“Short for Calliope,” I say, still focused on my fingernails.
“Greek muse or musical instrument?”
I look up, surprised he’s heard of either. “Greek muse. My dad’s obsessed with ancient Greece. Besides, the musical instrument is loud and big and abrasive.”
His eyes spark with amusement. “Well, that’s not you—not the loud or big parts, anyway.”
I’m not sure why, but his comment makes me smile. The expression feels stiff, though, and I drop my gaze, embarrassed out of nowhere. My nails look horrible with their jagged patches of polish, and I hide my hands under the table, trying to recall the exact moment I stopped giving a shit about looking nice.
Tucker reaches for the peach he eyed before. It rolls in his outstretched hand. “Want one?”
“You’re passing out my aunt’s food now?” I ask, but I catch it when he tosses it my way.
It’s good, sweet. Tucker polishes off his in all of two seconds, then places the pit on a paper napkin he snags from the stack in the center of the table. He fixes his gaze on me, and then I feel self-conscious, biting and chewing and swallowing in front of this disarmingly beautiful boy. I put my unfinished peach down next to his pit.
“No good?”
“I’m full.”
“So, anyway,” he says with a shrug, “I’m thinking we should start over. I mean, if you’re here all summer, we’re gonna run into each other sometimes and I, for one, don’t want things to be uncomfortable.”
The way he says all this, flashing a smile that could thaw glaciers, is too genuine to answer with irreverence.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s start over.”
Again, he sticks out his hand. “Tucker Morgan.”
“Callie Ryan.”
I slip my hand into his, surprised by the warmth of his palm, the firmness of his grip.
I pull quickly free, before I become swept away.
8
When Tucker heads outside to start taming the yard, I escape to my room. I bring the poppies and set them on my nightstand; they’re too pretty to leave in the kitchen, where Lucy might enjoy them. I know I’m going to have to face her and get to doing some actual work eventually, but some time to cool off won’t hurt either of us.
Everything in my room is as I left it: the wardrobe, the desk, the bed—an unavoidable reminder that I’m no longer half of a pair—and the mirror. I hate the mirror. It’s bad enough, recalling the original and why Lucy had to replace it, but this new mirror’s clear cast throws back my likeness with staggering clarity. I shirk past the sad girl’s reflection, draw the curtains, and curl up on the bed, enormous and cold and lonely. The light is dim and the air is cool, and there’s a constant, quiet tap-tap-tapping. Drafty old house, Daisy playing, wind rustling the tall trees.
I’m off course, having just encountered an intriguing boy.
The last time this happened, I couldn’t wait to tell Chloe. Except, she beat me to it.
“I met someone,” she’d said, bursting into my room.
She was incandescent, wearing a nightgown, an old favorite she refused to give up, her hair freshly washed and twisted into a knot. She’d been distracted through dinner, ignoring Mom’s chatter about how she’d just planted summer squash and lettuce in the backyard garden, shrugging off Dad’s concern about her running home from the pool by herself, but now she was focused, situating herself on the end of my bed, folding her fawn legs beneath her.
“Really?” I said, putting my bio homework aside.
“After my run. Get this—he’s our new neighbor.”
Her eyes glittered, as if such good fortune was unheard of. Her interest in romance, in boys, was new and innocent and sweet. I wasn’t about to flatten it, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to tease her, either.
“Isaac,” I said, nudging her with my foot. “Dibs.”
“Callie!”
I laughed. “I talked to him when I got home from practice. He’s nice, right?”
“So nice.”
“And cute.”
“So cute.”
“And … old.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Not that old.”
“Ancient. He’s going to college in California in the fall.”
“He told me. Also, he thinks it’s badass that I’m training for a triathlon.”
“If only Dad felt the same.”
She groaned. “He gave me such a hard time while we were doing the dishes. He was all, ‘I just don’t understand why you can’t swim exclusively, like your sister. It’s dangerous,’” she said emphatically, mimicking Dad’s disapproving baritone with impressive accuracy. “‘Cavorting around the city alone. What if you’re hit by a car? And during the triathlon, what if you crash on your bike? What if another swimmer takes you under?’” She’d giggled then, as if our dad’s fretting was unfounded and absolutely hilarious.
