“That’s not true,” Melanie said automatically, but her sister’s words seemed to embed themselves in her skin like fishing hooks. “I have loved seeing Mom. Yes, it’s been hard witnessing some of those moments and learning things about her that caught me off guard. But we’ve gone in there enough. I don’t think we should keep this up indefinitely. Even Mom has expressed her fears about how the portal might corrupt us. And I’m still not convinced it’s one hundred percent safe.”
“Believe me, I get that this is well outside your comfort zone. It’s outside of mine too. But I’m done with easy and safe. I want the real Mom.” Kelsey threw her arms up in the air. “And I don’t want to sell this house.” She laced her fingers behind her head, her elbows pointed out aggressively, and stared at Melanie, ready for a standoff.
“I kind of gathered that.” Melanie slid slowly down the wall. Dammit, Kelsey. Where was your loud, assertive opinion one month ago? “So what do you want to do?” she asked tiredly. “You want to move out here and live here year-round? Spend your summers here? What?”
“No.” Kelsey unlaced her fingers and let her arms fall to her sides. “I’d like to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast.”
Melanie couldn’t have been more surprised if Kelsey had announced she was pregnant. Every cell in her body immediately recoiled against the idea of a B and B. Perfect strangers coming and going in the house that my family has inhabited for a century? Lounging in the living room with their shoes on and showering in the bathrooms, their unfamiliar hair getting caught in the drains? The thought made her slightly queasy. Dummy, she admonished herself. Isn’t that exactly what you’re agreeing to, anyway, by selling the house? Isn’t that exactly what you allowed the Holloways to do for the past fifteen years? “A bed-and-breakfast?” she repeated, her face as neutral as she could make it. Melanie had told Kelsey she would hear her out, and she was going to even if it nearly killed her.
“Yeah.” Kelsey wouldn’t look at her. “I’ve already done some preliminary research. Since Lake Indigo is unincorporated, they’re a part of Fairfield Township, and their zoning laws consider homestays and small bed-and-breakfasts, like this one would be, to be a residential business, so it would be allowed. I could use the rest of my inheritance as the start-up cash I would need for any renovations, new linens, advertising costs, and whatnot. And Josh’s oldest brother, John, is an accountant. Josh said he’d be happy to help me set up the lodging and sales taxes account and federal and state tax ID. There’s a lot more to consider, I know, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten at this point.”
Incredulous, Melanie stared at her little sister. Kelsey was speaking a foreign language—residential businesses, start-up cash, and tax IDs. Flighty Kelsey—the girl who still had their dad do her taxes, the girl who notoriously shrank every nice article of clothing she had ever owned because she forgot to read the label before tossing it in the wash—had done all of that. Melanie would have been downright impressed by Kelsey’s out-of-the-blue gumption had she not felt so profoundly hurt. While she’d been roller-painting the walls and strategizing with their realtor, Kelsey had been looking up zoning ordinances behind her back. And it was clear that Josh knew. She wondered if Ben had too. His not-so-subtle comments about making sure she was on the same page as Kelsey made her suspect as much. She was the only one left out in the cold.
She twisted her hands into the fabric of her skirt. “Oh, well, that’s good that you did preliminary research since, you know, you kept this a huge secret from me, and the house is practically sold, and we have an agent who’s been busting her butt for us and really looking forward to her five-figure commission. Do you have any idea what kind of assholes we’re going to look like if we back out now?” She pulled her skirt taut over her lap. “I’ll give you a hint. Big ones.”
“I know,” Kelsey said, and she sounded almost tearful. She sank down onto the floor, too, but across the room from Melanie, near the tapestry. “I should have said something sooner. I tried to. But you have to admit that you didn’t really leave me any openings. Any time I got up the nerve to talk to you about it, Charlene would call or something else would happen to push us that much closer to the house sale. And anyway, I haven’t had the idea for very long, and it seemed so intimidating at first, like something totally out of my league. But the more I’ve looked into it and thought about it, the more I think that this is exactly what I need. Exactly what I should be doing with my life.” She raised her eyes hopefully. “You know me. I love talking to people, I love cooking and baking, and I love this house.”
