Awakening

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Especially guys.

  Guys who aren’t Kevin, anyway. Kevin she’s known since kindergarten, so she never thought of him as a “guy.” He was just Lisa’s brother . . . until the day he suddenly noticed her during sophomore year.

  She saw it happen. She and Lisa were in the Wilsons’ pool, and Kevin came out of the house, jangling car keys, just as Calla climbed onto the diving board. He more or less stopped short, and she could feel his eyes on her in a way they had never been before.

  He tossed aside the keys and hung around by the pool with Calla and Lisa instead—a first. And he offered to give Calla a ride home that night, courtesy of his newly obtained driver’s license. She could feel the vibe between them as they drove through the darkened streets of Tampa, not saying much, listening to Alicia Keys.

  When he pulled up in front of her house, she thanked him and started to climb out of the car. He reached past her, pulled the door closed so that the interior light went off again, took her into his arms, and kissed her.

  That was the beginning. After two great years, last spring was the end. But not the worst end that can happen to a person.

  Oh, Mom. I can’t believe I’ll never see you again.

  Never again will she look at her mother and feel as though she’s seeing herself a couple of decades in the future; never again will they stand back to back, laughing, as Calla’s father checks to see who is taller. It’s been a draw at five foot seven since Calla was a freshman.

  I was supposed to grow taller than you. It was going to happen any day now. You said it yourself. You said you had one last growth spurt when you were my age.

  You never said you were going to die, dammit! How could you leave me?

  “Are you okay?” Dad asks anxiously, and she looks up to see him watching her.

  “I’m fine.” She flashes a bright, fake smile.

  She has to be fine. She can’t go with him to California. She can’t stay at the Wilsons with Kevin home for a few more weeks. She won’t go to Chicago with Uncle Scott and Aunt Susie.

  That leaves Odelia and Lily Dale. Case closed.

  Look at the bright side.There probably aren’t a whole lot of rules in Odelia’s house.

  That isn’t based on intuition, it’s based on common sense. Anybody who eats gummy worms for breakfast and cold hot dogs, straight from the package, for a midnight snack—both of which Odelia did while she was staying with them— probably isn’t a stickler for rules.

  Mom had a lot of rules; rules Dad didn’t bother to enforce whenever she was away on business. He was just . . . well, there. She loved him, but she never paid much attention to him, and vice versa.

  Now he’s all she has, and she’s all he has, and . . . well, he’s kind of driving her crazy. He’s grown much more strict since Mom died. He’s barely let Calla out of his sight, almost as if he thinks that if he can’t see her, something awful might happen to her, too.

  She looks down at her plane ticket to Buffalo with a sudden stab of regret.

  Less than an hour from now, she’ll be at thirty-five thousand feet, winging her way more than a thousand miles away from her dad. Not long after she gets on her plane, he’ll return to the airport with his luggage to get on his, which will take him to the West Coast.

  The sudden ringing of her cell phone in her pocket is a welcome distraction. “Hello?”

  “I miss you already.”

  Lisa. Calla smiles wistfully. “I miss you already, too.”

  “Then don’t go! Come here.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” she says, casting a glance at her father, who appears to be lost in thought. “And you know why.”

  “He’s going back to school in a few weeks. You can avoid each other till then.”

  “Under the same roof? I doubt it.”

  “Who knows? Maybe if you come here, you’ll get back together,” Lisa says, and Calla’s heart—oblivious to things like logic or likelihood—soars.

  “That’s not going to happen,” she tells Lisa resolutely.

  “I honestly think he still loves you.”

  “He has a funny way of showing it,” she says bitterly, remembering the shocking text message he sent back in April. He couldn’t even wait to dump her in person. It was too urgent to put on hold until his spring semester at Cornell drew to a close; it required immediate action via cell phone. “Look, Lisa, I’ve got to go. My flight is boarding.”