“Have you registered yet?”
“Last week. I used birthday money from Aunt Lucy for the fee.” She was lucky her birthday fell when it did; fifteen was the minimum age for athletes entering the Seattle Summer Triathlon, held Labor Day weekend annually.
“Dad might be ticked,” I warned.
“It’ll be worth it. Swim team is cool, but I’m starting to feel like a hamster on a wheel, blowing through all those sets, going literally nowhere.”
I pulled an indignant face.
“No, no,” she recanted. “I love that you love swim team, and I think you should stick with it—you’re too good to give it up.”
“You’re good, too. In a couple of months, you’ll probably be faster than me.”
She shook her head, her gaze drifting around my room, snagging on the trophies and medals displayed on the wall across from my bed. “I need something else,” she said. “Something different. Something all mine.”
“I get it,” I told her, though I didn’t. I liked that we were both swimmers, both students at North Seattle Prep, both regularly annoyed with our loving but overbearing parents.
We were the Ryan girls. A twosome.
“You could register for the triathlon, too,” Chloe said. She’d detected, as usual, my hesitancy to speak the truth. Another difference: My sister favored honesty, while I defaulted to courtesy.
“No way. Dad’s right: so dangerous.”
She smiled, though her tone was apologetic. “When I said I wanted something all mine, I didn’t mean—”
“No, I know. The triathlon’s about you, and what a badass you’re becoming.”
She moved quickly, a snake’s sudden strike, and poked me in the ribs. “Isaac thinks so.”
Isaac did think so. Not long after, he started giving Chloe pointers on biking, going so far as to join her on some of her training rides. My parents liked that she wasn’t out alone. My sister liked that she had a hot guy pedaling beside her.
I roll onto my side, uncomfortable on this unfamiliar mattress, in this unfamiliar house.
Disoriented.
Sometimes I fall into memories so vivid and powerful, so full of Chloe’s spirit, I forget, for a few minutes, that she’s really gone. Resurfacing—remembering—is the same as losing her all over again, an endless cycle of daydreams and dashed hopes.
In need of a diversion, I give myself permission to think of Tucker Morgan, all floppy hair and cheerful smiles. I waste a few minutes conjuring stories about his youth, deciding his parents were once into the grunge scene, before he crashed into their lives and forced them toward a more conservative existence. Reasonably intelligent, the Tucker of my imagination is considering college but wants to see how he feels about lawn mowers, rakes, and climbing roses before committing to higher education. And so he’s taken up work as Bell Cove’s most promising Yard Boy.
For the first time since arriving in Bell Cove, I relax and drift into a dreamless sleep.
9
A draft.
My whispered name.
Cold fingertips ascending my arm.
I lurch i
nto wakefulness. The sun throws prisms of light across the floor. The curtains are wide open, though I’m sure I closed them before I lay down.
Sure.
Someone came into my room while I slept. Someone opened the drapes and breathed my name and touched my arm and then … disappeared?
I shudder.
My stomach rumbles.
God, I’m such a disaster.
As I swing my legs over the side of the bed, I notice a swim cap on my nightstand. It’s sitting harmlessly next to the poppies, black, with my old club team’s logo—a stylized swimmer racing freestyle, feet kicking up a plume of water—in shades of aqua and cerulean.
It wasn’t there before I fell asleep.
Gingerly, I pick it up. I have a half dozen caps exactly like this at home. There’s one in my backpack, too, plus a pair of goggles, in case hell freezes over and I decide to go for a swim.
Chloe had caps identical to this one, too.
I cross the room to the wardrobe and dig into my backpack. My fingers find silicone, and I pull out the cap I packed.
It’s the other’s twin.
In the chaos of my departure last summer, I must have left a swim cap behind. Or maybe Chloe left one lying around. We both used these exact caps for our ocean swims, favoring them over latex options because silicone is insulating. So this cap spent the last year at Stewart House. Lucy found it and set it out for me. Because she thought I might want it? Or because she thought it would nudge me into conversation?
