Versions of Her

by Andrea Lochen

  “It’s supposed to be in the eighties and nineties all week,” Melanie said into the phone. She had caught Kelsey on her lunch break. “When are you coming out for a swim?” She stopped herself just in time from adding, It might be our last chance, you know.

  “Is Everett finished with the basement?” Kelsey asked, surprising Melanie. Since Melanie had revealed the information about their mom’s message and how she’d seen her pregnant, Melanie had thought that Kelsey would be leaping at the chance to return to the lake house and the world behind the tapestry. But apparently Everett was a strong enough deterrent to make her think twice.

  “Today’s his last day,” Melanie said. The afternoon sun was hot on her neck. “Just installing the drainage pipe outdoors and testing the sump pump.”

  A door banged shut—the Fletchers’ house. She ducked out of sight behind a lilac bush. She really wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with rude Nicholas or even his kind wife, Jess, with her beautiful, enviable children.

  “I have off tomorrow and Wednesday,” Kelsey said. “Sprocket and I could come for an overnight.”

  “That would be great,” Melanie said. “See you then.” From her vantage point behind the sweet-smelling lilacs, she could see the mother-in-law, Marie, walking down the porch steps, carrying something. It was long and black, like a photographer’s tripod.

  “Why are you whispering?” Kelsey asked.

  “I’m not whispering,” Melanie hissed. “Got to go.”

  Marie was loading the tripod into the truck bed. Her blond hair was up in a bun, and an orange scarf was tied around her head like a headband.

  “All right, weirdo. See you tomorrow. Probably sometime midmorning.”

  “Okay. Bye.” Melanie put the phone in her pocket, hoping Marie was going to drive away soon. It would be embarrassing to pop out at that point.

  The door slammed shut again. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come along?” someone called from the porch.

  “Heavens, no,” Marie replied, putting her hands on her hips with a smile. “All you do is mope around and ask me if I’m nearly finished.”

  “I do not,” the woman replied. “I love watching you paint.”

  Melanie couldn’t see who the speaker was from behind the lilacs.

  “You love the idea of watching me paint. You are bored stiff by the actual act,” Marie said. “What you really want to do this afternoon is go for a swim then take a nap in the hammock. And you have my blessing.”

  Melanie’s knees were starting to ache from her crouched position. She straightened her legs and bent at the waist instead. This is getting ridiculous. Maybe she should run around the back of the house and go through that door. If they spotted her, she could just pretend she had come back up from the lake. She was worried Everett was going to come outside looking for her and blow her cover. Oh, why did I go the antisocial route? She could have just waved at Marie and headed back inside to start making up the bed for Kelsey.

  “Would you bring me my tote, love? It’s right there by the door.”

  A woman with long silver hair, parted down the middle, descended the steps, lugging a heavy-looking canvas bag. Melanie’s breath caught in her throat. She ducked down even lower. The woman heaved the bag into the truck bed then came around to the driver’s side window. Melanie couldn’t hear what the two women were saying with their voices lowered, but she didn’t need to.

  It was Vinnie, older than Melanie had last seen her in real life—when Vinnie had been in her midforties—and definitely older than Melanie had last seen her in the time portal as a high schooler. She was probably fifty-nine, the same age Christine would have been, and was still slim and regal looking in her emerald caftan.

  Lavinia Birdwell Fletcher, in the flesh, living right next door to Melanie—not Nicholas and Jess’s landlord but Marie’s partner.

  THEIR LAST SUMMER AT the lake house, when Melanie was fourteen and Kelsey was twelve, they had spent on the dock. Previous summers, they had rowed across the lake with their dad, tossed a Frisbee with the Fletcher kids, played board games, or read on the wraparound porch with their mom. But that summer had been the summer of the dock. Spread out on two striped towels, sometimes listening to their Discmans, sometimes doing their summer reading for ninth and seventh grades—To Kill a Mockingbird and The Secret Garden, respectively—they rarely moved except to dive into the lake to cool off or reapply sunscreen. “Teenagers,” their dad said, shaking his head every time he asked them if they wanted to pick raspberries or go for a pontoon boat ride. Their mom would bring out fresh lemonade and call them in for lunch. By the end of the summer, both Melanie and Kelsey had been the color of warm gingerbread.

