Cicada Summer

by Maureen Leurck

  “Everything okay?” Eddie called from the porch. “Who’s here?”

  “I think you should leave,” I said to the man. “I don’t care what you’ve done before, but you’ll have to bulldoze through me to get to this house.”

  He briefly smiled. “If I had a dollar every time . . .” He shook his head before he drove down the road.

  I sank down on the lawn, my legs suddenly Jell-O.

  Eddie appeared next to me. “Uh-oh. Let me guess: another tax lien?” When I didn’t answer, he continued. “Former resident trying to take the property back? Insurance adjustor? Contractor looking for work? Someone who hates old houses?”

  “You’re getting warmer,” I said without looking at him.

  “Waterview?”

  I didn’t answer as I put my head in between my knees and took a deep breath.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Those assholes. Only interested in destroying, never fixing.” He let out a long breath. “Well, they can talk all they want, but we won’t let them get near our girl.”

  “Eddie,” I mumbled into my arms, “I might not have a choice. If no one buys the house, I might have to sell to them. After the flood, the wiring, the plumbing, the everything, I’m already into this house for way more than I planned. There’s no contingency fund left. If anything else goes wrong, it doesn’t make any sense for me to even fix it. I’ll have to sell to Waterview and watch them tear it down.”

  And Matt might be the one to sign off on the paperwork, I added silently.

  “That won’t happen,” he said firmly.

  “Even if I do find a buyer, though, what’s to say that they won’t sell to Waterview a few years down the road? They’re patient. They’ll wait.” I glanced at the leafy oak in the front yard. “Like the cicadas.”

  I thought about calling Matt, asking what he knew about Waterview’s interest, but I knew he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me anything.

  Eddie and I sat on the lawn for a few moments, before he said, “Can we get the historical society involved somehow? They have to want to keep the house around, for . . . historical reasons.”

  I picked my head up as I thought of Shannon and her perky zingers. “Historical status. If the house had historical status, then Waterview couldn’t tear it down,” I said slowly.

  Eddie shook his head. “Do you have any idea how to get historical status for this house? I’ve heard the process is an administrative nightmare. They don’t like to give it out unless the house is truly a landmark, since it kind of screws everything up for development.”

  “That’s exactly what I want. I’ll figure something out, some way to get it.” With renewed determination, I stood and brushed my hands off on my jeans. I extended one forward and pulled him up. “Let’s get back to those ceilings.” While Eddie and his crew were working on skim-coating the ceilings, I walked around the side of the house, frowning at the bubbling stucco up near the roof. I had hoped that it could be fixed with a patch. In theory, it could be scraped off and a new layer of wet stucco could be applied, and then sanded, textured, and painted, but we wouldn’t really know until we got up there and surveyed the damage. I doubted that there was much insulation left behind the façade, and we might have to replace that, as well. I just hoped that in the meantime, no pests decided to nest in there and pull out whatever was left of the insulation.

  In my house growing up, the exterior walls were cedar, and woodpeckers had a serious love affair with the material. At least twice a year they would drill a hole in the side of the house, pull out insulation, and nest inside. They became my father’s biggest enemy, his mortal rival.

  I was almost to the backyard, close to where we’d found the old arbor, when I heard a loud thud from next door. “Elsie?” I said. I carefully tried to peer into her window, and at first didn’t see anything, but I could make out what looked like a foot on the ground, near the front stairway.

  “Elsie?” I called again as I knocked on the front door. I thought I heard a weak moan in response, so I opened the door. As I stepped inside, I saw Elsie collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, cradling her arm. I rushed to her side. “What happened?”

  She weakly looked in the direction of the wooden staircase with white painted risers.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered. I lightly touched her shoulder. and she winced in pain, clutching her forearm. “Let me get some help. I don’t want to move you.”

  An ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The medics carefully lifted her onto a stretcher, stabilizing her forearm. They said she likely had broken both bones in it, by the way it was bent downward at an unnatural angle. I rode with her in the ambulance, and grabbed a crappy cup of coffee from the vending machine as I sat in the waiting room of the ER.

