Second Chance Summer (40 page)

There was nothing I could do to fix this, or make it better. So I just nodded and pulled my chair a little closer to my dad’s. And together, we watched the sky lighten and transform, as another day began.

chapter thirty-two

I
FINALLY GOT WHAT
D
ICKENS WAS TALKING ABOUT
. I
T WAS THE
best of times and the worst of times, all mixed into one. Because things were great with Henry, with Lucy, at work, even with my siblings. But every day, my father got worse. The FedEx truck bearing my dad’s work documents stopped coming, and I’d thought it was just an anomaly until three days went by. Mom told me when my dad was napping one afternoon that his firm had pulled him off the case. This sent my father into a funk like I’d never before seen from him. He didn’t get dressed, barely combed his hair, and snapped at us when we tried to talk to him—making me realize how much I had relied on him being who he was, the cheerful and punning father I’d taken for granted.

But it did give me an idea. Leland and Fred both agreed, and it was arranged while my dad took his late-afternoon nap. When he woke up, Warren helped him outside, where the Movies Under the Stars—Edwards Family edition—had been set up. Leland had agreed to run the projector, and we’d spread out
blankets on the back lawn, down by the water, to watch what my father had always promised was the perfect bad-day antidote.

It was a much smaller crowd than normally assembled at the beach—just us, Wendy, Leland, the Gardners, and the Crosbys. I turned the introduction duties over to my dad, and we all got very quiet while he did his best to raise his voice so he could tell us, in no uncertain terms, how much we were all about to enjoy
The Thin Man
. And as we watched, I was able to pick out my father’s laugh above everyone else’s.

The movie helped shake him out of his funk, but just seeing him like that had been enough to scare me. The next couple of weeks fell into a pattern almost like a pendulum, with the good and the bad in constant flux, and I could never fully enjoy the upswing because I knew that there would be a downswing coming shortly thereafter.

We all started staying in at night, and spending the time after dinner sitting around the table, not rushing off to meet our dates (me and Warren) or catch fireflies with Nora (Gelsey). After much protesting from my mother, we excavated the old battered Risk board and set it up in the living room, where it became a shrine to strategy. And later on, when it got too dark or cold to stay on the porch, we all came inside to play the game, until my dad started yawning, his head drooping, and my mother would declare détente for the night and she and Warren would help my dad upstairs.

“Because,” I said as angrily as I could, to my mother, “I haven’t trusted you since you left me for dead in Paraguay. That’s why.”

“You tell her, Charlie,” my brother said in a monotone, as my mother flipped pages, frowning.

“Sorry,” she said, after a minute, as Kim and Jeff both groaned. “I don’t—”

“Page sixty-one,” Nora hissed. “At the bottom.”

“Oh, right,” my mother said. She cleared her throat. “I’ll ruin you, Hernandez,” she said to me. “I’ll wreck you and your whole family until you beg for mercy. But mercy won’t come.” She looked over at Kim and Jeff and smiled. “That’s very good,” she said, causing Nora to throw up her hands and my dad to applaud her performance.

Because we weren’t going out, people started to come to us. The Gardners occasionally stopped by, mostly to use us as impromptu actors to hear the current draft of their screenplay read aloud. Nora would take notes for her parents, and they kept casting my mother, despite the fact that she was constantly pausing mid-scene to offer her opinions.

When we weren’t butchering the Gardners’ script with our terrible line readings or playing Risk, we’d watch movies on the old corduroy couch, all my father’s favorites. And while he’d start off telling us more trivia than we ever wanted to know about
The Americanization of Emily
or
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
, he would usually fall asleep halfway through.

Sometimes Wendy or Henry came over for the movie or to take sides in the battle for global domination—it was only with Henry’s help that I’d finally conquered Russia—but usually it was just the family, just us five. And I found I liked it. I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier.

But it wasn’t like I was spending the whole night inside. I would usually sneak out later, once everyone had gone to bed. Sometimes I’d paddle the kayak across to Lucy’s dock and we’d sit for hours with our feet dangling in the water, talking. She remained oblivious to Elliot’s crush but had also given up on Brett after he’d sent her a booty-call text by accident—it had been intended for someone named Lisa. One Saturday night, we’d all met up at the beach at midnight—me, Henry, Elliot, Leland, and Lucy. Rachel and Ivy, the other lifeguards, had bought us a few six-packs in exchange for Leland taking over some of their shifts, and we’d had a party on the dark, empty beach. We’d gone nightswimming and played I Never—it turned out that Lucy pretty much Always Had—and I’d ridden back on Henry’s handlebars as it was starting to get light
out, my damp hair twisted up, closing my eyes and feeling the wind against my face as he brought me home once again.

But parties on the beach or nights with Lucy were the exception. If I was sneaking out, it was usually to go next door. I knew by now which one was Henry’s bedroom, and he knew mine. Luckily, we were both on the ground floor, and I became practiced at creeping across to his house, and drumming my fingers lightly on the glass of his window. Henry would meet me, and we would either go out to the dock, or his old treehouse, if he knew Maryanne was out of town. If it had been a particularly bad day with my dad, I’d always find myself going over to Henry’s. There was something so terrible in what was happening to my father, made all the more awful because I was powerless to stop it. And as he deteriorated, each new version of him replaced the other, and I had trouble remembering when he hadn’t just worn pajamas and a robe all day, when he hadn’t struggled to eat all his meals, his hands shaking as they tried to bring food to his mouth, coughing as he tried to make himself swallow. When he hadn’t needed help to stand or sit or walk upstairs, when he’d been the one to lift our heavy boxes, and throw Gelsey over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and when I was very little, carry me in from the car after long drives when I’d pretend to fall asleep. It was getting hard to remember who he’d been last week, let alone who he’d been four months ago, when everything had seemed fine.

