Melanie pursed her lips. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Kelsey had chosen Everett over the other contractor simply because he was cute. Her sister was a sucker for dimples. Once, Melanie had explained to her how dimples were actually a genetic deformity of the cheek muscles, and Kelsey had slugged her. But cute only went so far in Melanie’s book.
“Was the forty-eight hours of drying time included in your two-week estimate?” she asked.
“You bet.” He stood up from his squatting position, his eyes crinkling at the edges as if he were laughing at her, and scratched the bridge of his nose. “You’re really eager to sell this place, huh?”
“Kind of.” She craved the sense of accomplishment she would feel once the lake house was in the hands of some other happier family. The nice sum of money that would be deposited in Kelsey’s and her bank accounts wouldn’t hurt either. It would give her a backup plan, a last resort, that she didn’t even really want to verbalize to her subconscious mind—IVF treatments and adoption fees. The fact that their dad wouldn’t have to lift a finger to help out made her proud too. Then she could go home to Ben, renewed and more herself than she’d been in over a year, and they could try again.
But the discovery of the time portal made the sale of the house feel like she was literally selling off pieces of her mom. She couldn’t go through with the sale until she had seen more of her mom’s life and learned all she could, all that the door behind the tapestry had in store for them. At that point, she and Kelsey could seal up the closet or figure out a way to divest it of its magic so that its new owners couldn’t accidentally trespass on their mom’s memories. It would be like a second funeral, one that would finally give her closure.
“But not your sister?” Everett asked.
It took Melanie a few seconds to realize what he was asking. She crouched down on the step so they could see each other better through the transparent tarp. “You’re right. If it was up to Kelsey, she’d probably love to keep this house in the family forever.”
“But it’s not?” he said, his inflection halfway between a statement and a question. “Up to her, I mean.”
“No,” she agreed, feeling like a bitch. But someone had to make the prudent decision. Maybe Kelsey couldn’t see it, but selling their summer home would be best for everyone in the long run. “It’s not up to her.”
IT WAS ONLY SEVEN O’CLOCK, the sun still high in the sky, but Melanie was already in her pajamas, with her teeth brushed and her face washed. She sat in the twin-size bed with the blue-and-white quilt pulled up to her armpits, staring at the Tree of Life tapestry. Though she was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted and should just go to sleep, all she wanted to do was step into the closet.
You’d be breaking your own rules, she scolded herself. It would be hypocritical if she asked Kelsey never to go into the time portal without her then did that exact thing behind Kelsey’s back. But Kelsey was working at Green Valley Pet Lodge all week and wouldn’t be back to Lake Indigo until at least Sunday. That was five whole days Melanie would have to wait to glimpse their mom again. Years seemed to pass so quickly inside the portal that she could be in her twenties or even older by then. Melanie would never know how their mom had borne up under the devastating accident at Harris Beach. She would never know how Lance had gone from being their mom’s crush to Vinnie’s husband. She would miss the remaining high school years and the entrance of her dad in her mom’s life. All of that could be happening at that very minute on the other side of the door only a few feet away from her.
She climbed out of bed. Why can’t Kelsey just take a few days off from her job? She took care of pampered pets, not animals with life-threatening injuries and illnesses. And it wasn’t every day that a person discovered a direct gateway to their mom’s past. Surely exploring it warranted a few personal days away from work.
She rested her palm on one of the turquoise flowers on the tapestry’s border. Maybe she could check on her mom without cheating Kelsey out of anything. She could just sneak behind the tapestry for five minutes, survey the bedroom to make sure her mom was okay, then leave an anonymous note of sympathy on the bench. An unsigned note couldn’t hurt anything. One small gesture of compassion wasn’t going to make the future spin wildly off course, and more importantly, if her mom did find it and read it, perhaps it would help her feel less alone. And if the note didn’t make it into her hands—if the time portal didn’t allow for that kind of contact—then no harm, no foul. At least Melanie had tried. After what she and Kelsey had just witnessed, she felt like she owed her mom that much. Then tomorrow, she resolved, she would call Kelsey and ask if her sister could come any sooner than Sunday for another visit.
