Second Chance Summer (42 page)

Henry looked up at me, and for a second, I saw all the pain—all the pain that I was causing—cross his face. Then he nodded, and just like that, he was back to being what he’d been to me at the beginning of the summer—a little distant, a little cool. “If that’s what you want,” he said. I nodded, and pressed my nails hard into my palms to stop myself from telling him otherwise. He looked at me for one moment longer, then turned and walked off the dock, shoving his hands in his pockets as he went.

As I watched him go, I felt a tear hit my cheek, then another, but I didn’t even bother to wipe them away. When I was sure he’d gone inside, I walked slowly up the dock myself, making sure not to look back at what we’d carved so long ago—the plus sign, and the heart, that was a lie once again.

chapter thirty-three

seven summers earlier

I
WAS OFFICIALLY LOST
.

I turned in a complete circle, but all I saw around me were trees, and trees that all looked exactly the same. Any sign of the path I had taken when I’d stomped into the woods was totally gone. The trees were blocking out the light above me, and this deep in the woods, it was darker than I had realized it would be. I could feel my heart start to beat faster, and made myself close my eyes for a moment and take a deep breath, like I’d seen my father do before he had court, and once when he saw what his car looked like when my mom rammed it into the tree that came out of nowhere.

But when I opened my eyes again, nothing had changed. I was still lost, and it was now a little darker out. I hadn’t intended to go into the woods. But I’d been so mad at Warren, for cutting me out of his stupid game. And when I’d told my mother about it, she was helping Gelsey with her new ballet slippers and told me she didn’t have time to deal with me right then. So I’d headed out the door, planning on just taking my bike and going down to the lake,
or maybe seeing if Lucy was around and wanted to hang out. But the more I thought about it, the unfairness of it all, the madder I got, until I’d convinced myself that all I wanted was to be alone. And at first, I’d been so busy noticing things—a huge anthill that I would have told Warren about if I’d been speaking to him, the springy moss that grew at the roots of trees, the thousands and thousands of ferns—that when I stopped and looked around, I realized I had no idea where I was. Figuring I couldn’t have gone that far, I headed toward where I was sure the road back to my house was, only to find woods, and more woods. So I’d changed direction, but that hadn’t helped, and had only served to make me more turned around. And now it was getting dark, and I was starting to feel myself panic, despite all the deep breaths I was taking. I had a ton of freedom up in Lake Phoenix, and could pretty much do what I wanted with my day, so long as I was back for dinner. And even though my mom always complained when I did this, I sometimes went for dinner at Lucy’s and forgot to call. So it could be hours before anyone realized that I was gone, that something was wrong. And it would be dark by then. And there were bears in the woods. I could feel the first hot tears start to build up behind my eyes, and blinked them away hard. I could find my way out. I just had to think rationally, and not panic.

A twig snapped behind me, and I jumped, my heart hammering harder than ever. I turned around, hoping with everything
I had that it would just be a squirrel, or better yet, a butterfly, basically anything but a bear. But standing in front of me was a kid who looked around my own age. He was skinny, with scraped-up knees and shaggy brown hair. “Hey,” he said, lifting one hand in a wave.

“Hi,” I said, looking at him more closely. I didn’t recognize him, and I knew all the kids’ whose families had homes in Lake Phoenix—most of us had been coming up here since we were babies.

“Are you lost?” he asked. And though he didn’t say it mockingly, and I was, I still felt my cheeks get hot.

“No,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “I’m just taking a walk.”

“You looked lost,” he pointed out, in the same reasonable voice. “You kept turning around.”

“Well, I’m not,” I snapped. I felt the urge to toss my hair at him. The heroine in the book I was reading tossed her hair a lot, and I’d been looking for an opportunity, even though I wasn’t quite exactly sure how to pull this off.

He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. He turned and started to walk in the other direction, and after he’d gone a few steps, I yelped, “Wait!”

I hurried to catch up with him, and he waited for me until I got there. “I’m maybe a little lost,” I confessed as I reached him. “I’m just trying to get back to Dockside. Or really, any road. I’ll be able to find my way back.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know where that is,” he said. “But I can
take you back to the street my house is on, if you want. I think it’s called Hollyhock.”

I knew exactly where that was—but it was a ten-minute bike ride away from my house, and I realized just how turned around I had actually gotten. “Did you just move in?” I asked as I fell into step next to him. He was a little shorter than me, and as I looked down at him, I could see an explosion of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

“This afternoon,” he said, nodding.

“Then how do you know where you’re going?” I asked, and I could hear my voice rise a little, as I started to panic again. Were there now two of us lost in the woods? Were we going to provide the bears with multiple entrée options?

“I know the woods,” he said, in the same calm voice. “We have some behind our house in Maryland. You just have to look for markers. You can always find your way out again, no matter how lost you think you are.”

That seemed highly unlikely to me. “Really.”

He smiled at that, and I could see his front teeth were slightly crooked, the way Warren’s had been before he got his retainer. “Really,” he said. “See?” He pointed through a gap in the trees and I saw, to my amazement, the road, with cars going by.

“Oh, wow,” I said as I felt relief flood through me. “I thought I was never going to get out of here. I thought I was bear food. Thank you so much!”