  Melanie blamed that summer for the sprinkling of light-brown spots on her shoulders and the one on her temple that she could mostly hide with her hair. Now she wore SPF 50 and a sunhat that made her feel like Audrey Hepburn. She slathered some more sunscreen on her legs and kicked off her sandals.

  “Are you going to come in or what?” Kelsey called from the water.

  “In a minute.” She positioned the cooler closer to the bench so that Sprocket’s water dish was in the shade and he had somewhere to lie if he got too hot.

  “I wish we had some Vertical Horizon. I always associate that CD with the lake because I must have listened to it a million times here!” Kelsey floated on her back, her arms undulating, her hair spread out on the water and even more mermaid-like than usual.

  “I think I have some of their songs on my phone. I could go get the outdoor speaker.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. Just get in here already!”

  Melanie sat at the dock’s edge, submerging her feet and calves. She had already shared with Kelsey what she had seen and overheard in the Fletchers’ yard the day before, but Kelsey was adamant that she didn’t want to see Lavinia, much less talk to her. “Good. Let her be some other woman’s problem,” was what she had said when Melanie told her she thought Vinnie and Marie were a couple. Though Kelsey had zero interest in talking with the living, breathing link to their mom’s past right next door, she was all about replying to their mom’s note as soon as possible and claimed to have a draft underway. The thought of what Kelsey’s draft contained made Melanie feel slightly queasy, so she was hoping to put her sister off for as long as possible. She wanted to keep things light and fun between them and not bring up the sale of the house, the time portal, and what they would be losing.

  “So I want to hear about this date with your coworker,” Melanie said. “Josh.” She remembered him from her visit to Green Valley Pet Lodge—tall and polite, with hipster glasses and eyes only for Kelsey. She wholeheartedly approved of him if only for the fact that he was breaking Kelsey’s “type” and he had shaken her hand when they met. She liked old-school manners—firm handshakes and holding doors open for strangers.

  “I already told you—we ate pizza at Tony’s and walked to a nearby park.”

  Melanie took off her wide-brimmed hat and lowered herself into the lake. It felt like a warm, wet embrace. “What did you guys talk about?”

  Kelsey paddled away from her. “Oh, you know, work stuff. And... um... books.” She clearly was hiding something. Kelsey was a miserable liar.

  “Do you think you guys will go out again?” Melanie asked.

  Kelsey was swimming for the wooden raft, the place where Jilly had almost died. Melanie swam after her.

  “Maybe,” Kelsey called over her shoulder. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?” Melanie pressed.

  Kelsey reached for the metal ladder and pulled herself toward the raft. “He’s my coworker and my friend. I just don’t want to screw anything up.”

  They clambered onto the raft, and Melanie could practically feel the ghost of slippery elbows jostling her ribs, the rocking under her feet as other children jumped up and down. Around them, the lake was silently rising and falling.

  “I totally get it,” she said. “There are higher stakes with him. But
at the risk of sounding cliché, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “It’s not just that,” Kelsey said. She splashed some water onto the sunbaked wood and sat down. “I also don’t know if I feel that way about him. I mean, we’ve been working together for two years. Shouldn’t I have felt a pull toward him before now? And it was almost by accident that we even went on a date. I texted him that I owed him pizza, and he misinterpreted it as us going to the restaurant together.”

  He didn’t misinterpret it, Melanie thought. “I think you’re talking about love at first sight, which doesn’t happen for most people. More often than not, that spark—that click that happens when you just know someone is right for you—doesn’t come right away.” She sat down cross-legged next to Kelsey. “You know how Ben and I met, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kelsey said dismissively. “You were both panelists at a science career day at some high school. And he and the med student were acting all superior to you and the chemistry major because you would be ‘working in a lab all day, pipetting things,’ while he and the med student would be out there helping sick people. When he asked you for your number at the end of the day, you told him he could stick his pipette where the sun don’t shine.”

