Lily Dale: Awakening (15 page)

“Sure, but . . . are you—?”

“I just . . . I need . . . to go home. I’m sorry.”

With that, she runs from the house. Outside, though, she falters at the foot of the steps. A cool breeze whispers in the boughs overhead. Calla looks up, blinded by the sun and her tears.

I need to go home.

But Odelia’s house isn’t home. Lily Dale isn’t home. Even Tampa isn’t home anymore.

She squeezes her eyes shut, hot tears spilling down her cheeks.

Mom . . . help me, Mommy.Where do I go? What do I do? I’m so lost.

She spins around blindly, opens her eyes again . . . and finds herself looking at the lake.

Standing on the grassy shore, in the distance, she can clearly see the outline of a woman in the glare of the sun.

ELEVEN

Calla takes off running toward the lake, her eyes fastened on the woman standing beside the shimmering water. She doesn’t dare look away.

The person is too distant for Calla to make out more than her silhouette—she’s wearing some kind of long dress or robe— but there’s something about her that seems to beckon.

Mom! Is that you?

Calla’s sneaker hits a rough patch of pavement and she lurches forward. She looks down, sees that it’s a pothole—the streets here are full of them—and manages to regain her balance.

When she looks up again, her gaze darts ahead, toward the woman.

But she’s gone. It’s as though she’s simply evaporated into thin air.

“No!” Calla cries out. “Wait!”

She picks up speed, hurtling toward the lake, thinking she might spot the figure off to the side or slipping behind a tree. But when she gets to the grassy, parklike spot beside the lake, there’s no one around.

It probably wasn’t Mom anyway.

Calla sinks onto a bench overlooking the water. Of course it wasn’t Mom. It didn’t feel like her, and anyway . . .

Her mother is gone. Forever. Calla is alone.

No matter how bad it gets, no matter how alone you feel, you’ll get through it. I promise you. And I’ll always be here for you.

“Then where are you now, Mom?” Calla whispers . . . just as a shadow falls across the grass in front of her.

“Excuse me?” a voice says, and she looks up to see Jacy Bly standing there. His glossy hair is spiked on top today, and she has a feeling he didn’t gel it to make it spike that way. There’s a no-fuss, laid-back aura about him. He’s wearing a faded maroon T-shirt and dark jeans that bag around his bare feet, and he’s carrying a fishing pole and tackle box.

“Oh . . . hi. I was just talking to . . .”
My dead mother.
Here in Lily Dale, that wouldn’t necessarily raise an eyebrow. But Calla finishes the sentence with “. . . myself.”

He says nothing, watching her through eyes so dark they’re black. They slant a bit at the corners, almost seeming to squint a bit beneath straight slashes of brow. He’s got high, pronounced cheekbones and the fullest lips she’s ever seen on a boy. On anyone, really.

She drags her gaze away from his lips—and her brain from the crazy thought of kissing them.
Where did that come from?

“Listen, did you see anyone around here a few minutes ago?” she asks him. “A woman?”

“Around here?”

She nods, gesturing at the spot. “She was standing right over there when I got here, but . . . she left.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“I didn’t think so,” Calla mutters. Jacy just looks at her.

“So, you’re, uh . . . going fishing?” she asks stupidly. After all, he’s holding fishing gear and heading toward a body of water.

He nods.

“Do you fish a lot?”

Another nod. “How about you?”

He’s so soft-spoken, she can’t help but feel like a blithering idiot.

A loud one, at that. “Me?” she practically shouts at him.

She tones it down with effort, asking in a near whisper, “You mean, do I fish?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I live in Florida,” she says, to prove that she specializes in moronic comments.

Jeesh, why can’t she get it together conversationally? You’d think she’d never spoken to a good-looking guy before.

“Florida . . . so there aren’t any fish down south, huh?” Jacy asks quietly, then those full lips of his part into a beautiful, white-toothed smile.

Calla breaks into a grin. “Nope,” she says lightly, “no fish at all.”

He gestures with his pole. “You want to try?”

“Fishing?”
No, fencing. Idiot.

“How about it?” he asks.

She hesitates.

Don’t say anything stupid,
she warns herself.
For God’s sake, just say yes.

