Second Chance Summer (4 page)

Once the danger of the rogue canine had passed, Warren opened his door and carefully got out, looking around at the driveway, which was empty of other cars. “Mom and Dad really should have been here by now.”

I pulled my cell out of my shorts pocket and saw that he was right. They had left a few hours ahead of us, and most likely hadn’t driven 40 mph the whole way. “Gelsey, can you call—” I turned to my sister, only to see that she was bent over almost in half, nose to knee. “You okay?” I asked, trying to look at her upside down.

“Fine,” she said, her voice muffled. “Just stretching.” She straightened up slowly, her face bright red. As I watched, her complexion changed back to its normal shade—pale, with freckles that would only increase exponentially as the summer went on. She swept her
arms up to meet in a perfect circle above her head, then dropped them and rolled her shoulders back. In case her bun or turned-out walk wasn’t enough to tell the world that she was a ballet dancer, Gelsey had the habit of stretching, and often in public.

“Well, when you’re done with that,” I said, as she was now starting to bend backward at an alarming angle, “can you call Mom?” Without waiting for her response—especially since I had a feeling it was going to be something like
Why don’t you do it?
—I selected the key from the key ring, turned it in the lock, and stepped inside the house for the first time in five years.

As I looked around, I let out a breath. I had been worried, after summers of renters, that the house would have changed drastically. That the furniture would be moved around, that things would be added, or there would just be the sense—hard to define but palpable—that someone had been in your space. The Three Bears had known it well, and so had I, the year I came back from oceanography camp and could tell immediately that my mother had put some guests in my room when I’d been gone. But as I took everything in, I didn’t get that feeling. It was the summer house, just as I’d remembered it, like it had been waiting for me, this whole time, to finally come back.

The downstairs was open-plan, so I could see all the rooms that weren’t bedrooms or bathrooms. The ceiling was high, stretching up to the top of the peaked roof, letting in swaths of sun onto the
threadbare throw rugs that covered the wood floors. There was the scratched wooden dining table we never ate on, which always just became the place to dump towels and mail. The kitchen—tiny compared to our large state-of-the-art one in Connecticut—was to my right. The door off the back of it led to our screened-in porch. It looked out on the lake and was where we ate all our meals, except in rare cases of torrential rain. And off the porch was the walkway down to our dock and Lake Phoenix itself, and through the kitchen windows, I could see the glint of late-afternoon sunlight hitting the water.

Past the kitchen was a sitting area with two couches that faced the stone fireplace, the place where my parents had always ended up after dinner, reading and doing work. Beyond that was the family room, with a worn corduroy sofa, where Warren and Gelsey and I usually found ourselves at night. One section of the built-in bookcases was filled with board games and jigsaw puzzles, and we usually had a game or puzzle going throughout the summer, though Risk had been put on the highest shelf, out of easy reach, after the summer when we all had become obsessed, forming secret alliances and basically ceasing to go outside as we circled the board.

Our bedrooms were all off one hallway—my parents slept in the master suite upstairs—which meant that Warren, Gelsey, and I would all have to share the one downstairs bathroom, something I was not looking forward to experiencing again, since I’d gotten used
to having my own bathroom in Connecticut. I headed down the hall to my bedroom, peering in at the bathroom as I went. It was smaller than I remembered it being. Much too small, in fact, for the three of us to share without killing one another.

I reached my room, with the ancient
TAYLOR’S PLACE
sign on it that I’d totally forgotten about, and pushed open the door, bracing myself to confront the room I’d last seen five years ago, and all its attendant memories.

