Everything had changed. Or, more accurately, everything was going to change. But nothing had really changed yet. And it made the condolences odd—as if people were saying how sorry they were that my house had burned down when it was still intact but with an ember smoking nearby, waiting.
“I will,” I said quickly, saving Connie from having to stammer through one of the well-meaning speeches I was already sick of hearing—or even worse, telling me about some friend of a friend who had been miraculously cured through acupuncture/meditation/tofu, and had we considered that? “Thank you.”
“Take care,” she said, putting more meaning in those words than they usually had, as she reached out and patted me on the shoulder. I could see the pity in her eyes, but also the fear—that slight distancing, because if something like this was happening to my family, it could happen to hers.
“You too,” I said, trying to keep a smile on my face until she had waved again and headed down the street, dog leading the way. I continued in the opposite direction, but my escape no longer felt like it was going to make things better. What was the point of trying to run away if people were going to insist on reminding you of what you were running from? Though I hadn’t felt the need to do it for a while now, running away had been something I’d done with real frequency when I was younger. It had all started when I was five, and I had gotten upset that my mother was paying attention only to baby Gelsey, and Warren, as usual, wouldn’t let me play with him. I’d stomped outside, and then had seen the driveway, and the wider world beyond it, beckoning. I had started walking down the street, mostly just wondering how long it would take for someone to realize I was even gone. I was soon found and brought home, of course, but that had begun the pattern, and running away became my preferred method of dealing with anything that upset me. It got to be such a routine that when I used to announce from the doorway, tearfully, that I was leaving home forever and ever, my mother would just nod, barely looking at me, telling me only to make sure to be back in time for dinner.
I had just pulled out Gelsey’s iPod—willing to suffer through even the Bentley Boys if it meant a distraction from my thoughts—when I heard the low rumble of the sports car behind me.
It occurred to me that I must have been gone longer than I’d realized as I turned around, knowing what I would see. My father was behind the wheel of his low-slung silver car, smiling at me. “Hi, kid,” he said through the open passenger-side window. “Want a ride?”
Knowing that there was no point in even pretending any longer, I pulled open the passenger side door and got in. My dad looked across at me and raised his eyebrows. “So what’s the news?” he asked, his traditional greeting.
I shrugged and looked down at the gray floor mats, still pristine, even though he’d had the car for a year. “I just, you know, felt like a walk.”
My dad nodded. “Of course,” he said, his voice overly serious, as though he completely believed me. But we both knew what I’d really been doing—it had usually been my father who would come and find me. He always seemed to know where I would be, and rather than bringing me right home, if it wasn’t too late, we would go out for ice cream instead, after I’d promise not to tell my mother.
I buckled my seat belt, and to my surprise, my dad didn’t turn the car around, but instead kept driving, turning onto the road that would take us downtown. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“I thought we could use some breakfast,” he said, glancing over at me as he pulled to a stop at a red. “For some reason, all the bagels in the house seem to be sesame.”
I smiled at that, and when we arrived, followed my dad into Stanwich Deli. Since the deli was packed, I hung back and let him order. As my eyes roamed over the shop, I noticed Amy Curry standing toward the front of the line, holding hands with a tall, cute guy wearing a Colorado College T-shirt. I didn’t know her well—she’d moved with her mother and brother down the street from us last summer—but she smiled and waved at me, and I waved back.
When my dad made it to the front of the line, I watched him rattling off our order, saying something that made the counter guy laugh. To look at my father, you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was truly wrong. He was a little thinner, his skin tone just slightly yellow. But I was trying not to see this as I watched him drop some change into the tip jar. I was trying not to see how tired he looked, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. But most of all, I was trying not to think about the fact that we had been told, by experts who knew these things, that he had approximately three months left to live.
chapter two
“DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS?” GELSEY WHINED FROM THE front seat for what had to be the third time in ten minutes.
“You might learn something,” Warren said from the driver’s side. “Right, Taylor?”
