by Lisa Tucker
He was so pleased that it was easy to make it down to the next branch, and the next. His arms were shaking a little, but he held on tight and kept going until crack, a branch he’d just put his foot on broke off. His foot was dangling in the air, and then his shoe fell off!
“Hold on!” the lady said. “Oh God. Wait! I’ll come up and—”
“I’m okay,” he said, because he was. His hands were sweating and all of him was shaking now, even his teeth, but he’d already swung the sock foot to another branch, a bigger one. “I can do it myself.”
He rested for a minute once he was safely on that branch. Then he went down again, and again. Finally he was on the last branch, the one that was just a small step to the ground, and then he was standing in the yard right next to her.
The shadows on her face made her seem not quite real, like a girl in a fairy-tale book. He felt like he wasn’t just an explorer, but king of the tree, and she was a princess who’d appeared to tell him what a good job he’d done—and hand him his shoe.
“You did it!” she said. “Great climbing!” She was smiling and kind of dancing around while he smashed his sweaty sock into his sneaker. “My name is Courtney, by the way. I’m a friend of your grandmother’s.”
He wasn’t sure which grandmother she was talking about, but it didn’t matter. He was glad when she took his hand. He wanted to make sure she didn’t trip on the tree limbs as they walked back across the yard. They made it over to the driveway, where Hannah was sitting on the hood of her car, leaning back against the windshield, looking at the sky, like nothing had happened.
When Courtney asked if he wanted to sit on the hood of the car, too, he said okay. He was so tired all of a sudden that he let her lift him up and sit him next to Hannah. He wondered if he’d been asleep the whole time, and the yard and tree were just a great dream.
Courtney sat down on the hood, on his other side. For a few moments, nobody said anything and Michael was examining the stars, trying to decide which one to make a wish on. He never picked the biggest star or the most twinkly one, because he felt like the other stars needed his wish more. Then Courtney and Hannah started talking so fast the words seemed like ping-pong balls flying by in the air above him. Hannah said their grandmother was on a date, and she’d texted that she’d be home as soon as she could. All they had to do was wait here. It couldn’t be too much longer. But Courtney said that Hannah deserved better, and she shouldn’t wait. “You can come home with me,” Courtney said. “Or your aunt.” Then Hannah said a bunch of stuff about her mother and her grandmother and her aunt that Michael didn’t really follow. She sounded so sad, but there was nothing he could do. His head had fallen onto Courtney’s shoulder and his eyes were closing again. Even the big light couldn’t keep him awake.
He woke up when Courtney sat up straighter, and his head jerked forward. Another car had driven into the dirt driveway. He could tell by the engine sound that it was his father’s Subaru. His parents had come to get him, just like he knew they would.
Courtney was scrambling to stand, easing him down so he was standing, too. His legs felt rubbery and tired, but he was running anyway. He ran to the driver’s side door and then his father was picking him up, lifting him in the air. His mother was there, too, touching his face and his knees and his arms. He thought they were both about to cry, but then they were giggling. He was giggling, too, because he knew this wasn’t a dream. None of it was, not even the best parts, which he blurted out because he wanted them to know so badly. They were his best friends. He wanted to tell them because that’s what you do with best friends, you tell them all the stuff you’re really happy about.
“I went on a boat and saw a real whale! I climbed a big tree!”
What happened next was very important to Michael; in fact, it would turn out to be the only thing he remembered about the time after his parents arrived. He would forget about all the grown-up talking that night, a lot of which, admittedly, he slept through, and all the confusing tears: Courtney’s, after his father thanked her and gave her an awkward hug; Hannah’s, after she noticed his mother’s watch and knew she was finally face-to-face with the person she’d been dreaming of; and even his mother’s, who hardly ever cried, but couldn’t help crying when she saw how thin her niece was, how broken, but also because she felt so sure she would have Hannah back that she was already thinking of what she would do for her, how she would ask Sandra and maybe even Courtney to help her love this sad, motherless girl back to health. Though she’d lost her sister, her sister’s daughter had found her again. This wasn’t fate or karma; this was grace.
But what Michael would always remember was his parents’ reaction after he told them about the boat and the tree. They continued to giggle and smile as they said how proud they were of him. When he took them over to see the tree and they didn’t say anything about it being dangerous or even give each other that doubt look he knew so well, he might have gone back to his original theory that this was only a great dream, except for the fact that his parents were wearing the same clothes they’d been wearing that morning, when he left. They were still his mommy and daddy, and they would still worry the next time he climbed a tree. They would worry when he learned to swim and ride a bike and drive a car, when he went to school and went to camp, and even when he was a grown-up himself and they were very old, like Grandma. Nothing had changed at all, except that something had.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my sixth book with Simon & Schuster, and I know I am lucky to have this wonderful company continue to support my work. My deepest thanks to everyone at Atria, especially Judith Curr, Greer Hendricks, Lisa Keim, Chris Lloreda, Peter Borland, Sarah Cantin, Rachel Zugschwert, Hillary Tisman, Paul Olsewski, Cristina Suarez, and Nancy Tonik. I’m also grateful to everyone on the S&S sales force, especially Michael Selleck, Terry Warnick, Barb Roach, Liz Monaghan, and my buddy Tim Hepp.