  Melanie laughed. “Not exactly.” Although she liked Kelsey’s more colorful version. “I think I just said, ‘No, I’d rather not.’ But then we crossed paths a month later at a graduation party for a mutual friend. I hardly recognized him because he had a full beard then—it was awful, like he was some mountain man. And I told my friend to save me from the most arrogant guy on the planet, but she abandoned me because they were cutting the cake. I really only gave him my number that time to get him to leave me alone. And he called about five times before we finally set up a date. Thank God, he’d shaved by then, and I started to understand his sense of humor and that he didn’t really think pharmacists were better than anybody else. But the point is that I didn’t feel that click right away. It took months. And it caught me off guard when it finally happened because Ben wasn’t the type of person I had ever pictured myself marrying. He’s so disorganized and spontaneous and athletic, so different from me in so many ways. But somehow he was just what I needed.”

  Talking about Ben made her miss him even more than usual. She yearned for those silly, carefree first years of dating and the beginning of their marriage when being just the two of them had been enough.

  “I used to be scared I would never find that with anyone. That ‘click.’” Kelsey put air quotes around it. “But I’m not so sure I even believe in it anymore. Or if I do, it’s something you could find with multiple people, not just one. And definitely not something permanent. Maybe only five or ten years max until the drudgery sets in.”

  Melanie stood up. The raft felt hot under her bare feet, and the sun beat down on her poor shoulders. “You’re not being serious, are you? Is this about Mom and Dad?”

  “No. Yes. Maybe a little.”

  On the dock, Melanie’s cell phone started ringing. Maybe it was Ben. Sometimes she swore he had a sixth sense.

  “Mom and Dad were happily married for twenty-nine years. Do you not remember how sweet they could be together? Dad would rub her shoulders and leave those little Shakespearean sonnet Post-it notes all over, and Mom would bake him Black Forest cake and knit those slipper socks that he loved. And every anniversary, they would put Rod Stewart on the stereo and dance around the kitchen.”

  “Okay, so maybe at some point in time, they had ‘the click.’ But now Dad is happily remarried to Laila, and as it turns out, Mom was probably seeing the neighbor lady on the side.”

  They both turned to stare at the Fletchers’ bungalow, which was mostly hidden by the trees. It looked squat and secretive next to the white Victorian, all red-shingled roof and no façade. For all they knew, Lavinia could be watching them from its dormers at that very moment.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Dad chose to remarry because he was lonely, and I’m pretty sure Mom would have given him her blessing. He was so helpless without a wife to take care of him.” She paused, choosing her next words carefully. “And we don’t know for sure that Mom was unfaithful to Dad. And either way, all the complexities of Mom and Dad’s marriage shouldn’t dictate what you believe in or how you choose to live your life, Kels. Falling in love with one person, staying faithful, those are still worthy goals—”

  The high-pitched ringing of her phone interrupted her again.

  “Maybe you should get that,” Kelsey said. “It might be important.”

  As Melanie stood immobile, contemplating all the gut-wrenching scenarios that would require someone trying to reach her in back-to-back phone calls—Ben in an accident or her dad in the hospital—Kelsey positioned her toes on the raft’s edge, bent forward, threw her arms up into a perfect point overhead, and dove in. Something about seeing her sister’s graceful entry into the water and reemergence unstuck Melanie. She dove in, too, sloppily, like the amateur she was, and swam after her sister for the dock.

  Kelsey toweled her hands off before picking up the phone. “Whoever it was left a voicemail,” she said and squinted at the screen. “Oh. Charlene Hallbeck.”

  “Thanks,” Melanie said, snatching the phone away. In her overpowering sense of relief—it wasn’t Ben or his parents, thank God, or Laila or her dad calling—she felt whiplashed and a tad peeved with her sister, peeved at the drama and sense of unnecessary urgency she had instilled. “I’ll just go call her back by the side of the house, okay? It’s where we get the best reception.”

  “Oookaaay,” Kelsey said, drawing the two syllables out so that she sounded skeptical. “But maybe before you do that, we could talk about something.”

