That Summer in Maine

by Brianna Wolfson

  Hazel took her fork to the pile of pasta and tried to continue eating. She jammed a few noodles into her mouth and chewed. Her heart was racing and her throat was too tight to swallow without great effort. And then she thought she heard Eve mumble something.

  “What was that?” Hazel asked with a threatening energy she had never experienced in herself before.

  Eve wiggled her shoulders, sat up straighter and appeared to have found her own reactive energy.

  “I said, you guys are losers.” Her chest rose and fell with feigned calmness. “And I’m sick of it here.”

  Hazel tried to slow her breathing to get her food down and to let the sharpness of Eve’s words subside.

  “And I told my mom to come and get me,” Eve added matter-of-factly. “I think she’s on her way right now. God, I hope she is.” The cadence of the rising and falling of her chest picked up speed now. “It is time to get the fuck out of here.”

  Everything in Hazel’s insides sank down and melted into a pool of sadness and betrayal and anger and heartache. But then she stopped the feeling. She needed to salvage this situation. She could still salvage it! She was lost for words but looked up at Silas in such a way that she hoped might urge him to do it.

  Silas fumbled with his utensils and coughed and then looked up at Eve, obviously entirely clueless about what to do.

  “That’s not the way to share that update,” Silas said in a dejected but unsurprised manner that in no way made up for the gravity of what had just happened. “And, Hazel, I just want you to know that...” Silas said and placed his palm on Hazel’s forearm. The end of his sentence dangled in his mouth. She could tell he had more to say.

  But before he could say it, Eve chimed in. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she chuckled. From the corner of her eye, Hazel could see that Eve had recrossed her arms but took a new, more participatory pose.

  Hazel yanked her arm out from Silas’s grip. “Oh yes. It is going to be good,” she said, eyes still down on her plate but with a fierceness in her voice. “It’s going to be more than good. We’re all going to live here together, and it’s going to be better than good. It’s going to be great.”

  As her words spilled out of her, she felt the hot prickling of tears forming behind her eyes. Her throat constricted again. She didn’t know if she was telling or begging anymore. Her truest, deepest desire was now lying out in front of everyone on the table.

  33

  JANE

  Jane grabbed the keys to the car and pressed the front door open. Cam and the twins were right outside, on their way in. Jane burst into tears at the sight of them all and fell into Cam’s shoulder.

  “I have to go get Hazel back,” she said as she sobbed. “I’m losing her, Cam.”

  Jane’s tears formed a wet puddle on Cam’s shirt.

  “I’ve been losing her for a long time. I’ve—”

  And just as she prepared to head further down the tunnel of her guilt, the phone in her hand buzzed. Before she even picked up the phone to see who was calling, she hoped and hoped that it was Hazel. Jane bumbled the phone in her hand, her fingers still frantic and shaking. It was Hazel! She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and pinned the phone to her ear.

  “Hazel,” she said as calmly as she could muster.

  But the other end of the line was quiet and empty.

  “Hello?” Jane said again, the anxiety building in her throat again. But still, there was nothing but quiet on the other end of the line.

  Jane pressed her forehead again into Cam’s shoulder as another wave of tears erupted.

  Cam’s hand arrived gently on Jane’s back. He rubbed it up and down calmly as Jane’s back rose with choppy inhales and fell with choppy exhales.

  Cam brought his lips to Jane’s wet cheek and kissed it.

  “Well, let’s go get her, then,” he said with his mouth still at her ear. “None of us wants to lose her.”

  Jane pulled her head up from Cam’s shoulder, her tears curiously subsiding at the thought of all her family in one place. She crouched down to the twins, who were seated in their car seats. At the sight of their mother, gummy smiles spread across their faces. Their eyes were clear and bright. They knew nothing but love.

  Jane looked up at Cam. His face and eyes were so kind as he nodded, urging Jane along.

  Jane picked up the car seats and she stood up. Cam’s face lit up with a smile and he took one of the car seats from her.