And, to her relief—and his, as far as she can tell—she does.

“There you are!” Odelia sticks her head in from the kitchen the moment Calla walks in the door. “Where have you been?”

“I went for a walk,” she says, not wanting to get into meeting Jacy. Which definitely took her mind off everything that’s been going on lately.

He’s the first guy she’s hung out with since Kevin. And as much as she tried not to notice how cute he is—well, she couldn’t help it. Sitting side by side on the pier, legs dangling over the water, they sat and fished for over an hour. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn’t—and for some reason, it didn’t matter when they didn’t.

Calla finds that unusual, because back in the beginning with Kevin, she always got nervous when she ran out of things to say. Not that she’s thinking this is any kind of “beginning” with Jacy.

Still . . . back when she and Kevin first started hanging out alone together, without Lisa as a buffer, Calla used to chatter about anything and everything just to avoid awkward silence.

With Jacy, even though he’s pretty much a stranger, somehow the silence wasn’t awkward. Maybe because that’s such an obvious part of his introspective nature.

“Evangeline came over looking for you,” Odelia says. “I thought you were over at the Taggarts’ all this time, but she said you’d been there and left.”

“I just felt funny hanging around with her aunt, waiting for her.”
And now I feel guilty that I was down by the lake with her crush
.

“Ramona is great. I’m surprised you felt uncomfortable with her.”

“It wasn’t her, really . . . it was . . . I just felt like taking a walk.”

“So how was it?” Odelia asks directly, and something in her expression—and her tone—tells Calla that she doesn’t buy her story.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to pull one over on a psychic. Poor Mom. What must it have been like for her, growing up?

“It was a good walk,” Calla tells her, relieved when Odelia doesn’t call her on it.

“Well, you had company while you were gone.”

“Evangeline. I know. You said.”
And in this town Evangeline will probably hear about my fishing with Jacy
—
or, who knows, have a vision about it
—
any second now.

“No, not just Evangeline. Someone came and brought you these.” Odelia lifts a vase filled with wildflowers from a small table near the stairs.

Calla’s eyes widen. “Someone brought me flowers? Who was it?”

“Blue Slayton.” A smile quirks the edges of Odelia’s hot-pink mouth.

Flustered, Calla just stares at the vase. Why would Blue Slayton bring her flowers?

“He said to call him when you got back.”

“I . . . uh, I don’t have his number.”

“Triple five four-seven-eight-two,” Odelia recites.

“You have it memorized?”

“Honey, this is a tiny town, and everyone here knows everyone else. Plus, Blue’s dad and I used to be good friends.”

“Used to be?”

Odelia snorts a little. “Back before old Dave went Hollywood.”

“Blue’s father lives in Hollywood?”

“Not officially. But he spends most of his time in L. A. these days. Psychic to the stars, and all that.”

Something tells Calla her grandmother doesn’t approve.

“What about Blue? Isn’t he in school?”

“Oh, he stays here when his dad’s away.”

“With his mother?”

“No, the housekeeper. His mother took off a long time ago and she never looked back. Not even for her son.”

Odelia sounds bitter.
Oh. She’s probably thinking of her ex-husband
, Calla realizes.
He did the same thing to her
—
and my mom
—
that Blue’s mother did.

Which also means Blue Slayton can join the sad little motherless club, with her and Evangeline. And Jacy, who told her, in his quiet way while they were fishing, that his parents are both alcoholics. Abusive ones. It wasn’t so bad when they lived on the reservation, he said, because he had neighbors who would look out for him. Then his parents moved to an apartment down in Jamestown. It wasn’t long before Social Services started showing up, and they finally removed him from his home, which, Jacy added, his parents didn’t protest.

He didn’t say specifically what his parents did to lose custody of him, and Calla didn’t push him to explain. She could tell it was a painful subject for him. She felt privileged that he had shared as much as he did.

“Here you go,” Odelia says, and holds out the phone. “You can call Blue.”

Still reeling from her breakup with Kevin—oh, all right, mostly from her afternoon with Jacy—she doesn’t really feel like talking to another guy.

Then again, she should at least thank Blue for the flowers. It would be rude not to.

She accepts the phone from Odelia. “What did you say his number was?”

