“What are you doing here?” he asked in the same loud whisper.
“What, am I not allowed to be in the woods now?” I asked, not quite as quietly, causing the kid next to him to turn around as well.
“Shh!” the kid said, a pair of binoculars raised to his eyes. He lowered them, and I realized with a shock that this was Henry’s little brother, Davy—recognizable, but just barely, as the seven-year-old I’d last known. Now he looked a lot like Henry had at his age—except I noticed that Davy was very tan for this early in the summer and he was, for some reason, wearing a pair of moccasins. “We’re trying to track the indigo bunting.”
“Davy,” Henry said, poking him in the back, “don’t be rude.” He looked over at me again, and said, “You remember Taylor Edwards, right?”
“Taylor?” Davy asked, his eyes widening, looking up at Henry in alarm. “Seriously?”
“Hi,” I said, waving, and then immediately crossing my arms again.
“Why is she here?” Davy half-whispered to Henry.
“I’ll tell you later,” Henry replied, frowning at Davy.
“But why are you talking to her?” Davy continued, not really whispering anymore.
“Anyway,” I said loudly, “if you could just—”
There was a flurry of wings from the tree the Crosbys had been looking at, and two birds—one brown, one blue—flew into the air. Davy scrambled for his binoculars, but even I could tell it was going to be too late—the birds were gone. His shoulders slumped, and he let the binoculars drop on the cord around his neck.
“We’ll come back tomorrow, okay?” Henry said quietly to Davy, resting his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Davy just shrugged, staring down at the ground. “We should go,” Henry said, glancing up at me. He gave me a fraction of a nod before he and Davy started to leave.
“Um,” I started, knowing it would probably be better just to get it out, rather than stalking the two of them through the woods in the hopes that they might lead me home. And what if they weren’t even going to their house, and I ended up following behind them while they chased some other random bird? “Are you going back home? Because I’m a little turned around, so if you are…” My voice trailed off, mostly at seeing Henry’s expression, which was equal parts incredulous and annoyed.
He let out a breath, then leaned down slightly to talk to Davy. “I’ll meet you at home, okay?” he asked. Davy scowled at me, then took off into the woods at a run.
“Does he know where he’s going?” I asked, as I watched him disappear from view. He certainly seemed to, but that’s what I’d thought when I entered the woods as well.
Henry seemed to find this funny for some reason. “Davy knows these woods like the back of his hand,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up in a half smile. “He just took his shortcut—God knows how he found it. I’ve never even seen it, but it gets him home in half the time.” Then Henry seemed to realize who he was talking to. The smile faded, and the annoyed expression returned. “Let’s go,” he said shortly, and headed off in a totally different direction than I’d been walking.
We tromped through the woods in silence for a few minutes, Henry not looking at me, but straight ahead. I was just counting down the minutes until I would be at home and this would be over.
“Thank you,” I finally said after I couldn’t take the silence any longer.
“No problem,” Henry said shortly, still not looking at me.
“I just…” I started, not really sure where I was going with this, but feeling like I needed to explain somehow. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was just trying to find the way home.”
“It’s fine,” Henry said, a little less brusquely than before. “We’re going to the same place, after all. And besides,” he said, looking at me directly for a moment, that ghost of a smile returning, “I told you it would be inevitable.”
I started to respond when I noticed that our path was blocked—there were two enormous trees down, moss already growing all over their trunks. Mixed in around the fallen trees were pieces of lumber, boards of different sizes. “What is that?” I asked. The whole thing, the downed trees and the jumbled pieces of wood made for a huge obstacle—where the pile was the highest, it reached almost up to my waist.
“Last month’s storm,” Henry said, already starting to walk around it. “There was a treehouse up there, it came down when the trees fell.”