  They both buckled them in tightly in the back seat and got in the front seats themselves. Jane put the keys in the ignition and the cadence of her breath finally slowed. Before she put the car in Drive, she picked up her phone to make one more phone call. She dialed the number of a woman whose number she had kept in her heart for sixteen years despite never having dialed it. A woman whose past was part of her past. Whose present was about to be part of her present.

  “It’s Jane,” she said calmly into the phone. “Silas’s ex. From that summer. Meet me at Silas’s. I know it’s a been a long time since you’ve been to that house but I promise you, you won’t regret it. I’m going, too, for the first time in a long, long time.”

  Jane took a deep breath. She had Susie’s words in her mind.

  All mothers’ stories are the same. All mothers’ stories are the same.

  “It’s about time we all find our way there,” she said to the woman, the should-have-been mother, on the other end of the line. And for no reason at all, without any signal from the woman on the other end of the phone, Jane felt confident that her instructions would be abided by.

  “Who was that?” Cam asked with one eyebrow raised.

  “You’ll see,” she responded cryptically with a smirk.

  “Well, okay, then,” Cam replied and placed his palm on his wife’s thigh.

  Jane put the car in Drive and took off.

  She had certainly made a mess of things in her life, and others had made a mess of theirs, but it was nothing that love couldn’t overcome. She got on the highway, headed for Grandor, Maine, in the dark, with a feeling of peace in her heart she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  34

  HAZEL

  Hazel was still seething when Eve jumped in in a calm and steady voice that didn’t match the thick tension filling the rest of the room. “I only came to this shithole to piss my parents off.” Eve flipped her bun from one side of her head to the other.

  “Eve!” Silas yelled, his voice deep and serious, urging her to stop. “That’s enough!”

  “What? It’s true,” Eve replied in a tone that was now de-escalated. As if what she’d said meant nothing at all. And perhaps it didn’t.

  Hazel wanted to have words, she wanted to know. She wanted to hear. And she wanted them all to wiggle right out of it.

  “For most of my life, my parents neglected to tell me what a little slut my mom was after she and my dad couldn’t get pregnant. Yup, she fucked that guy and made me.” Eve pointed at Silas with a fire in her eyes that could have burned a hole in both of them.

  Silas was steaming, his teeth gritted and shoulders tense. But he didn’t try to stop her again.

  “And I wanted to punish them for waiting so long. There, I said it. You think I give a shit about either of you?”

  Eve turned her eyes back down to her plate and without a trace of anxiety or emotion, dealt another blow.

  “If you did, that’s pathetic and I feel sorry for you.”

  Hazel’s head felt light and heavy and frantic and still, all at the same time. She didn’t know how to stop it. She didn’t know how to grab it back. So Eve continued.

  “But I think my mom and dad have got the message by now. And I’m going back to a life I actually like, and when I do, I’ll probably never think of either one of you again. They are on their way to come and get me right now so I don’t have to spend another second with y
ou losers.”

  Eve turned her phone over, began to type, but then slammed it back on the table.

  “No fucking service. But they are coming. I know they are coming.”

  As Eve crossed her arms, Hazel erupted again. Her mind went to the sonograms immediately. Every single person on this planet wants nothing more than love, she thought. Every single person. Even Eve. Hazel knew it. She could show her that she’d been loved. That she was still loved. By the people in this very room. It was her only chance.

  “You pretend you don’t care. But I know you do! And he does, too! I’ll show you,” Hazel said forcefully. And without another breath, Hazel pushed her chair out from the table, burst through the back and ran toward the workshop. The outside air felt crisp in her lungs and she felt a happiness fall over her upon seeing those two sonograms taped to the wall. With a gentle tug, Hazel pulled the pictures from the wall. She held them tight between her thumb and her index finger as she sprinted back through the screen door and to the dinner table where Silas and Eve were sitting in silence, eyes down on their plates, without a word between them.

