That Summer in Maine

by Brianna Wolfson

  Eve rubbed her hands together like some kind of movie villain, but there was something in the slump of her shoulders and the downturned edges of her mouth that suggested this wasn’t the outcome she’d hoped for or expected.

  “As soon as we hung up the phone, I went on to Wassup? and I typed in your name, Hazel Box. It didn’t really occur to me that you might have a different last name now like I did, but hey, lucky me. Your weird mom gave you his last name. The first image in the results was a close-up of a girl with one green eye and one hazel eye looking straight into the camera and black messy hair that could have used some help from a blow-dryer in my opinion. You looked a little chubby—sorry—and a little less cool, but definitely like we could be sisters. And that, my friend, my sister, is how I found out about you. It took me a while before I reached out to you. I wanted to get to know Silas first. You know, see how this new family thing would go. Silas and I didn’t talk much about you last summer but I felt like messaging you anyway before this summer. That’s the deal.”

  Eve pressed her mouth into a smile, raised her eyebrows and then clicked the lamp off. She tucked herself back under her comforter and then turned on her side and faced away from Hazel again.

  “Why didn’t you tell me then?”

  Hazel felt short of breath again. Her lungs and tummy were in a pretzel.

  “I decided I wanted to keep Silas to myself for a bit,” Eve replied nonchalantly without turning back around. “Only one new family member at a time, you know? Plus, it allowed me to have yet another thing to hang over my stupid parents’ conscience.”

  Hazel suddenly and vigorously wanted to be out of that room. She wanted to be anywhere where the silence wasn’t weighing on her like lead. She felt her chest and lungs tighten and Hazel opened her mouth to swallow a big gulp of air to bring everything in her body back to harmony. But it didn’t work. A tingly anxiety started creeping over her skin and that big green wall flashed in her mind’s eye again.

  Hazel lifted the covers, zipped down the stairs, pushed the screen door open, and finally found relief when she sprawled her arms and legs out on the open grass and breathed in the evening air. The stars were bright and sparkling in the otherwise black, velvety sky. Silas’s cabin appeared a big sturdy shadow in the night with the single exception of one window aglow. With the lights on, the one room became a great illuminated stage. She could clearly make out Silas seated in a chair rocking back and forth. She watched him for a few moments swaying back and forth rhythmically, just blankly staring out into the rest of the room.

  It occurred to Hazel, though, that Silas’s room faced the other side of the house. She counted the widows from the edge of the cabin. This was surely the window of the locked room. What was he doing in there, she wondered.

  She thought about going inside and asking. She thought about pressing open that door she had been so curious about since she and Eve arrived. But Silas, rocking back and forth alone, looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed. There were walls in this home, too, now. Big ones.

  Hazel made her way back inside and down the hallway toward her bedroom. There was a glow around the edge of the locked door. She knew Silas was in there. She wanted to knock and ask why but walls were walls and sometimes even doors were walls. So she slunk back into her bedroom, tucked herself under her covers again, placed one ear against her pillow and drifted to sleep.

  31

  The next morning, Hazel woke up and made her way downstairs to the kitchen. Silas was leaning his hip against the cabinets and staring into his coffee. Eve had a half-eaten piece of toast on her plate and her knees up on the table and was waving her phone around in the air, presumably looking for service.

  “Morning,” Hazel said as she sat down. But no one answered.

  Hazel took a piece of toast from the middle of the table and spread the huckleberry jam slowly over the surface. Her mother’s favorite, Hazel thought, and smiled. She brought the toast to her mouth and bit down. The sound of the crunch echoed in the quiet room as crumbs sprinkled down her chin. The faint sound of her chewing only amplified the prior silence.

  She looked up at Eve again and began to study her face, looking for vibrations just under the surface of the skin that would give Hazel any hint about what she was thinking.

  “What?” Eve said sharply as she looked up from her phone and straight into Hazel’s eyes.

  Hazel sat quiet and still. Eve must have seen the blatant longing in Hazel’s face because she jutted her chin forward and raised her eyebrows, looking for a response from Hazel. But when Hazel didn’t give it, she shook her head and returned to her phone. There was nothing there. Just disinterest.

  Hazel took another bite of her toast and turned her gaze toward Silas. His shoulders were slumped but still. His thigh was pressing into the drawers casually. He was still just standing calmly, looking at nothing. Doing nothing. Saying nothing.

  Hazel began to trace the quiet on Eve’s face to Silas’s face and back. She felt everyone’s divergence. She could taste it. Everybody in this room was numb to their reality.

  She wanted to yell and laugh and return to joy together, but now all of those moments seemed a distant illusion.

  “I’m going to head down to the waterfront if anyone wants to come,” Hazel said into the room, hoping it would jolt everyone back to life. But it was still quiet.

  She took another bite of her toast and waited. But still nothing.

  She couldn’t not go now, so she slipped out the back door without another word. Hazel took a few steps across the grass and then turned back to watch the scene through the screen door. Neither Silas nor Eve had moved. She decided she would go down to the lake and at least put her feet in the water. She ended up spending time there, quietly thinking. On her way back up to the house, Silas’s workshop caught her attention.