So that explained the lumber, and the occasional nail I could see jutting up through the beams. I started to follow him when a memory came back to me, hitting me with such force that I stopped walking. “Do you still have yours?” I asked. The second after I said it, I remembered he no longer lived in his old house. “I mean, is it still there? The treehouse?” Henry and his dad had built it together, and we had declared a younger sibling–free zone, and spent hours up there, especially whenever the weather was bad, and spending all day by the lake wasn’t an option.
“It’s still there,” he said. “As far as I know. You can still kind of see it if you look down the driveway.”
“I’m glad,” I said, not even realizing that this was what I felt until I said it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
I stared at the fallen trees as I walked around them, still a little shocked to see them on the ground, the opposite of where they should be. It seemed crazy that something so big, so seemingly permanent, could be knocked down by a little wind and rain.
Henry was already starting to stride ahead, and so, hurrying to catch up with him, I started to clamber over the downed trees. By then, I’d made it to the top of the tree, where the trunk had narrowed, and it seemed like it would be simple enough. “Ow,” I muttered under my breath as yet another twig scraped my leg.
Henry turned back and squinted. “What are you doing?” he called, starting to walk toward me.
“Nothing,” I said, hearing the annoyance in my voice, which I knew wasn’t exactly fair, since he was helping me get out of the woods, but all I was doing at that moment was trying to keep him from having to wait on me.
“Don’t,” he said, and I could hear that he sounded equally annoyed. “That wood’s rotten, it’s likely to—”
With a snap, the trunk I’d been standing on collapsed, and I was pitching forward, bracing for the inevitable fall, when just like that, in an instant, Henry was there, catching me.
“Sorry,” I gasped, feeling how hard my heart was pounding, the adrenaline pumping through my body.
“Careful,” he said, as I started to step out of the trunk. “Davy twisted his ankle doing that last month.”
“Thanks.” I leaned on him a little bit for support as I lifted my foot out, trying very hard not to think about what kind of creepy-crawlies were probably living in a rotted-out tree trunk. It wasn’t until I had both feet back on the forest floor that I realized his arms were still around me. I could feel the heat from his hands on my back through my thin T-shirt. I looked up at him—it was still so strange to have to look up at Henry—and saw how close we were, our faces just inches apart. He must have become aware of this at the same time, because he dropped his arms immediately, and took a few steps away.
“You okay?” he asked, the brusque, businesslike tone back in his voice.
“Fine,” I said. I brushed off some of the wet leaves that had stuck to my ankles, mostly so he wouldn’t see how flustered I was.
“Good,” he said. He started walking again, and I followed behind, careful to put my feet where I saw him place his, not wanting another mishap. In what seemed like only a few more seconds, I was following Henry out of the woods, blinking in the brighter sunlight, and realizing I was just two streets away from my house. “You know your way from here?” he asked.
“Of course I do,” I said, slightly insulted.
Henry just shook his head and smiled, the first real smile I’d seen since meeting him again. “It’s not like you have the greatest sense of direction,” he said. I opened my mouth to p
rotest this, and he went on, “I just had to help you find your way out of the woods.” He looked at me evenly for a moment, then added, “And it wasn’t even the first time.” Then he turned and walked away, leaving me to try and figure out what he meant.
A moment later, when he’d passed out of sight, it hit me. The first time we’d met had been in these very same woods. As I walked home, shielding my eyes against the sun, so bright after the darkness of the woods. I realized that I’d been so caught up in thinking about how things with him had ended, I’d almost forgotten how they had begun.
“Taylor, where have you been?” my mother asked when I returned, her eyes widening as she took in the scratches on my legs. I’d been trying to sneak back to my room quietly, hoping that everyone would still be asleep, but no such luck. My mom was unpacking what looked like practically a kitchenful of paper bags from the PocoMart, the closest thing to a grocery store in Lake Phoenix. There were bigger supermarkets, but they were a good half hour drive away.
“Just walking,” I said vaguely as I glanced around the kitchen, not meeting her eye. I saw that the coffeemaker was still empty—my mother was a tea drinker—which meant that, two hours after I’d left, my father was still asleep.