But when I stepped inside, I wasn’t confronted by anything except a pleasant, somewhat generic room. My bed was still the same, with its old brass frame and red-and-white patterned quilt, the trundle bed tucked beneath it. The wooden dresser and wood-framed mirror were the same, along with the old chest at the foot of the bed that had always held extra blankets for the cold nights you got in the mountains, even in the summer. But there was nothing in the room that was
me
any longer. The embarrassing posters of the teen actor I’d been obsessed with back then (he’d since had several well-publicized stints in rehab) had been removed from above my bed. My swim team ribbons (mostly third place) were gone, along with the collection of lip glosses that I’d been curating for several years. Which was probably a good thing, I tried to tell myself, as they all surely would have gone bad by now. But still. I dropped my purse and sat down on my bed, looking from the empty closet to the bare dresser, searching for some evidence
of the fact that I had lived here for twelve summers, but not seeing any.

“Gelsey, what are you
doing
?”

The sound of my brother’s voice was enough to pull me out of these thoughts and make me go investigate what was happening. I walked down the hallway and saw my sister chucking stuffed animals out of her room and into the hall. I dodged an airborne elephant and stood next to Warren, who was eyeing with alarm the small pile of them that was accumulating in front of his door. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“They turned my room into a
baby’s
room,” Gelsey said, her voice heavy with scorn as she flung another animal—this time a purple horse that I vaguely recognized—out the door. Sure enough, her room had been redecorated. There was now a crib in the corner, and a changing table, and her twin bed had been piled high with the offending stuffed animals.

“The renters probably had a baby,” I said, leaning to the side to avoid being beaned by a fuzzy yellow duck. “Why don’t you just wait until Mom gets here?”

Gelsey rolled her eyes, a language she’d become fluent in this year. She could express a wide variety of emotion with every eye roll, maybe because she practiced constantly. And right now, she was indicating how behind-the-times I was. “Mom’s not going to be here for another hour,” she said. She looked down at the animal in
her hands, a small kangaroo, and turned it over a few times. “I just talked to her. She and Daddy had to go to Stroudsburg to meet with his new oncologist.” She pronounced the last word carefully, the way we all did. It was a word I hadn’t been aware of a few weeks ago. This was when I’d thought my father was just having minor, easily fixed back pains. At that point, I wasn’t even entirely sure what the pancreas was, and I definitely didn’t know pancreatic cancer was almost always fatal, or that “stage four” were words you never wanted to hear.

My father’s doctors in Connecticut had given him permission to spend the summer in Lake Phoenix under the condition that he see an oncologist twice a month to check his progress, and when the time came, that he bring in nursing care if he didn’t want to go into hospice. The cancer had been found late enough that there apparently wasn’t anything that could be done. I hadn’t been able to get my head around it at first. In all the medical dramas I’d ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.

I met Gelsey’s eye for a moment before looking down at the floor and the jumbled pile of toys that had landed there. None of us said anything about the hospital, and what that meant, but I wasn’t expecting us to. We hadn’t talked about what was happening with our dad. We tended to avoid discussing emotional things in our
family, and sometimes hanging around with my friends, and seeing the way they interacted with their families—hugging, talking about their feelings—I would feel not so much envious as uncomfortable.

And the three of us had never been close. It probably didn’t help that we were so different. Warren had been brilliant from preschool, and it had come as a surprise to no one that he’d been the class valedictorian. My five-year age gap with Gelsey—not to mention the fact that she was capable of being the world’s biggest brat—meant we didn’t have one of those superclose sister relationships. Gelsey also spent as much time as possible dancing, which I had no interest in. And it wasn’t like Warren and Gelsey were close with each other either. We had just never been a unit. I might have once wished things were different, especially when I was younger and had just read the Narnia series, or
The Boxcar Children
, where the brothers and sisters are all best friends and look out for one another. But I’d long since accepted that this wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t necessarily bad—just the way things were, and something that wasn’t going to change.

Just like it wasn’t going to change that I was the unexceptional one in the family. It had been that way as long as I could remember—Warren was smart and Gelsey was talented, and I was just Taylor, not particularly skilled at anything.

Gelsey went back to throwing the stuffed animals into the hallway, and I was about to go into my own room, feeling like I’d spent
far too much time as it was with my siblings that day, when a flash of orange caught my eye.