He had started sleeping late in the mornings, though I still found
myself jerking awake at eight, expecting him to be there, tickling my feet, telling me to get a move on, that we had pancakes to eat. I continued to go to the diner on my days off, getting our food to go, and bringing it home to him. But after three trips with his toast in its Styrofoam container sitting on the counter, uneaten, I’d stopped.

After the particularly bad nights—like when he’d snap at my mother, then look immediately regretful, and like he was on the verge of tears—I’d head to Henry’s as soon as the house was quiet and sleeping. Despite our talk in the rowboat, I usually didn’t want to go into what was happening, even though he always gave me the opportunity to. Mostly, I just wanted to feel his arms around me, solid and true, while I tried to shut out the feelings that were hurting my heart with a thousand tiny pinpricks, which was somehow worse than having it broken all at once.

Whenever it got really bad at home, I would know that there was happiness waiting for me just around the corner, right next door. But whenever I found myself in a moment of happiness—laughing with Lucy, kissing Henry, conquering Asia with a shoestring army—I’d suddenly get shaken out of it, since I knew that much worse was coming down the pike, and really, I had no right to be enjoying myself when my father was going through this. And there was always the uneasy knowledge that, soon, there would be a breaking point.

“And this,” Henry said, wrapping his arms around my waist, “is where the magic happens.”

“Is it?” I asked, stretching up to kiss him. We were behind the counter at Borrowed Thyme, through the stainless steel swinging doors, back where the ovens and prep stations were. I’d had the day off, so I had come downtown to pick up some things for my mother and to visit Henry. Finding the store in a between-customers lull, he’d taken me behind the counter to show me how things worked.

“I was just about to ice some cupcakes,” he said, pointing to a mixer bowl full of white buttercream icing that, even from here, smelled delicious. “Want to help?”

“Maybe,” I said, sliding my hands around his waist and kissing him again. I was in a great mood—my dad had had a good morning, been up and alert and making terrible puns at breakfast, I didn’t have to work, I was with Henry, and there was a lot of frosting just there for the taking. Lucy was caught up in her latest boy—I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be around long, so I’d just taken to calling him Pittsburgh—so I knew she wouldn’t give me a hard time for not hanging out with her, which meant I had all afternoon to spend kissing Henry. Breaking the moment, my phone trilled in my bag across the counter. I listened for a second—it was the ringtone for the house’s landline. I started to go to answer it when I realized that it was probably Gelsey.

“Do you need to answer that?” Henry asked.

“Nope,” I said. I crossed to my phone and turned the ringer off so that it wouldn’t interrupt us again when she inevitably called back. “It’s just my sister wanting me to help her get ready.” When Henry still looked perplexed, I added, “It’s the first night of the carnival.” Gelsey had been freaking out about it all week, and she’d finally told me that she had a crush on a boy in her tennis group—which actually explained why she’d stopped complaining about her lessons recently. She, tennis boy, Nora, and the boy Nora had a crush on, were all meeting up for what Gelsey kept insisting was
not
a double date. Nevertheless, when she’d found out that I didn’t have work today, she’d assumed that I would be spending the afternoon helping her primp—by which she meant I would give her a makeover, using my makeup. And while I was willing to help Gelsey get ready, I was not about to spend four hours doing it.

“Ah, the carnival,” Henry said with a smile. He brushed some hair back from my forehead and smiled at me. “I remember the carnival.” I smiled back, pretty sure that we were both remembering the same thing. He kissed me again before we headed over to where the frosting was. “Cupcakes.”

Henry showed me the proper icing technique, and even though I insisted on tasting the frosting every few minutes, just to make sure it wasn’t going bad, we were soon making progress. “Not too hard, right?” he asked.

I nodded, admiring my handiwork. The bell dinged out front
just as we were finishing the batch, and I realized that I should probably be getting home—I’d let Gelsey dangle long enough. I took a cupcake for the road and kissed Henry good-bye. I biked home, humming Warren’s tune under my breath, waving at the people I knew as I passed. Halfway home, though, I pulled out my phone to turn the ringer back on and realized that something was wrong. I had seven missed calls and two voice mails.

I started biking faster, hoping that it was just Gelsey wanting me to help and being a pain. But as soon as I stepped onto the porch, I could feel it in the air, a kind of crackling tension that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. My mother was on the phone in the kitchen, but she slammed it down when she saw me.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. Her face was red, and her expression was scared and angry in equal measure.

I swallowed hard, thinking of all the calls I’d ignored, just assuming they were Gelsey. A terrible dread was creeping over me. “Um,” I said, feeling my heart begin to pound. What was happening? “I was downtown. My ringer was off. What’s going on?”

“Your dad—” my mom started, but her voice broke and she turned away from me slightly, wiping her hand across her face. “He’s not doing well. I’m going to take him to the hospital in Stroudsburg and see what they say.”

“What’s wrong?” I made myself ask, even though my voice was no more than a whisper.

“I don’t know!” my mother snapped, turning back to me. “Sorry,” she said after a moment, a little more quietly. “I’m just…” Her voice trailed off and she gestured helplessly around her.

“Where’s Gelsey?” I asked, looking around the house, as though I was going to spot my siblings, like maybe they were just hanging out on one of the sofas while all this was happening. “And Warren?”