  Hazel made her way toward it and slowly turned her neck to look behind her before sliding the large barn door open. She had to push it with both arms with all her weight behind it to set the heavy weight of it into motion.

  Hazel immediately felt an awareness of geometry and creativity and presence upon entering.

  The space seemed to be governed by a specific but entropic rule. A purposeful disorder. The room felt smaller from the inside but Hazel was well aware that the perceived capacity was diminished by the precarious stacks of worn notebooks of varying stages of deterioration lining the walls and the color on the walls. The bound notebooks of varying thickness stretched entirely from one side of the space to the other, creating a rocklike strata along an entire wall. Above the wall of books, sketches of tables and chairs and benches were nailed into the wood. An assortment of dinged-up wooden surfaces of different heights and thicknesses and widths created a maze through the center of the space.

  To the right was the workbench, where everything was kept in meticulous order. Each hammer and screwdriver and saw hung from its designated peg in an apparent order. The different nails and screws were stacked in transparent, scratched plastic drawers, arranged according to size.

  Hazel imagined Silas standing in front of the workbench reaching up for a tool conveniently selected for the task in front of him. She imagined him hunched over one of the tables, sawing a thick piece of wood, and wearing a mask covering his mouth and nose as a storm of sawdust enveloped him.

  Each thing in the workshop carried such specific purpose. Hazel could understand the call to a craft like this. The combination of human hand and instrument to create an object. An object that could be touched and used and interacted with. She imagined the power Silas would feel in changing the physical form of a thing. Cutting a raw slab of wood into a beautiful, usable form.

  There was something divine in the ability to create like that. To make something more out of something less.

  Hazel walked slowly and gingerly around the perimeter of the workshop, inhaling the scent of freshly cut wood an
d must. It all felt rugged and masculine. It was a place Silas belonged.

  Hazel felt a surge of spirituality flow through her. The space felt simultaneously grand but heavy. Sacred but utilitarian. Illicit but inviting.

  The competing forces made her feel a certain reverence for Silas’s craft.

  And this was no doubt his church, if anything was.

  Hazel reached out to let her fingertips brush against the sketched-on paper. She liked the slightly ribbed texture and the grooves of the pencil markings. She pulled her hand away from the wall and looked down at her finger, which was now covered in black charcoal that had sunk into her skin, revealing her fingerprint. She pushed her pointer finger back into a piece of paper on the wall, leaving a black oval print.

  Right next to where Hazel had left the mark, she noticed a photo nailed into the wall. The image of a person seemed to violate the impression of the space as something solely and wholly belonging to Silas.

  It was a picture of a very beautiful woman with an arresting shock of long, straight golden hair. Hazel was immediately drawn into her smoky eyes. The woman couldn’t have been much older than she was, but she seemed to carry more wisdom in her face. She was turned to the side with her head tilted toward the camera. Her lips formed almost a pout. Her crisp white and flowing tank top contrasted sharply with tanned and rich skin.

  She wondered who this woman was. And who she was to Silas. The photo was intimate, and surely taken without fair warning to its subject during an intimate moment somewhere, sometime.

  Hazel wanted to know more about this woman, her story, her relation to Silas. She couldn’t remove the picture from the wall without tearing it, so she lifted it up to check the back for any hints of anything. Any annotations or scribbles. But there was nothing but a neon orange date—April 11, 1995—in blocky numbers like those on a digital clock.

  Lifting the photo revealed two other images. Two sonograms. Each was taped to the wall haphazardly, strips of silver duct tape cutting across the top of each in no particular angle. Hazel wondered why one would preserve something on a wall, without more careful attention to how it was displayed. But alas, there they were. Two eerily grainy images of babies in their wombs.

  Hazel pulled them off the wall instinctively and held them next to each other. She felt overcome with a sense of knowing and connection. Without thinking much about it, Hazel assumed that these two images were of Hazel and Eve in the womb. She knew it so deeply in her bones. On the basis of no evidence at all, she felt so sure of it. Who else could they have been? Two teeny-tiny little girls growing big enough and strong enough. Two teeny-tiny little girls getting ready to join the world.

  Hazel could feel Silas’s desire for fatherhood. His love for his girls, even though he wouldn’t meet them.

  She turned the sonograms over looking for evidence but there was nothing. Just blank images. No dates. No names. No inscriptions. No nothing.

  She imagined Silas, her father, proudly taping these two images next to one another. She imagined him placing two girls permanently side by side on the wall of his workshop, knowing that they would not be side by side in their own lives.

  She imagined Silas peeking at these photos every day when he came to work on his furniture. She imagined him thinking about his two girls, now no longer little, as he worked. Hazel imagined her father thinking about his girls growing up and wondering whether they’d inherited his hair or his eyes or his comfort with tools. She imagined him wondering whether they would come together in any place or at any time that wasn’t on this wall.

  Hazel imagined how he must have felt to have his girls here by his lake. In his home.

  For the first time, Hazel felt confident that Silas may have wanted this summer to come. Yes, she thought and may have even murmured out loud. He probably longed for it. She was sure of it now, holding those sonograms in her hand.

