[English] SECOND CHANCE SUMMER

Second Chance Summer
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Chapter four

three weeks earlier

IT WAS OFFICIALLY THE WORST BIRTHDAY EVER.

I was sitting on the couch next to Warren, while Gelsey lay on her stomach on the floor in front of us, her legs turned out, froglike, and resting in a diamond on the carpet behind her, something that never failed to make me wince. We were all watching a sitcom that none of us had laughed at once, and I had a feeling my siblings were only there because they thought they had to be. I could see Warren sneaking glances at his laptop, and could guess that Gelsey wanted to be up in her room, which had been turned into an ad hoc dance studio, working on her fouettes, or whatever.

My siblings had tried to make it feel like as much of a celebration as possible under the circumstances—they’d ordered a pineapple and pepperoni pizza, my favorite, put a candle in the center of it, and clapped when I blew it out. I’d closed my eyes tightly in anticipation, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made a birthday wish and actually thought anything might come of it. But this was a fervent, eyes-closed-tightly wish that things would turn out to be okay with my dad, that everything that was happening was just a mistake, a false alarm, and I was imbuing this wish with as much hope in the outcome as the ones I’d made when I was little, when all I’d wanted from the universe was a pony.

The sitcom laugh track blasted through the room, and I looked at the clock on the DVD player. “What time were they supposed to be home?” I asked.

“Mom wasn’t sure if they were making it back tonight,” Warren said. He met my eye for a moment, then looked back at the television. “She said she’d call.”

I nodded, and focused on the antics onscreen, though I could hardly follow them. My parents were at Sloan-Kettering, a cancer hospital in Manhattan, where my father was getting tests done. They’d been there for the last three days because it turned out that the back problem that had been bothering him for the last few months wasn’t actually a back problem at all. The three of us had been left to fend for ourselves, and we had been doing our own chores without complaint and getting along much better than usual, none of us talking about we were all afraid of, as though by naming it, we would make it real.

My mother had called me that morning, apologizing that they were missing my birthday, and while I assured her that it was okay, I had felt a hard knot start to form in my stomach. Because it felt like, on some level, this was what I deserved. I had always been close to my dad—I was the one who went along with him on errands, the one who helped him pick out birthday and Christmas gifts for my mother, the only one who shared his sense of humor. So I should have been the one to realize something was actually wrong. I could see the signs, after all—my dad wincing as he eased himself down into the low driver’s seat of his sports car, working harder than usual to lift things, moving a little more carefully. But I hadn’t wanted it to be real, had wanted it to be something that would just quietly go away, so I hadn’t said anything. My father hated doctors, and even though my mother could presumably see all the same things that I did, she didn’t insist that he go to one. And I had been focused on my own drama at school—convinced that my breakup and its fallout was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I was thinking just how stupid I’d been when headlights cut through the darkness outside the window, cresting up the hill of our driveway, and a second later, I heard the hum of the garage door. Gelsey sat up, and Warren turned off the volume. For a moment, we all just looked at one another in the sudden silence.

“They’re back, so that’s a good sign, right?” Gelsey asked. For some reason she looked at me for an answer, and I just looked at the television, where the hijinks were winding down and everything was getting happily resolved.

I heard the door open and close, and then my mother appeared in the doorway of the TV room, looking exhausted.

“Could we talk to all of you in the dining room?” she asked. She didn’t wait for us to answer, but left the room again.

As I stood up from the couch, I could felt the knot in my stomach get bigger. This did not seem to be the good sign Gelsey was talking about, and the one that I had wished for. Because if it was good news, I figured that my mother just would have told us. She wouldn’t have needed to tell us in the dining room, which in itself seemed ominous. In ad***ion to the few times it was used each year for eating fancier dinners on nicer plates than usual, the dining room was the place where things were Discussed.

I followed Warren and Gelsey through the kitchen toward the dining room, where I saw my father was sitting at his usual spot, at the head of the table, looking somehow smaller than I remembered him being only a few days ago. My mother stood at the kitchen island with a square white bakery box, and she pulled me into a quick, awkward, one-armed hug. We weren’t really physically affectionate in my family, making this as worrying a sign as needing to hear news in the dining room.

