“Son,” my dad said, cutting him off. “Maybe over dinner?”
“You got it,” Warren said, flushing slightly as he walked out. A moment later, I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car engine starting.
My dad looked at me over his computer screen and raised an eyebrow. “So, kid. Your mother really asked your brother to get the pizza?”
I tried to hide a smile as I pulled at a loose thread at the end of my T-shirt and shrugged. “She may have suggested either of us. I delegated.”
He shook his head, smiling slightly as he looked back down at his papers. He hadn’t stopped working when he was diagnosed, claiming that he was just going to finish up a few loose ends, but I knew that he wouldn’t have been happy if he wasn’t working. He’d been a partner at his law firm, specializing in appeals. He went into the office every Saturday, and most Sundays as well. It was just normal that he was only at dinner one or two nights a week, working the rest of the time. I’d gotten used to the phone ringing late at night or early in the morning. I’d gotten used to hearing the faint hum of the garage door opening and closing at four a.m. as he headed into the office early, someone’s last hope at a second chance.
“What are you working on?” I asked, after he’d been typing in silence for a few minutes.
“A brief,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now. Would have had it done sooner, but…” He let the sentence trail off, and I knew what he meant. A few weeks ago—three to be exact—we’d found out what was wrong with him, which had derailed everything for a while.
“That doesn’t sound so brief,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when my dad smiled.
“Nice,” he said approvingly. My father loved puns, the more groan-inducing the better, and I was the only one who tolerated them—and, for that matter, tried to respond in kind. “I just…” He looked at the screen, shaking his head. “I just want to get this right. It looks like it might be my legacy.”
I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.
“Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.
The bathroom wasn’t big enough.
This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.
“You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.
“You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.
“I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.
Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.
I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.
“Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.
When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.
“Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub. “Pholcidae.” My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.
“Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from where she was practically hiding behind my mother—which seemed a tad melodramatic to me.
“No,” my father said. “I’m just going to need a piece of paper and a glass.”
“On it,” Warren said, hustling out and returning with one of my magazines and a water glass. He handed them across the threshold to my dad, and then the rest of us all hung back. It wasn’t only arachnophobia—my father took up almost the whole of the small bathroom. He’d gone through college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker, and still was big, despite some of the weight he’d lost recently—tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, trained over years to carry across courtrooms to jurors’ ears.
A moment later, my dad emerged from behind the shower curtain, holding the glass pressed to the magazine. The spider scrambled frantically from one end of the glass to the other, over the features of the starlet who adorned the cover. My dad grimaced as he straightened up, and my mother immediately took the magazine from him and thrust it out to me.
“Taylor, set this free outside, would you?” She took a step toward my father, and asked, her voice more quiet, “Are you okay, Robin?”
While Robin was my dad’s full name, he went by Rob, and the only times I heard him called Robin was when my mom was angry or worried, or my grandfather was visiting.
My father was still wincing, and I didn’t think I could stand to see it, something I’d almost never seen before—my dad in pain. Magazine and trapped spider in hand, I turned away, glad for an excuse to leave.
I headed out the front door and down the steps to the gravel driveway, where I lifted the glass. Expecting the spider to crawl away immediately, I was surprised when it stayed where it was, frozen over This Summer’s Top 10 Beauty Tips. “Move,” I said as I jiggled the magazine, and finally it got the message and skittered away. I shook out the magazine, and was about to go back inside, but the thought of the expression on my dad’s face caused me to leave the magazine and glass on the porch and walk down the driveway toward the road.
I was barefoot, and every step made me flinch, reminding me just how long it had been since I’d been able to do this without shoes on—how long, in fact, since I’d been back here. When I was halfway down the driveway, I reached our bearbox—a wooden, weighted contraption designed to keep the bears from getting into the trash—and had to stop and give my feet a little rest, noticing the fireflies’ lights starting to blink on and off in the grass. Then I practically hopped my way to the end of the driveway, and stepped onto the paved road.
Though I didn’t want to, I found myself gravitating next door. The lights were on in what I now knew was Henry’s house, spilling out from the windows into squares on the gravel driveway. I looked at the lighted windows, wondering if he was home, and if so, which room was his, when I caught myself and realized I was being ridiculous. I looked away and noticed, for the first time, that there was a tent pitched next to the house, a round camping one. As I stared, the tent lit up, throwing whoever was inside into silhouette. I turned and took a few steps up the street quickly, walking nonchalantly, as though I were just out for an evening stargazing session.
