Second Chance Summer (6 page)

“Oh,” I said, nodding like I understood. I had no idea what that meant in terms of the rest of his life, but he didn’t seem like he was about to give me a detailed explanation, and I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask for more information. All of a sudden, I realized there was a much bigger distance between Henry and me than just the few feet that separated us.

“Yeah,” Henry said, and I wondered if he was feeling the same thing that I was—like he was standing on the dock with a stranger. “I should go,” he said shortly, as he turned to leave.

It felt wrong to end this on such an unsettled note, so, mostly just wanting to be polite, as he passed me, I said, “Good to see you again.”

He stopped, just a few feet from me, closer than ever, close enough that I could see that there was still a scattering of freckles across his cheeks, but so faint I could almost see each one, and connect them, like constellations. I could feel my pulse beating harder at the base of my throat, and I suddenly had a flashback to one of our early, tentative make-out sessions five years earlier—one that had, in fact, taken place on this very dock.
I’ve kissed you
flashed through my mind before I could stop it.

I looked at Henry, still so close, wondering if maybe he was remembering the same thing. But he was looking at me with a flat, skeptical expression, and as he started to walk away again, I realized that he had deliberately not returned my “good to see you” sentiment.

Maybe, on a different day, I would have left it at that. But I was cranky and tired and had just spent four hours listening to boy bands and facts about the energy of light, and I could feel my temper start to flare. “Look, it’s not like I wanted to come back,” I said, hearing my voice get louder and a little more shrill.

“Then why are you here?” Henry asked, his voice rising as well.

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter,” I snapped, knowing that I was about to go too far, but also knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself. “I never wanted to come back here ever again.”

For a second, I thought I saw a flash of hurt pass over his face, but then it was gone, and the same stony expression had returned. “Well,” he said. “Maybe you’re not the only one who wanted that.”

I tried not to flinch, even though I knew I deserved it. We stared at each other, in a momentary standoff, and I realized that one of the main problems with having an argument on a dock is that there’s really nowhere to go if the other person is standing between you and dry land.

“So,” I said finally, breaking our eye contact and folding my arms over my chest, trying to indicate with my tone of voice how little I cared. “See you around.”

Henry slung the kayak paddle over one shoulder like an ax. “I
think that’s inevitable, Taylor,” he said ruefully. He looked at me for a moment longer before turning and walking away and, not wanting to watch him go, I strode to the end of the dock.

I looked out at the water, and the sun that was just starting to think about setting, and let out a long breath. So Henry was living next door to me. It would be fine. I could deal with it. I would just spend the entire summer indoors. Suddenly exhausted by the thought of all of it, I sat down and let my feet skim the surface of the water. Just then, I caught sight of something at the very corner of the dock.

HENRY
+
TAYLOR
4EVER

We had carved it together, in the center of a crooked heart, five years ago. I couldn’t believe that it was still here after all this time. I ran my fingers over the plus sign, wondering why, at twelve, I thought I’d had any concept of forever.

From somewhere behind me, I could hear the sound of tires crunching on gravel, then car doors slamming, and I knew my parents had finally arrived. I pushed myself up and trudged across the dock, wondering just how I’d gotten here.

chapter four

three weeks earlier

I
T 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 addition 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.

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

“Y
OU HAVE GOT TO BE
KIDDING
ME
.” M
Y 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.