Melanie didn’t know what was wrong with her, but the more vulnerable her sister made herself, the more she wanted to shut Kelsey down. “Sure, but you don’t love doing laundry or scrubbing toilets or dusting. You hate anything involving finances or computers, and you can’t show up anywhere on time to save your life. You can’t exactly keep your guests waiting around all the time. There’s no way you could make this work on your own.” She felt mean and hollow as soon as the words left her mouth.
“I thought you might say something like that.” Kelsey gave her a pained smile, her eyes glistening. “But just because I’m not as anal-retentive as you doesn’t mean I’m not a smart, capable person. Just because I’m not as rigid and as sterile—” She stopped talking and covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry. You know that’s not what I meant.”
Melanie shook her head, suppressing tears of her own. “It’s fine. It’s true, isn’t it? Everything you’ve said about me is true.” She leaned her head back against the wall, picturing her home office in Ohio, the oak bookcase with the biology textbooks, the binders with hard copies of all her lesson plans, and the empty desk and chair just waiting for her to sit down and update her curriculum and syllabus for the fall semester. She would retreat there and let Kelsey do whatever she wanted with the house. It would be another failure, another defeat that she would have to chalk up, but maybe something good would come out of it for Kelsey. Melanie needed to go somewhere she was needed and wanted, somewhere she could make herself useful, and clearly that wasn’t here anymore.
“It’s hard to believe we share the same DNA sometimes,” Kelsey said. Her raw, fiery emotion seemed to have been tamped down to embers. She was absentmindedly tracing the bottom border of the tapestry. “You got Mom’s intelligence and Dad’s work ethic, and all I got was her out-of-control curls and his honker of a nose.”
Melanie knew that was Kelsey’s one great hang-up: her belief that their parents had been prouder of Melanie because of her academic achievements. But it wasn’t true, at least not in the way Kelsey supposed. While Melanie had made her parents proud in the traditional way of the driven first-born child, Kelsey had made them proud in the head over heels, totally smitten way of the youngest. They were charmed by her free spirit, amused by her diverse hobbies and interests, and downright delighted by the very surprise of her, the fact that they never quite knew what the wild, mermaid-haired girl would do or say next. Melanie was a relief, the daughter they could count on to do what they expected, but Kelsey—Kelsey was a joy.
But Melanie didn’t know how to say that to her sister, especially since she was still smarting from the shock of the bed-and-breakfast and the other insults.
“Stop fishing for compliments,” she snapped. “You know you’ve always been the prettier of the two of us, Dad’s nose and all. And you hogged up all the athletic genes too.”
As Melanie and Kelsey had grown up, everyone had always compared Kelsey to their mom because of their curly hair and blue eyes, but Melanie knew that she was Christine’s true double—in mannerisms, in interests, in obsessive-compulsive cleaning, and in holding back their feelings, too, and trying to project the perfect image of themselves while they were really crumbling inside. Is it any wonder, then, Melanie pondered, that I’m so disillusioned with her because I can see these character flaws in myself?
“I’m not fishing,” Kelsey said, furrowing her brow. “And I know you’re only try
ing to be nice, but I’m kind of tired of being called pretty. Why does no one ever say, ‘Wow, Kelsey, you’re so resourceful,’ or ‘Thanks, Kelsey. That was a clever idea.’?”
“Now you really are fishing.”
“I’m not. I’m just sick of you and everyone else thinking I’m this birdbrain who has no business hiring someone to do basement repairs, let alone trying to run my own bed-and-breakfast.”
“It’s hardly fair for you to say that I assumed that. I only learned about your plan five minutes ago.” Melanie rocked forward, gripping her knees. “And for the record, I don’t think you’re a birdbrain. I think this would be a huge undertaking for anyone, Mensa member or otherwise.”