Melanie snatched up a pen and the pocket notebook that she used for grocery and to-do lists. Then she lifted the tapestry out of the way, unfastened the door, and hurried inside before she could second-guess herself.
Peering into her mother’s bedroom, she knew immediately she had made the right decision. It was like she and her young mom were identical versions of each other separated only by decades. Her mom sat in the antique bed with the comforter pulled up high, just as Melanie had only moments before. Her brown curls were wet and glossy, her cheeks flushed and her eyes teary. She was all alone in her misery. It was like the encounter was meant to be, like Melanie had arrived at just the right moment to comfort her. If only her mom could sense her presence.
“Hi, Mom,” Melanie whispered, pushing the door open another inch wider. She wondered how much time had passed since the boy’s drowning—hours, days, maybe weeks. “How are you holding up?”
It was the same thing Ben had asked her the day after the miscarriage, one of those well-meaning yet insufferable questions it was impossible to answer without a tinge of venom in her voice. She was suddenly glad her mom couldn’t hear her.
Her mom wiped her eyes and stared up at the ceiling.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through this right now,” Melanie murmured. “I know you can’t hear me, but I wish you could know that things are going to get better for you. It’s not always going to be so bleak. Somehow you’re going to endure this, and you’re going to be stronger for it. And you’re going to grow up to marry the love of your life and have two daughters who adore you.”
She held up the notebook in her left hand, trying to keep the door propped open with her right elbow so she could scrawl her message. Dear Mom—the door gave way against her weight, skidding open, propelling her forward. Her handwriting looked atrocious. It was impossible. I’m sorry, Kelsey, she thought as she gave up the ruse of that one last technicality and stepped into the bedroom.
Her note was all wrong, anyway. She couldn’t address her as “Mom.” Melanie sat on the desk chair, no red swimsuit hanging from it now. Christine, she started again on a new piece of paper, then words failed her. What exactly can I say to my teenage mother who’s grieving the fatal drowning of a child on her watch? She studied her mom, whose blank gaze was still fixed on the ceiling. It was no one’s fault. It was simply a terrible, terrible accident. But Melanie knew that just like her mom, if the tables had been turned, she, too, would have blamed herself.
You did the best you could, she jotted down before she could overthink it, but sometimes tragedy simply has your number and even your best isn’t enough. You are a good person, and it’s not your fault that he died. Be gentle with yourself, okay? There are several people—
The bedroom door suddenly creaked open. Melanie swiveled in her chair to see Vinnie carrying a glass of water. She strode past Melanie and squeezed herself into a tiny space on the bed near Christine’s hip. “Drink this,” Vinnie ordered, and childlike, Christine obeyed.
Melanie’s first reaction was one of resentment. Vinnie was intruding on their mother-daughter moment, which Melanie quickly recognized made no sense: her mom couldn’t see or hear her and, in fact, had no idea she even had a daughter. Still, Melanie couldn’t help the ill will she felt toward the redhead who had di
stracted Christine from her lifeguard duties in the first place. But of course, Melanie was being unfair. The child would have been submerged by the waves even if the Birdwells and Lance Fletcher hadn’t shown up. Vinnie had done nothing wrong by chatting with Christine on the lifeguard tower.
Melanie realized with a jolt that, just as Kelsey had confided the other night, she too had started thinking of their mom inside the time portal as “Christine.” It was a weird, blurry distinction, but it somehow helped Melanie reconcile the different versions of her mom. “Mom” was a finite, knowable identity, or so Melanie had thought, but they were just starting to plumb the depths of Christine.
“Are you wearing flannel pajamas under there?” Vinnie asked, tugging the comforter down. “You do realize it’s eighty degrees outside, right? Not to mention only eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Even my granny is still out and about right now.”
Christine handed Vinnie the empty glass and sullenly rolled away to face the wall.
There are several people—who love you more than you know, Melanie had been poised to write, but she watched, distracted, her unfinished note on the desk.
