August Isle

by Ali Standish

  Dedication

  For Mom, who wrote me into her story

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Ali Standish

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  She was going to leave me again.

  I could tell by the warm flush on her cheek, the way her eyes darted eagerly around the house as if she were already gone, already seeing things Dad and I couldn’t.

  Mom never looked that happy anymore unless she’d gotten her next assignment.

  Reluctantly, I paused Baking Battles and trudged into the kitchen, where steam coiled up from the pizza Dad had just picked up. Hawaiian. My favorite.

  As I sat down in my usual spot, Mom draped herself into the opposite chair and tugged a piece of pizza free from the box. Holding it in her right hand, she began to eat. Her left fingers drummed lightly against the table.

  “So,” Dad said. He dropped down into his seat, but his shoulders stayed stiff. “There’s something we need to talk about, kiddo. Well, something Mom needs to tell you.”

  Dad always carried a sigh in his voice when he had bad news. Mom pinned on a smile. She looked like a doll, like something made just to be perfect.

  I looked more like Dad.

  “I’m going on a trip, Miranda,” Mom said.

  A knot rose in my throat. Without realizing it, I must have been holding on to the tiniest bit of hope that I was wrong.

  “You’ve only been home a week,” I protested.

  “I know,” she said. “But this is a really good assignment. Documenting the effects of climate change in Argentina. The photographer they had lined up canceled, and the magazine asked me to step in.”

  Mom worked for lots of newspapers and magazines, going wherever they sent her, taking pictures of elections and earthquakes, festivals and floods. She traveled a lot.

  Sometimes it felt like she just came home to sleep off the jet lag for a few days before chasing her next assignment.

  “The story’s for Witness,” she added. I could hear the excitement in her voice, but I couldn’t bear to see it glittering in her eyes, so I stared at my empty plate instead. Witness was a major magazine. If she did a good job, it would mean more commissions for more national magazines. More trips.

  More time away from me.

  “When do you leave?” I asked.

  “A few days.”

  I looked up to see a glance pass between Mom and Dad. I wished I could reach up and snatch it from the air, unfold it, and read what was written inside, like a note passed from Kelsey Mays to Tiffany Rubald in the back of Mrs. Painswick’s class.

  “What?” I asked.

  When Mom didn’t answer, Dad ran his hand over his stubbly chin. “It’s just that this assignment is going to be a little longer than most.”

  “Only a month,” Mom added quickly. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “A month?” I yelped. Mom’s shoots usually didn’t last more than a few days. “Can’t we go with you?”

  Mom’s doll smile faded a little as she met my pleading gaze. Her eyes were a swirl of blue and gray, the color I’ve always imagined the wind would be if you could see it. The color of something you can never quite seem to catch.

  “I’m sorry, kiddo,” Dad said. “But I’ve got to be here for the Anderson case. And this isn’t the kind of shoot where a kid can tag along.”

  Dad was a lawyer, and he had this big case about to go to trial. So big he was planning to stay over most nights in Chicago, where it was being tried.

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Stay with Gram and Gramps?”

  I didn’t exactly like the idea of spending the whole month with Dad’s parents in Ohio. Gram made brussels sprouts every night, and Gramps blasted the Weather Channel on high volume all day long. But they were my only grandparents, and I was their only grandchild, so they did spoil me a lot. Maybe spending the summer there wouldn’t be too bad.

  Mom reached over and smoothed a stray strand behind my ear. I wished she would keep brushing her fingers through my hair, but her hand returned to her lap.

  “Gram’s still recovering from her hip surgery,” she said. “They wish they could have you, but it just isn’t a good time.”

  I felt my forehead wrinkling, my mind beginning to wander toward dark places. “You aren’t sending me back to that camp, are you?”

  Two summers ago, Mom and Dad had tried to send me to a summer camp—the kind with lakes and bugs and strangers.

  I lasted approximately three and one-quarter days before finally convincing my counselor that if she didn’t call my parents to come pick me up, I would hitchhike home.

  “No,” Mom said. “Much better. We’re sending you to stay with Aunt Clare. Remember? She brought her daughter, Sameera, to stay with us when you were eight. You loved them.”

  “Aunt” Clare was not actually my aunt—I didn’t have any real aunts, or uncles for that matter. She was Mom’s best friend from childhood. She was really nice, I remembered, and Sameera was pretty cool, too, even though she had spent a lot of time showing off her gymnastics skills and also used all my toothpaste.

  But that was four years ago, and Clare and Sameera lived all the way on August Isle, this little island off the coast of Florida.

  “You’re sending me to Florida?” I asked. “By myself? For a whole month?”