Which actually seemed like a pretty good idea, I decided, as I took in the moon above me, huge in the sky, sendi
ng sheets of light down onto the road. I tipped my head back to search for stars.
I’d loved them ever since I was little, and my grandfather, a naval officer, had sent me a book about constellations. I hadn’t ever been good at identifying them, but the stories stuck with me. Lovers exiled to the ends of the universe, goddesses punished for vanity and hung upside down. Whenever the night was clear enough, I’d look up, trying to make out patterns in the sky, trying to see what had caused those long-ago people to tell stories about what they saw. The stars were always easier to see in Lake Phoenix, and tonight they seemed to take over the entire sky. I just stared up at them until it felt like I could breathe, maybe for the first time that day. Maybe for the first time in the last three weeks.
I really didn’t know how I was going to get through the summer. It had only been a few hours, but it already felt like more than I could handle. It was like we were all just pretending that nothing was happening. We weren’t even talking about the reason that we had all decamped there. Instead, we’d spent dinner listening to Warren go on about how pizza was invented.
I turned to head back to the house when I stopped short. The dog from that afternoon was sitting at the edge of our driveway, where gravel met pavement. I looked up the street, to see if there was an owner coming, leash and plastic bag in hand. The streets of Lake Phoenix were safe enough, and usually deserted enough, that people walked their dogs off the leash. The only time I’d heard about this being a problem was when the Morrisons were walking their mean poodle one night and encountered a bear, no doubt on a bearbox trash bender. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison had beat a hasty retreat, but their poodle, on the other hand—who, in addition to being mean was also apparently not too bright—seemed to think the bear was just a big dog and trotted over to say hello. At some point, the dog figured out that this was a terrible idea, and ran away, unscathed. After that, I never saw the Morrisons walking it without a leash—and a very short one, at that.
But the street tonight was quiet, no late-night walkers looking for their slightly irregular canine. I took another step, and the dog didn’t get up and move, or even stiffen. Instead, its tail thumped harder, like I was just the person it had been waiting to see. I saw that the collar was a faded blue, which meant it was most likely a boy, and that there was writing on his tag. So he had a home, he just was choosing to avoid it. At that moment, I could relate.
Wherever the dog lived, though, he obviously lived somewhere, and that somewhere, despite what he seemed to think, was not our driveway. I walked around him, and headed back to the house, figuring that the dog would be able to take care of himself. I’d gone only a few steps when I heard a faint jingling sound behind me. I turned back and saw the dog following me. He froze in his tracks, then sat hastily, as though I wouldn’t notice that he had moved. Feeling like I was in a bizarre game of Red Light, Green Light, I pointed back at the road. “No,” I said as firmly as possible, trying to remember all the lessons from Top Dog. “Go.”
He lowered one ear, tilting his head, and looked at me with what almost looked like a hopeful expression as his tail thumped on the ground. But he didn’t leave.
As I looked closer, I could see that he looked a little mangy, some of his fur matted. But I figured that made sense—if his owners had been really on the ball, they probably wouldn’t be letting their dog wander around at night on his own.
“Go,” I said again, even more firmly this time. “Now.” I kept making eye contact, like the show always advised. The dog just looked at me for a second, then his other ear dropped and he seemed to sigh. But he did stand up—which actually didn’t change much, heightwise, since his legs were a little short for his body. He gave me one more long look, but I tried not to show any signs of wavering. And after a moment more, he turned and started slowly down the driveway.
The dog walked to the end of the gravel, paused, then turned left and headed down the street. And even though I’d intended to go right in, I watched the dog getting smaller and smaller, hearing the jingle of his tag growing fainter, until he finally rounded the curve in the road and disappeared from view.
chapter six
THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE WITH A START. I BLINKED AS I LOOKED around the room, for a second not remembering where I was. Then my eyes fell on the penguin on my dresser, and it all came back to me. I groaned and rolled over again, but even as I closed my eyes, I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep.
I sat up and squinted out at the sunlight that was streaming in through my window. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day, for all the good that was going to do me. I got out of bed, and after looking at the penguin for a moment, I stuffed it on the top shelf of my closet and shut the door, so it wouldn’t be the first thing I saw when I woke up every morning.