  Hazel slammed the two sonograms down on the table between Eve and Silas. She looked up at Silas.

  “He’s been looking at these sonograms of us all these years. They are taped up in his workshop right near his bench.”

  Silas’s spine straightened and his eyes got wide.

  “He thought of us every day until we got here, Eve.”

  It wasn’t until now that Hazel realized she was out of breath. From the running and also the energy of it all.

  “Every day.”

  Silas’s head tilted forward and he rolled his chin across the top of his chest before looking back up.

  “Do you understand what this means, Eve? This is your father. Your real one. And I am your sister. Your real one. We are the people that care about you. We are your family. Your real family. Not those people at home. It’s us. It’s us!”

  Hazel turned to look at Silas, her voice now quivering. Silas’s green eyes met Hazel’s and they were full of tears. He swallowed harshly even though there was nothing in his mouth.

  He placed one palm over Hazel’s hand and one over Eve’s shoulder.

  “Listen, kiddos,” he said, with peacefulness. But a somber one. “I do like knowing you both. I really do. And, in a way, yes, we are a family.”

  Eve was looking straight back at Silas as he spoke, her indifference overpowered by his earnestness. Hazel felt a tear start rolling down her cheek. Eve tried to roll her eyes but couldn’t.

  “But those sonograms are not of you,” Silas explained, in a calm and sobering tone. “Both of those sonograms are images of a little baby named Ruby who never made it into the world.” He painstakingly surmounted each word as it rolled up through his throat and across his tongue. Hazel could tell each word was harder than the last to get out. Her heart sank and sank and sank. A bit for Silas, but more so for herself. It sank so deep she wasn’t sure it could ever be retrieved.

  “Before either of you were even a twinkle in my eye—” he smirked a little now “—I was married and in love with my high school sweetheart. Her name was—well, is—Torrey, and she is perfect. We were meant to have a baby together.”

  Hazel started piecing together all the things she had sensed and observed. The garden. The baskets. The locked door. Silas in that room in the middle of the night. The sonograms.

  Her whole image, her whole future, shattered before her very eyes.

  “We were meant to have that baby together.”

  Silas brought his thick fingertips over the image.

  “But the baby didn’t make it.”

  Silas’s voice remained steady but full tears were now falling down his face. Hazel brought her hand to her own face, which was wet and salty now. Even Eve appeared stricken as she held her hands to her heart.

  “Well, what happened to Torrey?” Eve asked, with more curiosity than care.

  “It was too hard, so we split.” Silas brought his hands up to his head and then let his head fall into them. His dark curls fell through the spaces between his fingers and swayed as he rocked his head back and forth.

  “But I miss her like crazy, girls.”

  No one said anything.

  “I miss her so much.” It wasn’t clear now who he was talking to.

  His words turned to a mumble that Hazel could barely make out. She could make out very few words—something about a car and a note and a crib, perhaps.

  Hazel’s mind blurred. And surprisingly, the image that emerged in her mind’s eye was the twins. Those precious little boys. She wondered what the world, her world, would be like without them. She didn’t want to know. And she felt for Silas. But she was broken. Into tiny little pieces that could never be put together. She’d abandoned her family for Silas and Eve, and they had abandoned her. She was alone. And broken. She was alone.

  “I think we all need some space,” Silas eked out with a tear in his eye. “Let’s all get to bed and talk about it all in the morning, okay?”

  “Works for me!” Eve said somewhat sarcastically, but with a fake enthusiasm. She pushed her chair out with a huff and stormed up the stairs. “I’ll probably be out of here by the time you wake up anyway.”

  Hazel was still left at the table and Silas had yet to move. He seemed catatonic. “I’m sorry that happened, Silas,” Hazel said in a whisper. And then she, too, pushed her chair out from the table and got up. “I’m sorry this all happened.”

