First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  Phin gave a short laugh. “We can always dream of a normal life, can’t we?”

  “No, Phin, we can’t. And we shouldn’t. We’re fine like we are! We’re great,” she said, up on her high horse again. She was up there a lot lately.

  She didn’t used to be like this. She’d always been confident about where she belonged and who she was but, lately, she’d been so insistent about it. She would hear herself sometimes, and even she found herself annoying. She was overcompensating. She knew that. But her emotions were so hard to control these days. She would cry at the drop of a hat. She would get angry at her mother for absolutely no reason. She was fifteen. That was part of it. But it was also the time of year. As soon as first frost was here, she was sure everything would get better. She’d be nicer to her mom. She’d sign up for driver’s ed. And maybe Josh Matteson would even fall in love with her and everything would be perfect.

  “I want to live in your world,” Phin said.

  “What are you talking about, weirdo?” She gave him a playful nudge. He was so thin it was like pushing at something pliable, like a bendy straw. “You already do.”

  * * *

  After school that Friday, Bay headed to the last meeting of the decorating committee in the school gymnasium—a state-of-the-art, embarrassingly large facility that dwarfed the three other academic buildings of Bascom High. A few years ago, the high school booster club had raised the funds for the gym in less than six months. Apparently, there were a lot of parents with deep pockets and memories of their glory years in sports here. The place smelled like fresh paint and new rubber and missed opportunities.

  At the first after-school decorating committee meeting a month ago, Riva Alexander had let Bay sketch out how she’d wanted the gym to be decorated, then she had Bay make a list of things to buy, while the other girls on the committee talked about the costumes they were going to wear. At the second meeting, Bay did her chemistry homework while Riva regaled the committee with what food and drinks she and her mother were bringing: flaky pastries that looked like knobby, weathered fingers, with slivered almonds for fingernails; big plastic drink dispensers with plastic eyeballs floating inside the punch. They’d spent the entire two hours huddled around Riva’s laptop, looking up where Riva had gotten her ideas on Pinterest.

  When Riva had asked Bay to help decorate, she’d hinted that she’d hoped Bay would get her aunt Claire to cater the dance, too. Riva loved food, and she would have loved to have spent hours talking to Claire about menus, going off on tangents about flan and crème fraîche and pink Himalayan salt. But Riva was out of luck. If it wasn’t about candy, Claire didn’t have time for it.

  Claire normally would have a lot of catering work this time of year. She used to have a party to cater almost every night in October. Bay remembered the Waverley house full of pumpkin pie scents in the fall. There had been mountains of maple cakes with violets hidden inside, lakes of butternut soups with chrysanthemum petals floating on top. But not this year. When Claire wasn’t making candy, she was on the phone, talking about the candy, or filling out orders for the candy, or boxing up the candy. There were even companies calling, asking about buying Waverley’s Candies. The way Bay saw it, Claire making candy was like the perfect chair in the perfect color in the perfect place in a room—only it was made of the wrong fabric. And when something that small was wrong, most people didn’t bother fixing it.

  The dance decorations had arrived that week, so this final committee meeting was to be spent putting them up. Bay tried to do her homework on the bleachers, but the other girls kept interrupting her, asking where everything belonged. She finally put her books away and joined them. Some boys from the soccer team—boyfriends and want-to-be boyfriends—showed up with duct tape and butcher’s twine and ladders pilfered from the janitor’s closet, acting very manly about it.

  Bay stood in the middle of the gymnasium, directing them all, feeling like an ice skater in a snow globe, spinning and spinning. It was nice. She always had this image in her head, the end product when everything was where it was supposed to be, and it was thrilling when she could actually make it happen in real life.

  She didn’t realize at first when everyone had gone quiet. The music from Riva’s laptop was still blasting. Bay was admiring the lighted ball that was hanging from the steel rafters. It was shrouded in paper cut-outs that cast shadows on the walls, which looked like a dark forest. Surrounding it were glittery paper bats chasing full moons made from wrapped, store-bought popcorn balls, which students could reach up and pluck from their strings from the ceiling. She finally looked around with a smile, only to see the whole group staring at the gymnasium doors.