From where I was stretched out in the backseat, I pulled down my sunglasses and turned the volume up on my iPod rather than responding. Lake Phoenix was only a three-hour drive from our house in Stanwich, Connecticut, but it felt like it had been the longest car ride of my life. And since my brother drove like a senior citizen (he’d actually once gotten a ticket for driving too slowly and causing a traffic hazard) it had taken us over four hours to get there—so it was getting close to actually being the longest car ride of my life.
It was just the three of us in the old wood-paneled Land Cruiser that Warren and I shared—my parents had gone on ahead of us, my mom’s car packed full with all the supplies we’d need for an entire summer away. I’d spent most of the trip just trying to ignore my siblings’ squabbling, mostly over what to listen to—Gelsey only wanted to play the Bentley Boys; Warren insisted we listen to his Great Courses CD. Warren had won the final round, and the droning, English accent was telling me more than I ever wanted to know about quantum mechanics.
Even though I hadn’t been back in five years, I had still been able to anticipate every turn on the drive up. My parents had bought the house before I was born, and for years, we spent every summer there, leaving in early June and coming back in late August, my father staying in Connecticut alone during the workweek and coming up on the weekends. Summers used to be the highlight of my year, and all throughout school I would count down until June and everything that a Lake Phoenix summer promised. But the summer I was twelve had ended so disastrously that I had been incredibly relieved that we hadn’t gone back the next year. That was the summer Warren decided that he needed to really start focusing on his transcript and did a pre-college intensive program at Yale. Gelsey had just switched ballet teachers and didn’t want to stop classes for the summer. And I, not wanting to go back to Lake Phoenix and face the mess I’d made up there, had found a summer oceanography camp (there had been a brief period when I’d wanted to be a marine biologist; this had since passed) and begged my parents to let me go. And every year since then, it seemed like there was always something happening to prevent us from spending the summer there. Gelsey started going to sleepaway ballet camps, and Warren and I both started doing the academic-service-summer-program thing (he built a playground in Greece, I spent a summer trying—and failing—to learn Mandarin at a language immersion in Vermont). My mother started renting our house out when it became clear that we were all getting too busy to take the whole summer off and spend it together in Pennsylvania.
And this year was supposed to be no exception—Gelsey was planning on going back to the ballet camp where she was the rising star, Warren had an internship lined up at my father’s law firm, and I had intended to spend a lot of time sunbathing. I was really, really looking forward to the school year ending. My ex-boyfriend, Evan, had broken up with me a month before school ended, and my friends, not wanting to split up the group, had all taken his side. My sudden lack of friends and any semblance of a social life would have made the prospect of heading out of town for the summer really appealing under normal circumstances. But I did not want to go back to Lake Phoenix. I hadn’t even set foot in the state of Pennsylvania in five years.
The five of us spending the summer together was something nobody would have even considered until three weeks ago. And yet, that was exactly what was happening.
“We’re here!” Warren announced cheerfully as I felt the car slow down.
I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked around. The first thing I saw was green. The trees on both sides of the road were bright green, along with the grass beneath them. And they were densely packed, giving only glimpses of the driveways and houses that lay behind them. I glanced up at the temperature display, and saw it was ten degrees cooler here than it had been in Connecticut. Like it or not, I was back in the mountains.
“Finally,” Gelsey muttered from the front seat.
I stretched out my neck from the awkward position I’d been sleeping in, for once in full agreement with my sister. Warren slowed even more, signaled, and then turned down our gravel driveway. All the driveways in Lake Phoenix were gravel, and ours had always been the way I’d measured the summer. In June, I could barely make it barefoot from the car to the porch, wincing every step as the rocks dug into my tender, pale feet, sheltered by a year of shoe-wearing. But by August, my feet would be toughened and a deep brown, the white of my flip-flop tan lines standing out in sharp relief, and I would be able to run across the driveway barefoot without a second thought.
I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats to get a better look. And there, right in front of me, was our summer house. The first thing I noticed was that it looked exactly the same—same dark wood, peaked roof, floor-to-ceiling windows, wraparound porch.
