“Borrowed it from one of Dad’s best customers,” he said. “I’m giving him a coffee cake tomorrow to thank him. But we have to get going.”
“Okay,” I said, completely confused about what the rush was, but settling myself onto the front bench. Henry took the back, and started to row us across the lake with surprising skill. I turned to face him, and pulled my knees up to my chest as I just enjoyed the ride, the way we skimmed fast over the lake until we were far enough from the dock that it appeared tiny.
Henry stopped rowing and hooked the oars over the sides. Then he pulled out his phone to check the time, the light of his screen unexpectedly bright. “Okay,” he said. “Almost time.”
I looked around. We were in the middle of the lake; I couldn’t see what we were almost on time for. “Henry?” I asked.
He smiled, and turned off the lantern. He lowered himself onto the floor of the rowboat, on the sleeping bags, and gestured for me to do the same. I did, crawling up to meet him. When I was next to him, he lay back down and I followed, ducking under his arm and finding my spot. We rocked in the boat for a moment, the only sound that of the water lapping against the sides and the cicadas humming all around us. He leaned down and kissed me quickly, then traced his finger down my cheek and smiled at me. “Ready for your surprise?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, looking around, wondering if I was missing something. “But—” Just as I started to say this, I heard the hiss of another firework being let off. And then, right above us, a firework exploded, huge and golden, seeming to take up the whole sky. “What is this?” I asked, looking up at him, but only briefly, as more fireworks were coming, one right after another.
“I go to school with one of the guys who works for this company,” he said. “And he agreed to delay a couple, so that we could get a really good spot to see them.”
“This is amazing,” I murmured, looking straight up above me into the night sky, watching it get overtaken by bursts of color and light. I had never before seen fireworks lying in a boat and looking up at them, but I knew as I watched them above me, that it would be now the only way I would ever want to see them. “Thank you,” I said, still not quite able to believe that Henry had arranged this—a private fireworks show, just for us. I stretched up and kissed him, and behind my closed lids, I could still see the flashes of light as the display continued in the sky above us.
After a few more fireworks, the show ended, and Henry and I clapped from the boat, even though we knew that nobody would be able to hear us. And even though watching the fireworks had been the whole reason for taking the boat out, it was so nice, just drifting there, that neither of us seemed to feel any need to go back right away. We unzipped one of the sleeping bags and slipped into it, as it was starting to get a little chilly, not to mention damp, out on the lake.
We kissed until my lips were numb and my heart was racing, and we were both out of breath, and then our kisses changed to ones that were more lingering and softer, and then, when we were taking a small break to get our breath back, we just started talking, as we drifted across the lake, the sky huge and star-filled above us.
Maybe it was because it was dark, or because we weren’t looking right at each other, or because it was just what happens when you’re lying in a rowboat with someone. But we started talking about much more serious things than we had yet talked about. I told him what had happened with my mother, and how seeing her about to cry had scared me so much. He told me about how he worried about Davy, especially since he would be leaving for college in a year and wouldn’t be there to take care of him. And I told him what I hadn’t said out loud yet, but had been thinking for the last few weeks—that I knew my father was getting worse, and I was terrified about what was going to come.
The gaps in our conversation got longer and longer, and I finally closed my eyes and rested my head against Henry’s chest, feeling warm and secure in his arms, surrounded by the soft flannel of the sleeping bag, with the boat rocking me gently back and forth. I felt myself yawn, and a moment later, I heard Henry echo me, and even though I’d had trouble sleeping all summer, I could feel myself falling into sleep, right there in Henry’s arms, under the stars.
It was starting to get light out by the time we woke up and rowed back to the dock. I’d woken up to find that I had a series of mosquito bites on my neck—pretty much the only piece of me that had been out of the sleeping bag—while Henry had gotten about five on his hand. At first, I’d been incredibly embarrassed that I’d fallen asleep, wiping my mouth quickly, just hoping that I hadn’t drooled on him by accident, hoping that my breath wasn’t terrible. I’d never slept next to anyone (unless Lucy on my trundle bed counted, and I had a feeling that it didn’t) and was worried that I’d accidentally kicked him, or muttered in my sleep, or something.
But if I had, Henry didn’t mention it and didn’t seem bothered. I pulled the sleeping bag around my shoulders as I sat next to him on the back beam while he rowed us home. Henry had a faint crease mark along the side of his face, from where he’d slept on the sleeping bag’s seam, and his hair was sticking up in little tufts all over. And for some reason, this made him look even cuter than he normally did.
We tied up the boat and took the equipment out of it, moving quickly. Mr. Crosby normally left for the bakery a little before six, and Henry wanted to get inside so that he could pretend he’d been sleeping there the whole time.
“Thank you for my surprise,” I said, trying with all my might to resist the urge to scratch at the mosquito bites on my neck.
“Of course,” he said, leaning down and kissing me quickly. “I’ll call you later?”
I felt myself smile, and as I stretched up to kiss him again, I found I no longer cared if my breath was terrible.
I walked up the yard and around the side of the house, humming the tune that Warren had gotten stuck in my head. I was about to head inside when I stopped short—my dad was sitting at the table on the screened-in porch, a mug of coffee in front of him.