  When Hazel got to the bedroom, the lights were off and Eve was already tucked into her bed, facing away from Hazel. Hazel thought she could make out the glow of Eve’s phone from under the comforters. Hazel slipped underneath her comforter and pulled out her phone, too. She wanted to call her mother. She wanted to hear her voice. She wanted to feel the comfort of her hugs. She wanted to be giving the twins a bath. She even wanted to see Cam. But she had thrown it all away. She had thrown everything away.

  She pressed her eyelids together and inhaled, trying to hold the tears back. But they found their way out at the corners and streamed down her cheeks. She could taste the salt on her lips. Her purposeful breath turned choppy and her heart ached. Oh, her heart ached.

  And before she knew she fell asleep, she was woken by the sound of a loud knock at the front door.

  * * *

  Silas, Eve and Hazel all convened in the foyer and then Silas walked over, slowly, to the door. There was a second set of knocks and Eve perked up at the sound of it. Certainly, Eve’s parents were here to take her back home. Her back was zipped up straight and her eyes widened, as if someone had come and breathed life into her body.

  Silas pressed his feet into the wood purposefully as he walked toward the door. The floor creaked with each step and then he took his hand to the doorknob. There was a trepidation to his movements. What was it? Was it so unusual to have visitors? Or was he unprepared for the beginning of the end of their summer?

  Silas opened the door slowly at first, but then with a velocity Hazel had not yet seen him move with. Silas stood frozen in the doorway. The woman on the other side of the door was not Eve’s mother at all. Hazel looked over at Eve, whose shoulders had gone limp and face had gone white. The woman at the door appeared to be full of spirit despite a nervousness in her eyes. She had tanned skin and almond-shaped eyes. Her hair was over one shoulder. She was wearing a long flowing skirt that rippled in the same way as her hair.

  Suddenly, the woman burst out for him. Her arms stretched in front of her with nothing but yearning in them as she crossed what might have been perceived as an impenetrable shield between them in the doorway. She wrapped her long arms around Silas’s back and pulled him in tight. Her thin arms and slight frame should have been no match for Silas’s wide shoulders and thick chest, but the way they held each other looked right and comfortable. They swayed a bit to the r
ight and to the left.

  It was at that very moment that Hazel realized exactly who this woman was. It was the woman in the picture in Silas’s workshop. This must be Torrey. This was what Silas’s love looked like when it was deep and true and real.

  Silas’s entire body slumped and he let his head fall right into the crease of the woman’s neck and shoulder. His curls fell gently over her clavicle.

  “What are you doing here? What are you doing here?” Silas repeated over and over and over and over in varying degrees of surprise and anxiety and relief and happiness.

  Hazel thought to turn away. She felt she wasn’t meant to be bearing witness to this kind of intimacy. This depth of feeling. But she couldn’t keep from staring. It was so simultaneously shocking and enlightening and heartwarming.

  “I’m so sorry,” Silas tried to whisper into her ear, but his voice was too hysterical.

  “I’m so happy I’m here,” the woman said calmly and she rubbed her hand across his back in warm, concentric circles.

  “I’m so happy you’re here, Torrey,” Silas said back to her, this time with more of a grip on the quiver in his voice.

  “How did this happen? How did you get here?” he asked, with his arms stretched out and his palms on her shoulders.

  “A wise woman told me to get here,” Torrey replied and then looked over Silas’s shoulder at Hazel. Hazel thought she detected a wink but just recoiled into her own ball of confusion and loss.

  Hazel looked down and noticed that Eve was squeezing onto her hand and staring out toward the doorway. Hazel, confused at the sudden gesture of solidarity, traced the line of her eyesight. To her surprise, she was looking past Silas and the woman’s embrace into the space behind them.

  There was the crackling sound of tires against gravel and Eve took a few steps toward it. Hazel followed closely behind her to get a view of what she was looking at. A sleek black car with no business up north in Maine was rounding the bend of the driveway. The car had barely come to a stop when two legs peeked out from the driver’s-side door and then two legs swung out the passenger-side door. Eve barreled toward them, interrupting Silas and Torrey as she whooshed by him.