“I ran into Paul Crosby at the market,” she said, referring to Henry’s dad. I felt my face start to get hot, and was just grateful that she’d run into him before his sons had a chance to report back about my getting lost in the woods. “In the dairy aisle. He said they’re living next door to us now.”
“Oh,” I said. “How about that.” I could feel my cheeks getting hotter, and I opened the fridge and stuck my head in, trying to pretend I was looking for something essential.
“You’ll have to go say hi to Henry,” my mother continued, as I concentrated on making sure the expiration dates on the containers of milk were all facing out.
There is only so long you can stand with your head in a refrigerator, and I had just reached that point. Plus, my ears were staring to get cold. “Mmm,” I said, closing the door and leaning my back against it.
“And I suppose I should go and say hello to Ellen,” my mother continued. She sounded distinctly less excited about this thought, and I didn’t blame her. Henry’s mother had never seemed to like kids very much unless we were quiet and out of the way. While we had always dashed full-out into my house, sometimes mid-watergun fight, when we reached Henry’s door, we immediately settled down and got quiet, without even talking about it. Theirs was not a house you ever made blanket forts in. And without my mother saying anything outright, I had always gotten the sense she really hadn’t liked Mrs. Crosby very much.
I pulled an apple from one of the bags on the counter, and my mother took it from me, washed it quickly, patted it dry, and then handed it back. “You and Henry used to be so close,” she said.
I glanced through the kitchen window to the Crosbys’ house, mostly so my mother wouldn’t be able to see my expression. “I guess,” I said. “But that was a long time ago, Mom.”
She started to fold up the bags, and I could have helped, but instead, I leaned against the kitchen counter and started to eat my apple. “Have you called Lucy yet?” she asked.
I bit down hard on my apple, wondering why my mother always assumed she knew what was best for me. Why didn’t she just ask me if I wanted to call Lucy, for example? Which I absolutely didn’t, by the way. “No,” I said, trying to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “And I don’t think I’m going to.”
She gave me a look that told me plainly that she thought this was a mistake as she put the paper bags away where we’d always kept them, under the sink. “Your childhood friends are the ones you should hang on to. They know you in a way that nobody else does.”
After this morning’s encounter with Henry, I wasn’t convinced this was a good thing. I watched as my mother crossed to the fridge with the summer calendar. The Lake Phoenix association made them every year, and one had been on the fridge up here for every summer that I could remember. They were designed to hang vertically, so that you could see all three months of the summer at once, each month flanked with pictures of smiling kids on sailboats, happy couples relaxing by the lake, and seniors taking in a sunrise. My mom attached it to the fridge with the mismatched magnets we’d always had and that I was suddenly glad the Murphys hadn’t taken, and I leaned closer to look at it, at all those empty squares that represented the days of summer ahead.
This calendar had always been a way, especially this early in the season, to revel in how much time was still left in the summer. In years past, the summer had just seemed to stretch forever, so that by the time August rolled around, I’d had my fill of s’mores and popsicles and mosquito bites, and was actually looking forward to fall—to cooler weather and wearing tights and Halloween and Christmas.
But as I stared at it now, and started to do the math, I got a panicky feeling in my chest, one that made it harder to breathe. On my birthday, three weeks ago, the doctors had told my dad that he had four months. Maybe more… but maybe less. And three weeks of those months had already passed. Which meant… I stared at the calendar so hard, it got a little blurry. It was the middle of May, so we still had the rest of the month and all of June. And then all of July. But then what? I looked at August, at the picture of the older couple holding hands as they watched the sun rise over Lake Phoenix, and realized I had no idea what would be happening then, what my world would look like. If my dad would still be alive.
“Taylor?” my mom asked, her voice concerned. “You okay?”
I wasn’t okay, and this normally would have been when I would have hit the road—gotten in my car and driven somewhere, gone for a long walk, anything to avoid the problem. But as I’d learned this morning, going outside certainly didn’t seem to help things—and in fact, made them worse.