Moments later, her grandmother is back in the kitchen, clattering pots and pans, and Blue Slayton is making small talk, then interrupting himself to ask, “You went fishing with Jacy today, huh?”

“How did you know?”

“You can’t get away with anything in the Dale,” he says casually.

Wow. Did he have a psychic vision of her and Jacy, or what?

“Listen, you want to go out sometime?” Blue asks. “For coffee, or something?”

Coffee? She doesn’t drink coffee. But she can hardly say,
How about milk and cookies?

You could just say no
. But that might hurt his feelings. Anyway, Blue Slayton is really cute. As cute as Jacy, in a drastically different way. Plus, it’s not like Jacy said anything about seeing her again when they parted ways by the lake. He just waved and said, “See ya.”

Yeah, and she was kind of disappointed by that. Despite Evangeline.

“Coffee sometime would be great,” she hears herself tell Blue.

He doesn’t sound surprised. Thrilled, either. He just says, as though this is all perfectly routine, “Okay, good. So . . . I’ll call you.”

Oh. He’s not going to make a date right now? She almost wishes she’d said no.

Calla hangs up and goes to find her grandmother in the kitchen. Odelia is stirring a bubbling pot on the stove as an old Enya song plays on the countertop radio. Loudly.

Odelia, singing along in an unskilled falsetto, doesn’t notice Calla in the doorway.

Calla clears her throat. Odelia doesn’t hear her. Calla has to get her attention, but what is she supposed to call her?

Grandma? Odelia?

So far, she’s still managed to avoid conversationally pegging her grandmother with a name. But that can’t go on indefinitely. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to address her directly. Now is probably a good time to start.
What did I call her when I was a little girl?
Calla wonders, and suddenly, a strange word flits into her head.

“Gammy?” She blurts it without thinking, and Odelia immediately turns her head.

“What did you say?”

“I said . . .” What
did
she say? And why? “I said, uh, ‘Grandma’?”

That sounds ridiculously formal for some reason, and Odelia is shaking her head. “No, you said ‘Gammy.’ I heard you.”

“Then why’d you . . .” Calla notices, to her surprise, that her grandmother’s eyes are suddenly shiny. “. . . ask?” she finishes, fervently wishing she hadn’t said anything at all.

“That’s what you used to call me,” Odelia says, going back to stirring her soup after swiping a hand at her eyes. “Gammy. When you were a little girl and I used to come see you. But then all those years went by and I thought you must have forgotten.”

“I did forget. Until now.”

She wants to ask her grandmother why all those years went by without a visit. What did she and Mom disagree about?
I can’t ask her yet. Maybe sometime . . . but not now.

“I’m glad you remembered,” her grandmother is saying. “You can still call me that.”

“But . . . I’m not a little girl anymore.”

Her grandmother waves away her protest. “Call me Gammy. You hear me?”

“Loud and clear.” Calla smiles, then remembers why she came into the kitchen in the first place, and her smile fades. “Listen, what time did Blue come over with those flowers?”

“Hmm? Oh, I don’t remember, exactly.”

“Did he wake you from your nap?” she asks, trying a different tactic, needing to know. “Or before Evangeline came over? Or was it later than that?”

“Oh, it was later. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes before you got home, I guess.”

“That late?”

Odelia nods. “Why?”

Because now I know for sure why he brought the flowers over today.
It was because he saw me fishing with Jacy Bly, and it bothered him.

That’s what she suspected in the first place. Call it intuition, or call it common sense.

It’s telling her something else, too: Blue Slayton is the kind of guy who wants what he can’t have. If she’s interested in him, all she has to do is pretend that she isn’t.

But she’s never liked to play games, and anyway, she isn’t sure she’s interested in Blue. Not the way she’s interested in Jacy. . . .

Who, she has a feeling, wouldn’t be into games, either. But anyway, Evangeline likes him.

Calla sighs. After what happened with Kevin, who needs any of this?

“Calla? It’s me!” a familiar voice says over the telephone the following evening.

“Lisa! I’m so glad you called!” And just as glad that Odelia is out at some mediums’ league meeting, so she can have a private conversation. “I’ve been dying to talk to you.”

“You too. Listen, I totally get that you don’t have access to e-mail—”