by Sarah Dessen
“No one is asking you to forget anyone.”
“But why didn’t we ever visit here, except for that one time before you and Mom split and the funeral? Why didn’t she ever come back, with me or just by herself?”
He groaned. “Do we have to get into this now? I’m so jet-lagged I can barely think.”
“I know about the accident,” I told him. “What happened with Chris Price. But only because of Bailey. It makes me wonder how much else I don’t know.”
“You don’t need to know everything,” he said. Now there was an edge to his voice.
“Maybe I do,” I replied. Silence. I pressed on. “Look, Dad. I know you want me to remember only the good stuff about Mom. But it’s okay that she was human and flawed. You don’t have to hide that fact from me.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to!” he said. He exhaled. “And that’s just my point. Despite everything, you are okay. My one job is to protect you. I tried to do that by building our lives in Lakeview. There just wasn’t room for anything else.”
“You can protect me without keeping secrets,” I said. “She was my mom. And this, here, it’s part of my life. And you kept it from me.”
“We both did,” he replied, sounding frustrated. “Look, Emma. Your mom never went back to the lake because by then it meant nothing but tragedy to her. It was where her problems started, the drinking, the addictions. Her bad choices led to the death of her best friend. She never got over that.”
“Then why did you guys bring me that summer?” I asked. “What was the point?”
“We were trying to save our marriage,” he said. I could hear the fatigue now in his voice, although whether it was literal or just this subject was hard to say. “Nana couldn’t help with you and we had no other options.”
“Just like this time,” I said. “So they’re family when you need a babysitter, and strangers when you don’t. That makes sense.”
He was quiet for what felt like a long time. As for me, I felt sick: I rarely, if ever, argued with my dad. Finally, he spoke.
“It’s not my intent to take you away from your family.” He said this last word slowly, as if it was difficult to pronounce. “But if we’re talking about what’s fair, you’ve spent three weeks there with her experience. It doesn’t seem wrong to ask you to do the same with mine.”
“You?” I said. “You’re not a lake kid.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I did spend summers working at the Club and met your mom there. It was a big part of my life, too.”
Not the same, I thought. But I didn’t say this aloud.
“How about this,” he said now. “You agree to come stay at the Tides. But you can still visit Mimi’s, as long as you make time for us as well. Get a bit of both worlds. Is that fair?”
“You’re staying at the Tides?” I said, remembering the ritzy resort Bailey had pointed out to me on my first trip to Lake North.
“It’s your grandmother,” he said helplessly. “And it’s not like we have a lot of choices.”
So that’s what it comes down to. Choices. Good and bad, right and wrong, yes and no. Like being behind the wheel, there are some that are instinctive, others you have to think about. It was only three miles to the other side, a distance I’d covered by foot already. Before I went back, though, there was one more trip to take. Luckily, it wasn’t far.
Fifteen
When I got to Roo’s, the Yum truck was parked outside, an extension cord stretching from it to the small garage. As I passed and heard the coolers humming, I thought of all that ice cream inside.
I went around the house to the screen door and peered in, but didn’t see anyone. There was a pair of sneakers kicked off on the floor, though, as well as a phone and some keys on a nearby table. When I heard a shower running, distantly, I sat down on the steps to wait.
It had only been a day since the conversation with my dad, and the fact that I was going to be moving to Lake North was just beginning to sink in. Partly this was because I hadn’t exactly told anyone about my dad’s directive. Yet.
First, Gordon went back to the doctor, who said she needed another round of antibiotics, making day camp still off-limits. Since I was the only one without a full-time job who wasn’t hugely pregnant, I’d offered to keep an eye on her. I hadn’t imagined it being that big of a task, until she attached herself to me like a shadow. If I was cleaning rooms, Gordon, her own spray bottle in hand, was right there. At lunch, she waited for me to make her a quesadilla after my own, then sat beside me at the table, reading her Allies book until we were done, at which point she followed me back to the motel. In the evenings, while Bailey worked late at the Station—since the breakup with Colin, she’d focused on making money and not much else—Gordon sat next to me on the couch as I watched house remodeling shows with Mimi, cheering when the hard hats came out and demos began. The only time we parted ways was when she went to bed, and I was pretty sure she would have stayed in my room if I’d offered. Which I didn’t.