A knock sounds from the hallway.
“Just a sec,” I call, dropping the cap I brought back into my backpack. I hurry across the room and shove the found cap into the nightstand’s drawer.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Screw Lucy and her prodding.
I open the door to my aunt and spend a second examining her expression. Is she waiting for me to mention the cap? Pour my heart out about how much I miss my sister? Yell at her, again, for interfering?
She invites me to join her for lunch.
I’m starving and she’s suitably repentant, so I follow her to the kitchen for a quiet meal.
“I started upstairs while you were resting,” she says, pushing the leftover bits of her tuna fish sandwich into Daisy’s bowl.
“Before or after you came into my room and opened the curtains?”
She gives me a quizzical look. “I didn’t open the curtains.”
“I closed them before I fell asleep. They were open when I woke up.”
Pity shines in her eyes. “I wouldn’t invade your privacy. You’re remembering wrong.”
“I don’t think so,” I say, but now she’s got me second-guessing my recollection.
I don’t mention the swim cap.
She stacks our plates atop each other. “Now that you’ve eaten, do you feel like working with me upstairs?”
I nod, tired all over again.
Lucy looks relieved, like she was worried I’d refuse to help, forcing her to take a stab at discipline. She leaves our dishes in the sink, grabs a folder from the counter, and drags me upstairs.
Chloe and I hardly came up here last summer, but I know there are six bedrooms, and now I can see they’re in the same terrible shape they were in a year ago. Ugly wallpaper, sheets draped over furniture, cobwebs dangling from corners. One room’s become a storage space, stuffed with piles of junk. Lucy tells me it’ll all need to be sorted and either purged or moved to the third-floor attic.
“We’ll name the rooms after the six original Stewart children,” she says as we walk down the hallway. “Thomas, Theodore, Gabriel, Abigail, Savannah, and Victoria. We’ll do each room in a color of the rainbow, but not in a tacky, obvious way,” she’s quick to clarify. “It’ll be lovely.”
She leads me into the room she’s calling the Abigail. The furniture has been pushed to the middle of the space, and the floor is mostly covered by drop cloths. The walls are bare, with the exception of bold flower-print wallpaper.
“Sit,” she says, dropping down on a clear patch of floor.
I join her. She opens her folder between us. There are swatches of fabric stapled inside, along with dozens of paint samples in every imaginable shade of red. There’s a detailed floor plan drawn on graphing paper, and magazine cutouts of everything from a large braided rug to prints for the walls.
“So,” she says breathy and animated—nerve grinding. “This is my vision, but if you have ideas, we can make adjustments.”
I don’t mention that I know nothing about interior design, and I keep quiet about how I have zero stake in this house and its aesthetic. She’s trying, and despite our rocky morning, I’ll try, too.
I point to a paint chip. Red, like blood. “This is nice.”
“You don’t think it’s too much for the walls?”
I shrug. “It’s a big room. It could be cool.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Why not go all out?” Her grin becomes a grimace. “But first, we have to clean.”
She shows me how to scrub the moldings with a bucket of soapy water and a thick sponge, then she tows an old boom box into the room and pops in a CD of eighties power ballads. We set to work, me scrubbing, Lucy prying nails and picture hooks from the walls with the claw end of a hammer. She pauses occasionally to dance and twirl to the dramatic strains of Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe, her hammer doubling as a microphone. I do my best to ignore her random dance fits and focus on dipping the sponge, scrubbing, and dipping again.
Lucy lets me get away with silence for a good twenty minutes before she’s compelled to start in with the questions. “So, Tucker … What do you think?”
“What difference does it make?”
“None, but—”
“He’s here to work on the yard, right?”
She frowns. “I thought it’d be nice for you to meet someone close to your age.”
“That’s why you hired him?”
“Well, no, but—”
“I’m not interested in meeting anyone. My age or otherwise.”
“You should make the most of your summer, Callie. Bell Cove’s not a bad place.”