“I’m so sorry about your birthday, Taylor,” she said. She gestured to the white box, and I saw that the sticker keeping the box closed read BILLY’S—my favorite cupcake bakery. “I brought these for you, but maybe…” She glanced at the dining room and bit her lip. “Maybe we’ll save them for afterward.”

I wanted to ask, After what? but I also felt, with every minute that passed, that I knew what the answer was. As my mother took a deep breath before heading in to join everyone, I looked to the front door. I could feel my familiar impulse kick in, the one that told me that things would be easier if I could just leave, not have to deal with any of this, just take my cupcakes and go.

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But of course, I didn’t do that. I walked behind my mother into the dining room, where she clasped my father’s hand, looked around at all of us, took a breath, and then confirmed what we’d all been afraid of.

As she spoke the words, it was like I was hearing them from deep underwater. There was a ringing in my ears, and I looked around the table, at Gelsey who was already crying, and my father, who looked paler than I’d ever seen him, and Warren furrowing his brow, the way he always did when he didn’t want to express any emotion. I pinched the inside of my arm, hard, just in case it might wake me up from this nightmare I’d landed in and couldn’t seem to get out of. But the pinching didn’t help, and I was still at the table as my mother said more of the terrible words. Cancer. Pancreatic. Stage four. Four months, maybe more. Maybe less.

When she’d finished and Gelsey was hiccupping and Warren was staring very hard at the ceiling, blinking more than usual, my father spoke for the first time. “I think we should talk about the summer,” he said, his voice hoarse. I looked over at him, and he met my eyes, and suddenly I was ashamed that I hadn’t burst into tears like my younger sister, that all I was feeling was a terrible hollow numbness. As though this was letting him down somehow. “I would like to spend the summer with all of you up at the lake house,” he said. He looked around the rest of the table. “What do you think?”

Chapter five

“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.” MY MOTHER CLOSED ONE OF the kitchen cabinet doors a little harder than necessary and turned to face me, shaking her head. “They took all my spices. Can you believe it?”

“Mmm,” I muttered. I’d been drafted into helping my mother unpack the kitchen, but mostly I’d been organizing and reorganizing the silverware drawer, which seemed preferable to dealing with one of the large boxes that still needed to be sorted. So far, my mother hadn’t noticed, since she’d been taking inventory of what was left in the kitchen. It seemed that last summer’s renters had taken most everything that hadn’t been nailed down—including cleaning supplies and all the condiments in the fridge. Conversely, though, they had also left a lot of their stuff behind—like the crib that had so offended Gelsey.

“I don’t know how I’m expected to cook without spices,” she muttered as she opened one of the upper cabinets, rising up on her toes to check the contents, her feet turned out in a perfect first position. My mother was a former professional ballet dancer, and though a tendon injury had sidelined her in her twenties, she still looked like she’d be able to reenter the studio at any moment. “Taylor,” she said a little more sharply, causing me to look at her.

“What?” I asked, hearing how defensive I sounded, as I straightened a teaspoon.

My mother sighed. “Can you stop it with the pouting, please?”

If there was a sentence designed to make me pout even more, I didn’t know what it was. Even though I didn’t want to, I could feel myself scowling. “I’m not pouting.”

My mom glanced through the screened-in porch out to the water, then looked back at me. “This summer is going to be hard enough for all of us without this… attitude.”

I closed the silverware drawer harder than I probably needed to, now feeling guilty as well as annoyed. I’d never been my mother’s favorite—that was Gelsey—but we’d always gotten along fairly well.

“I know you didn’t want to come here,” she said, her tone softening. “But we have to try and make the best of it. All right?”

I pulled the drawer open, then pushed it closed again. I’d been in this house for only a few hours, but already I was feeling claustrophobic. And the presence next door of an ex-boyfriend who hated me—with good reason—wasn’t helping. “I just,” I said, a little haltingly, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here all summer. And—”

“Mom!” Gelsey stomped into the kitchen. “The crib is still in my room. And the lights aren’t working.”

“The Murphys probably took the lightbulbs, too,” she muttered, shaking her head. “I’ll go look.” She walked out behind Gelsey, her hand resting on my sister’s shoulder, but stopped at the kitchen threshold and turned back to me. “Taylor, we can talk about this later. In the meantime, why don’t you or Warren go pick up a pizza? It doesn’t look like I’m going to be cooking anything here tonight.”

