Awakening

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  LILY DALE

  AWAKENING

  WENDY CORSI STAUB

  Walker & Company

  New York

  Dedicated to my nieces and nephews, littlest to biggest:

  Andrew Sypko, Dominick and Li’l Ricky Corsi, Leo James and

  Hannah Rae Koellner, Caroline and Elizabeth Staub

  And to Brody, Morgan, and Mark, my boys.

  Written in loving memory of my mom, Francella Corsi

  The author is grateful to agents Laura Blake Peterson and Holly Frederick, as well as to Tracey Marchini, all at Curtis Brown, Ltd.; to Nancy Berland, Elizabeth Middaugh, and staff at Nancy Berland Public Relations; to Rick and Patty Donovan and Phil Pelleter at The Book Nook in Dunkirk, New York; to Emily Easton and Deb Shapiro at Walker & Company; to David Ginsberg of Turnpike Entertainment; to Mark and Morgan Staub for their literary expertise and creative feedback; and to Brody Staub for pure sunshine and hugs.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  Seventeen years ago

  “Breathe, Stephanie. And focus on the lilacs, like they taught you in class. Come on . . .”

  “They’re . . . not . . . freaking . . . lilacs . . . Jeff,” Stephanie pants to her husband, straining forward with the exertion. “They’re . . . lilies.”

  Calla lilies, to be precise, but she’s in too much pain to utter an extra word. And if she had enough energy to get one more out, it sure wouldn’t be “calla.”

  No, it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Are you sure?” Jeff is asking above her.

  If she had the strength, she would probably reach out and jab him. Hard. This whole baby thing is his fault. If it weren’t for him— “Stephanie, sweetheart, don’t forget to breathe.”

  It takes a moment for Stephanie to recognize the new voice, coming from somewhere near the bed. Odelia Lauder isn’t prone to quiet, soothing inflection.

  Stephanie’s mother is more likely to jabber on and on in her usual excitable, opinionated way . . . unless she’s giving a reading.

  She’s always quiet and soothing toward the strangers who come to her door day after day.

  “Breathe, Stephanie. Breathe.”

  They don’t always get along—all right, they rarely do— but Stephanie’s glad she’s here. Purely for her mother’s sake, of course, she tells herself—Odelia would have been upset if she missed the chance to welcome her first grandchild.

  But you need her here, too. You’re in pain and you’re afraid and you’ve already gone through hell—and she’s the only one who knows about that. Just her and—

  A tremendous contraction nearly tears her in two. Oh, God. . . .

  She might be twenty-three years old, but she desperately needs her mommy. Needs to see her. She strains to get a glimpse of the familiar face.

  “Mom!” she exclaims as her mother comes into view at last.

  For God’s sake, Mom, blue eye shadow?

  That’s what she wants to say, but she doesn’t. Mostly because she can’t.

  All she can manage is, “When—?” before she’s forced to break off, unable to push another word past the pain.

  “I caught the first flight out of Buffalo this morning, and I had to change planes in Charlotte, and . . .”

  Mom rambles on about her spur-of-the-moment trip to Florida, oblivious to the fact that another brutal contraction is sweeping in, until Stephanie screams in agony.

  Then she says, again, calmly, “Breathe, Stephanie.”

  “Dammit! I’m . . . breathing . . . ,” she bites out as the midwife bustles at the foot of the bed.

  “Not the right way,” Jeff reminds her. He gives an example of the rhythmic panting they learned in a childbirth prep class a few months ago.

  So now she can’t even breathe right?

  Well, they’re the wrong damned lilies. So there!

  She’d say that aloud, but her abdomen is currently being crushed in an invisible vise.

  They were supposed to be lilies of the valley, dammit!

  She craves the delicate white blooms that grow wild in the woods near Lily Dale every spring; never tires of their heady scent. They have special meaning for her.

  But nobody here, not even Mom, knows about that.

