by Ali Standish
The next morning, Mom announced we were going to Disneyland, just the two of us, for my tenth birthday.
For three whole days, it was just Mom and me. She even turned her phone off, except to call Dad every night.
I had seen commercials for Disneyland, but I had no idea how big the roller coasters would be, and by the time we’d waited for an hour to get to the front of the line for one, I was too scared to go anymore. Mom didn’t seem to mind, though. We did the smaller rides instead, and I held her hand tight.
The next day, my head felt all spinny, so we stayed in the hotel and had room service and watched funny movies and laughed until our stomachs hurt.
I thought it was the best trip ever. I thought Mom did, too. I started to hope that maybe things were going to go back to normal.
But when I reached for her hand as our plane back to Illinois took off, she winced. Once we were safely up in the air, she pulled it away and shook it like she had a writing cramp.
“Ouch,” she said. “I think my poor fingers need a break.”
A few days later, Mom flew to Alaska to take pictures of glaciers. And when she came back, she was more distant than ever.
On my plane to Florida, purple-haired Meg sat me down next to an old man with little red veins in his cheeks who took up the whole armrest.
I did not hold his hand.
When I got off a few hours later, another airline employee—this one a man named Joey—was waiting to take me to where Aunt Clare and Sameera were supposed to meet me. He didn’t say very much, which was nice, because I never had a clue what to say when adults I didn’t know tried to talk to me.
Then we got to the end of the terminal, and I held my breath as I scanned the crowd for Aunt Clare and Sameera. I had only just realized that I had no idea what either of them looked like now. What if I couldn’t find them?
But then my eyes fell on a slim girl in a cute spaghetti-strap dress who was holding a poster-board sign and jumping up and down. The sign said WELCOME, MIRANDA!!! in big glitter-glue letters. Next to the girl was a beaming blond woman.
Sameera dropped her sign and ran over. I stiffened as she threw her arms around me. “Miranda!” she cried. “I’m so happy you’re here!”
“Thanks, Sameera,” I managed. “Um, me too.”
“Oh, you can call me Sammy,” she said. “That’s what everyone calls me now.”
When she pulled away, I saw that she was shorter than me and that she’d gotten braces. It didn’t look like she would have them much longer, though, because her teeth were shiny and straight beneath them. She had long black hair and bronze skin.
Next to her, I suddenly felt pale and shapeless in my wrinkled T-shirt.
If she went to our school, I thought, she would sit at the table with Kelsey Mays and Tiffany Rubald and the other girls who had stopped inviting me to their birthday parties around the fifth grade. Who giggled and whispered when I walked past in the cafeteria.
Yet there she was, dragging me through the crowd and grinning at me over her shoulder. Like I was the Queen of England or something.
“Mom! Mom! Look who I found!” she exclaimed as we reached Aunt Clare.
I suddenly wondered if this was just an act she was putting on for her mom. If as soon as we were alone together, the smile would slide right off her face. Sameera and I had gotten along well when she had come to visit, but would Sammy and I? She had come a long time ago, before the birthday invitations had stopped.
“Hi, Miranda,” Aunt Clare said. “We’re so happy to have you! I can’t believe how big you’ve gotten.” She wrapped me in a hug that smelled like pineapple and mint. It was a nice smell, but it just made me miss Mom’s scent—red licorice and photo paper with just a dash of perfume.
Aunt Clare was pretty like her daughter, though they didn’t look very similar until you noticed how their smiles were the exact same shape. She had sunglasses perched atop her wavy yellow hair, and freckles over her pale skin that made her look younger than Mom. She wore a sundress with turtles printed on it.
“Thanks for having me,” I said. “I’m really, um, excited.”
“Us too!” said Sammy, linking her arm through mine and steering me toward the door. I muttered goodbye to Joey, who was asking Aunt Clare to sign something.