She left and I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes longer, my eyes drawn to the plastic orange prescription pill bottles that lined the counter. I looked at them for a moment longer, then headed off in search of my dad, since I knew wherever he was, Warren would be as well.

I found them both—not that it was a very long search, in a house this small—sitting around the dining table, my father with his glasses on, a stack of papers and his laptop in front of him, Warren with a huge book that he was frowning importantly at, making notes on a legal pad as he read. Warren had gotten in early-decision to Penn, and was already planning on the pre-law track, but to look at him, you’d think that he was already an equity partner, and that law school—not to mention college—would just be a formality.

“Hey,” I said, poking my brother in the back as I took the seat next to my dad. “Mom said to pick up pizza.”

Warren frowned. “Me?” My father shot him a look and he got to his feet. “I mean, sure. What’s the name of the place downtown?”

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I turned to my dad, and so did Warren. My brother might have had a photographic memory, but it was my father who always remembered the important things—events, dates, names of pizza restaurants.

“The Humble Pie,” my dad said. “If it’s still there, that is.”

“I’ll find out,” Warren said, straightening his polo shirt and walking to the door. He stopped after a few steps and turned to us. “You know that pizza was developed as a way to use leftovers, starting in Italy, in the fifteenth—”

“Son,” my dad said, cutting him off. “Maybe over dinner?”

“You got it,” Warren said, flushing slightly as he walked out. A moment later, I heard the front door slam and the sound of the car engine starting.

My dad looked at me over his computer screen and raised an eyebrow. “So, kid. Your mother really asked your brother to get the pizza?”

I tried to hide a smile as I pulled at a loose thread at the end of my T-shirt and shrugged. “She may have suggested either of us. I delegated.”

He shook his head, smiling slightly as he looked back down at his papers. He hadn’t stopped working when he was diagnosed, claiming that he was just going to finish up a few loose ends, but I knew that he wouldn’t have been happy if he wasn’t working. He’d been a partner at his law firm, specializing in appeals. He went into the office every Saturday, and most Sundays as well. It was just normal that he was only at dinner one or two nights a week, working the rest of the time. I’d gotten used to the phone ringing late at night or early in the morning. I’d gotten used to hearing the faint hum of the garage door opening and closing at four a.m. as he headed into the office early, someone’s last hope at a second chance.

“What are you working on?” I asked, after he’d been typing in silence for a few minutes.

“A brief,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now. Would have had it done sooner, but…” He let the sentence trail off, and I knew what he meant. A few weeks ago—three to be exact—we’d found out what was wrong with him, which had derailed everything for a while.

“That doesn’t sound so brief,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, and was rewarded when my dad smiled.

“Nice,” he said approvingly. My father loved puns, the more groan-inducing the better, and I was the only one who tolerated them—and, for that matter, tried to respond in kind. “I just…” He looked at the screen, shaking his head. “I just want to get this right. It looks like it might be my legacy.”

I nodded, looking down at the scratches on the wood table, totally unsure how to respond to that. We all knew what was happening with my dad, but we hadn’t really talked about it since my birthday, and I had no idea what to say.

“Well,” my dad said more quietly, after a pause. “Back to it.” He started typing again, and even though I’d intended to leave and start unpacking, it suddenly felt wrong to just leave my dad working alone on his last case. So I sat next to him, the silence punctuated only by the tapping of the keyboard, until we heard the crunching of the car’s tires on the gravel, and my mother’s voice, calling for us to come to dinner.

The bathroom wasn’t big enough.

This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.

“You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.

“You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.

“I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.

Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.

I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.

“Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.

When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.

“Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub. “Pholcidae.” My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.

“Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from where she was practically hiding behind my mother—which seemed a tad melodramatic to me.

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“No,” my father said. “I’m just going to need a piece of paper and a glass.”

“On it,” Warren said, hustling out and returning with one of my magazines and a water glass. He handed them across the threshold to my dad, and then the rest of us all hung back. It wasn’t only arachnophobia—my father took up almost the whole of the small bathroom. He’d gone through college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker, and still was big, despite some of the weight he’d lost recently—tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, trained over years to carry across courtrooms to jurors’ ears.

A moment later, my dad emerged from behind the shower curtain, holding the glass pressed to the magazine. The spider scrambled frantically from one end of the glass to the other, over the features of the starlet who adorned the cover. My dad grimaced as he straightened up, and my mother immediately took the magazine from him and thrust it out to me.