“I’m fine,” I snapped at her, even though there was a piece of me that knew she didn’t deserve it. But I wanted her to know what was wrong without having to ask. And what I really wanted her to do was what she hadn’t done, now that it mattered the most—I wanted her to fix it. But she hadn’t fixed it, and she wasn’t going to be able to. I threw away my half-eaten apple and left the kitchen.
Finding the bathroom miraculously empty, I took a long, hot shower, washing the dirt from the scratches on my legs and staying in there until the hot water in our tiny hot water heater started to run out.
When I came back into the kitchen, it was filled with the smell of coffee. The coffeemaker was burbling and hissing and there was half a pot already brewed. I could see my dad sitting on the screened-in porch, laptop in front of him, steaming mug in hand, laughing at something my mom was saying. And even though I knew what the calendar on the fridge said, I somehow couldn’t get it to make sense, not with my dad sitting in the sunlight, looking totally healthy, unless you knew otherwise. I walked to the doorway of the screened-in porch, leaned against the door frame, and my dad turned to look at me.
“Hi, kid,” he said. “What’s the news?” And before I could get the words around the lump that had formed in my throat, to begin to answer, he looked out to the view of the lake, and smiled. “Doesn’t it look like a beautiful day out there?”
Metamorphosis
chapter seven
A THIRTEEN-LETTER WORD FOR “CHANGE.” I GLANCED DOWN AT the Pocono Record’s crossword puzzle and tapped my pencil on the empty squares of 19 across. Trying to concentrate, I looked through the screened-in porch and out to the lake. I wasn’t exactly in the habit of doing crosswords, but I was getting a little desperate for entertainment. After five days in Lake Phoenix, I was officially bored out of my mind. And the worst part was that in this situation, unlike family vacations or Gelsey’s dance recitals, I couldn’t complain to anyone that I was bored out of my mind and know they were feeling the same way. Because I wasn’t supposed to spend this summer being entertained. It wasn’t supposed to be fun. But that didn’t change the fact that I was, in fact, incredibly bored. And suffer
ing majorly from cabin fever.
I heard the now-familiar sound of the FedEx truck’s tires crunching on our driveway and jumped up to intercept the daily package, just to have something to do. But when I stepped outside, I saw that my dad was already holding the white box in his hands, nodding at the driver—who, after daily deliveries, was getting to be pretty familiar.
“You’re keeping me busy in this neck of the woods,” the driver said, flipping down his sunglasses. “You’re just about the only delivery I get around here.”
“I believe that,” my dad said, pulling open the tab on the box.
“And if you guys could keep your dog tied up, I’d appreciate it,” the driver said as he settled into the front seat. “I almost hit him this morning.” He started the truck and backed down our driveway, beeping once as he turned down the road.
My dad turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Dog?”
“Oh, my God,” I said. I leaned over the front porch railing and saw, sure enough, the same dog loitering by the edge of our driveway. “Shoo!” I yelled at him. “Get out of here!” He glanced at me, then trotted past our driveway and out of sight, but I had a feeling he’d be back before too long. “It’s just this dog,” I said, as the jingling of his tags grew fainter and fainter. “He thinks he lives here.”
“Ah,” my dad said, still looking a little puzzled, and I could see that I hadn’t really clarified anything. He crossed the driveway and climbed the stairs, leaning a little bit on the railing. “Well, just don’t let your brother see him.”
“Right,” I said, and followed my dad to the screened-in porch, where he shook out the box’s contents, a thick sheaf of papers, many marked with brightly colored flags. He’d gotten a similar delivery from his law firm every day so far, all apparently pertaining to a case that he’d been working on. When I’d asked why his firm couldn’t just e-mail the documents, instead of sending a FedEx truck through the mountains of Pennsylvania every day, he’d told me that it was due to security issues.