  Anyway, a vase filled with lilies of the valley was supposed to be her focal point for labor, a technique suggested by the woman who taught the childbirth class at the hospital.

  That was back when Jeff was still trying to convince her that a home birth attended by a midwife was dangerous. He couldn’t understand why she was so reluctant to go to a hospital . . . and she couldn’t tell him the truth.

  The hospital might require too much information about her . . . past.

  When Odelia visited from western New York, she took it upon herself to find a midwife and bring her over to meet Stephanie, all in the space of a day. Ordinarily, Stephanie would have resented her mother’s meddling. This time, she welcomed it.

  Jeff was effectively overruled. It would be a home birth.

  Still, Stephanie agreed that some of what they learned in the hospital class was useful.

  Like the breathing.

  And using a visual focal point.

  But instead of her chosen lilies of the valley, the bedside table holds a stupid water glass filled with stupid supermarket-bought calla lilies. They were the best Jeff was able to do on short notice.

  “They’re white lilies,” he said cluelessly when she told him they were all wrong. “You said white lilies.”

  She probably shouldn’t have cursed him out, regardless of her excruciating pain. He was only trying to help, almost as nervous about becoming a father as she is about giving birth—even though she at least knows intuitively that everything will be all right.

  She and the baby will both survive, and the baby will be a girl, regardless of the so-called penis the doctor saw on the ultrasound screen back in December.

  Stephanie is no doctor, but that was no penis. It was the umbilical cord, or a shadow.

  Her baby is a girl.

  She knows that with absolute conviction, the way she’s always known certain things.

  Odelia doesn’t realize her daughter shares that gift, though. And, of course, Jeff doesn’t know about any of it. There are some facts—hugely important facts—he doesn’t know about her past. And he never will, as far as she’s concerned. He would never understand any of it. Look at Stephanie’s father. He didn’t get it . . . and he couldn’t live with it . . . so he left.

  If Jeff ever left . . .

  Don’t even think about that.

  She’s loved him from the moment they met. He’s solid, stable, practical, reliable—everything she’d hoped for in a husband. Everything she never had, growing up with an eccentric mother and an absent father.

  So she can’t share everything with him. So what?

  Everyone has secrets. Some more profound than others.

  Their baby’s gender has been an amusing secret for her to keep, considering how her husband has already bought a miniature Tampa Bay Buccaneers jersey for his “son,” whom he plans to call Robert.

  They haven’t discussed girl names, and “Robert” is clearly out, so that little detail will have to be left until the last minute, which is a little frustrating.

  Far more frustrating is the fact that Stephanie can’t ever choose which information she receives.


  It would have been most helpful if she knew that her water was going to break last night, a full month before her due date, in the middle of a crowded aisle at Publix.

  She wasn’t supposed to go into labor until mid-May. Which is why her mother was going to bring a bouquet of freshly picked lilies of the valley with her on the plane down from western New York.

  But everything went wrong.

  The baby is coming early, and the lilies of the valley aren’t yet in bloom back home, and God knows you can’t find them anywhere in Tampa on a moment’s notice, even if you know what you’re looking for, which Jeff apparently didn’t, and— “Oh, no!” Stephanie cries out as another wave of brutal pain radiates through her swollen body.

  There’s a flurry of activity around the foot of the bed.

  The next thing she knows, Jeff and her mother have changed their “breathe” mantra to “push,” counting their way to ten relentlessly every time they say it.

  “Steph! Steph, he’s here!” she hears Jeff announce as if from a great distance.

  Then . . . “Wait a minute . . . He’s a girl!”

  She’s vaguely conscious of laughter, of residual pain, of a baby’s first cries. Her baby’s first cries.

  As she drifts off to blessed pain-free oblivion, she remembers something she heard back home in Lily Dale, years ago.

  We cry coming into the world, as everyone around us laughs with joy. And we laugh with joy leaving the world, when everyone around us cries.

  Stephanie is too out of it, and Jeff too wrapped up in his newborn daughter, for either of them to hear the quiet, meaningful exchange between Odelia and the midwife.