  There was Josh Matteson, bits of stray smoke curling off his shoulders, smoke only she could see. Her hand almost went to her heart, but she stopped herself halfway and pretended to scratch her neck instead.

  He, too, seemed confused as to why everyone had gone silent. That’s when he saw Bay.

  Bay cursed that stupid note. It had taken her weeks to write. When school had started in August, she’d seen Josh in the hallway on that first day, and suddenly she’d had honey in her veins. The note had laid it all out as passionately and sincerely as she could make it. She’d described her feelings as best she could, though she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it just right. She’d told him she’d be outside on the front steps after school every day, waiting for him if he ever wanted to talk—which she was still doing, almost making her late to her job at her aunt Claire’s house every afternoon, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Funny, when she’d given him the note—in front of his friends, which had been her first mistake—it had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t believe her.

  To Josh’s credit, he smiled from the gymnasium doors. “I was wondering where everyone went,” he said in that deep, bright voice of his, like fresh water in a dark cavern.

  “We’ll be out at your house later,” Riva said, quickly stepping forward. Riva looked like she was already wearing a costume. She favored billowy skirts with colorful scarves tied around her waist. Her eyes were slightly tilted in a way that gave her an exotic, gypsy-ish air, despite her fair, WASP-y coloring. There was something about her that was just slightly west of center, making her the odd one out in her group, the one gotten mad at the most and excommunicated for days on end for mysterious mean-girl reasons.

  “Want to stay and help decorate?” Riva added, but it was said insincerely, because if she had wanted him there, she would have asked him before now. But she hadn’t. Because of Bay. Josh was avoiding seeing her, and his friends knew that. And what Josh thought mattered to them. Josh was a star soccer player, class vice president, and he had been voted most likely to succeed in the senior superlatives—based entirely on his last name, some conjectured. But they only saw how perfect and beautiful and easygoing he was. They couldn’t see him burning with unhappiness.

  “No,” Josh said. “I’m not very good at that kind of stuff. I’ll just watch.”

  Everyone tried to act normal, giving Josh deference while still trying not to slight Bay, presumably so Bay wouldn’t run out and leave them in a lurch. They needed her. All the county high schools had been invited to this soiree, so it had to be special, it had to be the best, to show off to their rivals.

  But Bay would never do that—would never run from herself.

  It was so excruciatingly awkward that everyone, Bay most of all, was relieved when it was over and they all went their separate ways, Josh leaving a trail of soot behind him that blew away in the breeze.

  3

  Bay walked from the school to her aunt’s house in the growing darkness, having just missed the late buses because of the meeting. She didn’t feel like running today like she usually did, always so anxious to get to the Waverley house. So she crunched slowly through the red leaves on the sidewalk, her face to the sinking sun, thinking about Josh. When she saw herself with him, she saw snow, so maybe this winter something would happen. Maybe she
just had to be patient. She’d discovered long ago that getting things to where they belonged was sometimes a timely process, so she’d become good at waiting. If only there wasn’t this longing that felt like actual pain sometimes. No one ever told her it was going to be like this. It was a wonder that anyone fell in love at all.

  “Hello again.”

  She had just reached the Waverley house. She stopped on the sidewalk and turned. Across the street, she saw the same man she’d seen yesterday on the green downtown, the elderly man in the gray suit. He didn’t have his suitcase with him today.

  Bay smiled in surprise. “I see you found Pendland Street.”

  “Indeed, I did. Thank you.”

  “Are you visiting someone?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” he said.

  Bay was momentarily distracted by the Halloween lights flipping on in Mrs. Kranowski’s yard behind him—orange twinkle lights strung in her boxwood bushes, tattered glow-in-the-dark ghosts hanging in her spindly maple tree. The decorations had obviously been in storage, because Bay could smell mothballs from across the street. Mrs. Kranowki’s elderly terrier, Edward, was at the front window, barking wildly at the man.