  Seeing her father look up at that statement, she realizes he’s been eavesdropping. Well, he can hardly help it, sitting right beside her. Still, it bugs her. Even though she knows he’s probably wondering what happened between her and Kevin. Comforting her through the breakup was Mom’s department. Dad never even acknowledged it—before or after Mom died. Maybe it was too awkward a topic for him. Or maybe he was just too caught up in his own grief that he didn’t consider her recently broken heart. Or maybe he is glad that as a newly single parent, he doesn’t have to deal with a college-aged boyfriend.

  She promises Lisa she’ll call or IM her later, hangs up, and sighs.

  “Lisa?” Dad asks. As if he didn’t know. “It’s not too late to change your mind and stay.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “I just wish there were somewhere else you could go. Or would go,” Dad adds, obviously thinking of Uncle Scott.

  “Well, there isn’t.”

  “Yeah. I know,” he says flatly—and sadly. He’s probably thinking of his parents now.

  Dad’s mother, Calla’s Nana Norma, died a few years ago, and his father, Calla’s Poppy Ted, lives in a nursing home not far from Uncle Scott. He has Alzheimer’s. When Nana died, Calla’s father and Uncle Scott went together to tell him. He sobbed inconsolably. He even went to the funeral. The next day, he asked Dad why Norma hadn’t paid her daily visit. Dad was forced to break the news all over again that she had died. Poppy sobbed inconsolably. And the next day, he woke up looking for her again.

  Poor Poppy. Now that Calla understands the profound shock and grief of losing the person closest to you, she can’t imagine having to wake up and relive it every single day for the rest of her life.

  “Dad, for what it’s worth, I’m glad I’m going to Lily Dale,” Calla feels obligated to assure him—or maybe both of them—yet again. “It’ll help me to feel closer to Mom.”

  “Calla . . .” He stops, as though he has no idea what he wants to say.

  “Dad, I need to see where Mom—”

  “Calla, she left home when she was your age and never went back. She didn’t even like to talk about it, so I don’t know how—”

  “Lily Dale was her life for eighteen years,” she cuts in. “Maybe she didn’t talk about it much, but she wasn’t big on reminiscing. You know that.”

  He nods. Of course he knows that. Mom was all about the here and now. She never wanted to look back, and she never wanted to look ahead.

  “Let’s just be,” she used to say. “I don’t like remember-whens or what-ifs, and I don’t like plans.”

  “Lily Dale used to be her home,” Calla tells her dad gently, noticing that he’s once again wearing the now-familiar expression he gets when he’s about to cry. “It was home to Mom the way Tampa is home to me.”

  Not that it feels like home anymore, she thinks glumly.

  Everything has changed. Mom’s gone, school’s out, Kevin’s no longer in her life. Even her friendship with Lisa is different. Calla can hardly pop in and out of her friend’s house the way she used to—not when she’d risk running into Kevin there. Lisa comes over to the Delaneys’ when Calla asks, but she can tell her friend is uncomfortable there now. Spooked, almost. Whenever she walks in the front door, she glances nervously at the spot at the foot of the stairs where Stephanie died.

  Calla herself goes out of her way to avoid it, which means getting out of the house whenever possible. It isn’t easy to escape her father’s watchful eye, but every time he’s otherwise occupied, she’s out of there.

  She’s
spent a lot of time these past few weeks wandering aimlessly along the winding streets of her development, gazing longingly at the houses occupied by people whose lives haven’t been shattered. Every glimpse of strangers going about their daily business brings a pang: the retiree pruning her gardenias, the businessman checking his mailbox, the little girls practicing cartwheels on the grass.

  Shocking, to Calla, that the rest of the world is still carrying on as usual.

  She’ll be glad to get away from Tampa, even though she’s about to spend three weeks in a strange place with a virtual stranger who’s—well, not to be mean to Odelia, but she’s . . . strange.

  “Grandma!”

  “Darling!”

  Calla stops walking so that the girl behind her can rush past, straight into the arms of a little old lady waiting by the Arrivals gate. The woman has a white bun, glasses on a chain, and is wearing a double-knit pantsuit with sensible brown shoes.

  After allowing herself a wistful glance at them, Calla looks around for Odelia, who doesn’t have a white bun and wears her pink-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses high in her dyed-red curls when they’re not balanced on the tip of her nose.