Says the woman who moved here to escape Los Angeles and her messy divorce. Of course Bell Cove is appealing, compared with her alternative.
She dances over to dip an extra sponge in the bucket so she can help me scrub. “Did I tell you I joined a book club?” she asks over screeching guitar riffs.
“No,” I say, hoping she’s not about to invite me into its membership. “But that explains the library-worthy collection in the parlor.”
“The moderator, Shirley, owns the bookstore in town. We can go one day, if you want.”
I sigh—I can’t help it—and answer with a noncommittal “Maybe.”
She drops her sponge into the bucket and wipes her hands on her jeans, facing me like she’s got something epic to say. “This morning, at breakfast, and on the porch … I know it’s difficult for you, being here. You’re so much like your dad when it comes to hard things—you lock your feelings up tight—but I shouldn’t have pushed.”
I nod, thinking about how not alike Dad and I are. He’s been so stoic since my sister died. He goes to work and brings home dinner and rushes around to pick up the balls my mom and I regularly drop. He sees a counselor and visits Chloe at the cemetery. Nothing seems to rattle him—not Mom’s drinking, not his surviving daughter using drugs in his house, not his sister, backhandedly provoking him during what was supposed to be a pleasant meal. Compared with Dad, I’m a catastrophe.
With renewed fervor, I scrub the molding around one of the Abigail’s large windows. A flash of color in the yard grabs my attention. Tucker Morgan, pushing an ancient mower. I watch furtively, rubbing my sponge over an already clean patch of molding. He’s making neat lines across the wild lawn, trimming it into something like a golf course green.
If I’m thinking like a normal teenage girl, I can admit that he seems nice enough. But as I told my aunt, it doesn’t make a difference.
He’s out of bounds.
10
The next morning, after a mercifully uneventful night and a check-in phone call with my dad, I share a subdued breakfast with Lucy. After, she clears her cereal bowl from the table and says, “I’m off to Green Apple Grocery. Would you get a start sorting up in the Gabriel? Trash the obvious junk. Stow anything interesting in the attic. I’ll take a look when I get back.”
I ditch my own dish in the sink and trudge up the stairs. In the stale air of the Gabriel, I pick a box, sink to the floor, and pull the cardboard flaps open. Dust plumes skyward. I sneeze. I find documents: old electric bills and bank statements addressed to Clayton Stewart, dated in the mid-2000s. This must be the man Lucy mentioned my first night back—the last Stewart to live here. The last Stewart to die here. I use a Sharpie to mark the cardboard TRASH and shove it unceremoniously aside.
The next box is full of back issues of National Geographic. I flip through one, glossy pages slipping through my fingers. There was a time not so long ago when I loved these magazines, their lengthy, detailed articles and gorgeous photography. My dad subscribes and saves them; there are more than a hundred lining the shelves of his office back home. But there’s no room for old magazines at Stewart House. TRASH.
Box number three is a relative gold mine: a collection of old CDs. The Police, the Cure, U2, even Bon Jovi. Lucy will be thrilled; whomever this stuff belonged to must be her musical soul mate.
Under the CDs are photographs. Mostly black-and-white, old and poor quality. I shuffle through the piles, examining the old-fashioned clothing and vintage cars, looking for rhyme or reason. There doesn’t seem to be an organizational system, though: Pin curls mingle with beehives, high ponytails, and flips.
At the bottom of the box, there’s a manila envelope. I tear the closure, and more photos fall into my lap. These are different, full-color and more modern, probably developed at one of those drugstore processing centers nobody uses anymore. Most of the pictures are of the same two children. A little boy playing on various sports teams, dark eyes shining from beneath the bill of a ball cap, peering from behind the face mask of a football helmet. A little girl who’s holding bouquets of wildflowers, sitting primly at a tea party attended by dolls. Here they are running around on the beach, and here’s a family portrait, two ebony-haired children standing in front of their parents, father resigned yet commanding, mother homely and meek. The girl is smiling, carefree, but the boy’s face is as sharp and alert as a raven’s.
How the Light Gets In Page 4