“I think it’s cute,” Trinity had said that morning as we sat eating toast together in her room. In a rare moment, we were alone: Gordon had gone with Mimi to open up the office, although I knew she’d find me as soon as I started cleaning. “She looks up to you.”
“Yeah, but why?” I asked. “She barely knows me.”
Trinity shrugged, slathering butter onto one of the four pieces of toast I’d brought her. Her bed, which was basically her home until the baby came, was piled with magazines, dirty plates, and her laptop, which she used to alternately HiThere! with the Sergeant and watch Big New York, her favorite reality show. Although I’d managed to quell a lot of my organizing urges, I was dying to get her out of the room just long enough to do a deep clean.
“Well, think about it,” she said. “Her mom’s out of the picture. So is yours.”
“My mom is dead, though.”
“True. But if you’re ten and live in another state from your only parent, it probably feels like a death, right?”
I thought about this. “What’s Amber’s story, anyway?”
She finished chewing. “Grew up here, followed some deadbeat guy to Florida, where she got hooked on pills. Social services was going to take Gordon until Mama and Mimi got involved.”
I thought of Gordon, so small in her glasses. My heart just broke for her. “Sounds kind of familiar.”
“You’re more alike than you know,” Trinity continued, shifting herself and rubbing a hip. “There’s also the fact that you both have two names but only go by one.”
“You think that bonds us?”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
I thought of that first day, when I’d told Gordon about my name and she’d called me lucky. It made me think maybe I should call her Anna once in a while. “I just don’t think I’m much of a role model. It makes me nervous.”
“Are you kidding?” she snorted. “You’re a good student with a bright future who lives in a big house with a nice, normal family. Forget Gordon. I want to be like you.”
It said something that this description, so easily put, did not describe me in my mind at all. “I’m also an anxious person with a dead mom who was an addict, trying to figure out what that means for me in my own life.”
“In your big house with your normal family,” she added, raising an eyebrow.
I made a face, just as over at the motel, Gordon came out of the office, shutting the door behind her. She had on shorts and an oversized Calvander’s tie-dye, just like mine, her short hair gathered back in an identical ponytail. When she saw me on the porch, she immediately started over.
“If I were you,” Trinity said, having observed this as well, “I’d enjoy it. You’ll notice nobody is wanting to emulate me right now.”
I smiled at her. “Pretty soon, you’ll have someone who loves you best, though.”
“Here’s hoping.” She put a hand on her belly. “I was so hard on my mom, though. Still am. With my luck, the payback is going to be brutal.�
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She’d started saying this kind of thing a lot lately, as the due date got closer and she grew increasingly nervous. And a couple of weeks earlier, I might have privately agreed that maybe she didn’t have the most tender, motherly touch, though I never would have had the nerve to tell her to her face. Now, though, I’d caught enough glimpses of her good heart to know it was in there somewhere. A tough mom was better than none at all. Gordon and I, of all people, could vouch for that.
Now, sitting on Roo’s steps, I heard whistling. When I turned around, he was walking into the living room, in shorts and bare feet and a Blackwood T-shirt. “Hey,” he said. “How long have you been there?”
“Not long,” I told him, getting to my feet. “Got a second?”
“Sure.” He walked over, pushing open the screen door with a creak. “Come on in.”
I did, feeling strangely nervous by this formality, plus the fact it was just us. Since the night of Club Prom, we’d barely seen each other, a result of my increased work schedule and his beginning a (yes) sixth job. Or was it seventh?