“Hey,” I said, bending down to pick up a stuffed animal I thought I recognized. “I think that’s mine.” In fact, it was a stuffed animal I knew very well: a small plush penguin, wearing an orange-and-white-striped scarf. It wasn’t the finest stuffed animal ever constructed—I could tell now that the felt was fairly cheap, and the stuffing was threatening to come out in several places. But the night of the carnival when I was twelve, the night I’d gotten my first kiss, the night Henry Crosby had won it for me, I’d thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world.

“I remember that,” Warren said, a look coming into his eyes that I didn’t like one bit. “Wasn’t that the one you got at the carnival?” My brother had a photographic memory, but usually used it to memorize obscure facts, and not to torment me.

“Yeah,” I muttered, starting to take a step away.

“Wasn’t it the one
Henry
won for you?” Warren put a special spin on his name. I had a feeling that I was being punished for making fun of Warren’s fear of small, harmless dogs. I glared at my brother. Gelsey was looking between the two of us, interested.

“Henry who?” she asked.

“You know,” Warren said, a small smile starting to take form on his face. “Henry Crosby. He had a little brother, Derek or something. Henry was Taylor’s
boyfriend
.”

Davy,
I silently corrected Warren. I could feel my cheeks get hot, which was ridiculous, and I found myself looking for an escape. If there was a way that I could have walked away from the conversation without it being totally obvious that I was uncomfortable, I would have.

“Oh, yeah,” Gelsey said slowly. “I think I remember him. He was nice to me. And he used to know the names of all the trees.”

“And—” Warren started, but I interrupted him before he could continue, not sure I could take any more.

“Anyway, you should get that cleaned up before Mom gets here,” I said loudly, knowing even as I said it that it was highly unlikely my mother would yell at Gelsey for anything. But I tried to pretend it was true as I left with all the dignity one can muster while holding a stuffed penguin, and went to the kitchen for no reason whatsoever.

Henry Crosby.
The name reverberated in my head as I put the penguin on the kitchen counter and opened and shut one of the cabinet doors. He was someone I had consciously tried not to think about too much over the years. He’d become reduced, shortened to a slumber-party anecdote when the inevitable question—
Who was your first boyfriend?
—would arise. I had the Henry story down perfectly now, so that I barely had to even think about it:

Oh, that was Henry. We’d been friends, up at my summer house. And the summer we were twelve, we started going out. He gave me my first kiss at the summer carnival….
This was when everyone would sigh,
and if someone asked me what happened, I would just smile and shrug and say something along the lines of “Well, we were
twelve
, so it became pretty clear there weren’t exactly long-term prospects there.” And everyone would laugh and I would nod and smile, but really I would be turning over what I’d just said. Because it wasn’t that any of those facts had been technically incorrect. But none of them—especially about why it hadn’t worked out—had been the truth. And I would push thoughts of that summer out of my head and rejoin the conversation, relegating what had happened—with Henry, and Lucy, and what I’d done—back to the anecdote that I pretended was all it was.

Warren came into the kitchen a moment later and beelined for a large cardboard box sitting on the counter. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, opening the top. “I was just kidding around.”

I shrugged, as though I couldn’t have cared less. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s ancient history.” Which was true. But as soon as we’d crossed the line that separated Lake Phoenix from the rest of the world, Henry had been circling around in my thoughts, even as I’d tried to turn up the volume on my iPod to drown them out. I’d even found myself watching for his house. And I had seen, to my surprise, the house that had been a soft white was now painted a bright blue, and the sign out front that had always read
CAMP CROSBY
now read
MARYANNE’S HAPPY HOURS
, decorated with a silhouette of a martini glass—all proof that new owners had taken over. That Henry wasn’t
there any longer. I had kept my eyes on the house even as it faded from view, realizing that I might really never see him again, which the presence of Maryanne, whoever she was, seemed to cement. This realization caused a strange mix of feelings—nostalgia coupled with disappointment. But mostly I had felt the cool, heart-pounding sensation of relief that comes when you know you’ve gotten away with something.