“Seriously,” Sammy gushed. “You have no idea. Jessie decided to go to this summer camp, and Anita is visiting her grandparents in Poland. Those are my best friends, by the way. So I thought I was going to be all alone for the summer. Then your mom called my mom and said you were coming, and I was so psyched! Remember how much fun we had when I came to visit that once?”
The double doors opened and spat us out into the hot afternoon. The air felt like when you’ve just stepped out of the shower and all the steam is still trapped in the bathroom.
“Do you like Ferris wheels?” Sammy asked, swishing her hair over her shoulder. “Because there’s this park by the ocean with a Ferris wheel and a little roller coaster and bumper cars.”
Maybe she finally noticed that I hadn’t said very much yet, because when we got to the crosswalk, she stopped and looked at me, her eyebrows crinkling together. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You don’t like Ferris wheels?”
She seemed disappointed, even worried, and I realized that she wasn’t acting. She really was just excited to see me.
I decided right then that I liked Sammy, even if she was probably a popular girl, and even if she did use all my toothpaste that one time.
“No,” I said, “I do. I remember seeing it on one of the postcards your mom sent.”
“So,” Aunt Clare said, catching up to us, “who’s ready to head home? Amar and Jai are getting dinner ready for us there.”
“Can I call my parents first?” I asked. “I told my dad I would let him know I got here.”
“Of course! Why don’t you call on our way to the minivan?”
She and Sammy walked a couple of paces ahead of me as I pulled out my phone. Dad answered on the first ring.
“Kiddo!” he said.
Warmth spread through my chest. “Hi, Dad.”
“How was the plane?”
“It was fine,” I said. “I’m with Aunt Clare and Sammy. It’s really hot. And the air feels thick. Like soup.”
“Well, that’s Florida for you,” he replied. “I’m glad you found them okay. Are you headed to August Isle now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Is Mom there?”
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Dad said. “She went out to get a few things for her trip. Want to try her cell?”
“No,” I said quickly. “It’s okay. I’ll just text her.”
I didn’t trust myself to talk to Mom without blurting out how much I already missed her, or confessing that every time she left, part of me worried that this time she might never come back.
“Anyway, we’re at the car,” I said, “so I gotta go.”
“Thanks for calling. Have a fun first night, okay? Love you.”
I waited for Dad to hang up, then slipped my phone back into my pocket.
“Ready?” Aunt Clare asked, opening the trunk of her minivan. Sammy lifted my rolly bag in before I could.
I nodded.
“Great,” she said. “Then let’s get our summer started, shall we?”
Sammy clapped her hands as I slid into the seat beside her. “Yes!” she said. “This is going to be the Best. Summer. Ever!”
She looked so confident that I could have almost convinced myself to believe her.
5
We drove down a highway that shot like an arrow between thick walls of pine groves and forests covered in blankets of some kind of ivy that Sammy called kudzu. Then we cut over onto a smaller road and wound through little towns that seemed to be crumbling into the ground in slow motion. On the side of the road, people were selling strawberries and peaches and boiled peanuts out of little wooden huts. When we came to a hut that was selling watermelons, we stopped, and Aunt Clare got out.
She came back hauling the biggest watermelon I had ever seen. “Voilà!” she said, straining to hoist it into the minivan. “Dessert!”
Pretty soon after that, we passed a sign pointing toward August Isle, and Sammy did a little cheer. “We’re almost there!”
I felt my heart begin to beat faster as I craned my neck to get my first glimpse. Would I recognize the Isle from the postcards, or would it look different than I had imagined?
Sammy rolled down the window and motioned for me to do the same. A warm wind swept in like a fever as we started up an arched bridge. Below us stretched a wide ribbon of dark water and a harbor with speedboats and sailboats lined up between wooden docks, bobbing like white ducks. I held my breath and clung to the door.
“Look!” Sammy said as we crested the bridge, pointing toward the windshield. “The ocean!”