Again, my heartfelt thanks to Megan Beatie and Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications. To all the booksellers who have championed my novels and all the readers who have written me. To my dear friend Joe Drabyak, who read the beginning of this novel and loved it. I think of you every day, Joe. I wish you could know how deeply you are missed.
To my family and friends: Marly and Michael Rusoff; Kevin Howell; Melisse Shapiro; Scott Tucker; Ann Cahall; Pat Redmond; Jim, Jeff, and Jamie Crotinger; Emily Ward, and, finally, Laura Ward and Miles Tucker, who were there. I will never forget waking up, coming back to you.
THE WINTERS IN BLOOM
Lyrical, wise, and witty, The Winters in Bloom is an enchanting, life-affirming story that will surprise readers and leave them full of wonder at the stubborn strength of the human heart.
Kyra and David Winter are happier than they ever expected to be. They have a comfortable home, stable careers, and a young son, Michael, whom they adore. Though everyone who knows the Winters considers them extremely overprotective parents, both Kyra and David believe they have good reasons for fearing that something will happen to their little boy. And then, on a perfectly average summer day, it does, when Michael disappears from his own backyard. The only question is whose past has finally caught up with them: David feels sure that Michael was taken by his troubled ex-wife, while Kyra believes the kidnapper must be someone from her estranged family, someone she betrayed years ago.
Read on for a first look at Lisa Tucker’s dazzling new novel
The Winters in Bloom
Coming in September 2011 from Atria Books
One
He was the only child in a house full of doubt. In bed each night, though it wasn’t dark—the floor lights his father had installed—and it wasn’t entirely private—the nursery monitor both parents refused to give up—he rehearsed the things he was certain of, using his fingers to number them. He was just a little boy, but he wouldn’t allow himself to sleep until he’d gone through both hands twice. Twenty was a good number, he t
hought, though of course it paled in comparison with the number of doubts, partly because his parents had had so many years to discover them, but mainly because the doubt list was always growing, towering above him like the giant boy at his old school, the one his father had called a bully. The giant boy, whose name was Paul, had never done anything to Michael, but his parents doubted that Michael could learn in such an environment and took him out of that school. The three schools that followed had led to three other doubts, and now Michael was finishing first grade in home school, even though homeschooling had its doubts, too. I doubt he’ll get the socialization he needs, his mother said. I doubt we can teach him laboratory science, his father said, but we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. And then the words his parents didn’t have to say—if the time comes—because the future was always the biggest doubt of all.
“I will get bigger.” Michael whispered it every night, holding up his thumb. Then he said, touching his index finger, “I will not die before I get to drive a car.” He would force himself not to think of all the ways he could die, the hundreds of things his parents had told him all his life. He would also force himself not to daydream about what his first car would be like, because then he would fall asleep before he finished his counting and dream about rows and rows of shiny cars, all with headlights that looked like eyes and grills that looked like mouths.
In the morning, he was often very tired. When he slumped down for breakfast, his mother would put her hand on his forehead and ask if he was feeling okay. He hardly ever got sick, except when he was two years old and then he was so sick he had to spend weeks in the hospital, though all he remembered about that now was the pattern of elephants and monkeys on the nurses’ clothes. His mother always made him touch his chin to his chest, even if he told her his neck didn’t hurt. Sometimes she would take his temperature and inspect his throat and ears with a flashlight and push on his belly to make sure his appendix wasn’t about to burst. Only after she was satisfied that he wasn’t coming down with something would she ask, “Did you have any nightmares?”
He used to tell her, but he’d stopped when he realized that she and his father discussed his dreams the same way they discussed all the books they were reading about Raising Your Gifted Child. So he didn’t tell her about the dream he kept having where the ocean came up to his bedroom window and he jumped in a boat and floated off. He only thought of it as a nightmare because he knew it should have been scary—if he was alone in the boat, this meant his parents must have drowned. In real life, he would have cried and cried for his parents: their love for him was one of the things he was most certain of; it was always somewhere in the first five things he counted every night. But in the dream, it never occurred to him to wonder where they were. He was sitting on a flat wooden seat in the middle of the boat, listening to the sound of the water lapping against the sides, blinking at the sun hanging so low in the sky it looked like he could row right to it. He felt like the biggest, scariest parts of the world were all gone, washed away by something that was winking at him in the soft fat cloud that floated overhead.
The lady who appeared that day was like the cloud, though she wasn’t fat and she wasn’t at all soft. Her arms were so skinny that when she bent her elbows, Michael thought of the paper clips he liked to twist apart when he was supposed to be learning geography. He didn’t really like geography, though he loved the maps hung up in the room where he studied—the schoolroom, his parents called it, though it was nothing like school, because there was only one desk. The map of the city was right in front of him, and he’d stared at it so many times that he knew the lady wasn’t lying when she said she was taking him to the ocean. He’d always wanted to go there, but his father said a jellyfish might bite him, or he might swallow a mouthful of dirty, germy sand, or, worst of all, a tide current might pull him out to the sea and he would never, ever come back.
