“Hey,” I said to Shar when she answered her phone. “Got your text. What’s up?”
“It’s not about me, girlfriend. I wanted to know about you.”
I couldn’t help it. I started crying again.
“How many hours until you can talk to her?” my best friend whispered.
I checked my watched. “Not ’til eight tonight.”
“Okay. I’m coming over. We’re gonna watch a Ryan Reynolds movie. And there just may be some ice cream involved.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Which kind of ice cream? I was thinking, maybe, a tiramisu gelato—”
I laughed through my tears. “No, I meant which Ryan Reynolds movie?”
“Who cares?” Shar replied. “I just want to ogle his hot body for two hours. Those abs…mmm! He makes me wish I were Canadian.”
Shar was good at distracting me and, as I brushed away the wet splotches on my cheeks and thought about something as frivolous as hot actors again, I was reminded of an event I’d neglected to mention to my best friend.
“Oh! By the way, are you free on the night of the eighteenth?”
There was a pause while Shar checked her calendar. “Sure. Why?”
“Because I’ve got two VIP tickets that I can’t use for ‘The Bachelor Pad’—the Closing Night performance that Saturday night and the private party afterward. I thought maybe you and Elsie might like—”
“How did you get those?” she interrupted.
“From Dane Tyler. It’s, um, kind of a long story.”
The shocked silence on the other end of the line let me know that my words hadn’t gone unheard. Finally, Shar said, “I’m leaving now. There will be no Ryan Reynolds and no ice cream until I hear this story. In its entirety. That means Every. Flipping. Detail. Got it, girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Good. See you in five minutes.”
Chapter Eight
By the time Shar had finished grilling me on everything that had happened and every word that had been said between Dane Tyler and me the night of the dress rehearsal—and after we’d watched The Proposal for at least our tenth time each and devoured a pint of gelato straight from the container—the hour had finally come to talk to my daughter.
“How did the first day go?” I asked Analise.
She was almost gasping for air when she replied, as if she’d been running to keep up with a schedule that had left her breathless. “It was good, Mommy,” she began, and then went on to list the stream of activities that started within moments of the parents’ departure from camp earlier in the day.
I just listened and smiled—relieved and heartbroken at the same time that my baby girl had been forced to be so resilient. That such frenetic action was needed to break the pain of separation but, yet, that it could be done in the course of an afternoon and evening.
I told her enthusiastically, “Wow, you did a lot today! That sounds wonderful, honey.”
While inside I whispered, if only to myself, “I miss you with my whole heart.”
~*~
It was, perhaps, too much to expect that even the madcap daily routine of Camp Willowgreen would be enough to change the emotional circuits in my daughter’s brain for an entire month. I wasn’t, however, expecting her meltdown to come in the middle of my dinner date with Kristopher.
“I told them to bring us only the crispy fries,” he informed me with a grin I recognized, almost as if it had come straight out of our high-school yearbook.
“Hope they follow orders,” I replied, crossing my arms with mock severity. “Otherwise, we’re out the door.” I pointed to the exit of Sloppy Joe’s threateningly, which made Kristopher burst out laughing.
“Yeah. Somehow, I don’t think Joe is sweating in fear of losing our business,” he said. A funny statement to us both because Joe Redland, the owner of Mirabelle Harbor’s beloved burger joint, was one of Kristopher’s second cousins.
Not only that, Sloppy Joe’s was always packed—usually with repeat customers. We wouldn’t be missed in this carnivorous crowd. They served the juiciest burgers, the sauciest wings, the tangiest barbecued pork, and the most succulent ribs on the North Shore. All that and they also had crispy fries.
“Hey, you brought back an old friend tonight!” Joe Redland himself said to Kristopher, as he did a proud walk-through of his restaurant.
“So nice to see you again,” I told him, and I meant it. Joe was a good guy.
He clasped my hand and said warmly, “I’ve missed seeing you, Julia. I’m so, so sorry about Adam.”
A lump formed in my throat, so I just nodded. I hadn’t been here since the accident. Had it really been that long?
The older man squeezed my hand tightly for a second before letting go and turning to his cousin again. “So, what’s going on with your mom and that firecracker sister of yours?” he asked, grinning.
A look I couldn’t interpret flashed across Kristopher’s face. He looked—for want of a better word—wary. I thought about what Yvette had said on the drive up to the camp about him being secretive. My plan for tonight was to figure out more about him in the now. The adult Kristopher Karlsen. To see if I got the feeling that he was, indeed, hiding something.
“They’re doing great,” Kristopher said with an extra (pseudo?) burst of cheerfulness. “Haven’t talked with Tricia in a couple of weeks but, last I heard, she was planning some sort of trek through Maine with a few fellow hiking enthusiasts.” He laughed (forced?) and seemed to expect Joe to find it equally amusing.
The owner’s smile broadened. “Yeah, we could always count on your big sister for adventure. But you’re no slacker yourself, kiddo. How long are you gonna stay up in these parts, hmm? Planning the next big move or—” He shot a glance at me. “Ah. Maybe you’ll stick around a little longer this time?”
“Maybe,” Kristopher said quickly.