  I stared at the fish tank in the wall and an eerie sense of déjà vu came over me as I recognized a big blue fish swimming near the bottom. Five years ago, Matt and I had sat in this very waiting room and watched that same fish while I waited to be admitted for suspected early labor.

  I was only six months’ pregnant, and it was far too early to be having contractions. I had ignored them for most of the day, thinking it was false labor, and that they would stop. But they continued, and by dinnertime, my doctor told me to go to the hospital so they could figure out what was going on. I hung up the phone and immediately burst into tears. Matt walked in the door at that moment, and put an arm around me and led me out the door to the car.

  I think we only waited in the ER for about ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity. Every second that ticked by was another moment that my child could have been in danger. My agitation was only calmed by watching the fish in the tank swim around, oblivious to what was happening around them.

  “Everything will be okay. I promise,” Matt had said to me as we waited.

  Finally, we got into a room and they hooked me up to a monitor. They found the heartbeat, turning the sound up so we could hear the strong thump thump, and watched the contractions on the monitor. A steady stream of paper with wavy lines spit out from the machine, indicating heartbeat and contractions. Matt and I held our breath and stared at the output.

  “The baby’s fine. The contractions are just strong false labor. You’re not going to have a baby anytime soon,” the doctor finally told us after I had been hooked up to the machine for close to an hour.

  Matt put his head down on my lap and exhaled slowly. It was only then that I realized how worried he had been. He had shown little emotion up to that point, instead being the calm parent to my crazy parent.

  He looked up from my lap and smiled. “Already causing heart attacks, isn’t he or she?” He sat up and kissed me on the forehead, and I remember thinking that we had endured the worst. That the night in the ER was our biggest scare, and that things would be perfect after that. The next time we were at the hospital was when Abby was born.

  The blue fish nudged a red fish with its nose, before it hid behind a plant, and I came out of my memory. I shifted in the hard plastic chair and took a sip of my coffee, wincing as it burned the roof of my mouth. Years ago, I had expected that we would be back again, that we would have more kids and more births and more excitement. In another life, maybe I would have been at the hospital for that reason. That I would be up on the maternity ward, having another baby. Giving Abby the sibling she so desperately wanted. Adding to the family that Matt and I both had dreamed of.

  I could picture it all so clearly, that other life. Holding a new baby in my arms in one of those blue and white hospital blankets, introducing Abby to him or her. Taking pictures of her holding the baby. Watching Matt change a diaper in the Isolette as I fiddled with the hospital bracelets around my wrist. The beeping of the machines down the hallway and the sound of approaching footsteps in the middle of the night from the nurses. The smell of a new baby as it lay against my chest. Matt and I, parents again.

  The life that I had planned for.

  Instead, I was sitting in the ER, watching the fish swim ag
ain, all alone. I forced another sip of coffee into my scalded mouth as I tried to remember what Traci told me: that I needed to move on. That that life was something that didn’t exist, and would never exist.

  I forced the hot liquid down my throat as I pushed the memory and the daydreams away and instead watched the fish swim around, focused on one second to the next.

  CHAPTER 27

  Even though Elsie had only broken her wrist, the doctors suggested she stay overnight at the hospital so they could monitor her blood pressure. It had dipped low, and they were concerned she might have a concussion due to her fall down the stairs. I asked her if she wanted me to stay overnight with her, but she refused, practically kicking me out of the room.

  As I was leaving the hospital, I got a text from Gavin. Would love to meet up again. Dinner on Friday night?

  I stopped in the lobby and smiled. Sounds great, I sent back. Call you in a few, came back as the response.

  I squared my shoulders and walked out of the revolving doors, reminding myself that I didn’t have to feel lonely anymore, that I had a new beginning right in front of me. That Traci was right, I was only torturing myself by looking backward and to the side instead of forward.