  “There was a membrane over the baby’s face, Odelia. Did you see?”

  “A caul. Yes, I saw.”

  “You didn’t look surprised.”

  “No. My mother said she was born with a caul, and so was I.”

  “What about Stephanie?”

  “I had her in a hospital. I was unconscious. They gave you drugs back then. So I didn’t see her.”

  “You do know what it means?”

  “Yes,” Odelia says thoughtfully, gazing over at the newborn child, snuggled in her unsuspecting father’s embrace. “I know exactly what it means. But he doesn’t. And if Stephanie has her way, I doubt my granddaughter ever will, either.”

  ONE

  The Present

  Here are the random thoughts that run through Calla Delaney’s numb brain as she stands tearfully at her mother’s burial service, flanked by her father and grandmother:

  What if I faint?

  What if I throw up?

  What if I lose it and start screaming or crying hysterically and they have to carry me away?

  Oh, and What is Kevin doing here?

  She can feel him here, even if she can’t see him. But he’s not over there to the left with his parents and his younger sister, Lisa, who happens to be Calla’s best bud since kindergarten. Lisa grabbed her hand and squeezed it, hard, as Calla passed by on her way from the limo, numbly following the white coffin toward the gaping black hole waiting to swallow it.

  Yes, loyal Lisa is here, crying her heart out in a stylish black dress with spaghetti straps, a wide-brimmed black straw hat, and spectator pumps. Even in mourning, she looks as though she just stepped off a mannequin’s platform at Neiman Marcus.

  Kevin, Calla senses, is somewhere toward the back of the crowd of mourners, symbolically banished from the front lines now that he and Calla are no longer a couple.

  It’s been over three months since he dumped her. When he did, Calla was positive that it was the worst thing that would ever happen to her, knew without a doubt that she had reached the rock-bottom depths of agony.

  She was wrong.

  God, she was so, so wrong.

  “And so the soul of Stephanie Delaney is released from the body, and the body shall now be committed to the earth. . . .”

  The minister—who is he, anyway?—sways back and forth as he speaks, sweat streaming over his fat red face, an open book in his hands.

  Which book? Is it the Bible? A prayer book? An all-purpose funeral guide?

  Calla wouldn’t know. She and her parents don’t go to church. It’s not something she ever really thought much about, and definitely never with any measure of regret.

  Never until now, anyway.

  Now, she thinks of Lisa’s—and Kevin’s—Southern Baptist family. Lisa prays for everything from her grandfather being cured of cancer to David Connor finally asking her out. Neither of those things has happened yet, but Lisa hasn’t given up. She just keeps on praying, certain that God will grant her wishes.

  All the prayers in the world can’t bring Mom back, Calla reminds herself, twisting her mother’s emerald bracelet around and around on her wrist.

  So in the end, what does it matter? Calla could have gone to church every day of her life, and she’d still be here, standing at her mother’s grave in the wilting humidity of Florida in July. Helpless. Angry. Distraught.

  I can’t take much more of this. If this isn’t over soon, I’m going to . . .

  I don’t know what. Just lose it.

  Oh, Mom . . .

  She closes her eyes, hard, and tears roll freely down her cheeks once again, leaving a hot, stinging trail like toxic rain.

  What am I going to do without you?

  Calla loves her father, of course . . . but how can it be just the two of them from here on in? They’re rarely, if ever, alone together.

  Now that’s all they’ll ever be.

  What will they do? Or eat? Or say?

  It would be easier, Calla thinks irrationally, if her grandmother lived closer.

  Never mind that Odelia Lauder, with her rotund figure, dyed-red curls, purple nail polish and matching strands of beads, is a classic whack job—according to pragmatic Mom, anyway.

  But at least if Odelia were around, things wouldn’t be so—

  Her grandmother abruptly reaches for Calla’s hand and clasps it tightly.