“How’s work going?” I said, thinking this.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” he replied, gesturing for me to have a seat on the couch.
“The new one,” I told him. “What was it again?”
“Driving for RideFly,” he said.
“Is that like GetThere? A ride-sharing thing?”
“No, it’s an airport shuttle,” he said. “Fifty bucks round trip from Lake North or North Lake to the Bly County airport. Plus, you get a free water and some mints.”
“There’s an airport in Bly County?”
“And here you thought it was just a mecca for formal wear,” he said, picking up his phone from the table and sliding it into a pocket. “Yes, there is an airport. It’s about the size of a dentist’s waiting room, but it exists.”
“Wow,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“Don’t feel bad. Nobody I know has ever flown out of it,” he said, plopping down beside me. “It’s mostly Lake North people who have money, and there aren’t much of those unless there’s a big event going on. This weekend it’s a wedding. We’re scooping up the out-of-towners.”
“Sounds like you could do that in the Yum truck,” I said.
“Is that an ice cream joke?”
“Couldn’t resist,” I said, and he laughed. As he sat back, stretching his feet out to rest on the buckled trunk that functioned as a coffee table, I said, “You know, it’s funny you mention Lake North. I’m actually going there tomorrow.”
“Are you attending the Janney-Sipowicz wedding?” he asked. “Because if so, I’ve already met the father of the groom. He likes jokes that start with someone walking into a bar.”
“Sadly, no.” I took a breath. “I’m actually moving over there. My dad and his new wife and my grandma are all coming down and we’re staying at the Tides, together.”
“The Tides? That place is super fancy. When are you coming back to stay at Mimi’s?”
“I’m not.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What? You’re leaving for good?”
“I can still visit,” I said. “For two weeks, anyway. After that, we all go back to Lakeview.”
“Wow.” He reached up, running a hand through the back of his hair. Another tuft sprang to attention, sideways. “I thought you were here all summer.”
“Nope,” I said. “Really, I was only supposed to be here until now. The Lake North thing just sort of happened because our house and Nana’s are still under construction. So I guess I should be happy.”
“Are you?”
“No,” I answered, honestly. “I mean, a month ago I had no plans to come here. I didn’t even think about this place. Now that I have to leave, I can’t imagine not being here to help with Calvander’s and see the baby come.”
We were quiet for a second. Outside, on the water, I could hear a motorboat chugging by.
“So you came to say goodbye,” he said. He looked at me. “That sucks.”
Hearing this, I felt a pang I didn’t expect. “Not goodbye yet. First I have a favor to ask.”
“You want some complimentary RideFly mints? I’ve got a whole bag.”
“No.” I took a breath. “Bailey said your mom took a lot of pictures that week I was here, when I was a kid. Do you guys still have them?”
“I’m sure we do,” he replied. “The tricky part will be finding them.”
He got up, crossing the room quickly over to a low cabinet beneath a window. When he bent down, pulling open the doors, I saw it was jammed full of photo albums of all types, sizes, and colors.
“Like a needle in a haystack,” he said, taking out a small flowered one that was wedged at the top and opening it. After scanning a page, he said, “Well, this one documents my awkward stage. So we can rule that out.”
“Can I see?”
“No,” he said flatly, putting it on the cabinet and taking out another one that was deep green, square, with an embossed cover. Opening it, he said, “Oh, here’s a picture of Waverly. So at least we’re getting closer.”
He handed the album to me. Sure enough, in the right-hand corner was a snapshot of my mom, in rolled-up jeans and a Blackwood Station T-shirt, bent over one of the dock pumps. “I wonder when this was.”
Roo, now rummaging through the rest of the cabinet, glanced over my shoulder. “Well, that’s the old Pavilion. It got taken out by a hurricane in 1997, so it had to be before that.”
“She met my dad in 1999,” I said. “And I guess she left for Lakeview in—”
“2000,” he finished for me. “That fall, after my dad died.”