  My phone buzzed, and I laughed as I pulled it out of my pocket. “Eager for a date, are . . .” I stopped when I saw that the caller was Matt, not Gavin.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said quickly.

  “You’re not bothering me. What’s going on? Is Abby okay?” I started walking quickly toward my car, keys in hand. Matt was supposed to pick her up from the house, with Eddie, when I went to the hospital with Elsie.

  “Yes, she’s fine. I just wanted to call and . . . talk to you about something.” His voice dimmed for a moment before he cleared his throat. “Her sixth birthday is next week—”

  “I know that,” I said. I got into my car and turned the air-conditioning on full blast, bracing myself for whatever might be his request. I imagined he might ask to take her somewhere extravagant, somewhere overnight, meaning she would miss spending the day with me.

  “I mentioned maybe taking her tubing on the lake for her birthday, and—”

  “No. It’s my turn. She’ll be at my house.” In the divorce agreement, we agreed that she would alternate years of where she spent her birthday. Last year, Matt had her on her birthday, and I spent the day in a heap on my couch, trying to unsuccessfully distract myself with reality television.

  “I know. I’m not asking for that day. This weekend, before her birthday. On Friday. I told her I would take her tubing and she said yes . . . and asked if we would both take her,” he said.

  “Both? Like you and me, together?” The words sounded so strange. You and me. Together. A unit.

  There was a pause before he said, “Yes.”

  “Well, will . . . anyone else be on the boat?” I didn’t have the strength to say “Julia.” I didn’t think I could fake pleasantries for hours with both of them, at the same time. While trapped in the middle of a lake. Life jackets or not, if that happened, there would be a fifty-fifty chance of someone going overboard. Or at least of me swimming to the shore regardless of how far it was.

  “Just the three of us. You, me, her,” he said. When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, “She asked me to call.”

  “She did? She asked you to call?” I knew I was being intentionally obtuse, but I enjoyed listening to his discomfort.

  “Yes, she did.” There was a pause. “So, what should I tell her?”

  Friday night, I thought. When Gavin wants to go on a date. I sighed and rubbed my forehead. For Abby, I would go and pretend that everything was fine between Matt and me. But for myself, I would meet Gavin after, and let my guard down.

  * * *

  “Now, stop. It’s really nothing. There’s no need to fuss over me.” Elsie waved her good arm in the air from her hospital bed, shaking her head at the chocolate-chip cookies that Abby and I had baked for her. She pointed to the countertop that lined the circumference of the room. “Leave it there for the nurses. They’ll make sure to give me the good drugs, then.” She winked at me.

  I set the white bakery box down on the counter, next to a box of latex gloves. I reached into the shopping bag from the Piggy Wiggly grocery store on the floor. “At least let me give you some lunch. The food here is abysmal, that much I remember.” I held out a turkey sandwich and she nodded, pointing to her food tray next to the bed. I unwrapped the sandwich and put it in her good hand.

  “You really shouldn’t be fussing over me,” she said again.

  I glanced down at her splinted arm, the purple and black bruises peeking through the black fabric. Her face was bright with makeup: blue eyeshadow, pink blush, and red lipstick. She had tried to conceal the angry, red bump on her left temple, but it still sprouted from her face like a molehill.

  The orthopedist had told her that she wouldn’t need surgery to reset the bones, but that they were both displaced. He said she was lucky that neither had broken the skin, and become a compound fracture. I had shuddered when she told me that. I had only seen a compound fracture once, when I worked on the docks in Fontana. A drunk guy had gotten off his boat and stumbled around on the pier, before tripping over his cooler and landing straight on his arm. I could still remember the ear-piercing sound of his shriek as he held up his flopping arm that was gushing blood.

  “It’s really no trouble. I needed a lunch break from the house, anyway,” I said as I pulled out a matching turkey sandwich and sank down on the pea-green vinyl chair across from the bed. I told her about the Waterview developer I had seen on the day she fell and how I wanted to get historical status for the house.