  Almost as if she’s just read Calla’s mind.

  Which is interesting considering that she’s seen Odelia Lauder exactly twice in the past decade, both brief and awkward encounters at family funerals up north.

  Of course, before Mom and Grandma had their final falling out in a highly charged scene Calla dimly recalls from her early childhood, Odelia was a regular fixture in their lives.

  She’s always lived back in western New York, in Lily Dale, Mom’s tiny hometown. Calla has never been there. When Calla grew old enough to ask her mother why, she said it was because of the weather.

  “It’s always cold and unpredictable and stormy. They get feet and feet of snow.”

  “Always?” Calla asked dubiously. “What about summer? Why can’t we go visit then?”

  Her mother never had a satisfactory answer for that question.

  Odelia used to visit them in Tampa, though. Calla vaguely remembers sitting on her lap reading stories, stringing clay beads, singing funny little songs. But the memories are surreal, almost as if they happened to somebody else.

  Kind of like this, today. The funeral.

  If only it were happening to somebody else.

  Tears spill past the frames of her sunglasses and trickle down her cheeks.

  It’s so hot. Everything is ominously still, the sky oppressive. It’s going to storm.

  Calla shifts her weight, slips her hand out of her grandmother’s to reach into the pocket of her black skirt for a fresh tissue. Her mother’s black skirt, actually. This is Mom’s suit, one she wears—wore—to her bank job, a well-cut designer crepe in a size 6. Not exactly Calla’s style, but why would she ever own a black suit in the first place? Unlike Lisa, she’s usually in shorts and T-shirts.

  Anyway, it fits perfectly. She and her mother have—had— the same long legs, long waist, slim build.

  “You look so much like her, Calla. . . .”

  How many times has she heard that phrase in these past forty-eigh
t hours?

  Not that she hasn’t been hearing it her entire life. Like her mother, she has thick milk-chocolate-colored hair with streaks of lighter brown; wide-set hazel eyes that go green or gray, depending on the day; even a faint patch of freckles on the bridge of her smallish—for her face, anyway—nose.

  She looks nothing like her father, who has pitch-black hair and blacker eyes.

  Sometimes Dad laughs when people ask if she’s the mailman’s kid. Sometimes he doesn’t. Especially when the person who’s saying it is a guy who’s flirting with Mom.

  Flirting.

  That makes her think of Kevin. She turns her head, slightly, seeking that familiar sun-streaked mop of hair, those big blue eyes fastened to her from wherever it is that he’s standing.

  She does see big blue eyes, filled with tears.

  But they belong to his sister, and Lisa isn’t looking at Calla. She’s staring, in sorrowful horror, at the coffin and the grave.

  Calla can feel Kevin—or someone else?—watching her intently. The sensation is as palpable as the rolling rumble of thunder in the distance.

  She turns again slightly and scans the crowd. There are a bunch of kids here from Shoreside Day School. Like Tiffany Foxwood, who—on the last day of school back in May— snickered when Calla tripped over Nick Rodriguez’s sprawled legs in the cafeteria, almost sending her chef salad flying.

  Nick didn’t trip her on purpose. In fact, he said, “Whoa, good save, Delaney.”

  But Tiffany, notoriously bitchy, snickered. Right, and here she is now, staring blatantly as if taking notes to report back to her coven. Yeah, you should have seen Calla, she was a mess, no makeup whatsoever, her face was all raw and she never stopped crying, not once. Oh, and she was the one who found her mother, you know. And she didn’t even check for a pulse. She ran screaming into the street like a raving lunatic, and the old guy next door, the one who’s almost deaf, actually heard her and called 911.

  The old guy next door is here, too, Mr. Evans, along with a group of elderly neighbors, no strangers to loss themselves at their age. And there are a few teachers from Shoreside: Mr. Hayes and Ms. Valvo and Mrs. Durkin. Dozens of Mom’s coworkers from the bank are here, and a bunch of faculty from the college where Dad is a professor.