The second thing I noticed was the dog.
It was sitting on the porch, right by the door. As the car drew closer, it didn’t get up or run away, but instead starting wagging its tail, as though it had been waiting for us all along.
“What is that?” Gelsey asked as Warren shut off the engine.
“What’s what?” Warren asked. Gelsey pointed, and he squinted through the windshield. “Oh,” he said a moment later, and I noticed that he was making no move to get out of the car. My brother denied it, but he was afraid of dogs, and had been ever since an idiotic babysitter let him watch Cujo when he was seven.
I opened my door and stepped out onto the gravel driveway to get a closer look. This was not the world’s most attractive dog. It was smallish, but not the tiny kind that you could put in your purse or might accidentally step on. It was golden brown with hair that seemed to be standing out from its body, giving it an air of surprise. It looked like a mutt, with biggish, stand-up German Shepherd-y ears, a short nose, and a longish, collie-like tail. I could see it had a collar on with a tag dangling from it, so clearly it wasn’t a stray.
Gelsey got out of the car as well, but Warren stayed put in the front seat and cracked the window as I approached him. “I’ll just, um, stay behind and handle the bags,” he muttered as he passed over the keys.
“Seriously?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him. Warren flushed red before quickly rolling up his window, as though this small dog was somehow going to launch itself into the front seat of the Land Cruiser.
I crossed the driveway and walked up the three porch steps to the house. I expected the dog to move as soon as I got close, but instead it just wagged its tail harder, making a whapping sound on the wooden deck. “Go on,” I said as I crossed to the door. “Shoo.” But instead of leaving, it trotted over to join me, as though it had every intention of following us inside. “No,” I said firmly, trying to imitate Randolph George, the bespectacled British host of Top Dog. “Go.” I took a step toward it, and the dog finally seemed to get the message, skittering away and then walking down the porch steps and across the driveway with what seemed like, for a dog, a great deal of reluctance.
Once the danger of the rogue canine had passed, Warren opened his door and carefully got out, looking around at the driveway, which was empty of other cars. “Mom and Dad really should have been here by now.”
I pulled my cell out of my shorts pocket and saw that he was right. They had left a few hours ahead of us, and most likely hadn’t driven 40 mph the whole way. “Gelsey, can you call—” I turned to my sister, only to see that she was bent over almost in half, nose to knee. “You okay?” I asked, trying to look at her upside down.
“Fine,” she said, her voice muffled. “Just stretching.” She straightened up slowly, her face bright red. As I watched, her complexion changed back to its normal shade—pale, with freckles that would only increase exponentially as the summer went on. She swept her arms up to meet in a perfect circle above her head, then dropped them and rolled her shoulders back. In case her bun or turned-out walk wasn’t enough to tell the world that she was a ballet dancer, Gelsey had the habit of stretching, and often in public.
“Well, when you’re done with that,” I said, as she was now starting to bend backward at an alarming angle, “can you call Mom?” Without waiting for her response—especially since I had a feeling it was going to be something like Why don’t you do it?—I selected the key from the key ring, turned it in the lock, and stepped inside the house for the first time in five years.
As I looked around, I let out a breath. I had been worried, after summers of renters, that the house would have changed drastically. That the furniture would be moved around, that things would be added, or there would just be the sense—hard to define but palpable—that someone had been in your space. The Three Bears had known it well, and so had I, the year I came back from oceanography camp and could tell immediately that my mother had put some guests in my room when I’d been gone. But as I took everything in, I didn’t get that feeling. It was the summer house, just as I’d remembered it, like it had been waiting for me, this whole time, to finally come back.