  When Bay’s eyes flicked back to the man—it had only been seconds—he was gone.

  Edward stopped barking, as confused as she was.

  Bay’s dark brows knit and she slowly backed away, then ran to the house. She slid up the wet hill, then hurried to the front door, looking over her shoulder as she entered, half expecting the man to have followed her.

  First frost falling on Halloween this year seemed to be making everything just that much weirder.

  It had been rose candy day in the Waverley house, the scent still permeating the air, even though the kitchen was closed for the evening. It smelled as if there were a garden hidden in the walls somewhere.

  The back labels on all the rose candy jars read:

  Rose essence is for memory

  of long ago first loves,

  have a taste and you will see

  the one you once dreamed of.

  Bay took a deep breath and felt her shoulders relax. But then she gave a start when her aunt appeared at the top of the staircase. She was in a bathrobe, obviously getting ready for her night out. “Bay?” Claire asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Bay pushed herself away from the front door. “Oh, nothing. Just this elderly man I’ve seen outside two days in a row. He wanted to know where Pendland Street was.”

  “It’s a popular street.”

  “He just seemed strange. He was wearing this shiny gray suit, like a salesman, maybe.”

  “Hey, Bay!” Mariah said, running down the stairs past Claire. She had brown eyes and curly brown hair like her father, hair that always looked somehow in motion, even when Mariah was still, as if someone were running their fingers through it, lovingly.

  “Hey, squirt,” Bay said, giving her a hug. “I’ve got homework. How about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s do it together in the sitting room.”

  As Bay walked into the sitting room with her backpack, she almost missed the look on Claire’s face, the look that maybe this man in the silver suit was not someone Claire was unfamiliar with.

  * * *

  Sydney arrived not long after Bay and Mariah had settled on the floor in the sitting room with their homework. She had just come from work and looked beautiful, as always, that perpetual scent of sweet hair spray floating around her like she was encased in fine mist. Again, her hair seemed a little more red than it had that morning. The change was subtle, but getting more noticeable. Her mother was slowly but surely turning into a redhead. Something like this happened to Sydney every year around first frost—an unexplained cut, or an odd change in color. But it was worse this year than most. Her restlessness was worse. It was for all of them, as if they all wanted something they suddenly feared they couldn’t have.

  Sydney asked how school was, and Bay gave her vague answers. Sydney finally gave up and headed upstairs to help Claire with her hair. Honestly, if it weren’t for her mom’s skill with hair, they would all have birds’ nests on their heads.

  Henry showed up next. He sat with the girls in the sitting room and waited, his blond hair still wet and the scent of Irish Spring soap clinging to his skin from his recent shower. Henry was a good man, a steady man who worked hard and loved unconditionally. He was a grounding force as strong as gravity in Bay and her mother’s lives. Henry was Bay’s adopted father, the only father she’d ever really known. She lost her biological father years ago. Bay could barely remember him now, the edges of his existence corroding like faxed paper. Her mother, always trying to make things right, never talked about him, for the same reason she kept trying to make Bay go out more and be more social, less Waverley. She was trying to make up for things that weren’t her fault. Sometimes Bay just wanted to hug her and tell her that it was all right. But that would put a serious crimp in her effort to avoid talking to her mother, an effort so concerted that it baffled even her sometimes.

  After the adults left, Bay put some frozen dinners (a dreadful staple in the Waverley house lately) in the microwave and she and Mariah ate and talked. Mariah mainly liked talking about her new best friend, Em. Apparently, they’d only met this week, but Em was already Mariah’s entire world. Mariah was such a normal kid—a braces-wearing, dirty-fingernailed, bright-eyed normal kid. In this family, that was curious. Sometimes Bay thought her own mother should have had Mariah, and Claire should have been Bay’s mother. That would have made more sense. Everyone would have been happier that way. Her mother would then have a normal daughter she didn’t have to worry about being made fun of, and Claire would get someone just like her, someone who accepted being strange, whose entire identity counted on it.