  “I know it sounds like a long time,” Dad said gently, “But before you know it—”

  “—you’ll be right back here in boring old Illinois,” finished Mom.

  Was that how Mom thought of where we lived? When you’d been to all the places she had, maybe it was a little boring. To me it was just home.

  “It’ll be fun, sweetie,” she assured me.

  Fun would have been spending the summer before eighth grade watching Baking Battle with Mom and cutting new recipes from magazines to add to my collection. I had actually thought this summer was going to be the one when we finally started trying some of them. Had hoped it so much I could almost taste them—the lavender-honey cupcakes with buttermilk frosting, the mile-high peach pie with cinnamon streusel topping, and the brown
-sugar pound cake with bittersweet chocolate glaze. Except I would substitute milk chocolate for the bittersweet chocolate, because who needed more bitter anyway?

  “I know it’s unexpected, kiddo,” Dad said, his jaw twitching as he glanced again at Mom. “But can we try to make the best of it?”

  I looked up to see that the flush was gone from Mom’s cheeks. She bit softly at her lip. I had stolen the happiness right off her face.

  Guilt swam in my stomach like a fish in a tank, nibbling away. Mom had gotten a big break, and instead of being excited for her, I was ruining the moment. All because I wanted her to stay in boring old Illinois and watch TV with me.

  I took a deep breath and dragged a little smile onto my face. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Why not?”

  I could only think of about a thousand reasons.

  2

  Later that night, I sat with my back against my bed, listening to the familiar muffled sounds of Mom packing. She and Dad were having a conversation that might have been an argument, but their voices were too low for me to tell. On my lap sat Bluey, the one-eyed stuffed dolphin I had slept with every night since forever. In front of me was a box of postcards.

  Sometimes I felt like Mom had a million secrets she kept from me.

  I only had the postcards from August Isle.

  Until Aunt Clare came to visit, the Isle had just been one of Mom’s secrets. It was Sameera who told me that August Isle was where my mom had spent all her summers as a kid.

  I didn’t want Sameera to know that she knew more about my own mom than I did, so I waited until she and Aunt Clare left to ask Mom about the Isle.

  “It’s very . . . hot,” she said.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “It was a long time ago, Miranda,” she said. “I was just a kid.”

  “Did Grandma and Grandpa Crawford live there, too?”

  “They spent summers there, like me.”

  Mom didn’t exactly keep my other grandparents a secret, but she didn’t talk about them much either. All I knew was that my grandmother had been a painter, and my grandfather had been some kind of businessman who spent most of his time in New York City. But they had died before I was born, in a car crash near the town where Mom grew up in Connecticut.

  “Could we go visit August Isle sometime?” I asked.

  “There’s a whole wide world out there full of places to visit, Miranda,” Mom said.

  Which I chose to take as a maybe.

  But in all the trips Mom had taken, she’d never invited me on a single one. The only place we’d ever been together—besides to Gram and Gramps’s—was Disneyland on my tenth birthday.

  It was my best birthday ever.

  Anyway, after Aunt Clare and Sameera left, I tried to ask Mom about August Isle a couple more times, but she always just said she didn’t remember much about it.

  I wasn’t surprised. There were so many things Mom didn’t want to talk about. Like why she became a photographer, or why she and Dad argued some nights when they thought I was asleep, or why I was an only child.

  Or why I sometimes caught her looking at me like I was a stranger who had wandered into her house.

  So after a while I stopped asking about August Isle, and I didn’t think much more about why she wouldn’t talk about it. Not until the day I came home from school to find a postcard from Aunt Clare in the mail. Mom was traveling then, so I got a magnet and put it up on the fridge for her to see when she got back.

  A few days after she came home, I spotted the postcard in the trash, underneath a banana peel.

  I glanced up at the refrigerator, still sprinkled with a collection of last year’s Christmas cards.

  It was October.

  I fished the postcard from the trash, wiped off the banana goo, and took it to my room. I stared at the street lined with colorful brick buildings and rows of palm trees like it was one of those I-spy pictures, and if I looked long enough, I would find a reason for why Mom had thrown it away. Or why she’d never told me about the Isle in the first place.

  When I didn’t, I got a tin box for the postcard and squirreled it away under my bed, next to the bulging binder of recipes I had never tried.

  The next postcard arrived six months later and showed a Ferris wheel, looming bright over the ocean.

  A few months after that one came my favorite, a card that showed a gigantic tree, light dappling through its lime-colored leaves.

  I dug each one from the trash only days after it had arrived.

  But none of the cards held any clues, and the messages Aunt Clare wrote were always short and cheerful.

  Sending you our love from August Isle!

  —the Grover family

  So eventually I stopped looking for answers in them.