  Hazel held the images against her heart. She was too distracted by her fantasy of Silas to notice the faintly printed date in the corner of one image. It would have revealed her answer, even if she didn’t want it revealed. But she was too distracted by her fantasy to seek reality.

  Hazel just returned them to their position on the wall and left the workshop with a buzz in her veins.

  She had everything she was looking for in coming up to Grandor. She had everything she needed. She could make this her home. She would make this her home.

  Hazel pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialed her mother’s number. The phone crackled as it rang, given the spotty cell service. Her heart was still racing from what she had found. The phone rang choppily again. Hazel strode toward the house as she held the phone at her ear.

  “Hello?” her mother’s voice rang through.

  “Mom,” Hazel said firmly.

  “Hello?” her mother said again, presumably unable to hear her.

  Hazel was close to the house now and the smell of dinner wafted toward her nose. This was it, Hazel thought to herself. The place where all of her meals would happen.

  “I’m staying here,” Hazel said into the phone and then hung up.

  Hazel ran into the house and straight toward her seat at the dinner table. She was still swollen with imagined love.

  Part IV

  Homecoming

  32

  HAZEL

  Hazel’s insides were still rushing and pulsing and surging and glowing with her discovery in the workshop earlier in the day and her plans for a new life. A new family. A new happiness.

  She had stayed at the lake...

  She slipped her knees under the table and pulled her chair in tight. Silas walked over with a big bowl of pasta mixed with coarsely chopped vegetables scattered throughout and placed it at the center of the table. Hazel watched as his strong thick fingers set the bowl down. She watched as a single black curl slipped out from behind his ear and across his forehead. As Silas tucked his rogue lock back behind his ear with the side of his finger, Hazel caught his green, emerald eye in hers. She felt her cheeks get hot as she was met with the full force of his smoky, intense eyes. She smiled back warmly. Lovingly. Her father.

  Silas returned her smile with a quick twitch of the eyebrow and returned to the refrigerator to finish putting together the meal. Hazel watched as his big heavy boots clopped against the hardwood floor. The old planks of wood surrendered just the slightest bit to Silas’s weight as he crossed over them. She felt another rush of heat fill her cheeks. How these floors must have known the feeling of his feet. How Silas must have known the give of the floor. This was his home. And soon to be her home, too. Hazel closed her eyes and slowly took in the scent of the meal. It was rich and full of love. She presumed it now more than she ever had before.

  When she opened her eyes, Eve was already seated in the chair across from her. Her arms were crossed and her legs were pretzeled between the chair and the edge of the table.

  “Hey,” Hazel said, trying not to let too much of her joy spill out with a single breath.

  Eve rolled her eyes and tilted her head back. The messy pile of her hair flopped from one side of her head to the other. Hazel glided over the response and smiled back at her. Surely this was a thing that all sisters did.

  Silas returned to the table with a plate of dark brown, perfectly sliced steak. The juice from the meat pooled below it and sloshed a bit as Silas set it onto the table. He took a seat and unlatched the cap from his beer. A gentle whoosh emerged from the bottle before Silas tilted his head backward and poured the beer into his mouth. Hazel watched the black stubble of sprouting hair on his neck undulate as the liquid moved down his throat. He slammed the bottle down against the table, perhaps a little too firmly.

  “Dig in,” Silas said, without looking up at either of the girls. He lifted the plate of steak, served himself three pieces and returned the bowl to its place in the middle of the table.

  By now, only E
ve hadn’t spoken. Her expression had grown sourer and sourer since Hazel sat down. Eve was making her annoyance known by one indiscreet groan after another. By folding her arms and shaking her head at every move. But it wasn’t like Eve to stay quiet for long.

  “I decided to become a vegetarian,” Eve said, head still dangling unnaturally to one side as gravity tugged on the bun.

  If it weren’t for the subtle nod Hazel observed, she would have thought Silas didn’t acknowledge it at all. He just served himself several large spoonfuls of pasta and then slammed his fork into the pile and thrust whatever noodles had been caught by the tines into his mouth. He chewed vigorously.

  Hazel waited for someone to fill the space of the quiet. But once again, there was only the sound of forks against plates echoing between them. She looked at Eve, who was limp on her chair and looking at the floor. She looked at Silas, who was alternating between shoveling his pasta and pouring his beer into his mouth.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t take the anonymity of Eve’s gaze. The directionlessness of Silas’s silence. The distractedness from each other. The hollowness of the room. Something molten and volcanic surged around inside of Hazel. And then it erupted. Detonated. She needed it all to be different. She needed these people to save her.

  “What is with you people?!” Hazel spewed.

  Now, Silas and Eve looked up from their plates with wide eyes.

  “Seriously. Can’t we even talk to each other over dinner?” Hazel demanded and slammed her fists, still curled around her fork and knife, into the table. “We are a family!” Bits of food flung from the silverware. “We are sisters and you are our father and this is our family dinner!”

  She looked at Eve and then at Silas. They were both erect in their chairs now, eyebrows pressed up toward their hair like exclamation marks.