“Sure,” he said, with a shrug. “It was no big deal.”

As he said this, I realized he wasn’t bragging, or telling me that he’d told me so, or being a jerk about the fact that I’d lied and then needed his help anyway. And as I looked at him, and his steady green-brown eyes, I was suddenly glad I hadn’t tried to toss my hair. “I’m Taylor, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, smiling at me. “I’m Henry.”

chapter thirty-four

M
Y DAD RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL THE NEXT DAY, BUT IT
was clear that things weren’t going to go back to whatever normal we’d established. His doctors no longer wanted him to go unmonitored, and apparently, he was going to need help soon that we wouldn’t be able to provide. So, as a condition of being able to come home, we would now have round-the-clock home health care workers. He also wasn’t supposed to climb stairs any longer, so a bed—the kind with a remote that could raise and lower it, the kind in hospitals—had been installed in our living room, the table we never used pushed aside to make space. A wheelchair sat in the corner of the screened-in porch, like a terrible sign of things to come.

And adding to the feeling that the summer as we’d known it had ended was the presence of my grandfather. After I’d had my conversation on the dock with Henry, I’d gone inside and cried for an hour. This seriously frightened Warren, who’d come home with Wendy and a pizza in tow for dinner, and hadn’t expected either the news about Dad or to find his sister in an emotional meltdown.
When I’d composed myself, with Warren standing by for emotional support, I’d called my grandfather in New York and told him the situation. I’d barely gotten the words out before he was telling me what bus he would be on, and when I should pick him up. So as my mother was dealing with the medical-supply people and setting up the bed, and Warren was taking Gelsey out for ice cream to tell her what was happening (never mind that it was ten in the morning), I was driving to Mountainview to meet my grandfather’s bus.

I arrived early and parked near the bus station, but it wasn’t until I got out of the car to wait that I realized I probably should have pulled myself together a little more. I wasn’t even wearing shoes, which was never really a problem in Lake Phoenix. My feet, by now, had toughed up so that I could easily run up the driveway barefoot, and I preferred to drive barefoot, always with a few lone grains of sand clinging to my feet and the pedals. Nevertheless, I almost always remembered to throw some flip-flops into the car so that I wouldn’t look like a total hick when I got out of it. But between lying awake the night before, wondering if I’d done the right thing with Henry, and this morning, with the new equipment and people traipsing through the house, I wasn’t really in the best frame of mind.

The bus arrived right on time, and I walked up the hot sidewalk to meet it, as the doors swung open and the passengers disembarked. My grandfather was the third passenger off, and I waved as he got closer, getting a curt nod in response.

Even though it was a Saturday morning, and the temperature was in the high eighties, he was wearing a collared shirt and a blue blazer, khakis with pleats, and boat shoes. His white hair was sharply parted and he carried a small leather duffel bag and a larger suitcase easily, as though they weighed nothing. As he got closer, I realized with a sudden pang that my grandfather, who had always been
old
, was now in much better shape than my dad was.

“Taylor,” he said as he reached me, pulling me into a quick hug. He didn’t look much like my father—my dad seemed to take after my grandmother, at least in the pictures of her I’d seen—but I noticed now, for the first time, that he had the same blue eyes as my dad. And me.

“Hi,” I said, already feeling awkward around him, and wondering how long he was going to end up staying. “The car’s this way.” As I headed over, I saw him look down at my feet and raise his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything, which I was grateful for. I wasn’t sure what explanation I could give for having forgotten to wear shoes that morning.

“So,” he said, after I’d started driving toward Lake Phoenix. I noticed that his posture was, as always, ramrod-straight, and I found myself sitting up a little straighter in response. “How is Robin?”

It took me a moment to translate this to my dad. I knew his name was Robin, of course, but he went exclusively by Rob, and my grandfather was practically the only one I had ever heard call
him this. “He’s back from the hospital,” I said, not really trusting myself to say more. My dad had been asleep most of the morning, even through the setup of the hospital bed, which had been loud enough to send Murphy running for cover. My grandfather nodded and looked out the window, and I tried to remember the last time he’d seen my dad—it would have been months ago, when he still seemed healthy, and strong, and normal. I had no idea how to prepare my grandfather for the changes in him—I could barely process them myself. “He’s not doing so well,” I said, looking straight ahead, concentrating on the brightness of the red light in front of me. “You might be a little surprised by how he looks.”

My grandfather nodded again, squaring his shoulders a little as though steeling himself to face this. After a few minutes of driving in silence, my grandfather pulled something out of his bag. “I made this for your sister,” he said. “I finished it on the bus.” He extended it to me just as I reached another stoplight and slowed for the yellow. “Do you think she’ll like it?”

I looked at the item on his outstretched palm. It was a tiny carved wooden dog, remarkably detailed. “You made this?” I asked, stunned. The car behind me honked, and I realized the light had changed. I drove on, and my grandfather turned the dog over in his hands.

“Whittling,” he said. “I learned to do it on the first ship I served on, when I had kitchen duty. I could make a potato look
like
anybody
.” I felt myself smile, a little shocked. It seemed my grandfather could be funny. “Your mother told me you got a dog, but she didn’t tell me what kind. So it’s kind of a mix.”