Second Chance Summer (8 page)

He lowered one ear, tilting his head, and looked at me with what almost looked like a hopeful expression as his tail thumped on the ground. But he didn’t leave.

As I looked closer, I could see that he looked a little mangy, some of his fur matted. But I figured that made sense—if his owners had been really on the ball, they probably wouldn’t be letting their dog wander around at night on his own.

“Go,” I said again, even more firmly this time.
“Now.”
I kept making eye contact, like the show always advised. The dog just looked at me for a second, then his other ear dropped and he seemed to sigh. But he did stand up—which actually didn’t change much, heightwise, since his legs were a little short for his body. He gave me one more long look, but I tried not to show any signs of wavering. And after a moment more, he turned and started slowly down the driveway.

The dog walked to the end of the gravel, paused, then turned left and headed down the street. And even though I’d intended to go right in, I watched the dog getting smaller and smaller, hearing the jingle of his tag growing fainter, until he finally rounded the curve in the road and disappeared from view.

chapter six

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
WOKE WITH A START
. I
BLINKED AS
I
LOOKED
around the room, for a second not remembering where I was. Then my eyes fell on the penguin on my dresser, and it all came back to me. I groaned and rolled over again, but even as I closed my eyes, I could tell that I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep.

I sat up and squinted out at the sunlight that was streaming in through my window. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day, for all the good that was going to do me. I got out of bed, and after looking at the penguin for a moment, I stuffed it on the top shelf of my closet and shut the door, so it wouldn’t be the first thing I saw when I woke up every morning.

I headed down the hall, throwing my hair up into a messy pony-tail as I went, noticing that the house was incredibly quiet. I glanced at the microwave clock when I reached the kitchen and realized why—it was eight a.m. In the not-so-distant past, my father would have been up for hours by now. He would have brewed a pot of coffee and would be halfway through answering that morning’s e-mails,
already settling down to work. The sight of the empty coffeemaker was enough to remind me that things had changed. That the normal I somehow kept expecting things to revert to was not going to come back again. I might have made a pot myself, but I had no idea how to make coffee—that had always been my dad’s responsibility, along with remembering important information.

Not really wanting to hang out alone in a silent house, I headed outside. I would usually have gone to the dock, but after my encounter with Henry the day before, I wasn’t sure I was going out to the dock ever again. So instead, I stepped into my flip-flops and walked down the driveway, figuring that maybe by the time I got back from my walk, other members of my family might be awake, and then we could…

I paused in the middle of the driveway, realizing that I didn’t know how to complete that sentence. I had no idea what I was going to do this summer, except witness the end of my world as I’d always known it. The thought was enough to propel me forward, as though I could somehow leave it behind me, along with the house and its silent coffeemaker.

I deliberately turned and started walking in the opposite direction of Henry’s house, and noticed for the first time that we appeared to have new neighbors there as well. At any rate, there was a Prius in the driveway and a sign I didn’t recognize that read
CUT TO: SUMMER
.

Dockside Terrace, our street, was empty this early in the
morning, except for a sleepy-looking man walking an energetic golden retriever. As I walked, I found myself noticing the signs in front of all the houses, and realizing how many of them I remembered. Almost all of the houses in Lake Phoenix had names, not numbers. But our house had never had a sign, since we could never reach a consensus about a name. We used to take a vote every summer, but nothing had ever seemed to quite fit.

I’d been walking for maybe twenty minutes when I decided to head back. It was starting to get hotter out, and the more joggers and dog-walkers who appeared, all waving cheerfully to me, the more aware I was that I had literally just rolled out of bed, and wasn’t wearing a bra. I was turning around when I noticed a gap in the woods that ran alongside the road. My memory was a little foggy on the details, but I was fairly certain that there was a path through here that ran almost directly back to my house.

I paused on the threshold of the woods before stepping into the gap. As soon as I did, it was like I had entered a different world. It was quieter and darker, with the sunlight filtering down to the ground in shafts and dappling the leaves of the trees. I hadn’t been in the woods in years, and as I started to follow the trail, I realized how familiar it all was, the beads of dew on the moss, the smell of the pine trees, the snap of twigs and leaves underneath my flip-flops. It was the same feeling as going back into the house had been—the realization that just because you’d left something behind didn’t
mean that it had gone anywhere. And as I walked, I found, to my surprise, that I had missed it.

Half an hour later, I was no longer feeling so warm and fuzzy toward the woods. I had lost whatever trail I thought I’d been on. My legs were scraped up from twigs, my neck had been feasted upon by mosquitoes, and I didn’t even want to think about what my hair looked like. But mostly, I was annoyed at myself, and a little incredulous that I had gotten lost so close to home.

I didn’t have my phone, which, with its built-in compass, not to mention GPS, would have come in handy at the moment. I couldn’t see any houses around me, nothing to get my bearings, but I wasn’t panicking yet. For right now, I was still hoping that if I could just find the path again, I’d be able to trace my way back. I no longer cared about the shortcut—I just wanted to go home.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard a bird caw and then, a second later, heard the sound called back—but badly, and not by another bird. A second later, the bird call repeated, slightly improved this time, and I headed in the direction I’d heard the sound come from, walking fast. If there were bird-watchers in the woods, it meant that maybe they could direct me back to the road, that maybe I wasn’t completely lost.

I found them soon enough—it helped that the bird-imitation calls kept coming—two guys, one tall, one around Gelsey’s height, both with their backs to me, both looking fixedly up at a tree.

“Hi,” I called. I was beyond worrying about embarrassing myself.
I just wanted to go home and get some breakfast and put calamine lotion on my bites. “Sorry to bother you, but—”

“Shh!” the taller one said, still looking at the tree, in a loud whisper. “We’re trying to see the—” He turned around and stopped abruptly. It was Henry, and he looked as surprised to see me as I felt.

I felt my jaw drop again, and hurriedly closed it. There was no doubt in my mind that I was blushing, and I wasn’t even tan enough yet to hide it. “Hi,” I muttered, crossing my arms tightly over my chest, wondering why each time I saw him, I somehow looked worse than I had before.

“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.