-dipping there.”
    Wallow and I do an autonomic, full-body shudder. I get a sudden mental image of two shelled walnuts floating in a glass.
    “You mean you recognize this place, Granana?”
    “No thanks to this chicken scratch!” She points to an orange dot in the corner of the picture, so small that I hadn’t even noticed it. “But look where she drew the sunset. Use your noggins. Must be one of them coves on the western side of the island. I don’t remember exactly where.”
    “What about the stars on the roof?”
    Granana snorts. “Worm shit!”
    “Huh?”
    “Worm shit,” she repeats. “You never heard of glowworms, Mr. Straight-A Science Guy? Their shit glows in the dark. All them coves are covered with it.”
    We never recovered Olivia’s body. Two days after she went missing, Tropical Storm Vita brought wind and chaos and interrupted broadcasts, and the search was called off. Too dangerous, the Coast Guard lieutenant said. He was a fat, earnest man, with tiny black eyes set like watermelon seeds in his pink face.
    “When wind opposes sea,” he said in a portentous singsong, “the waves build fast.”
    “Thank you, Billy Shakespeare,” my father growled under his breath. For some reason, this hit Dad the