The downstairs was open-plan, so I could see all the rooms that weren’t bedrooms or bathrooms. The ceiling was high, stretching up to the top of the peaked roof, letting in swaths of sun onto the threadbare throw rugs that covered the wood floors. There was the scratched wooden dining table we never ate on, which always just became the place to dump towels and mail. The kitchen—tiny compared to our large state-of-the-art one in Connecticut—was to my right. The door off the back of it led to our screened-in porch. It looked out on the lake and was where we ate all our meals, except in rare cases of torrential rain. And off the porch was the walkway down to our dock and Lake Phoenix itself, and through the kitchen windows, I could see the glint of late-afternoon sunlight hitting the water.
Past the kitchen was a sitting area with two couches that faced the stone fireplace, the place where my parents had always ended up after dinner, reading and doing work. Beyond that was the family room, with a worn corduroy sofa, where Warren and Gelsey and I usually found ourselves at night. One section of the built-in bookcases was filled with board games and jigsaw puzzles, and we usually had a game or puzzle going throughout the summer, though Risk had been put on the highest shelf, out of easy reach, after the summer when we all had become obsessed, forming secret alliances and basically ceasing to go outside as we circled the board.
Our bedrooms were all off one hallway—my parents slept in the master suite upstairs—which meant that Warren, Gelsey, and I would all have to share the one downstairs bathroom, something I was not looking forward to experiencing again, since I’d gotten used to having my own bathroom in Connecticut. I headed down the hall to my bedroom, peering in at the bathroom as I went. It was smaller than I remembered it being. Much too small, in fact, for the three of us to share without killing one another.
I reached my room, with the ancient TAYLOR’S PLACE sign on it that I’d totally forgotten about, and pushed open the door, bracing myself to confront the room I’d last seen five years ago, and all its attendant memories.
But when I stepped inside, I wasn’t confronted by anything except a pleasant, somewhat generic room. My bed was still the same, with its old brass frame and red-and-white patterned quilt, the trundle bed tucked beneath it. The wooden dresser and wood-framed mir
ror were the same, along with the old chest at the foot of the bed that had always held extra blankets for the cold nights you got in the mountains, even in the summer. But there was nothing in the room that was me any longer. The embarrassing posters of the teen actor I’d been obsessed with back then (he’d since had several well-publicized stints in rehab) had been removed from above my bed. My swim team ribbons (mostly third place) were gone, along with the collection of lip glosses that I’d been curating for several years. Which was probably a good thing, I tried to tell myself, as they all surely would have gone bad by now. But still. I dropped my purse and sat down on my bed, looking from the empty closet to the bare dresser, searching for some evidence of the fact that I had lived here for twelve summers, but not seeing any.
“Gelsey, what are you doing?”
The sound of my brother’s voice was enough to pull me out of these thoughts and make me go investigate what was happening. I walked down the hallway and saw my sister chucking stuffed animals out of her room and into the hall. I dodged an airborne elephant and stood next to Warren, who was eyeing with alarm the small pile of them that was accumulating in front of his door. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“They turned my room into a baby’s room,” Gelsey said, her voice heavy with scorn as she flung another animal—this time a purple horse that I vaguely recognized—out the door. Sure enough, her room had been redecorated. There was now a crib in the corner, and a changing table, and her twin bed had been piled high with the offending stuffed animals.
“The renters probably had a baby,” I said, leaning to the side to avoid being beaned by a fuzzy yellow duck. “Why don’t you just wait until Mom gets here?”
Gelsey rolled her eyes, a language she’d become fluent in this year. She could express a wide variety of emotion with every eye roll, maybe because she practiced constantly. And right now, she was indicating how behind-the-times I was. “Mom’s not going to be here for another hour,” she said. She looked down at the animal in her hands, a small kangaroo, and turned it over a few times. “I just talked to her. She and Daddy had to go to Stroudsburg to meet with his new oncologist.” She pronounced the last word carefully, the way we all did. It was a word I hadn’t been aware of a few weeks ago. This was when I’d thought my father was just having minor, easily fixed back pains. At that point, I wasn’t even entirely sure what the pancreas was, and I definitely didn’t know pancreatic cancer was almost always fatal, or that “stage four” were words you never wanted to hear.