Vinnie set the glass on the floor. “Move over.” She gave Christine a gentle shove and lay down beside her on top of the covers, and suddenly, Melanie’s dislike of Vinnie evaporated. She was being the kind of support that Melanie wished she could be for her mom, the kind of friend Christine needed right then, and for that, Melanie was grateful.
“You do realize I’m missing the Birdwell Family Sheepshead Tournament to be here, right? And you know how much I love card games. And my dipshit family.” Vinnie stroked the back of Christine’s damp head. “God, I could use a cigarette. Do you want one? Your mom won’t know. We’ll blow the smoke out the window.”
Christine turned over halfway and accepted a cigarette from Vinnie’s pack of Virginia Slims. She let Vinnie light it for her then propped herself up against the headboard, exhaling deeply as if she’d done it many times before. Melanie couldn’t take her eyes off the sight of her health-conscious mother puffing away. She had no doubt as to whose packs of cigarettes she and Kelsey had stolen from the closet bench.
Vinnie jumped up from the bed to grab a ceramic dish off the dresser to use as a makeshift ashtray, then she curled back up next to Christine and lit her own cigarette. The two friends smoked in silence for so long that Melanie was sure her five-minute pledge to herself had expired and she should leave.
“You can’t keep beating yourself up,” Vinnie said at last, extinguishing her cigarette in the dish.
“Sure I can. I’m quite good at it. Just watch me.” Christine stubbed out her cigarette and reached for Vinnie’s pack, but Vinnie pulled it away. She caught Christine’s hand in hers.
“Look, you can tell me to get bent if you want to, and I’ll leave you alone, but you need to stop blaming yourself. No one blames you. In fact, just yesterday, Mrs. Granger was saying how strong of a swimmer you are, and how if you couldn’t save him—”
“Get bent,” Christine said. Her blue eyes were light and playful, but her tone was dead serious.
Vinnie was still holding the hand that had been reaching for the cigarette pack. She leaned in so that her forehead was lightly touching Christine’s, then their noses brushed, and finally their lips met. And before Melanie could process what was happening, Vinnie was kissing Christine, and Christine was kissing back.
Melanie stood up from her chair and took a step back, clutching the small notepad to her chest. She felt warm and light-headed, embarrassed by the intensely private, intimate moment she was witnessing. She was an interloper, a Peeping Tom. She took another step back, crashing noiselessly into the desk but thankfully not feeling it as the solid wood passed right through her time-traveling leg.
Still, she couldn’t look away. As the girls continued to kiss, Vinnie wrapped her arms around Christine’s narrow waist, and Christine tangled her fingers through a hank of Vinnie’s long coppery hair. One of them, Melanie wasn’t sure who, let out a breathless sigh. She stumbled to the closet and fumbled to lift the tapestry.
“Vinnie,” Christine said. “Stop. We can’t do this.”
Melanie was tempted to pause and listen to what followed, but her desire to get away was even more pressing. In the sixteen square feet of space behind the door, she collapsed onto the bench, not even bothering to turn on the overhead light. She hastily ripped the note out, laid it on top of the cardigan, took a deep breath, then let her eyes adjust to the dark. Unbidden, the kiss replayed in her mind again and again—Vinnie leaning in and tenderly bringing her face closer and closer to Christine’s, the graceful meeting of their lips, their tongues. Was it their first kiss or something that happened frequently throughout their teens?
Oh, why did I break my own rules and go through the time portal tonight? It was like walking in on her parents having sex—which neither Melanie nor Kelsey had ever done, thank God—except ten times worse. Parents were supposed to have sex. Melanie’s mother, whom she had always thought was straight, was not supposed to be making out in bed with her best friend, the neighbor girl.
Melanie returned to her twenty-first-century bedroom, crawled under the covers, and tried to imagine what Kelsey would say if she knew: “You’re overreacting. You’re being a prude. Plenty of people experiment in their teens. It doesn’t mean Mom was a closeted lesbian.” The imagined sentiments were so reassuring that Melanie was tempted to call the real Kelsey and spill all, and only the thought of how pissed off her sister would be stopped her. Just like the initial revelation of the door behind the tapestry, the new one wasn’t something that could easily be explained over the phone.