  Instead I found myself gazing at their pictures and imagining me and Mom into them.

  In my imagination, we would ride bikes on the beach and stroll down the cheery street, maybe wearing floppy straw hats. I would point up to the canary-colored building with the white trim that looked like a slab of yellow butter cake piped with royal icing. “What’s that place?” I would ask, and Mom would look up and laugh and say, “Well, it’s a funny story, actually. . . .”

  Now I set all eight postcards in front of me and stared at them once more.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go to August Isle. It was the only place in the world I actually really wanted to visit.

  I had just never imagined going by myself.

  But maybe I was looking at it all wrong. Maybe I should think about my trip as a chance to investigate. Just because I hadn’t learned anything about Mom from the pictures of the Isle didn’t mean I wouldn’t find any clues about her on the Isle itself.

  Maybe I could at least find out more about why she didn’t like to talk about it.

  And maybe, just maybe, I would find something that would help me understand why everything had changed between us.

  3

  I tried to stretch out the next few days the way the contestants on Baking Battle stretched their pastry dough thin. But before I knew it, we were pulling into a parking spot at the airport.

  Mom looked up from her phone, brushing her hair back from her face. “Are we here already?” she asked. “Gosh, that was quick.”

  “So remember, Mom’s going to be pretty out of touch,” Dad said.

  “I don’t know how much service we’ll have up in the Andes,” Mom added.

  “But she’s not leaving until tomorrow, so call us when you get to Florida. And call me anytime, okay?” Dad said, reaching back and squeezing my knee.

  The three of us got out of the car and walked toward the airport. I carried my backpack while Dad took my rolly bag. Since she knew the airport like the back of her hand, Mom marched in front of us.

  Inside, there were about a million people, including a lady with purple hair named Meg waiting to take me through security who I waved a shy hello to. Once we had watched my bag disappear behind the check-in desk, she stood to the side while I said goodbye to Mom and Dad.

  “Well, this is it, kiddo,” Dad said. I lunged forward and buried myself in his arms. If I burrowed deep enough, maybe I could still feel them around me when he left.

  “Have fun,” he whispered. “And remember to call, okay? I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. Then I turned to Mom.

  She smiled at me as she unfolded her arms. For the first time all day, when she looked at me, I thought she actually saw me. For a second, I got a flash of the old Mom, the way things used to be. “Come here, sweetie.”

  Mom’s grip wasn’t as strong as Dad’s. Her arms were light and slender, more like rays of sunlight you had to remember to feel. I wanted to let myself melt into them. “You’re going to have a great time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. My heart was beating fast—too fast—and I clutched at her back when I felt her start to pull away.

  She gave a brittle laugh. “Don’t worry, Miranda,” she said.
“Everything’s going to be all right. You believe me?”

  “Yes, Mom,” I lied.

  “Good,” she said, letting go. I forced myself to let go, too. “And Miranda?”

  “Mmm?”

  She wore a funny expression, and for a second I thought I might have seen a shadow of worry cross her face. Then she gave her head a little shake and it was gone. “Just—have a good time, okay? Be safe. I love you.”

  Then she and Dad were walking away, and my heart shattered into a million shards that flew into my chest and legs and fingers and throat and made them all throb with loneliness.

  And even though Mom couldn’t hear me, I whispered something to her, the same thing I always whispered when she left on a trip.

  I imagined my words carrying through the airport and landing on her purse or sticking to her blouse, where they would cling like burrs until she finally looked down and noticed them.

  And then she would hear me calling to her.

  Please don’t forget me.

  Please come home.

  4

  In my earliest memories of Mom, she is reading me a story while I curl up on her lap. I can feel her fingers brushing lightly through my hair in the morning and her hand folding tightly around mine as she guides me across a busy crosswalk. I can remember how some nights, I woke up to find her crawling under my covers, wrapping her warm sunshine arms around me before we both fell back to sleep.

  In those memories, Mom’s love for me is fierce and sure.

  But that was before she started traveling all the time. Before she started giving me funny looks, and before her love started to fade like the ink on Aunt Clare’s postcards.

  Sure, Mom still said she loved me. But I couldn’t feel it the way I used to.

  Sometimes I got flashes of the old love. Like when she looked at me that day in the airport. Or like when she took me to Disneyland.

  It was a few weeks after the fourth-grade field trip to the aquarium that Mom was supposed to chaperone. I was scared to go on my own—all that water with just a flimsy layer of glass to keep it from crashing down around me—and she promised she would make it in time. But she got held up, and Dad came instead.

  I think Dad must have had to miss an important meeting or something, because when Mom came home, they got into one of their hushed fights, and this one went on for a long time.