I looked at the picture again. In it, my mom would have been around the same age I was now, although she looked like much more of a grown-up than I felt. What was it about pictures that aged people?
“Okay,” Roo said suddenly, putting another album, this one burgundy-colored, on the top of the cabinet and opening it. “I think we’re getting somewhere. Look.”
It was a picture of three little girls with blond hair, sitting at the picnic table below Mimi’s. They were all in swimsuits, eating Popsicles, and turned in the same direction, as if they’d been told to look at whoever was taking the shot. I immediately picked out myself, in the red tank suit with a giraffe on it. It took a second of looking this time, but only that, to realize the other two were Bailey and Trinity.
“That’s the summer,” I said. “2005. My parents split up that fall.”
“So we were four.”
“Yep.” I looked to the next picture, also of the beach area at Mimi’s, but this one was of a skinny little boy in a skiff, holding a set of oars. “Is that you?”
“Nope. Jack. He’s always been skinnier and taller.” He pointed to the row below. “That’s me.”
I leaned in closer, taking him in: towheaded and skinny as well, in baggy shorts and a T-shirt with a dinosaur on it. He was sitting on the hood of a car, feet balanced on the front bumper. Behind him, you could see the driver’s-side door was open, an arm—thick and hairy—cut off by the frame.
“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating the driver.
“Some boyfriend of my mom’s,” he said with a shrug. “There was a string of them for a while there. Then she went back to school and didn’t have time to date.”
“Did she ever remarry?”
“Nope.” He squinted down at the shot again. “I think I remember that car, actually. It was huge. The guy was small. Probably compensating.”
I looked again as well, but you couldn’t really tell much by just an arm. “My dad was the opposite. Didn’t date anyone for years, just threw himself into work. Tracy was the first woman he brought home, and now they’re married.”
“You like her?”
I nodded. “She’s nice. She makes him happy. Plus, she likes to sail, which I hate.”
“Ticks every box,” Roo said.
“Exactly.” I picked up the album. “Okay if I look at this
one over on the couch?”
“Sure. I’ll keep digging, see if there’s another one.”
I got through two full pages before I saw something that brought me to tears. Weirdly, it was not the shot of Bailey and Jack with my parents in the background, my dad with his arm over my mom’s shoulders. Or the one of Celeste and my mom, posing together in front of what I was pretty sure was the same gardenia bush where we’d taken our pictures before Club Prom. Instead, it was a picture I’d almost passed over. It was of an older woman in a lawn chair, taken from behind, and the composition was weird, everything in the picture over to one side and just empty lake on the other. It was only when I looked more closely that I saw she had a child in her lap, blond-headed, and that they were holding hands. You could see a gold bracelet, braided and thick, on the woman’s wrist. The child held a stuffed giraffe in her arms. Me, Mimi, and George.
By this point I’d seen my own face and that of my parents, cousins, aunt, and grandmother repeated in square after square of snapshots. But there was something about seeing my beloved giraffe there as well that made this one picture feel like the ultimate proof that the trip really happened. When things were hard between my parents, and later, when my mom moved out, he was the one I cried to most, burying my face in the soft, nubby fur of his neck. He’d stayed on my bed all the way up until high school before I’d moved him across the room to a shelf, where he remained close enough for me to see before I fell asleep every night. Even now, I knew exactly where he was: in the final box I’d packed up from my room at Nana’s, with my books and favorite pictures. It would be the first one I would unpack in the new house, once I got there.
“I think that’s the only album you’d want,” Roo said now. I swallowed over the lump in my throat, turning the page as he walked over and sat down again. “Although you’re welcome to keep looking. My dad’s albums are someplace as well. Probably tons of shots of your mom there.”
“This is great, actually,” I said, studying a shot of Celeste, my dad and mom, and another man, with Jack’s same nose and slim frame—Silas, I assumed—sitting at the picnic table. “These are all new to me.”