Melanie tried to remember her first kiss—with a boy named Duke Randolph at a post-homecoming party her freshman year of high school. It had been wet and sloppy and tasted like Dr. Pepper. He hadn’t even been her date that night, but they’d both chosen to stay upstairs in the family room, watching a horror movie, while everyone else had disappeared into the basement to smoke pot. Duke had slid over on the plaid couch until their thighs were touching, draped his arm heavily over her shoulders, and gone in for the kill.
Where the heck is Duke Randolph now? Probably married with two kids, a mortgage, and a flabby stomach. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was Melanie had once kissed him as a fifteen-year-old but had gone on to fall in love with and marry Ben. The same was true for her mom and Vinnie, she consoled herself. Maybe it was their shared traumatic experience. Maybe it was just experimentation, adolescent hormones, the seventies, young love, whatever. It had passed as they’d both matured into happily married women with their own children. How else were they able to continue to be such good friends living right next door, summer after summer? Until that final summer when Jilly nearly drowned, of course.
What troubled Melanie as she drifted off to sleep that night was the thought of her parents kissing. Surely they’d had more passionate kisses behind closed doors, but all Melanie could recall right then were stiff pecks on the cheek as her dad left for work. Chaste, closed-mouth kisses when he got home, her mom turning away immediately to tend to whatever was cooking on the stove—nothing half as sensual as the kiss between her mom and Lavinia Fletcher.
Chapter Ten
“Have you tried a pill pocket?” Josh asked, leaning against the Siberian husky’s kennel door. “Peanut butter?”
“I’ve tried everything!” Kelsey insisted. “Peanut butter, pill pockets, his food, a chunk of cheese. He’s too smart. He finds it and eats around it or spits it out. His owner warned us. He said we’d basically have to force him to swallow it.” She glanced down at the small green bottle in her hand. “Great. Three times a day. This is definitely a two-person job. Can you help me out? I’m not in the mood to get bitten.”
“Sure.” Josh rolled up the sleeves of his navy-blue hoodie and stepped inside. “Hi, Koda. Gosh, you’re handsome. Has anyone ever told you that you look like a doggy Frank Sinatra with those blue, blue eyes?” H
e reached out his hand to let the husky sniff him.
Kelsey handed him the pill bottle. “A doggy Frank Sinatra?”
“Don’t tell me you can’t see the resemblance.”
She carefully opened Koda’s jaws, squeezing his lips against his teeth. “Oh, definitely. I guess I was more surprised by your use of the word ‘doggy.’ What are you—three years old?”
He laughed and deposited the pill in the back of the dog’s throat.
Kelsey gently closed Koda’s mouth, holding it shut until she heard him swallow. “Good boy.” She stroked his chest. “Good doggy,” she added for Josh’s benefit. After giving Koda the rest of the cheese slice she’d unsuccessfully tried to wrap the pill in, she stood up. “Thanks. It’s been such a crazy morning that I’ve had to pee for over an hour and still haven’t gone. The grass out back was actually looking kind of tempting when I was last out there.”
“Sheesh! Please go relieve yourself. I’ll cover for you.” He grabbed Koda’s water bowl to refill it. “It’s only going to get busier, you know!” he called after her. “Beth told me we’re getting at least ten more dogs this afternoon and two cats. It’s a sign of the apocalypse. And Memorial Day weekend, I guess.”
Beth intercepted Kelsey on her way back from the bathroom. “Can I talk to you in my office for just a second?” she asked.
A list of scenarios whirled through Kelsey’s mind, all of them ending in Beth asking her to pick up more hours. “You bet,” she said, trying to hide the reluctance she felt. She snitched a miniature Milky Way from the candy dish on Beth’s desk as she sat down across from her.
Beth let out a tearful sigh, and it quickly became apparent that the talk was a Leona-related one not a work-related one. Kelsey relaxed a little, still sympathetic to her boss’s parenting struggles but relieved that she wouldn’t have to spend any more time at the pet lodge and away from Sprocket and the lake house.
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