  The phone gave a frantic little buzz in Melanie’s hand. It was a text from Charlene. Please call me at your earliest convenience. Good news! “Of course we can keep talking about this, Kels. But just give me five minutes to talk to Charlene first, okay? Before she decides I’ve gone missing and sends out a S.W.A.T. team to break down the door.”

  “It’s not about this. It’s about something else.” Kelsey’s cheeks were pink, and Melanie couldn’t tell if they were flushed from sunburn or nervous energy.

  “Our response to Mom’s note?” She sighed heavily. “Fine. But it needs to wait just a bit longer. I’ll be right back.” She cut Kelsey off before she could say anything else and jogged up the hill.

  What good news will Charlene have for us? An ad for the house in Midwest Living? A ton of phone calls to try to schedule showings? Melanie imagined the smug smile on the realtor’s face as she politely told buyers’ agents that they’d have to wait until Sunday’s open house.

  “Hi, Charlene. It’s Melanie Kingstad-Keyes.” She paced the side of the house, not sure why she suddenly felt so scared.

  “Melanie! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! Did you get my message?”

  “I didn’t listen to it yet. I wanted to call you right back. It seemed urgent.”

  “Well, as you probably know, we have been getting lots of interest in your house—several requests from multiple buyers and agents trying to get a looksee before the open house. And until now, I’ve turned them all down.” She paused for so long that Melanie thought the call had been dropped.

  “Hello?”

  “Until now,” Charlene repeated. “A very wealthy buyer has expressed interest. He’s a client of an agent I’ve worked with many times before. He paid cash for his first lake house, and they closed in less than thirty days.”

  She paused again, and that time, Melanie realized she was waiting for her to say something. “Okay?” she said.

  “He and his wife want to see the house tonight,” Charlene continued. “They’re flexible about the time. Anytime between four and eight. Whatever works best for you.”

  Melanie turned to look at the lake, which was the color of mulberry wine and sparkling in the sunlight. Kelsey was throwing a tennis ball for Sprocket off the dock. “But I thought you
said no exceptions. No showings before the open house.”

  “This is the only exception we will make. And even if they put an offer in, which I suspect they might, we’ll add in a clause that we need until at least Monday to accept or reject their offer instead of the typical twenty-four-hour period. We won’t want to limit ourselves until we know the outcome of the open house. Sound good?”

  Melanie heard a vehicle approaching, probably one of the neighbors—hopefully not Vinnie—returning home. But the tires crunched up her gravel driveway, not the neighbors’. She peeked around the side of the house to see a battered van with Flood Repair Pros in bold typeface on the side. Everett. What the heck is he doing here? He’d finished the job the previous afternoon, and she’d paid him in full.

  “Okay,” she said. “We can do tonight. Six o’clock.”

  She tried to rush Charlene off the phone so she could intercept Everett—there was no way she wanted him bumping into her sister in her little red bikini—but the realtor wasn’t having it. Charlene wanted to explain that she’d be sending someone right over to install the lockbox on their front door, then she wanted to make sure Melanie would have the house in shipshape condition. Melanie felt insulted by the implication that the house would be anything less than perfect in her hands.

  But by the time she had disconnected the phone, Everett was stooped down, petting Sprocket, and Kelsey was making her way up from the lake. Her body language was closed off and tense as she hugged a towel around herself.

  Give him a piece of your mind, Melanie encouraged her sister. Send him packing. But instead, Kelsey uncrossed her arms, letting them fall to her sides, and the pair kept talking.

  Annoyed, Melanie decided not to return to the backyard. Let Kelsey deal with Everett on her own, then. Melanie had other more important things to do, like scrubbing away any residual toothpaste and soap scum out of the upstairs bathroom sinks. And the master bedroom was probably a catastrophe. Whenever Kelsey stayed over, she draped her clothes, both clean and dirty, over every surface. Since Sprocket was in total shedding mode, Melanie would also have to vacuum and sweep one more time. She had no idea where she, Kelsey, and Sprocket would go during the showing. More importantly, she had no idea how she was going to tell her sister that a very interested, very wealthy buyer was all lined up to see the place in only a few hours.