  When Mariah fell asleep in the sitting room later that night, Bay set aside the book she’d been reading. The furnace fired up on its own. Like an old woman, the house hated a chill. Bay lifted Mariah’s feet off her lap and grabbed her hoodie off the back of the old couch. She walked through the kitchen and out the back door, crossing the driveway to the garden gate. She found the key hidden in the honeysuckle vines and entered, closing the gate behind her. The place was completely enclosed. The nine-foot fence covered in honeysuckle was as thick as a wall. Because the tree was dormant, nothing else would bloom in the garden, either, not even the rosebushes, which were still in bloom around town in clusters of pink and magenta from Indian summer.

  The solar-powered ground lamps glowed with steady yellow light, marking the footpaths all the way to the back of the lot, where the apple tree was.

  It was a short tree, barely reaching the top of the fence, but its limbs were long and wide, almost like vines. This tree was a presence, a personality, an influence on every Waverley who had ever lived here. Legend around Bascom was that if you ate an apple from the Waverley tree, you’d see what the biggest event in your life would be. Claire had once told Bay that the mere fact that someone wanted to see the biggest event in their life meant they weren’t concentrating on what was good about every day, so Claire kept the gate locked and the finials sharp so no one could get in. As for the Waverleys themselves, they were all conveniently born with a severe dislike of apples, so they were never tempted to eat one. There was a long-ago saying that was still heard from time to time in town: Waverleys know where to find the truth, they just can’t stomach it.

  Bay reached the tree and touched its weathered trunk, the swirls and ridges of the bark like a mysterious chart to untold places. She lowered herself to the brown grass and looked up through the bare branches at the half moon like a black-and-white cookie in the sky.

  This was Bay’s thinking place. It had been since she was five, since she’d first arrived in this town and knew, knew she was home. Just a girl and her tree. Being here in the garden always made her feel better.

  She thought about how she wished Josh Matteson would love her the way her dad loved her mom, and
her uncle loved her aunt. The Waverley sisters had married men as steadfast and normal as the women were mercurial and strange. The men in their lives loved them the way astronomers loved stars, loved the promise of what they were, knowing there was something about them they would never truly understand.

  “I wish you could tell me what to do, tree.”

  She thought she saw the barest movement along its limbs, just a slight tremble, the way eyes flicker under lids while dreaming.

  Maybe it wished so, too.

  * * *

  Russell Zahler was too late for afternoon tea at the Pendland Street Inn, but purposely so. It was best not to be noticed by too many people, and the inn guests were all from out of town, anyway. They had nothing useful to share with him about what he needed to know.

  The proprietor of the inn, Anne Ainsley’s brother, Andrew, was at the front desk when Russell came back from his walk. Anne was clearing away the dishes in the dining room from tea. She smiled at him when she saw him. Her teeth were crooked and yellow, but she always showed them when she smiled, as if she didn’t care.

  “Hello, Mr. Zahler. You missed tea,” Andrew said from the front desk. He was a fat man, but his movements were small and birdlike, his elbows always held closely to his sides, his footsteps clicky and dainty. From the way he was sitting back in the desk chair, his hands resting on his rotund belly, Russell guessed Andrew had eaten what had been left over from afternoon tea.

  Russell had yet to offer any payment or ID, but Anne had obviously worked around that. Her brother had no idea. Andrew Ainsley was curious about Russell, though. He was probably wondering if Russell was a man of substance or means. He had peppered Russell with questions during breakfast, probably wondering if he deserved a photo on the wall. Russell had given him the story he gave most: he was a retired businessman on vacation from Butte, Montana. If ever asked what business, Russell would say he’d once owned a plant that manufactured clips for pegboards. Most people would lose interest after that.