“Well, it’s always nice to get together with old friends, isn’t it?” Joe enthused, just as our server came rushing to the table with our order.
“Here you go,” the college boy said. “Two cheeseburgers with the works and a double order of crispy fries.”
“Thanks,” Kristopher and I chorused.
“It looks heavenly,” I added.
Joe beamed. He glanced at our table and called the boy back. “You get them a refill on their sodas and, while you’re back there, add on two chocolate-vanilla swirl milkshakes for them, my treat.” Then he winked at us and said, “Enjoy your dinner, kids.”
Before we could even thank him properly, he was gone, laughing with some customers half a room away.
“I swear that guy is, like, part leprechaun or something,” Kristopher said.
I laughed. “He does seem a touch magical, and he moves faster than anyone I’ve ever met, especially for a man in his seventies.”
“I know, right? My mom said he was like that, even when he was little.”
“So,” I said, between bites of my delectable cheeseburger, “how is your sister?” I knew Tricia was two years older than him and had been just as quick to blow out of town after high-school graduation as Kristopher did. “Did she ever get married? Start a family? I haven’t heard news about her for ages.”
He shifted awkwardly in his seat and fiddled with a couple of French fries before answering. “Uh, she’s been in and out of a few relationships. Nothing sticking, though.” He shrugged. “No children either, though it would be fun to be an uncle. I can just see the cute personalized mugs they’d give me for Christmas with ‘World’s Coolest Uncle’ scripted on the side.” He smiled.
I smiled in return, but I wasn’t going to let him change the subject so easily.
“What about you, then? No desire to settle down and have kids of your own?”
“Oh, I’m not ruling anything out. But I do like that ‘uncle’ idea. All the enjoyment, almost none of the responsibility.”
“Ha. Yeah, I can see where that would have its advantages, but what I meant was—”
“Oh, look!” He pointed out the window. There were a bunch of teens driving by. So many that they were almost spilling out of a silver convertible. “Wonder where they’re all headed.”
Another change of subject, I thought. But I said, “They’re kids on summer vacation. Wherever they go, they’ll turn it into a party.”
He nodded, watching them with a gaze I could only describe as one of deep yearning. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be that age again?”
No, a loud voice in my head yelled. But I said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d want to go back.”
“What if you could go back to being eighteen, knowing then what you know now?” he asked.
“That would be a little different, I guess, but life doesn’t work that way—at least outside of a time-travel movie. If you get all the youth, you also get all the uncertainty.”
He grimaced. “When you put it like that, I’m not sure I’d want to go back either.”
I laughed, but I was determined to get us back on a topic he kept avoiding: His family. “So, you and Tricia both left home really young. Was it hard for you to leave Mirabelle Harbor? Or were you glad to have escaped?”
He shot me an odd, anxious look. “What do you mean…escaped?”
“Oh, you know, getting away from the suburbs. The Midwest. The familiar.”
Some of the tightness in his shoulders seemed to fall away when he shrugged, almost as if he was trying to get rid of it faster. “There was a lot of, um, tension, I guess you could say, in my house when Tricia and I were growing up. I think we both needed to put a little distance between ourselves and that…atmosphere.”
This was the first I’d ever heard Kristopher speak of that. Although, thinking back, I remembered with a flood of recognition how he and I always went out for our dates or, on the few nights we stayed in to study, how we met at my house, not his. In fact, I remember only going into his room one time, and it was on a weekend when his parents were out of town and his sister was already living in another state. We made out on his bed for almost two hours that night. I blushed, remembering.
“What?” he asked me. “Are you okay? You look a little flushed. Too warm in here?”
“It’s fine. I’m good,” I said with a laugh.
I was about to ask a few follow-up questions about his parents, but I was mentally tripping over how to word it. No one just wanted to blurt right out and ask about the source of that kind of tension. Were his mom and dad always fighting?
I wasn’t given the chance to figure out the best phrasing, though, because my cell phone rang. Analise’s ringtone.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said, delighted to hear from her, although it was a tad early. Her nightly calls didn’t usually come for another hour or so.
“Mommmmmy!” she cried. “Oh, Mommy, I want to go home.” There was a pause on the other end of the line and I heard my daughter’s big gulping sobs.
My pulse kicked into high gear. I jumped up and excused myself from the table, telling Kristopher to wait there. Then I raced out the front door and away from the noise inside the burger place. Before I could even ask her what was wrong, I was reaching for my car keys, ready to drive up to Camp Willowgreen with only a split second’s notice, if necessary.
“Talk to me, honey. Please. Tell me what’s wrong. Are you hurt?”
She sniffled and gasped for air. “I—I—”
I was aware there was another conversation going on between Analise and someone else who was next to her. As my heart continued to pound, I could hear an adult voice asking her, “Do you want me to talk to your mom for you?”
Analise mumbled something to that person and then said, “Mommy, here’s Shannon.”
“Mrs. Crane?” the young camp counselor said.
“Yes, yes! What’s going on up there, Shannon? Please tell me what happened. I’m so worried.”