  “And how difficult is that?” she said as she nibbled at her sandwich.

  “Difficult. Beyond difficult. We have to prove that either someone famous lived there—historically significant, as they say—or that the house is a landmark for some other reason.” I took a large bite of my sandwich and rolled my eyes.

  “And is it? A landmark, I mean,” she said.

  I smiled. “Depends on who is asking. In reality, no. But Eddie and I are going to try to figure out something, some angle to pitch to the town council to get them to consider our position. But it’s still a huge long shot.”

  “Ah, so not quite as easy as you had hoped,” she said with a knowing nod. She glanced down at her turkey sandwich and smiled. “Most things aren’t.”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry that we haven’t made much progress with finding your daughter. I’ll make some more phone calls, contact some more agencies. Something will shake loose.” I gave an encouraging nod, but my words felt fragile, easily shattered.

  In a hospital gown, without the benefit of her usual brightly colored clothes, she looked older than I had ever seen her. I had a terrible thought that she might not have many good years left.

  “Maybe some things are meant to stay in the past,” she said quietly. Her red lips fell downward and seemed to bleed into her paper-thin skin.

  “Sure. Of course. Some things.” I thought of Traci’s words again about Matt and me. “But not this. We’ll find her,” I said again.

  “You know, I spent the first few years after I had the baby searching for a sign of her in every child that I saw. I would be at the market and see a towheaded two-year-old, and I would search her face for any sign of me, or of David. Or at church with my parents on Sunday, I would see a tiny girl with bows in her hair and pray that she would turn around and flash me deep blue eyes just like David’s. Sometimes I would try to bargain in my prayers, say that even if the child wasn’t mine to raise, just to give me a sign. Some moment in which I would know that she was safe. Loved.” She placed her good hand lightly on top of her splint. “I would promise that I wouldn’t try to contact her, or think about her again, if I could just catch a glimpse of her.” She smiled, her eyes watery. “Maybe I’m not meant to find her. Maybe I wouldn’t like what I found.”

  “Or maybe this is your sec
ond chance, like you said. Right now, there’s just a few bumps in the road,” I said.

  A nurse walked into the room, and Elsie’s face brightened. “Paige, my favorite! How are you today, dear?”

  Paige smiled as she grabbed Elsie’s pink water pitcher. “Same as yesterday, love. Ready for the weekend.” She turned to me. “You look familiar. What’s your name?” She held the pitcher in the air, mid-thought. “Did you go to Badger High School?”

  I nodded, a familiar feeling of dread coming over my face in the form of a flush. “Alex Proctor, but I graduated in 1999.”

  “Hmmm. I was 1997. I don’t think we ever met, though.” She narrowed her eyes at me as she searched the corners of her brain. “Proctor . . . Proctor . . . Proctor.”

  I decided to pull off the conversation Band-Aid right away. “Matt Proctor. My ex-husband. You graduated with him.”

  “Aha!” She triumphantly lifted a finger in the air as though she was the one who had solved the familiarity puzzle. “Matt, right. How is he?”

  “Honey, she said ex-husband.” Elsie’s voice crackled through the air, shooing away the building discomfort in the room.

  Paige smiled. “Right. Sorry.” She put a hand on her hip. “Well, if he let you go, he can’t be doing that great.” She gave me a wink, before she walked out of the room with Elsie’s pink water pitcher.

  “She should see Julia,” I muttered. “I think he’s doing pretty well. Me, I’m not so sure.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Elsie said. “You have that teacher.”

  “Well, for one, I don’t ‘have’ him. I’m not even sure how I feel about him.” I didn’t tell her about pushing my date back to after-dinner drinks to go out on the boat with Matt and Abby, or that I couldn’t seem to push Matt out of my head long enough for Gavin to take over.

  “It will all work out,” Elsie said as she stared out the window at the sunshine that spread across the fields. The bright green hills were crisscrossed with horse fences and dotted with the occasional barn and silo. In the distance, the trees parted and the landscape sloped down toward the lake.