I squinted against the sunlight. A town carved into neat blocks unfolded in front of us, a big hotel soaring on either end. Beyond everything else, I could just see a line of sparkling blue on the horizon.
It disappeared as we swooped down the other side of the bridge. We were almost across when I decided I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and it burst from my mouth. My lips tasted like salt.
Sammy shot me a funny look. “Were you holding your breath?”
“Yeah. It’s, um, just this thing I do.”
“Why?” she asked, cocking her head.
I hesitated uncertainly. Before I could answer, Aunt Clare glanced at me in the rearview mirror and said, “To make a wish, right? You hold your breath over the bridge, you get to make a wish at the end. Your mom and I always used to do that.”
“Exactly,” I agreed, grateful to Aunt Clare for rescuing me. I made a mental note of what she had said about Mom, too. My first clue, even if it didn’t seem like a very important one.
“How come you never told me I should hold my breath?” Sammy pouted.
“Because you might wish for something I don’t want to come true,” Aunt Clare said. “Like to be a grown-up already, or to have a flying pony in our backyard.”
“Mo-om,” Sammy grumbled, “I’m allergic to ponies, remember?”
“Which is why I can’t allow you to wish for one,” Aunt Clare replied. “See? I’m just looking out for you.”
Sammy rolled her eyes, but I thought Aunt Clare was kind of funny.
As we cruised onto the Isle, I couldn’t help but wonder what anyone who lived here would need to wish for. It was a town that looked like it was built just for people to take pictures of to put on postcards, and yet it was a hundred times better than my postcards had shown. They hadn’t shown how blue the sky could be, floating along above us like a weightless river. They hadn’t prepared me for how bright the flowers were that spilled from the window boxes of the buildings on Oak Street, or the way their iron balconies curled like hands cupped around whispered secrets.
I kept blinking, trying to take pictures in my mind of all the little details, to gather them up like a sweet bouquet. Beside me, Sammy was looking at something on her phone. The sun hovered just over her shoulder, perched like some bright tropical bird.
I leaned out the window, staring at the familiar brick storefronts. There was a blue café, a pink general store, and a green shop that sold dresses like the one Aunt Clare was wearing.
The canary-colored building—the one I had wondered about in the postcards—turned out to be a place called Sundae’s Pharmacy & Ice Cream.
“Sundae’s has the best ice cream in Florida,” Sammy said, glancing up. “Maybe even the whole country. You’ll see.”
“Better look out the other side,” Aunt Clare said, “or you’ll miss the August Oak.” She pronounced it “Aw-GUST.”
She stopped at the only stoplight on Oak Street and pointed out the window. I gasped.
There was a little park there, reigned over by the most enormous tree I had ever seen. I remembered it from my favorite postcard, but I had no idea that it would be that huge.
The afternoon light made the leaves glow, and they fell into the shape of a giant golden bell.
“Wow,” I breathed. “It’s like its own forest.”
“It’s over four hundred years old,” Sammy said. “The Isle’s named for it, only people got lazy and started pronouncing it ‘AU-gust’ like the month.”
“But why do they call it the Aw-GUST Oak?” I asked.
“‘August’ means something that’s really impressive,” Aunt Clare said. “Something that’s earned people’s respect.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything more august than this tree. “Can I take a picture?”
“Sure,” said Aunt Clare, pulling the minivan over. I aimed my phone through the window, trying to capture how the light shone on the leaves. As we pulled away, I typed a text to Mom. “I’m here,” I wrote. I hesitated for a second, then, deciding the picture was halfway decent, attached it under the text.
“Do you like taking pictures?” Sammy asked. “Your mom’s a photographer, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She is. I’m not that good at it, though.”
Actually, last Christmas Mom had given me my own camera. It was one of those times when things suddenly felt good between us again. She woke me up early the next morning and took me driving around the countryside. It had snowed all night, and we pulled off onto a gravel road, then got out into this white forest. As we walked deeper in, Mom taught me how to set the focus and adjust the zoom. She talked about balance and perspective, and how to make the snow look white instead of gray.