“Taylor, set this free outside, would you?” She took a step toward my father, and asked, her voice more quiet, “Are you okay, Robin?”

While Robin was my dad’s full name, he went by Rob, and the only times I heard him called Robin was when my mom was angry or worried, or my grandfather was visiting.

My father was still wincing, and I didn’t think I could stand to see it, something I’d almost never seen before—my dad in pain. Magazine and trapped spider in hand, I turned away, glad for an excuse to leave.

I headed out the front door and down the steps to the gravel driveway, where I lifted the glass. Expecting the spider to crawl away immediately, I was surprised when it stayed where it was, frozen over This Summer’s Top 10 Beauty Tips. “Move,” I said as I jiggled the magazine, and finally it got the message and skittered away. I shook out the magazine, and was about to go back inside, but the thought of the expression on my dad’s face caused me to leave the magazine and glass on the porch and walk down the driveway toward the road.

I was barefoot, and every step made me flinch, reminding me just how long it had been since I’d been able to do this without shoes on—how long, in fact, since I’d been back here. When I was halfway down the driveway, I reached our bearbox—a wooden, weighted contraption designed to keep the bears from getting into the trash—and had to stop and give my feet a little rest, noticing the fireflies’ lights starting to blink on and off in the grass. Then I practically hopped my way to the end of the driveway, and stepped onto the paved road.

Though I didn’t want to, I found myself gravitating next door. The lights were on in what I now knew was Henry’s house, spilling out from the windows into squares on the gravel driveway. I looked at the lighted windows, wondering if he was home, and if so, which room was his, when I caught myself and realized I was being ridiculous. I looked away and noticed, for the first time, that there was a tent pitched next to the house, a round camping one. As I stared, the tent lit up, throwing whoever was inside into silhouette. I turned and took a few steps up the street quickly, walking nonchalantly, as though I were just out for an evening stargazing session.

Which actually seemed like a pretty good idea, I decided, as I took in the moon above me, huge in the sky, sending sheets of light down onto the road. I tipped my head back to search for stars.

I’d loved them ever since I was little, and my grandfather, a naval officer, had sent me a book about constellations. I hadn’t ever been good at identifying them, but the stories stuck with me. Lovers exiled to the ends of the universe, goddesses punished for vanity and hung upside down. Whenever the night was clear enough, I’d look up, trying to make out patterns in the sky, trying to see what had caused those long-ago people to tell stories about what they saw. The stars were always easier to see in Lake Phoenix, and tonight they seemed to take over the entire sky. I just stared up at them until it felt like I could breathe, maybe for the first time that day. Maybe for the first time in the last three weeks.

I really didn’t know how I was going to get through the summer. It had only been a few hours, but it already felt like more than I could handle. It was like we were all just pretending that nothing was happening. We weren’t even talking about the reason that we had all decamped there. Instead, we’d spent dinner listening to Warren go on about how pizza was invented.

I turned to head back to the house when I stopped short. The dog from that afternoon was sitting at the edge of our driveway, where gravel met pavement. I looked up the street, to see if there was an owner coming, leash and plastic bag in hand. The streets of Lake Phoenix were safe enough, and usually deserted enough, that people walked their dogs off the leash. The only time I’d heard about this being a problem was when the Morrisons were walking their mean poodle one night and encountered a bear, no doubt on a bearbox trash bender. Mr. and Mrs. Morrison had beat a hasty retreat, but their poodle, on the other hand—who, in ad***ion to being mean was also apparently not too bright—seemed to think the bear was just a big dog and trotted over to say hello. At some point, the dog figured out that this was a terrible idea, and ran away, unscathed. After that, I never saw the Morrisons walking it without a leash—and a very short one, at that.

But the street tonight was quiet, no late-night walkers looking for their slightly irregular canine. I took another step, and the dog didn’t get up and move, or even stiffen. Instead, its tail thumped harder, like I was just the person it had been waiting to see. I saw that the collar was a faded blue, which meant it was most likely a boy, and that there was writing on his tag. So he had a home, he just was choosing to avoid it. At that moment, I could relate.

