The Summer of Lost Wishes
by Jessa Gabrielle
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Copyright © 2016 Jessa Gabrielle.
All rights reserved.
First edition: June 13th, 2016
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
The low battery of death flashes at me. We’re ten minutes from the Calloway Cottage, but I still dig for my car charger. This summer is already off to a terrible start. Actually, it’s more than just the season. It’s my entire life – as of now, this is my life.
I stab the car charger into the power outlet and hook it into my phone. The lightning bolt appears in the battery image. This was all Mom’s stupid idea. Aunt Carrie took over Grandma’s old beauty shop years ago, but Mom inherited Grandma’s house, which she sold in order to start her own business in her hometown. My mom’s never had an eye for design, or even a love for it, but as soon as Grandma got sick, Mom got Pinterest-happy and is convinced she’s the next Martha Stewart, coastal style.
We literally spread Grandma’s ashes into the ocean three days ago, and Mom’s already lugging everything we own in the U-haul trailer behind us. I doubt Grandma has even sunk to ocean floor yet. That isn’t any of Mom’s concern, though. She’s too busy trying to make the impossible decision between Iceberg Blue and Cloudless Blue for the shutters.
Moving to the Florida coast should be an ideal situation for a sixteen-year-old girl, but moving away from my entire life so Mom can decorate beach houses for the wealthy doesn’t classify as an ideal situation. It’ll take one day of sweat, sunburn, and lizard sightings to make her realize how stupid this is.
“Piper, are you even listening to me?” Mom asks, tapping her newly-manicured plum-colored nails against the steering wheel. She looks over at me when we catch a red light.
“I’m sorry, Mom, but you just sold your childhood home to purchase some cozy little beach cottage that’s all for show,” I say. I look down at my phone instead of waiting for her reaction.
She sighs, a bit too dramatically. I’m pretty sure the dramatic eye rolls and huffy sighs are supposed to be on my end of this conversation, not hers.
“This is for our future,” Mom says through her teeth. She readjusts her sunglasses and stares ahead at the street. “Selling that property was the only way I could better myself and take care of you. I did this for us.”
Or you know, we could’ve just sold it, kept the money for college, and stayed in Tennessee. I don’t dare say it. I know Mom has wanted to move back for so many years, and since the divorce from my former stepdad, she’s daydreamed about life in Coral Sands more than she ever did before. She swears it’s true what they say about coming home, so maybe that means I’ll end up back in Tennessee someday.
The Calloway Cottage has been empty for years, but it was only recently placed on the market. Mom thought it was the perfect home for us, so she put in an offer before Grandma even passed away. No one else had a chance to look at the place. The family accepted Mom’s offer immediately.
She mumbles something else about Iceberg Blue and then her voice cracks. She dabs at her eyes under her sunglasses, but I don’t say a word. I don’t even know why she’s crying. She wasn’t close to Grandma at all. We rarely ever visited, and Mom might as well have rejoiced upon the news of Grandma’s illness because it meant she had an inheritance on the way.
I mean, Mom’s not a bad person or anything. Grandma never made an effort to see us either. She never bothered to come to Tennessee, and Mom couldn’t afford to take off work very often to visit Florida. Our vacations weren’t spent visiting relatives. Still, it’s hard watching my mom conduct as if this were a business transaction. Aunt Carrie sobbed on the boat at sea, barely able to read the poem she’d brought for the seaside ceremony. Mom checked her phone during the prayer. It wasn’t the typical family movie kind of funeral. But we’re not really a typical family.
“That’s it,” Mom says, pointing through the windshield. Her voice perks up, almost a bit squeaky with excitement. “That’s our new home.”
I lean forward, bracing myself against the dashboard. The seatbelt digs into my chest, but I don’t even care. The Calloway Cottage is nothing like I imagined. When I hear ‘beach cottage,’ I think of a little wooden shack with old-timey shutters and a strip of sand for a driveway.
But this house – with a second floor and small balcony – sits right in the middle of suburbia USA. The shutters are weather-beaten, and the stony walkway needs some patching, but this definitely isn’t what I expected when Mom said she bought a beach cottage.
“Tell me again why the Calloways sold this place,” I say, my eyes still leaping toward the windshield.
“It was a steal,” Mom says. She pulls into the wrap-around driveway, parking the U-haul directly in front of the steps. “It was a family home, and I don’t think the recent generations cared for it. They live up north and wanted it off their hands, so I gladly offered to do just that. It’s been here as long as I can remember, and now we live here.”
It may not be Tennessee, but at least I have a house I don’t mind taking photos of and sending to my friends back home. Well, after Mom fixes it up anyway.
“C’mon,” Mom says. “I want to show you the inside. It’s gorgeous.”
I leave my phone and everything else behind and race up the front steps behind Mom. The porch is huge. Mom says something about getting a porch swing or something to liven the place up. I wonder if people sit on their front porches on the coast as much as they do in the country. For some reason, I imagine everyone here lounging by the pool with strawberry daiquiris more than I imagine them on a porch swing with sweet tea.