Kelsey squinted at her. “I don’t believe you. I doubt you think this would be a huge undertaking for you. If you were the one starting your own B and B, everyone would probably be slapping you on the back and lining up to make reservations.”
Melanie squinted back at her, trying hard not to smile. “Well, it’s not like you asked me for my help.”
“I don’t want your help!” Kelsey pushed off the floor, her face reddening. “I know you have your own job, a job that you love, in a different state. I’m not asking you to leave it. I’m just asking you to give me a chance.”
Melanie stood up too. “We should head back downstairs. Ben and Josh are probably starting to wonder if we’re having a cage match up here.”
“You’re not answering me.”
“I’m still thinking about it. I have at least twenty-four hours. Twenty-three. Don’t rush me.” She turned to exit the room, but Kelsey didn’t follow her. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll be down soon.”
Melanie knew in an instant what her sister was up to. The pull of the tapestry was like a magnet. She felt it too. What year is it inside the time portal right now? Somewhere in the nineties? She and Kelsey were probably tubing with the Fletcher kids without a care in the world. How nice it would be to slip into that, far away from the headache of her adult concerns. Just what the heck am I going to do about this pending offer on the house? Either choice she made, she was doomed.
“Kelsey...”
“Will you just mind your own business? I’m just going to drop in for a minute.”
“It’s never just one minute. You know that. What do you want me to tell poor Josh?”
“That I’m crying in the bathroom after an out-and-out brawl with my overbearing sister, but I’ll be right down after I pull myself together.”
Melanie glared at her. Kelsey’s earlier inquiry about the blood thinners was still setting off a slowly pulsing alarm deep in Melanie’s brain. Kelsey had expressed to her several times over the last week that she thought she might only be able to get in one last correspondence with their mom. Just what is she planning to do, especially in a moment of desperation? Melanie felt like letting out a loud, guttural growl of frustration but settled for a deeply exasperated sigh instead.
For pity’s sake, it was a lot of work to be the big sister. Sometimes she wished she could just throw caution to the wind and be like Kelsey, not caring about the two men waiting for them downstairs or the berry parfait, which was undoubtedly melted by now, or Charlene, who was probably wondering why they hadn’t called her back already, or the state of her hormones and ovaries. Screw it, she thought. All of it.
“Fine,” she said. “One minute. Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kelsey could feel the energy coursing on the other side of the door even before they’d opened it. It reminded her of the crazy rattling that shook her tiny apartment whenever her washer was on the spin cycle. Maybe it was just her and her adrenaline. She was so revved up, it wouldn’t surprise her, but Melanie was looking antsy too.
The energy was soundless, but it felt like she was physically colliding with someone and had just had the wind knocked out of her. She had gone there looking for a sign from her mom, to see if she should give the bed-and-breakfast thing a shot or step aside and let Melanie have her way. Kelsey also wondered if she should try to warn her mom of her untimely death or leave fate to its cold mechanisms. She hoped her mom wouldn’t let her down, because she was severely conflicted. After taking a deep breath, she shoved open the door.
She and Melanie had scarcely tumbled out of the closet, letting the tapestry flap against the door, when a person rushed past them and hefted the tapestry back upward—their mom, in her mid- to late thirties, her hair tied back with a black ribbon.
Oh God, this is it. Mom is time traveling! Where is she going? She was turning the silver latch, and Kelsey lurched forward, ready to slip in behind her as soon as the door opened. But Melanie put her hand on her shoulder, slowing her down, yanking her backward, and Kelsey nearly fell. The door was open, and their mom was stepping inside sideways, shoulder first, so she wouldn’t have to pull it open far. Kelsey thrust her hand out, hoping to prevent the door from closing, but she was too far away. All she caught was the edge of the tapestry as it tauntingly slid back into place.
“What the hell?” she shouted at Melanie. She felt like throwing something at her and would have gladly, had anything been in reach.
“What did you think you were doing?” Melanie shouted back. “Jumping into a memory of a memory? What if you never found your way back out?”