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Wherever the dog lived, though, he obviously lived somewhere, and that somewhere, despite what he seemed to think, was not our driveway. I walked around him, and headed back to the house, figuring that the dog would be able to take care of himself. I’d gone only a few steps when I heard a faint jingling sound behind me. I turned back and saw the dog following me. He froze in his tracks, then sat hastily, as though I wouldn’t notice that he had moved. Feeling like I was in a bizarre game of Red Light, Green Light, I pointed back at the road. “No,” I said as firmly as possible, trying to remember all the lessons from Top Dog. “Go.”

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

THE 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.

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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.

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“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.

“Don’t,” he said, and I could hear that he sounded equally annoyed. “That wood’s rotten, it’s likely to—”

With a snap, the trunk I’d been standing on collapsed, and I was pitching forward, bracing for the inevitable fall, when just like that, in an instant, Henry was there, catching me.

“Sorry,” I gasped, feeling how hard my heart was pounding, the adrenaline pumping through my body.

“Careful,” he said, as I started to step out of the trunk. “Davy twisted his ankle doing that last month.”

“Thanks.” I leaned on him a little bit for support as I lifted my foot out, trying very hard not to think about what kind of creepy-crawlies were probably living in a rotted-out tree trunk. It wasn’t until I had both feet back on the forest floor that I realized his arms were still around me. I could feel the heat from his hands on my back through my thin T-shirt. I looked up at him—it was still so strange to have to look up at Henry—and saw how close we were, our faces just inches apart. He must have become aware of this at the same time, because he dropped his arms immediately, and took a few steps away.

“You okay?” he asked, the brusque, businesslike tone back in his voice.

“Fine,” I said. I brushed off some of the wet leaves that had stuck to my ankles, mostly so he wouldn’t see how flustered I was.

“Good,” he said. He started walking again, and I followed behind, careful to put my feet where I saw him place his, not wanting another mishap. In what seemed like only a few more seconds, I was following Henry out of the woods, blinking in the brighter sunlight, and realizing I was just two streets away from my house. “You know your way from here?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” I said, slightly insulted.

Henry just shook his head and smiled, the first real smile I’d seen since meeting him again. “It’s not like you have the greatest sense of direction,” he said. I opened my mouth to protest this, and he went on, “I just had to help you find your way out of the woods.” He looked at me evenly for a moment, then added, “And it wasn’t even the first time.” Then he turned and walked away, leaving me to try and figure out what he meant.

A moment later, when he’d passed out of sight, it hit me. The first time we’d met had been in these very same woods. As I walked home, shielding my eyes against the sun, so bright after the darkness of the woods. I realized that I’d been so caught up in thinking about how things with him had ended, I’d almost forgotten how they had begun.

“Taylor, where have you been?” my mother asked when I returned, her eyes widening as she took in the scratches on my legs. I’d been trying to sneak back to my room quietly, hoping that everyone would still be asleep, but no such luck. My mom was unpacking what looked like practically a kitchenful of paper bags from the PocoMart, the closest thing to a grocery store in Lake Phoenix. There were bigger supermarkets, but they were a good half hour drive away.

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“Just walking,” I said vaguely as I glanced around the kitchen, not meeting her eye. I saw that the coffeemaker was still empty—my mother was a tea drinker—which meant that, two hours after I’d left, my father was still asleep.

“I ran into Paul Crosby at the market,” she said, referring to Henry’s dad. I felt my face start to get hot, and was just grateful that she’d run into him before his sons had a chance to report back about my getting lost in the woods. “In the dairy aisle. He said they’re living next door to us now.”

“Oh,” I said. “How about that.” I could feel my cheeks getting hotter, and I opened the fridge and stuck my head in, trying to pretend I was looking for something essential.

“You’ll have to go say hi to Henry,” my mother continued, as I concentrated on making sure the expiration dates on the containers of milk were all facing out.

There is only so long you can stand with your head in a refrigerator, and I had just reached that point. Plus, my ears were staring to get cold. “Mmm,” I said, closing the door and leaning my back against it.

“And I suppose I should go and say hello to Ellen,” my mother continued. She sounded distinctly less excited about this thought, and I didn’t blame her. Henry’s mother had never seemed to like kids very much unless we were quiet and out of the way. While we had always dashed full-out into my house, sometimes mid-watergun fight, when we reached Henry’s door, we immediately settled down and got quiet, without even talking about it. Theirs was not a house you ever made blanket forts in. And without my mother saying anything outright, I had always gotten the sense she really hadn’t liked Mrs. Crosby very much.