“This is what they call an open-concept floor plan,” Mom says, although there’s no need to explain. She’s watched enough HGTV lately that I’ve even caught on to some of the terminology. “Isn’t the kitchen amazing?”
It’s actually a bit empty, as is every other room in the house. A thin layer of dust blankets the hardwood floors, and every room is painted with an asylum shade of white. Iceberg Blue doesn’t sound so bad now. Forget the shutters – we need it in here.
There’s a massive bay window with a sitting area in the living room with a view of the street and the palm trees in the yard. I bet it lets in a lot of natural light. Oh God, I sound like Mom.
“So, where’s my room?” I ask, getting to the important stuff.
“Upstairs but first I want you to see down here,” Mom says, motioning me along with her hand.
We explore her master bedroom and insanely large bathroom, the laundry room because obviously I’ve never seen one of those, Mom’s soon-to-be office across from her bedroom, a smaller guest bedroom, and then she finally motions me upstairs.
“There are two full-sized rooms up here, so you can have your pick,” Mom explains. “There’s a smaller room, I think maybe a nursery, that I’ll probably use for storage.”
I glance into the first bedroom and walk down the hall to see the second, just for comparison’s sake. The second o
ne leads out onto the balcony. I don’t remember seeing an exit to the balcony in the first bedroom.
The view is pretty nice, just like the bay window. I walk up to the railing to soak in the morning’s sunshine, but the roar of a muffler steals my moment of vitamin D. I look in the direction of the noise – our neighbor’s house. A guy in a muscle shirt and ripped blue jeans steps out of an older black truck. He may not be the cowboy boots and scruffy-faced kind of guy I’m used to from back home, but he’s not bad on the eyes.
“I’m guessing you’ve picked a room. Isn’t the view amazing?” Mom gushes from behind me.
I turn back and look at her standing in the doorway to the balcony. The view is definitely amazing.
Chapter Two
Mom unhitches the U-haul from her car, leaving it sitting awkwardly in our driveway. I’m not sure leaving it unattended with all of our personal belongings is the smartest idea Mom’s had.
“Maybe we should take the boxes and stuff in before we go buy more,” I suggest.
Mom brushes me off with a wave of her hand. “I don’t even have a broom to sweep those dusty floors, Piper,” she says, as if I should already know this. Who throws away their broom just because they’re moving?
“Then maybe we should buy some cleaning supplies before you purchase furniture,” I say. I lean against the hood of her car. “You can’t have stuff delivered here when you have nowhere for the furniture dudes to put it.”
At least Mom took the time to have electric, water, and wifi all up and running before we got here. I think I would’ve just gotten back in the car and headed to Tennessee on my own if we hadn’t had at least that much.
“Okay. We’re just going to grab a few cleaning supplies, get some lunch and minor groceries, and we’ll come back and unload things. Deal?” Mom asks.
I groan. I hate that I actually like this idea. Any kind of food sounds good after the freaking seven-hour drive we made before the crack of dawn. It should be lunch time at all fast food joints by now.
“Fine,” I say through my teeth. “Cleaning supplies. Taco Bell. Unpack.”
“Deal,” Mom says. “Let me go grab my keys. I promise. We won’t be gone too long.”
I don’t bother getting in the car yet. Instead, I analyze the front of the cottage. It’s a beautiful place, but it needs a lot of work. Like real work, carpentry kind of work. I don’t care how much HGTV my mom watches – there’s no way she can fix some of this. And she knows that painting over the problem isn’t going to fix it.
“Morning! Moving in?” a man’s voice calls out.
I glance over at the house with the loud truck. An older man – okay, not too old, maybe Mom’s age – waves from his driveway. He wears khaki shorts and a stained T-shirt, like he got into a boxing ring with a can of paint. He has that salt-and-pepper hair that Mom thinks is sexy.
I nod. “My mom just bought it,” I tell him.
On cue, Mom rushes down the steps, keys in hand, and waves to the neighbor like the businesswoman she plans to be.
“Hi, I’m Charlotte Davenport,” she says, extending a hand toward him even though she’s six feet away. “I see you’ve met my daughter Piper already.”
He nods. “She said you just bought the Calloway Cottage. Nice to finally have some neighbors,” he says. “Blake Carter, by the way.”
Mom exchanges the adult ‘nice to meet you’ remarks, jokes about the change in climate, and then has the nerve to ask him if he’d mind keeping an eye on the place while we run into town for a few things. Gosh, Mom. Really?
“I’ve been watching after this place for years,” Mr. Carter says. “It’s just another day for me. No one should mess with it, but I’ll step in if they do.”
An hour and a half later, hot sauce gushes from my soft taco, and I savor every bit of it as it latches onto my tongue with an incredible burn. I don’t care if we have broomsticks poking through Mom’s cracked car window in the parking lot. I don’t care that my makeup looks like it’s on its third day after that long drive this morning. I don’t even care that I’m eating like a savage wolf in front of all these people in Coral Sands because starvation is a serious thing, and this taco is heaven.
Mom scoops up another chip from her nachos and pops it in her mouth just as a woman about Mom’s age stops in front of our table.