The lady had asked him where he wanted to go more than anywhere in the world. She was so nice to him that he felt like it might be true when she said she loved him, even though he’d never seen her in his life until that morning. He was outside the house, in the backyard. It was the second day of the outside alone half hour, which his mother had decided he needed after she read a book about letting kids be free range, like the good-for-you kind of chicken. Michael didn’t know what to do outside—his mother had told him to go ahead and do whatever he wanted, but he was afraid to touch anything, because dirt on your hands could make worms grow in your stomach, and he knew he should never climb a tree, he could fall and break his neck—so he walked around in circles and waved back each time his mother waved at him. She could see him perfectly while she did the dishes. So she must have seen the lady, and it must have been okay for him to go with her, like the lady said. It’s a surprise! Like on your birthday, except better!
He knew he wasn’t supposed to even talk to strangers, but the lady said she wasn’t a stranger. You’re my little buddy, the lady said, and she was crying, which made Michael feel bad for her. She was so skinny and sad, but in her car, she had lots of toys, just like she promised. She had toys he’d always wanted to play with, like robots with little parts that could break off and choke him, and bright red and blue and yellow cars that were probably made with lead paint. He was afraid to touch the toys at first, but then he decided that he wouldn’t choke or swallow lead paint unless the toy went in his mouth. And why would the toy go in his mouth, when it was so much more fun to move the robot arms and pretend the cars were zooming up and down his legs, like the lady’s car was zooming up the highway?
He might have had trouble believing that his parents had agreed to let the lady take him somewhere if he hadn’t overheard them just last night, talking about how they had to change. It can’t be good for him to be trapped in the house all summer. Other children are out of school, going to camp, playing with their friends. The two of us are doing our best, but it’s not enough. He needs more people in his life.
His mother was the one who’d talked the most, but his father had made noises that sounded like agreement. So this trip with the lady that his parents had planned must be like the time they replaced the entire heating system in the house, rather than trying to get the old one fixed. Sometimes you have to take extreme measures, his father had said, and then he’d explained that an extreme measure was necessary when the problem was so big, the only way to deal with it was to give up on what you’d done before and start over from square one.
Being with this lady, sitting in a regular seat in the back of her car belted in with a regular seat belt, next to another seat covered with dangerous toys he’d taken out of a dangerous plastic bag, on the way to the ocean, was definitely an extreme measure. On some level Michael felt this, but most of him was just excited. The lady was happy now, too; her laughs sounded like Christmas bells. She had a really friendly smile and nice straight teeth, but when she pushed her hair back, he noticed a big scar on her wrist, and he wondered if it hurt sometimes, the way Mommy’s scar on her knee did whenever it rained.
If they talked about anything important on the way to the Jersey Shore, Michael didn’t remember it. What he remembered—and would for the rest of his life—was that afternoon on the boat. It wasn’t a rowboat like in his dream; it was a big fishing boat with an upper deck and a lower deck and lots and lots of people. Michael was on the upper deck looking out at the wavy sea when a giant fish jumped straight out of the ocean and landed with a huge splash. It was a humpback whale, the fisherman announced, and everybody on the boat was pointing and talking when the whale jumped up again! It did it seven times, which Michael heard people say was amazing, because a lot of times these whale-watching boats went out for hours and didn’t see anything.
It’s because we’re lucky, the lady said. She pointed at the whale’s tail, which seemed to be waving before it disappeared back into the water. It likes you.
Michael closed his eyes tight, but when he opened them it was all still there: the bright blu
e sky and the soft pillow clouds and the endless ocean lapping at the sides of the boat. His hand was still tucked in the lady’s bony hand, and the boat hadn’t tipped over and the seagulls hadn’t pecked his eyes out and the big scary fish wasn’t really scary at all.
“It likes me,” Michael whispered; then he grinned as big as he could, in case the whale was looking up at him through the water. In case the whale was like the lady, who’d promised when she appeared in his backyard that all she wanted was to be Michael’s friend, more than anything in the world.
Two
At some point that afternoon, it did occur to Michael that his parents had to be very worried, without even a phone call to tell them that he was okay. Of course he was right, though his assumption that his parents knew this lady would also turn out to be true. (Actually, only one of his parents knew her, and knew was hardly a strong enough word for the relationship they’d had, but as this was a long time ago, it was all the same to Michael who, like most five-year-olds, thought of his mommy and daddy as fixed in time, with barely any life before he was born, much less complicated lives before they got married.) Even his feeling that the lady loved him was true, though her love was a desperate, entirely unexpected response that he couldn’t possibly have made sense of. But that his parents must be worried about him, that he understood all too well, even if he didn’t understand why. It had never occurred to Michael to wonder if something had happened to his parents to make them so chronically afraid. Until that afternoon on the boat, he had no basis of comparison other than the parents of his classmates at school, during the short periods he went to school, but since those parents weren’t in the classroom nearly every day, sitting in a corner, watching, as his mother or sometimes his father was, there was no way to tell what they were like.