I pulled an apple from one of the bags on the counter, and my mother took it from me, washed it quickly, patted it dry, and then handed it back. “You and Henry used to be so close,” she said.

I glanced through the kitchen window to the Crosbys’ house, mostly so my mother wouldn’t be able to see my expression. “I guess,” I said. “But that was a long time ago, Mom.”

She started to fold up the bags, and I could have helped, but instead, I leaned against the kitchen counter and started to eat my apple. “Have you called Lucy yet?” she asked.

I bit down hard on my apple, wondering why my mother always assumed she knew what was best for me. Why didn’t she just ask me if I wanted to call Lucy, for example? Which I absolutely didn’t, by the way. “No,” I said, trying to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “And I don’t think I’m going to.”

She gave me a look that told me plainly that she thought this was a mistake as she put the paper bags away where we’d always kept them, under the sink. “Your childhood friends are the ones you should hang on to. They know you in a way that nobody else does.”

After this morning’s encounter with Henry, I wasn’t convinced this was a good thing. I watched as my mother crossed to the fridge with the summer calendar. The Lake Phoenix association made them every year, and one had been on the fridge up here for every summer that I could remember. They were designed to hang vertically, so that you could see all three months of the summer at once, each month flanked with pictures of smiling kids on sailboats, happy couples relaxing by the lake, and seniors taking in a sunrise. My mom attached it to the fridge with the mismatched magnets we’d always had and that I was suddenly glad the Murphys hadn’t taken, and I leaned closer to look at it, at all those empty squares that represented the days of summer ahead.

This calendar had always been a way, especially this early in the season, to revel in how much time was still left in the summer. In years past, the summer had just seemed to stretch forever, so that by the time August rolled around, I’d had my fill of s’mores and popsicles and mosquito bites, and was actually looking forward to fall—to cooler weather and wearing tights and Halloween and Christmas.

But as I stared at it now, and started to do the math, I got a panicky feeling in my chest, one that made it harder to breathe. On my birthday, three weeks ago, the doctors had told my dad that he had four months. Maybe more… but maybe less. And three weeks of those months had already passed. Which meant… I stared at the calendar so hard, it got a little blurry. It was the middle of May, so we still had the rest of the month and all of June. And then all of July. But then what? I looked at August, at the picture of the older couple holding hands as they watched the sun rise over Lake Phoenix, and realized I had no idea what would be happening then, what my world would look like. If my dad would still be alive.

“Taylor?” my mom asked, her voice concerned. “You okay?”

I wasn’t okay, and this normally would have been when I would have hit the road—gotten in my car and driven somewhere, gone for a long walk, anything to avoid the problem. But as I’d learned this morning, going outside certainly didn’t seem to help things—and in fact, made them worse.

“I’m fine,” I snapped at her, even though there was a piece of me that knew she didn’t deserve it. But I wanted her to know what was wrong without having to ask. And what I really wanted her to do was what she hadn’t done, now that it mattered the most—I wanted her to fix it. But she hadn’t fixed it, and she wasn’t going to be able to. I threw away my half-eaten apple and left the kitchen.

Finding the bathroom miraculously empty, I took a long, hot shower, washing the dirt from the scratches on my legs and staying in there until the hot water in our tiny hot water heater started to run out.

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When I came back into the kitchen, it was filled with the smell of coffee. The coffeemaker was burbling and hissing and there was half a pot already brewed. I could see my dad sitting on the screened-in porch, laptop in front of him, steaming mug in hand, laughing at something my mom was saying. And even though I knew what the calendar on the fridge said, I somehow couldn’t get it to make sense, not with my dad sitting in the sunlight, looking totally healthy, unless you knew otherwise. I walked to the doorway of the screened-in porch, leaned against the door frame, and my dad turned to look at me.

“Hi, kid,” he said. “What’s the news?” And before I could get the words around the lump that had formed in my throat, to begin to answer, he looked out to the view of the lake, and smiled. “Doesn’t it look like a beautiful day out there?”