“Everything’s okay. Analise isn’t sick or hurt, just very sad. She really wanted to talk with you, and even though it’s before our regular cell-phone time, I thought it would be a good idea to let her call you. We were just starting an evening art project, when Analise panicked. She realized what we were doing and started weeping.”
“Because of an art project?”
“Yes. It involved wrapping silver-colored thread around nails that had been hammered into a piece of wood. If the campers followed the directions exactly, it would make a pattern. A pretty design. But Analise got very upset with this activity.”
And suddenly I knew exactly what had gone wrong. “It’s string art,” I told her, feeling the tears beginning to pool in my eyes.
“That’s right,” Shannon said, surprised. “You’re familiar with it?”
“I am.” I swallowed. “Analise’s father had a number of string art designs hanging up in the patient rooms of his doctor’s office. He always—” My voice broke and I had to stop for a moment. “He’d promised her that they’d make a few pieces together sometime, when she was on vacation. But they never got the chance because…well…”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Shannon whispered. “We had no idea.”
“I know. I know. There’s no way you could have known.” My heart was bleeding for my sweet, sensitive daughter, having to deal with the onslaught of such memories alone, hours from home. And it was aching even for me. Having to be so far away from her. “Please let me talk with her again.”
“Of course,” the counselor said, giving the phone back to Analise.
“I just couldn’t do it, Mommy,” she told me. “I just couldn’t make that project.”
“I don’t blame you, my love. I couldn’t have done it either.”
And the two of us spent the next few minutes on the phone, crying together.
Finally, I said, “Do you want me to come up and get you tonight? Was everything else okay today?”
She sniffled a few times and blew her nose. “We did some fun things today. Before that project.” She sighed. “Tomorrow, there’s supposed to be a play. I’m in it.”
“Really? What’s your part?”
“I’m the sun.” She sniffled again. “It’s kind of important. There are only three characters. Me, the wind, and this guy with a jacket.”
The storyline rang a bell. “One of Aesop’s fables?”
“Yeah.”
I wasn’t sure if I felt more relieved that she seemed to be looking forward to the next day at camp or disappointed for myself that I couldn’t rescue her from the land of rolling hills, quaint cabins, and sparkling waters, if only so I could have her back with me again. But I was the grown up here. I had to ask the big questions. Do whatever was in her best interests, not mine.
“So, you probably don’t want to miss that, huh? I mean, how would they put on the play without you?”
“Right. I suppose I should stay here for that, but—” She paused. “It was a tough day for missing Daddy.”
“Oh, Analise. I’ve had those, too.”
Shannon got back on the phone a minute later and told me that my daughter seemed pretty tuckered out. “She’s yawning, her eyelids are drooping, and she looks like she needs a good night’s sleep. I think we could relax the rules again and have her call you in the morning. Would that help, Mrs. Crane? To see how things feel for her when it’s a new day?”
I agreed that this was a good idea. After talking with Analise one more time and telling her that I loved her, I reluctantly hung up, feeling every single mile of distance that separated us tonight.
Finally, once I’d gotten myself together, I returned to Kristopher, who was still sitting contentedly at the table, playing with the last of his crispy fries.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
I briefly told him about my conversation with Analise and her counselor. How I was glad she was, more or less, all right, but how the worry had left me feeling drained. Sad. A little helpless.
Kristopher said, “Well, I’m glad you don’t have to drive up to the camp tonight. That would’ve b
een a tragic end to our dinner and movie date.”
I squinted at him and forced a slight smile, but his reaction puzzled me. I knew he was trying to make light of the situation (maybe a misguided attempt to cheer me up?), but it was a self-centered comment. Not the kind of thing another parent would have said in this situation.
“You know, Kristopher, I’m really not in the best mindset for a movie after that phone call. Maybe we can skip that for tonight and just talk a while over coffee?”
He looked crestfallen. “That’s not quite what we did on our first date, though.”
“Well, we’re not quite high schoolers anymore, are we?” I said, a little too fast and with a little more of an edge than I’d intended. I hadn’t wanted to insult him, but my irritation with his inflexibility and his persistence in pushing this “recreated date” on me, given what had just happened, was rising.
He seemed to sense that something was amiss and backpedaled a bit. “I’ve heard lots of great things about Camp Willowgreen. Neither Tricia nor I ever went there, but it always sounded like heaven with that big lake and all the games the campers got to play during the day.”
“It’s a very scenic environment, yes, and they do have—”
“Plus, the routine has to be a good thing for the children. You know, it’s kind of like the military. Everyone knows when to wake up. When to eat. When to play or to talk to friends or to go to sleep. There’s no time for wallowing. Kids need structure and rules or they’ll stay too soft.”
Wallowing?
“Perhaps,” I said slowly. “I have the highest respect for the military but, remember, my daughter is ten. I’m not worried about her being too soft.”
I wasn’t liking the turn the conversation had taken. Not at all. It was almost as if Kristopher was suggesting that Analise lacked discipline, and that I should be taking a harder line with her. He wasn’t acknowledging the depth of her loss—or mine, for that matter. It was as if he expected me to forget that I’d experienced nearly two decades of life without him in it. He seemed to assume that we could just pick up where we left off as teenagers.
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