“Charlotte Davenport? Is that you?” she asks in one of those twangy voices that I swore were only used in bad Lifetime films.
That nacho takes a dive down Mom’s throat before she throws on that classic Davenport smile and gushes back in an equally fake voice.
“Meet my daughter, Piper,” Mom says, motioning toward me as I quickly work to swallow that bite of taco that was still lingering between my taste buds and the great beyond.
The lady – Sandra – is apparently someone Mom graduated with ages ago. She expresses her sympathy for Grandma’s death, asks Mom what on this planet made her move back to Coral Sands, and of course, inquires about my deadbeat dad who I have zero memories of, even if he is in a few of my baby pictures. There’s a piece of me that is glad I have Mom’s name and not his, but it’s still awkward when people realize my last name is my mom’s maiden name.
She shows Mom a few pictures of her own kids – a junior high cheerleader and a varsity soccer star of a son. Then they laugh about how their parents used to pull photos out of wallets instead of holding up a smartphone.
“So I’m assuming you moved into your mom’s house?” Sandra asks. “I’ll have to swing by sometime. You know, bring a housewarming gift.”
Mom crumples up the wrapper from her burrito. “Actually, I sold Mom’s house,” she says, a bit matter-of-fact like the Charlotte Davenport I know. “It was dated and I just didn’t want to invest in how much it’d take to bring it into this century. So I purchased the Calloway Cottage.”
Sandra gasps and places a hand over her chest. How freaking dramatic. I didn’t think people really acted like this. I feel like my life has become a made-for-television movie in less than twenty-four hours.
“Well, that’s just one hell of a return,” Sandra says. She shakes her head. “I bet you’re aiming to have it all fixed up just before the big anniversary. Geez, Charlotte, of all the houses in town for you to purchase. The Calloway Cottage? They should’ve demolished it when they planned to fifty years ago.”
Sandra looks off at the orange light fixture above the table behind us and shakes her head again, as if Mom has committed the ultimate offense and she’s completely disgusted with us. She doesn’t even say goodbye. She simply walks away from the table, out the exit, and toward her suburban mom SUV in the parking lot. I bet she has a stick figure family on her back glass, complete with a family pet. She seems like a dog person. She probably has a poodle or some other yappy house dog that wears sweaters and has a luxurious pet bed.
I don’t question Mom until we’re back in the car because if the people of this town feel the same way as Sandra does about the Calloway Cottage, I don’t want to draw any more attention to us than necessary.
“Okay, spill,” I say, fastening my seatbelt. “What’s wrong with our house? Is it haunted? Did someone die there? What anniversary is she talking about?”
Mom heaves a sigh and leans her head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat. “Nothing is wrong with our house,” she says. “It’s not haunted. No one died there.”
She doesn’t answer my last question. Or crank up the car. Or even blink.
“Mom,” I say.
She puts a hand up to stop me. Then she squeezes her eyes shut. She takes a deep breath – or more like three – and then opens her eyes and faces me.
“Coral Sands is coming up on the fifty-year anniversary of the biggest tragedy this town has ever seen,” she explains. “There was an accident out near Shark Island where five local teenagers died just before their high school graduation.”
The silence in the car is as eerie as the words ‘Shark Island.’ I remember the awkward silence
after Aunt Carrie called Mom to let us know about Grandma’s passing. We knew it was coming. Mom couldn’t afford to keep taking off work just to sit in an out-of-state hospital while Grandma lay dying. Aunt Carrie cried and called Mom an ungrateful brat, but Aunt Carrie isn’t a single mom who can’t afford to miss work without pay.
In that moment, it’d felt like the world turned into a bleak cloud. The lights were a bit dimmer. The air was hazy, like a humid summer day that literally sucks the oxygen out of your lungs the moment you step onto your porch. That “bleak cloud moment” lingered just a bit, to make sure we really felt it, and then it passed, quickly and easily, to drop its storm elsewhere.
That’s how this moment feels – except there’s more of a melancholy touch to the way Mom inhales and exhales. I dare to speak.
“What is Shark Island? What happened there?” I ask, twisting my body toward her to show her I’m really listening and not just blabbing for the sake of conversation.
She bows her head, cranks the car, and turns on the air conditioning, but she doesn’t leave Taco Bell’s parking lot.
“They were all so young,” she says. “It was a few weeks before graduation. They all had their lives planned out. They went out on a boat one night when a storm was rolling in. To this day, no one knows why they did it. They were smart kids, grew up in Coral Sands, and knew the ropes. But there they were, in the dark, on a boat, in bad weather and…”
Her voice cracks. Were they thrown overboard and drown? Lost at sea for all of eternity? Shipwrecked on Shark Island and found once it was too late? Mom grabs a napkin from under her cell phone and dabs at her eyes.
“Shark Island was an actual island. It was connected to the mainland by a huge fishing pier. It had a lighthouse, and all of the fishermen went there to catch for the local seafood restaurants and markets,” she says. “It became Shark Island after quite a few sharks were seen there. They were coming in to feed.”
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