Metamorphosis

Chapter seven

A THIRTEEN-LETTER WORD FOR “CHANGE.” I GLANCED DOWN AT the Pocono Record’s crossword puzzle and tapped my pencil on the empty squares of 19 across. Trying to concentrate, I looked through the screened-in porch and out to the lake. I wasn’t exactly in the habit of doing crosswords, but I was getting a little desperate for entertainment. After five days in Lake Phoenix, I was officially bored out of my mind. And the worst part was that in this situation, unlike family vacations or Gelsey’s dance recitals, I couldn’t complain to anyone that I was bored out of my mind and know they were feeling the same way. Because I wasn’t supposed to spend this summer being entertained. It wasn’t supposed to be fun. But that didn’t change the fact that I was, in fact, incredibly bored. And suffering majorly from cabin fever.

I heard the now-familiar sound of the FedEx truck’s tires crunching on our driveway and jumped up to intercept the daily package, just to have something to do. But when I stepped outside, I saw that my dad was already holding the white box in his hands, nodding at the driver—who, after daily deliveries, was getting to be pretty familiar.

“You’re keeping me busy in this neck of the woods,” the driver said, flipping down his sunglasses. “You’re just about the only delivery I get around here.”

“I believe that,” my dad said, pulling open the tab on the box.

“And if you guys could keep your dog tied up, I’d appreciate it,” the driver said as he settled into the front seat. “I almost hit him this morning.” He started the truck and backed down our driveway, beeping once as he turned down the road.

My dad turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Dog?”

“Oh, my God,” I said. I leaned over the front porch railing and saw, sure enough, the same dog loitering by the edge of our driveway. “Shoo!” I yelled at him. “Get out of here!” He glanced at me, then trotted past our driveway and out of sight, but I had a feeling he’d be back before too long. “It’s just this dog,” I said, as the jingling of his tags grew fainter and fainter. “He thinks he lives here.”

“Ah,” my dad said, still looking a little puzzled, and I could see that I hadn’t really clarified anything. He crossed the driveway and climbed the stairs, leaning a little bit on the railing. “Well, just don’t let your brother see him.”

“Right,” I said, and followed my dad to the screened-in porch, where he shook out the box’s contents, a thick sheaf of papers, many marked with brightly colored flags. He’d gotten a similar delivery from his law firm every day so far, all apparently pertaining to a case that he’d been working on. When I’d asked why his firm couldn’t just e-mail the documents, instead of sending a FedEx truck through the mountains of Pennsylvania every day, he’d told me that it was due to security issues.

I slumped down in the chair across from him and sighed, all the while aware that I wasn’t even managing to do the one thing my dad had asked of us—that is, stop hanging around the house.

On our first full day, it quickly became obvious that Warren and Gelsey and I had no idea what to do with ourselves. And so, the three of us spent the first two days simply following my dad from room to room, in case he wanted to bond or something. After the second straight day of this, we’d been sitting around the table on the screened-in porch while my father worked. Gelsey had her battered copy of Holding On to the Air, the ballerina Suzanne Farrell’s autobiography, I had my magazine, now with the spider-tainted cover removed, and Warren had a textbook in front of him. We were all reading, kind of—except every time my dad would glance up from his work, we would look up too, and Warren would smile unnaturally, all of us waiting for some cue, someone to tell us how to act. But it was becoming very clear to me that it was called quality time for a reason—by definition, it didn’t mean spending every waking minute together.

And in summers past, we’d certainly never spent much time inside unless it was raining. As its name implied, Lake Phoenix was a summer community on a lake, and the lake—and its beach—was pretty much the main attraction. There was also a pool, complete with a waterslide that I’d spent a lot of time at when I was younger, plus tennis courts and a golf course. It was like a strange combination of a country club and camp—except that it wasn’t at all fancy. There were no million-dollar houses or estates, but you did have to buy a membership to be able to go to the beach and pool. And because it was so far removed from everything, and such a small community, Lake Phoenix was incredibly safe, and I’d basically had free run of the place from when I was about seven. There was a bus for kids, the shuttle bus, that ran from the Recreation Center around to the pool and beach. But I’d taken it only rarely. Most of the time, I’d ridden my bike everywhere.

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When we’d been up here before, my mother would spend her time either at the beach or playing tennis, my father would be working outside or playing golf, and my siblings and I were either at the tennis and golf lessons our parents had forced us to take, or at the beach or pool. We would all come back for dinner and eat together on the screened-in porch, everyone a little more tan than when we’d left that morning. But we’d never just stayed home, all day, when it was gorgeous and sunny out.