  She wouldn’t be caught dead in double knit or sensible shoes. No, she’s more likely to wear . . .

  Birkenstocks and yellow capris.

  That’s exactly what she has on, and after spotting her, Calla debates—but only for a split second—fleeing before Odelia spots her.

  You can’t do that. It’s not like there’s anyplace else to go.

  Sure there is. You can hop a flight to Europe. Or some island where you can start over and nobody will know who you are or what happened to you. You can—

  “Calla! Yoo-hoo! Calla, here I am!”

  Yes, there she is, running with open arms and the most welcoming smile ever.

  “I’m so, so happy you made it. You don’t know how thrilled I am to have you here.”

  In that moment, Calla senses with overwhelming clarity that she’s right where she should be. “Hi,” she says, her voice muffled by Odelia’s generous cleavage.

  “How was your flight? Were you afraid?”

  “Afraid? No, I knew the flight would be okay.”

  Odelia smiles an odd little smile. “So did I.”

  Before Calla can contemplate the possible implication of that strange smile, Odelia says in a rush, “Let’s get your luggage and blow this pop shop. I’m double-parked.”

  Calla smiles. Of course she is.

  Less than ten minutes later, they’re standing beside an ancient, beat-up cherry-red convertible.

  “Um, do you want to pop the trunk so I can put my luggage in?” Calla asks, dragging her suitcase around to the back.

  Odelia laughs. “This trunk doesn’t pop. That invention’s way before its time. I’m surprised there isn’t a rumble seat in there someplace.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. That’s way before your time, too. Get in, and I’ll take care of your bags.”

  Calla obediently climbs into the passenger’s seat, then spots a white rectangle propped beneath the windshield wiper on the driver’s side. “Uh-oh. You got a ticket,” she calls.

  “Oh, that? I got it years ago. Paid it, too.”

  “Then what—?”

  “I carry it with me whenever I come to the airport. It’s good for something. I just put it on the windshield, and the parking patrols leave me alone.”

  What is there to say except Oh.

  Well, there’s Wow.

  There’s other stuff, too. Far less tolerant than Oh or Wow. She can just imagine what her upstanding, law-abiding, sensible father would say about Odelia’s all-purpose parking ticket.

  Then again, Dad doesn’t know any of this. And he doesn’t have to know, Calla reminds herself. I’m on my own now. She just isn’t sure she knows how to feel about that.

  “Ready to go down to Lily Dale?” Odelia asks, getting into the driver’s seat.

  “Ready,” Calla tells her. “How far is it?”

  “You mean in miles, or time?”

  “Time, I guess.”

  “About an hour if someone else were driving, but I can get us there faster.”

  “I’ll bet,” Calla murmurs, fastening her seat belt. She has a feeling she’s going to need it.

  The farther they get from the New York State Thruway exit, the more rural the scenery.

  “We’re really in the country,” Calla notes, gazing out the open car window at a couple of black-and-white cows grazing in a pasture bordered by a grape vineyard.

  “What did you say?” Odelia turns down the radio.

  CD player, actually. She’s singing along with an old Bob Dylan song on a homemade mix that includes Dylan, the Dead, the Band, and, inexplicably, the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

  “Never mind,” Calla tells her, figuring her grandmother knows she lives in the country. It’s just news to Calla, who pictured a small upstate New York town as being more, well, tourist-friendly. But she hasn’t seen a restaurant or hotel for a few miles now.

  Plus, Odelia described Lily Dale as a gated community. Calla is pretty familiar with those, considering that she lives in a nice one off Westshore back home. But she’s having a hard time picturing an exclusive suburban development plunked out here in the middle of nowhere.

  She shivers a little in the cool breeze blowing through the window, but she doesn’t roll it up. You don’t get to drive with your car windows down in Florida very often, and she likes the feeling of the wind in her hair.

  Just when she’s about to ask how much farther they have to go, Odelia brakes and screeches onto a side road. “We’ll go this way,” she says. “Less traffic.”