I headed down the hall, throwing my hair up into a messy pony-tail as I went, noticing that the house was incredibly quiet. I glanced at the microwave clock when I reached the kitchen and realized why—it was eight a.m. In the not-so-distant past, my father would have been up for hours by now. He would have brewed a pot of coffee and would be halfway through answering that morning’s e-mails, already settling down to work. The sight of the empty coffeemaker was enough to remind me that things had changed. That the normal I somehow kept expecting things to revert to was not going to come back again. I might have made a pot myself, but I had no idea how to make coffee—that had always been my dad’s responsibility, along with remembering important information.
Not really wanting to hang out alone in a silent house, I headed outside. I would usually have gone to the dock, but after my encounter with Henry the day before, I wasn’t sure I was going out to the dock ever again. So instead, I stepped into my flip-flops and walked down the driveway, figuring that maybe by the time I got back from my walk, other members of my family might be awake, and then we could…
I paused in the middle of the driveway, realizing that I didn’t know how to complete that sentence. I had no idea what I was going to do this summer, except witness the end of my world as I’d always known it. The thought was enough to propel me forward, as though I could somehow leave it behind me, along with the house and its silent coffeemaker.
I deliberately turned and started walking in the opposite direction of Henry’s house, and noticed for the first time that we appeared to have new neighbors there as well. At any rate, there was a Prius in the driveway and a sign I didn’t recognize that read CUT TO: SUMMER.
Dockside Terrace, our street, was empty this early in the morning, except for a sleepy-looking man walking an energetic golden retriever. As I walked, I found myself noticing the signs in front of all the houses, and realizing how many of them I remembered. Almost all of the houses in Lake Phoenix had names, not numbers. But our house had never had a sign, since we could never reach a consensus about a name. We used to take a vote every summer, but nothing had ever seemed to quite fit.
I’d been walking for maybe twenty minutes when I decided to head back. It was starting to get hotter out, and the more joggers and dog-walkers who appeared, all waving cheerfully to me, the more aware I was that I had literally just rolled out of bed, and wasn’t wearing a bra. I was turning around when I noticed a gap in the woods that ran alongside the road. My memory was a little foggy on the details, but I was fairly certain that there was a path through here that ran almost directly back to my house.
I paused on the threshold of the woods before stepping into the gap. As soon as I did, it was like I had entered a different world. It was quieter and darker, with the sunlight filtering down to the ground in shafts and dappling the leaves of the trees. I hadn’t been in the woods in years, and as I started to follow the trail, I realized how familiar it all was, the beads of dew on the moss, the smell of the pine trees, the snap of twigs and leaves underneath my flip-flops. It was the same feeling as going back into the house had been—the realization that just because you’d left something behind didn’t mean that it had gone anywhere.
And as I walked, I found, to my surprise, that I had missed it.
Half an hour later, I was no longer feeling so warm and fuzzy toward the woods. I had lost whatever trail I thought I’d been on. My legs were scraped up from twigs, my neck had been feasted upon by mosquitoes, and I didn’t even want to think about what my hair looked like. But mostly, I was annoyed at myself, and a little incredulous that I had gotten lost so close to home.
I didn’t have my phone, which, with its built-in compass, not to mention GPS, would have come in handy at the moment. I couldn’t see any houses around me, nothing to get my bearings, but I wasn’t panicking yet. For right now, I was still hoping that if I could just find the path again, I’d be able to trace my way back. I no longer cared about the shortcut—I just wanted to go home.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard a bird caw and then, a second later, heard the sound called back—but badly, and not by another bird. A second later, the bird call repeated, slightly improved this time, and I headed in the direction I’d heard the sound come from, walking fast. If there were bird-watchers in the woods, it meant that maybe they could direct me back to the road, that maybe I wasn’t completely lost.
I found them soon enough—it helped that the bird-imitation calls kept coming—two guys, one tall, one around Gelsey’s height, both with their backs to me, both looking fixedly up at a tree.
“Hi,” I called. I was beyond worrying about embarrassing myself. I just wanted to go home and get some breakfast and put calamine lotion on my bites. “Sorry to bother you, but—”
“Shh!” the taller one said, still looking at the tree, in a loud whisper. “We’re trying to see the—” He turned around and stopped abruptly. It was Henry, and he looked as surprised to see me as I felt.
I felt my jaw drop again, and hurriedly closed it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was blushing, and I wasn’t even tan enough yet to hide it. “Hi,” I muttered, crossing my arms tightly over my chest, wondering why each time I saw him, I somehow looked worse than I had before.