“Well, when you’re done with that,” I said, as she was now starting to bend backward at an alarming angle, “can you call Mom?” Without waiting for her response—especially since I had a feeling it was going to be something like Why don’t you do it?—I selected the key from the key ring, turned it in the lock, and stepped inside the house for the first time in five years.
As I looked around, I let out a breath. I had been worried, after summers of renters, that the house would have changed drastically. That the furniture would be moved around, that things would be added, or there would just be the sense—hard to define but palpable—that someone had been in your space. The Three Bears had known it well, and so had I, the year I came back from oceanography camp and could tell immediately that my mother had put some guests in my room when I’d been gone. But as I took everything in, I didn’t get that feeling. It was the summer house, just as I’d remembered it, like it had been waiting for me, this whole time, to finally come back.
The downstairs was open-plan, so I could see all the rooms that weren’t bedrooms or bathrooms. The ceiling was high, stretching up to the top of the peaked roof, letting in swaths of sun onto the threadbare throw rugs that covered the wood floors. There was the scratched wooden dining table we never ate on, which always just became the place to dump towels and mail. The kitchen—tiny compared to our large state-of-the-art one in Connecticut—was to my right. The door off the back of it led to our screened-in porch. It looked out on the lake and was where we ate all our meals, except in rare cases of torrential rain. And off the porch was the walkway down to our dock and Lake Phoenix itself, and through the kitchen windows, I could see the glint of late-afternoon sunlight hitting the water.
Past the kitchen was a sitting area with two couches that faced the stone fireplace, the place where my parents had always ended up after dinner, reading and doing work. Beyond that was the family room, with a worn corduroy sofa, where Warren and Gelsey and I usually found ourselves at night. One section of the built-in bookcases was filled with board games and jigsaw puzzles, and we usually had a game or puzzle going throughout the summer, though Risk had been put on the highest shelf, out of easy reach, after the summer when we all had become obsessed, forming secret alliances and basically ceasing to go outside as we circled the board.
Our bedrooms were all off one hallway—my parents slept in the master suite upstairs—which meant that Warren, Gelsey, and I would all have to share the one downstairs bathroom, something I was not looking forward to experiencing again, since I’d gotten used to having my own bathroom in Connecticut. I headed down the hall to my bedroom, peering in at the bathroom as I went. It was smaller than I remembered it being. Much too small, in fact, for the three of us to share without killing one another.
I reached my room, with the ancient TAYLOR’S PLACE sign on it that I’d totally forgotten about, and pushed open the door, bracing myself to confront the room I’d last seen five years ago, and all its attendant memories.
But when I stepped inside, I wasn’t confronted by anything except a pleasant, somewhat generic room. My bed was still the same, with its old brass frame and red-and-white patterned quilt, the trundle bed tucked beneath it. The wooden dresser and wood-framed mirror were the same, along with the old chest at the foot of the bed that had always held extra blankets for the cold nights you got in the mountains, even in the summer. But there was nothing in the room that was me any longer. The embarrassing posters of the teen actor I’d been obsessed with back then (he’d since had several well-publicized stints in rehab) had been removed from above my bed. My swim team ribbons (mostly third place) were gone, along with the collection of lip glosses that I’d been curating for several years. Which was probably a good thing, I tried to tell myself, as they all surely would have gone bad by now. But still. I dropped my purse and sat down on my bed, looking from the empty closet to the bare dresser, searching for some evidence of the fact that I had lived here for twelve summers, but not seeing any.
“Gelsey, what are you doing?”
The sound of my brother’s voice was enough to pull me out of these thoughts and make me go investigate what was happening. I walked down the hallway and saw my sister chucking stuffed animals out of her room and into the hall. I dodged an airborne elephant and stood next to Warren, who was eyeing with alarm the small pile of them that was accumulating in front of his door. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“They turned my room into a baby’s room,” Gelsey said, her voice heavy with scorn as she flung another animal—this time a purple horse that I vaguely recognized—out the door. Sure enough, her room had been redecorated. There was now a crib in the corner, and a changing table, and her twin bed had been piled high with the offending stuffed animals.
“The renters probably had a baby,” I said, leaning to the side to avoid being beaned by a fuzzy yellow duck. “Why don’t you just wait until Mom gets here?”
Gelsey rolled her eyes, a language she’d become fluent in this year. She could express a wide variety of emotion with every eye roll, maybe because she practiced constantly. And right now, she was indicating how behind-the-times I was. “Mom’s not going to be here for another hour,” she said. She looked down at the animal in her hands, a small kangaroo, and turned it over a few times. “I just talked to her. She and Daddy had to go to Stroudsburg to meet with his new oncologist.” She pronounced the last word carefully, the way we all did. It was a word I hadn’t been aware of a few weeks ago. This was when I’d thought my father was just having minor, easily fixed back pains. At that point, I wasn’t even entirely sure what the pancreas was, and I definitely didn’t know pancreatic cancer was almost always fatal, or that “stage four” were words you never wanted to hear.
My father’s doctors in Connecticut had given him permission to spend the summer in Lake Phoenix under the condition that he see an oncologist twice a month to check his progress, and when the time came, that he bring in nursing care if he didn’t want to go into hospice. The cancer had been found late enough that there apparently wasn’t anything that could be done. I hadn’t been able to get my head around it at first. In all the medical dramas I’d ever seen, there was always some solution, some last-minute, miraculously undiscovered remedy. Nobody ever just gave up on a patient. But it seemed like in real life, they did.
I met Gelsey’s eye for a moment before looking down at the floor and the jumbled pile of toys that had landed there. None of us said anything about the hospital, and what that meant, but I wasn’t expecting us to. We hadn’t talked about what was happening with our dad. We tended to avoid discussing emotional things in our family, and sometimes hanging around with my friends, and seeing the way they interacted with their families—hugging, talking about their feelings—I would feel not so much envious as uncomfortable.
And the three of us had never been close. It probably didn’t help that we were so different. Warren had been brilliant from preschool, and it had come as a surprise to no one that he’d been the class valedictorian. My five-year age gap with Gelsey—not to mention the fact that she was capable of being the world’s biggest brat—meant we didn’t have one of those superclose sister relationships. Gelsey also spent as much time as possible dancing, which I had no interest in. And it wasn’t like Warren and Gelsey were close with each other either. We had just never been a unit. I might have once wished things were different, especially when I was younger and had just read the Narnia series, or The Boxcar Children, where the brothers and sisters are all best friends and look out for one another. But I’d long since accepted that this wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t necessarily bad—just the way things were, and something that wasn’t going to change.