I swallowed hard and climbed the porch steps, feeling my face get hot. “Hi,” I murmured, trying to smooth my hair down, knowing exactly what this looked like.
My father was wearing his familiar blue pinstripe pajamas, with a plaid robe over them. He shook his head at me as he took a sip of his coffee, but there was something in his expression that let me know just how much he was enjoying this. “Late night?” he asked.
“Kind of,” I said, feeling myself blushing harder than ever. “Um, Henry took me out in a rowboat to see some fireworks, and then we kind of fell asleep.” Just hearing it, I realized how ridiculous it sounded.
My dad shook his head. “If I had a dime for every time I’d heard that excuse,” he said gravely, making me laugh. He arched an eyebrow at me, and I recognized the pun expression, even on my father’s much thinner face. “I’m afraid that excuse isn’t going to float,” he said, as I groaned, and took the seat next to him. “It’s kind of an either-oar situation. And if it doesn’t hold water…”
“Enough,” I said, laughing. I looked at him as he lifted the mug with both hands and took another sip. “Why are you up so early?”
He faced the back of the screened porch, the side that looked out to the water. “Wanted to watch the sunrise,” he said. I looked in that direction as well, and we sat in silence for a moment. “I should probably be lecturing you,” he said, glancing over at me. “But…” He trailed off and smiled at me, shrugging. He pointed outside, where the whole sky was turning the palest shade of pink, the color of Gelsey’s pointe shoes. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he asked, his voice not more than a whisper.
I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “It is,” I murmured.
“I don’t know how many of these I’ve missed, or just taken for granted,” he said, his eyes on the lake. “And I told myself I was going to get up for one every morning. But I have to tell you, kid,” he said, looking over at me, “I’m just so tired.”
And as h
e said it, I realized that he did look exhausted, and in a way that I’d never seen before. There were deep lines in his face I didn’t recognize, and bags underneath his eyes. It looked like the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t come close to making up for, the kind of tired that went down to your bones.
There was nothing I could do to fix this, or make it better. So I just nodded and pulled my chair a little closer to my dad’s. And together, we watched the sky lighten and transform, as another day began.
chapter thirty-two
I FINALLY GOT WHAT DICKENS WAS TALKING ABOUT. IT WAS THE best of times and the worst of times, all mixed into one. Because things were great with Henry, with Lucy, at work, even with my siblings. But every day, my father got worse. The FedEx truck bearing my dad’s work documents stopped coming, and I’d thought it was just an anomaly until three days went by. Mom told me when my dad was napping one afternoon that his firm had pulled him off the case. This sent my father into a funk like I’d never before seen from him. He didn’t get dressed, barely combed his hair, and snapped at us when we tried to talk to him—making me realize how much I had relied on him being who he was, the cheerful and punning father I’d taken for granted.
But it did give me an idea. Leland and Fred both agreed, and it was arranged while my dad took his late-afternoon nap. When he woke up, Warren helped him outside, where the Movies Under the Stars—Edwards Family edition—had been set up. Leland had agreed to run the projector, and we’d spread out blankets on the back lawn, down by the water, to watch what my father had always promised was the perfect bad-day antidote.
It was a much smaller crowd than normally assembled at the beach—just us, Wendy, Leland, the Gardners, and the Crosbys. I turned the introduction duties over to my dad, and we all got very quiet while he did his best to raise his voice so he could tell us, in no uncertain terms, how much we were all about to enjoy The Thin Man. And as we watched, I was able to pick out my father’s laugh above everyone else’s.
The movie helped shake him out of his funk, but just seeing him like that had been enough to scare me. The next couple of weeks fell into a pattern almost like a pendulum, with the good and the bad in constant flux, and I could never fully enjoy the upswing because I knew that there would be a downswing coming shortly thereafter.
We all started staying in at night, and spending the time after dinner sitting around the table, not rushing off to meet our dates (me and Warren) or catch fireflies with Nora (Gelsey). After much protesting from my mother, we excavated the old battered Risk board and set it up in the living room, where it became a shrine to strategy. And later on, when it got too dark or cold to stay on the porch, we all came inside to play the game, until my dad started yawning, his head drooping, and my mother would declare détente for the night and she and Warren would help my dad upstairs.
“Because,” I said as angrily as I could, to my mother, “I haven’t trusted you since you left me for dead in Paraguay. That’s why.”
“You tell her, Charlie,” my brother said in a monotone, as my mother flipped pages, frowning.
“Sorry,” she said, after a minute, as Kim and Jeff both groaned. “I don’t—”
“Page sixty-one,” Nora hissed. “At the bottom.”
“Oh, right,” my mother said. She cleared her throat. “I’ll ruin you, Hernandez,” she said to me. “I’ll wreck you and your whole family until you beg for mercy. But mercy won’t come.” She looked over at Kim and Jeff and smiled. “That’s very good,” she said, causing Nora to throw up her hands and my dad to applaud her performance.