“Enough is enough,” my dad said, after he’d glanced up to find us all looking—and Warren still smiling—at him. “You three are driving me crazy.”

I looked at my brother, who shot me a questioning look back. I really wasn’t sure what my father was talking about—especially since I had been so careful not to do anything that might drive him crazy. “Um,” I finally said after a moment, when it became clear my siblings weren’t going to jump into the breach, “what are we doing?”

“You’re not doing anything,” he said, sounding aggravated. “And that’s the problem. I don’t need the three of you staring at me all day. It makes me feel like I’m in some kind of science experiment. Or—even worse—some kind of reality show.”

I saw Warren open his mouth to respond, but then close it again—further proof that none of us were acting like we normally did. I had never seen Warren back down from an argument.

“Look,” my dad said, his tone softening a little, “I appreciate what you are all trying to do. But while we still can, I would like to have as normal a summer as possible. Okay?”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what a “normal” summer was. In a normal summer, or at least what they’d looked like over the last few years, we wouldn’t have been together.

“So,” Gelsey said, and I noticed she was sitting up a little straighter, a glint coming into her brown eyes, “what should we do with our time, then?”

“Whatever you want,” he said, spreading his hands open. “Just so long as it doesn’t involve just hanging around the house all day. It’s summer. Go have fun.”

That seemed to be all the impetus my sister needed. She bolted from the table and ran into the house, yelling for my mother, asking if they could do a barre. My father watched her go, smiling, then turned back to me and Warren, who still hadn’t moved.

“I mean it,” he said, waving us away with his hands. “In ad***ion to this case, I have to start work on a very important project soon, and I’d like some peace to do it in.”

“Project?” Warren asked. “What kind?”

“Just a project,” my dad said vaguely, looking down at the papers in his hands.

“So,” Warren said, and I could tell he was trying a little too hard to sound casual, the way he always did when his feelings were hurt and he didn’t want to show it. “You don’t want us to spend time with you?”

“It’s not that,” my dad said, and he looked pained for a moment. “Of course I want to spend time with you. But this is just weird. Go enjoy your summers.” Warren took a breath, probably to ask my dad to qualify what, exactly, that meant. Maybe sensing this, my dad went on, “You can do whatever you want. I just want you to do something. Get a job. Read the collected works of Dickens. Learn to juggle. It doesn’t matter to me. Just stop lurking about, okay?”

I nodded, even though none of these seemed like actual possibilities for ways to spend my time. I’d never had a job, had zero interest in juggling, and had pretty much written off Dickens after freshman year English. He’d lost me from page one of A Tale of Two Cities, when I’d been unable to grasp how something could simultaneously be the best of times and the worst of times.

Warren and Gelsey, in contrast, had no such problems figuring out what to do. Gelsey was going to do a barre with my mother every day, working on her technique so that she didn’t fall too far behind in her ballet training. My mom had also gone over to the Lake Phoenix Recreation Center and somehow convinced the people running it to let Gelsey use one of their rooms—when it was empty and the seniors weren’t using it for yoga—to practice in a few times a week. And as a compromise with my mother, Gelsey had also agreed to take tennis lessons. Warren had blissfully thrown himself into reading what seemed like his entire freshman course-load, and could usually be found on the porch or the dock, merrily highlighting away. The whole situation was yet another reminder of my siblings’ exceptionalism—as ever, they had something to do, the thing they’d always done, the thing that they seemed to know from birth that they were best at. Which left me, as usual, alone and far behind as they pursued their paths to greatness.

So for the past five days, I had mostly been wandering around and feeling in the way. I had never been so aware of just how small the house was, and how few places there were to hide in it. And ever since the two embarrassing Henry encounters, I was avoiding both the dock and the woods, and had pretty much stopped going outside, except for my nightly excursion to take the trash out to the bearbox (which had somehow become my job) and shoo away the dog who seemed to have no intention of leaving. My mother had also reported that when she’d stopped by to bring a planter of geraniums to Henry’s mother, she wasn’t there, but that a blond girl, around my age, had answered the door.

I had tried very hard not to think about this too much, and certainly wasn’t letting it bother me. After all, what did I care if Henry had a girlfriend? But it somehow, retroactively, made those two encounters with him even more humiliating, and I had been careful to avoid looking at the house next door, not letting myself wonder if he was home.