Second Chance Summer (3 page)

It was something that I had no idea how to handle, but as an unexpected upside, it was something that seemed to be working in my favor. Somehow, overnight, everyone in school seemed to know, and my teachers had been informed, though why or by whom, I’d never been sure. But it was the only explanation for the fact that I’d aced all my finals, even in classes like Trig, which I’d been dangerously close to getting a C in. And if that wasn’t enough proof, when my English teacher had passed out our exams, she’d set mine down on my desk and rested her hand on it for just a minute, causing me to look up at her.

“I know that studying must be hard for you right now,” she’d murmured, as though the entire class wasn’t listening, ears straining for every syllable. “So just do your best, all right, Taylor?”

And I’d bitten my lip and done the Brave Nod, aware the whole time that I was pretending, acting the way I knew she expected me to act. And sure enough, I’d gotten an A on the test, even though I’d only skimmed the end of
The Great Gatsby
.

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

“D
O WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THIS
?” G
ELSEY 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.