Because we weren’t going out, people started to come to us. The Gardners occasionally stopped by, mostly to use us as impromptu actors to hear the current draft of their screenplay read aloud. Nora would take notes for her parents, and they kept casting my mother, despite the fact that she was constantly pausing mid-scene to offer her opinions.
When we weren’t butchering the Gardners’ script with our terrible line readings or playing Risk, we’d watch movies on the old corduroy couch, all my father’s favorites. And while he’d start off telling us more trivia than we ever wanted to know about The Americanization of Emily or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he would usually fall asleep halfway through.
Sometimes Wendy or Henry came over for the movie or to take sides in the battle for global domination—it was only with Henry’s help that I’d finally conquered Russia—but usually it was just the family, just us five. And I found I liked it. I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier.
But it wasn’t like I was spending the whole night inside. I would usually sneak out later, once everyone had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d paddle the kayak across to Lucy’s dock and we’d sit for hours with our feet dangling in the water, talking. She remained oblivious to Elliot’s crush but had also given up on Brett after he’d sent her a booty-call text by accident—it had been intended for someone named Lisa. One Saturday night, we’d all met up at the beach at midnight—me, Henry, Elliot, Leland, and Lucy. Rachel and Ivy, the other lifeguards, had bought us a few six-packs in exchange for Leland taking over some of their shifts, and we’d had a party on the dark, empty beach. We’d gone nightswimming and played I Never—it turned out that Lucy pretty much Always Had—and I’d ridden back on Henry’s handlebars as it was starting to get light out, my damp hair twisted up, closing my eyes and feeling the wind against my face as he brought me home once again.
But parties on the beach or nights with Lucy were the exception. If I was sneaking out, it was usually to go next door. I knew by now which one was Henry’s bedroom, and he knew mine. Luckily, we were both on the ground floor, and I became practiced at creeping across to his house, and drumming my fingers lightly on the glass of his window. Henry would meet me, and we would either go out to the dock, or his old treehouse, if he knew Maryanne was out of town. If it had been a particularly bad day with my dad, I’d always find myself going over to Henry’s. There was something so terrible in what was happening to my father, made all the more awful because I was powerless to stop it. And as he deteriorated, each new version of him replaced the other, and I had trouble remembering when he hadn’t just worn pajamas and a robe all day, when he hadn’t struggled to eat all his meals, his hands shaking as they tried to bring food to his mouth, coughing as he tried to make himself swallow. When he hadn’t needed help to stand or sit or walk upstairs, when he’d been the one to lift our heavy boxes, and throw Gelsey over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and when I was very little, carry me in from the car after long drives when I’d pretend to fall asleep. It was getting hard to remember who he’d been last week, let alone who he’d been four months ago, when everything had seemed fine.
He had started sleeping late in the mornings, though I still found myself jerking awake at eight, expecting him to be there, tickling my feet, telling me to get a move on, that we had pancakes to eat. I continued to go to the diner on my days off, getting our food to go, and bringing it home to him. But after three trips with his toast in its Styrofoam container sitting on the counter, uneaten, I’d stopped.
After the particularly bad nights—like when he’d snap at my mother, then look immediately regretful, and like he was on the verge of tears—I’d head to Henry’s as soon as the house was quiet and sleeping. Despite our talk in the rowboat, I usually didn’t want to go into what was happening, even though he always gave me the opportunity to. Mostly, I just wanted to feel his arms around me, solid and true, while I tried to shut out the feelings that were hurting my heart with a thousand tiny pinpricks, which was somehow worse than having it broken all at once.
Whene
ver it got really bad at home, I would know that there was happiness waiting for me just around the corner, right next door. But whenever I found myself in a moment of happiness—laughing with Lucy, kissing Henry, conquering Asia with a shoestring army—I’d suddenly get shaken out of it, since I knew that much worse was coming down the pike, and really, I had no right to be enjoying myself when my father was going through this. And there was always the uneasy knowledge that, soon, there would be a breaking point.
“And this,” Henry said, wrapping his arms around my waist, “is where the magic happens.”
“Is it?” I asked, stretching up to kiss him. We were behind the counter at Borrowed Thyme, through the stainless steel swinging doors, back where the ovens and prep stations were. I’d had the day off, so I had come downtown to pick up some things for my mother and to visit Henry. Finding the store in a between-customers lull, he’d taken me behind the counter to show me how things worked.
“I was just about to ice some cupcakes,” he said, pointing to a mixer bowl full of white buttercream icing that, even from here, smelled delicious. “Want to help?”
“Maybe,” I said, sliding my hands around his waist and kissing him again. I was in a great mood—my dad had had a good morning, been up and alert and making terrible puns at breakfast, I didn’t have to work, I was with Henry, and there was a lot of frosting just there for the taking. Lucy was caught up in her latest boy—I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be around long, so I’d just taken to calling him Pittsburgh—so I knew she wouldn’t give me a hard time for not hanging out with her, which meant I had all afternoon to spend kissing Henry. Breaking the moment, my phone trilled in my bag across the counter. I listened for a second—it was the ringtone for the house’s landline. I started to go to answer it when I realized that it was probably Gelsey.