  Traffic? Calla wants to laugh but doesn’t dare. It might be insulting to point out that the only “traffic” they’ve seen so far was a four-car backup caused by a slow-moving tractor.

  They pass a number of houses, some of them more like cottages, really. Then they round a bend and a small blue lake comes into view. A lake?

  There was something about a lake, she remembers suddenly. When her mother and grandmother had their emotional falling out that long-ago day, one of them said something about a lake. No, not said—screamed. They were both shrill, Calla recalls, and crying. And when Odelia stormed out, her mother told her never to come back. She never did . . . until the funeral.

  “What is that water?” Calla asks her grandmother, hoping to jog her memory.

  “It’s Cassadaga Lake. And over there is the Leolyn Hotel.” Odelia indicates a large old building that doesn’t look like any hotel Calla has ever seen. It looks more like a haunted house.

  “Isn’t there, like, a Marriott around here?” she asks, wondering where her father is going to stay if he visits.

  Odelia laughs so hard she almost misses another turn. “Oops, here we are.” Scrambling, she corrects her steering, which sends them careening through the old-fashioned wrought-iron entrance to Lily Dale. There’s a guard—Odelia waves at him—but no actual gate.

  Obviously, gated communities up north are nothing like they are in Tampa, Calla thinks, looking around. She’s so busy gazing in dismay at the first smattering of small gingerbread structures, which must be over a hundred years old and look as though they haven’t been touched since they were built, that she fails to notice the sign as they pass it.

  LILY DALE ASSEMBLY . . . WORLD’S LARGEST CENTER FOR THE RELIGION OF SPIRITUALISM

  THREE

  Odelia’s home is a stone’s throw from the main gate, on a tree-shaded lane called Cottage Row. The name fits. This small two-story structure is definitely more cottage than house, with its peeling pastel pinkish-orange paint and masses of flowers growing on either side of the front-porch steps.

  The garden looks as though it were planted by someone who closed her eyes and threw handfuls of seeds at the soil— and it probably was, knowing Odelia’s slapdash style.

  Calla can’t help but contrast these beds, overflowing with clashing blo
ssoms of pink and orange, purple and red, with the ones her mother designed back home: carefully tended plots filled with mostly calming shades of white and cream, accented by lots of lush green tropical foliage. Of course, there were lots of Mom’s all-time favorite lilies, the waxy cone-shaped blossoms for which Calla was named.

  “Why do they call this place Lily Dale if there are no lilies?” Calla asks after a quick glance around as they climb the steps, each of them hauling a heavy piece of Calla’s luggage.

  “Oh, there are lilies. Your mother’s old favorites aren’t in bloom now, but they’re called lilies of the valley. They’re little white bell-shaped blossoms the size of your pinky fingernail, but they give off a tremendous scent.” Odelia’s smile is sadly nostalgic. “When they pop up everywhere in late spring every year, I think of your mother . . . and of you.”

  “Of me? Why? I’m named after calla lilies.” She’s pretty sure those striking, elegant flowers don’t grow just anywhere. Brides carry them in bouquets, fancy restaurants have them in vases, but you never stumble across a random patch of them.

  “Well, your father made a mistake when your mother was having you,” Odelia informs her. “Stephanie sent him out to get lilies of the valley when she went into labor, and he brought back calla lilies instead.”

  “You were there?” she asks, doubting it, and is surprised when Odelia nods. “And Mom didn’t like calla lilies?” Calla tries not to take that personally.

  “No, she did. In fact, they became her favorite, because of you. But when she was your age, living here, she was crazy about lilies of the valley. She loved the way they smelled.”

  Calla frowns, suddenly noticing an overpowering floral scent wafting in the air. She sniffs, looking around for the source and finding nothing.

  “After Stephanie left Lily Dale,” Odelia goes on, seemingly oblivious to the mysterious tide of fragrance, “I’d bring her lilies of the valley, and she’d say they reminded her of home.”

  Home? Oh. She’s talking about this home, of course. Not their house in Tampa, a three-thousand-square-foot contemporary with professional landscaping and a pool.