Then we heard a twig snapping nearby, and we looked up to see a pair of deer, a fawn with its mother, each wearing a light coat of snow. They stared at us, unmoving. The winter sun shone through the trees behind them, turning them gold. Mom nudged me, and I lifted the camera.
I snapped my picture in a panic, forgetting everything Mom had just taught me. The sound of the shutter clicking sent the creatures bolting, but it didn’t matter. Mom said the shot I had gotten was wonderful. She said I was a natural. She had it blown up and framed, and it hung now in our living room.
I never used my camera again after that. It had felt so good for Mom to be proud of me for something, and I was afraid if I tried again, she would realize that I had just gotten lucky with those deer. Then her pride would be gone, and the memory of that day would be spoiled forever.
Anyway, maybe deep down Mom knew it, too, because she didn’t offer to take me out again after that. When I packed for August Isle, I glanced at the camera before leaving it in my bottom drawer, where it had been ever since that day.
“My mom teaches piano,” Sammy was saying, “but I gave up after I butchered my first recital.”
“That was only because you never practiced,” Aunt Clare said.
“I’m a journalist,” Sammy continued, ignoring her mom. “Or at least I’m going to be. I want to be editor of the school paper next year. So I’m going to get the perfect scoop and have an article on it ready for back-to-school.”
“What’s the scoop?” I asked.
“I haven’t found it yet,” she said, her eyes narrowed in thought. “But I will. And you can help while you’re here!”
“I don’t really know how,” I said, “but I can try.”
“So what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A baker,” I said.
“Ooooh,” Sammy breathed. “Like with your own bakery?”
“Yeah.”
I guess I probably got the idea from all the baking shows I watched. I started getting into them right around the time that the kids at school started becoming really mean, and after my only real friend, Caroline, moved away before sixth grade.
That’s when I discovered that when you see a perfectly latticed apple pie, or a strawberry shortcake that’s been layered just right, nothing else seems so terrible. Like there’s no problem the right dessert can’t solve.
“I didn’t know you liked to bake,” Aunt Clare said. “You’ll ha
ve to make us something one night.”
“Totally!” Sammy chimed. “You can teach Mom. She’s worse at baking than I am at the piano.”
“Thanks a lot,” Aunt Clare said.
“Oh,” I mumbled. “Um . . .”
I wished I had brought my binder of recipes with me. But even with them, I had never actually made anything myself, let alone taught someone else. Before I could come clean, though, Sammy was already chatting away again.
“I want to be like your mom,” she said with a wistful sigh. “Traveling around the world, always chasing the next lead. Does she ever take you with her?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because it wouldn’t be appropriate for Beth to take her daughter to work with her,” Aunt Clare said, saving me for a second time. “Just like it wouldn’t be appropriate for your dad to take you into the operating room.”
Sammy shrugged. “Still. I bet she’s told you some awesome stories.”
“Yeah,” I replied faintly. “Totally.”
Actually, I didn’t like asking Mom about her work. It was too hard watching her face light up as she talked about all the distant places she’d been when she could have been with me.
Now we were driving down a row of houses with funny names like Pelican’s Roost and Mermaid’s Hideaway written on signs in front. The houses were painted bright colors, and some were even on stilts. They looked kind of like they had escaped from the circus, but in a pretty, not-scary kind of way.
Then, squished between Seahorse Chalet and the Crab Hole, there was a big house with no name. It was painted mint green and trimmed in white, with a turret at the top and a porch. It might have been nice, except that lots of the planks had been stripped bare of their paint, and some of the shutters were falling off their hinges. Tufts of long grass swallowed up the path that led from the street to the porch.
Nestled among the bright houses, this place stuck out like a rusted clasp on a string of perfect pearls.
“What’s that house?” I asked, eager to get away from the subject of Mom.