“I wanted to know where Mom was going!”
Melanie laughed bitterly, shaking her head. “Come on. Honestly? Like you don’t know? The house is probably sending her back to her first kiss with Vinnie.”
“You don’t know that.” Kelsey gathered the tapestry in her arms and pushed it to the side. She hooked her finger around the crescent-moon latch.
“Stop that,” Melanie said. “You’ve got to give her a second to get where she’s going.”
“It’s not opening.”
“It’s probably because Mom’s still in there. Just wait a minute. Be patient.”
Kelsey counted to sixty in her head before attempting to twist the latch again. It wouldn’t budge. “Melanie, I’m not joking. I think it’s locked.”
Melanie pushed Kelsey out of the way. Miss Know-it-All. Her complexion turned ashen when she couldn’t open the door either. She blew out a heavy sigh. “I wonder if the time portal only allows one set of travelers at a time,” she said. “If it’s ‘occupied’ right now, so to speak, we have to wait our turn.”
“Meaning?” Kelsey prodded.
“That we can’t return to our time until Mom gets back to hers.”
“Oh crap. That could be hours.”
“Or even longer.” But for once, Melanie didn’t seem as flustered as Kelsey. She was calmly looking around the room. A yellow-and-red starburst quilt covered the bed. Teardrop prisms and a dragonfly suncatcher dangled in the window, and a Discman and a stack of CDs were on the desk. It was the way Kelsey most clearly remembered the room, the way it had been in their last summers at the lake house, so she guessed they were in their early adolescence.
“The Spice Girls, awesome. I’d forgotten about them,” Melanie said, reading the CD spines. She lay on her stomach on the bed, kicking her legs up behind her.
“Are you not bothered by this?” Kelsey asked. “We’re essentially trapped here for God knows how long. Ben and Josh will have no idea what happened to us.”
“Sure, I’m bothered. But it’s out of my control. It’s all out of my control.” She sounded like someone who had just attended a new age self-help seminar and memorized its mantra.
“Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?” Kelsey joked. She sat down on the bed next to Melanie, remembering how her sister had always kept her bedroom door closed from age thirteen on and how she would have to knock and wait for permission to enter. She would find Melanie on the bed in just that position, listening to music and reading a magazine. Melanie would seem so grown-up, so cool and untouchable, that Kelsey would swallow back her invitation to row to Dern’s together for a Popsicle and back out of the room.
> “I think these rooms are way too small for a bed-and-breakfast,” Melanie said. “Especially your dinky room.”
“I think so too. That’s why I was planning to knock down the wall between them to make one big room and the shared bathroom a private en suite.”
“Oh, you were, were you?” Melanie rolled over onto her side. “And what are you going to do about that?” She gestured to the tapestry with her foot.
“Leave it there for decoration. Buy a padlock for the door whenever a guest is staying in here.”
“You really have thought this out, haven’t you?” Melanie was scrutinizing her in such a way that Kelsey had to wonder if her sister was starting to come around.
“Yes,” Kelsey lied. She had no idea what knocking down a wall entailed or how much it cost, but people on HGTV seemed to do it all the time, so it couldn’t be that complicated. And she’d never considered locking the time portal before until Melanie had just asked about it. In fact, Kelsey had had the romantic notion that she could stay in this room with the tapestry, but now she realized that made no sense, that it would have to be one of the guest suites, and she would have to live downstairs in the fourth bedroom. She was doing all of it on the fly, but if Melanie wanted to believe she had it more planned out than she actually did, so much the better.
Melanie sat up. “Should we go downstairs and see what we’re up to?”
Her sister had surprised her again. “You don’t want to stay up here and wait for Mom to get back?” Kelsey asked, a nervous little quiver running through her. What if Melanie’s theory is wrong? Maybe the rush of energy Kelsey had felt was a sign that it was on its last leg, like a car with a grinding transmission. What if the time portal was just flat-out broken?
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