The Dead of Summer, page 4
“Caught yourself a cute one, didn’t ya, Orlando?”
“You guys are gonna scare him off,” I whine, but it’s clear Sam is having the time of his life getting a backstage pass to the most dysfunctional family on Anchor’s Mercy. I’m amazed at his durability but aware we’ve got to let him go home at some point. I cut into the jabber. “Rain’s coming. Willy, can I use the Jeep to run Sam the rest of the way to his aunt’s?”
Take it, I think. This is your chance to run! But Sam hesitates a moment too long, and the adults are on him again, screaming.
“Nonsense!”
“Come in, come in!”
“Ollie, don't be rude to our guest.”
“I’d actually love to see inside,” Sam says. “My aunt always said these old houses had a lot of character.”
Characters is more like it, I think, but I can’t deny it’s a little fun showing Sam around. Plus, the longer he’s here, the longer I have a human shield from all the questioning I know Willy and Aunt Maddie have been saving up. Questions about school this past year, and college applications, and auditions. Questions I absolutely do not want to answer.
The adults race ahead as Sam and I drag the suitcases up the back porch. He notices my silence and, before we go in, he offers an understanding glance.
“My family can be a lot, too. I get it.”
God, that feels nice to hear. I let out a long breath. “Yeah, you’re being a great sport about all this. I can drive you home at any time. Really, just say the word and we’ll sneak away from the circus. They won’t even notice.”
“Are you kidding me? Today has been like one long, private tour. I’m loving it.”
“Don’t you want to see the fun stuff? Like the beaches and the whales and the drag shows?”
“We’ve got all summer. How about we just start with your house?”
I’m not used to someone being so plainly interested in me. It’s exciting and scary and the timing could not be worse, but since when do I get what I want? I know I should say more—to somehow warn Sam off so he can go on exploring the dream of Anchor’s Mercy without the heaviness of my drama—but selfishly, I don’t want him to go.
The bravest thing I can do right now is let him in, and that’s exactly what I do. He pauses in the doorway, and our chests are just inches apart.
“Oh, and by the way, the piece you played on the boat? It was Tchaikovsky, obviously. Piano Concerto Number One.”
I’m holding my breath. He’s right.
“In B-flat minor.” He boops me on the nose. “Show-off. I like that,” he says, and then he whistles his way into Singing House.
Sam rushes inside, but I take a moment to just listen.
Singing House has many songs. There’s the lullaby roar of the ocean, and the glissando of gulls roosting in the upper gables. Footsteps in other rooms send a creaking waltz through the walls and ceiling. The air does something to conversations, too, peeling off the top notes and casting them like copper bells down the curved wooden staircase. My ears catch everything as I stand in the back hall, listening to my memory come back to life.
The adults are already upstairs, shaking the old walls with their laughter as they ricochet between the guest rooms. Sam is way ahead of me in the parlor. I hear him gasp; he’s found the piano.
“Holy shit.” Sam rounds the piano as I enter. It glows in the golden cup of the bay window, and the bench is askew like someone was playing it in a dream until they woke up and vanished. Sam is polite enough not to slide right in, but I suddenly can’t stop myself. I lift the keyboard cover and skim my fingers over the worn keys. Deep in the piano, the wires let out a thrum of recognition. I pluck out a C-sharp and wince.
“She is profoundly out of tune,” I say.
“You have perfect pitch?”
“Unfortunately.”
“How perfect?”
I consider the challenge in his voice. I could let him tap out notes and name them with my eyes closed, but where’s the fun in that? Naming pitches is a party trick. I should show off.
I lean over to crank open a nearby window. The room inhales the sweetness of storm clouds and rain. “Listen,” I tell him.
Sam somehow looks even cuter as he focuses. “What, the seagulls?”
We listen to the birds. My hand drifts over the keys until I’m sure, and then I grab the note. It’s a perfect match—almost. The piano is out of tune, and so is the bird, yet Sam is impressed. I push it a bit further, capturing the cadence of the cries as a repeating series of notes. A vamp. With my other hand I usher in the rolling bass of the thunder. When a bike whizzes by, I snatch the ding of its bell (a high F-sharp) and create a meandering melody with the birdsong. I repeat it all, cleaning it up as I go, coaxing it into coherence. The improvised piece is like a lot of my compositions: fragments smoothed together by an instinct I can’t really define. It’s like I’m playing along to music hovering just outside reality, flooding through my ears and out my fingertips like I’m not a person but a passage.
I let the piece fade away and open my eyes. Seeing the way Sam is looking at me, I snatch my hands back and feel my face warm.
“That was incredible,” Sam whispers.
“Like a fish to water!”
I jump so bad my knees knock the underside of the keys. Gracie is suddenly in the doorway, Willy and Aunt Maddie over her shoulders. She’s got tears in her eyes as she rushes to the piano.
“Oh, don’t stop, Ollie-baby! Play us something else. Sam, you’ve got to hear what our Ollie can do. He’s a genius.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” Sam says. His cool demeanor from the ferry has totally thawed. The way he looks at me is everything I would have wanted a few minutes ago, but now I just want to stop this moment from happening. This is one thing I don’t think I can smile my way through.
“Any requests?” Gracie asks the room on my behalf. Aunt Maddie’s got her phone out, filming again. I hold up my hand against the glare of the flash.
“Actually, I can’t,” I say quickly. “It’s totally out of tune.”
“This isn’t one of your fancy auditions,” Willy scoffs. “Just go for it, Ollie. Show-off.”
I want to, I don’t want to. It felt incredible to play again; it felt heartbreaking, too. The song still sings in my ears, ringing for release, but I shake my head. The adults whine like mainlander kids.
“Come on, Ollie!”
“Just one song!”
“Oh, Ollie-baby, you’re no fun anymore!”
I slam the keyboard cover shut as I stand up, and everyone goes quiet. Maddie puts her phone down. The moment lasts for a horrible eternity, refusing to break, until there’s a knock at the door and Bash’s mom, Mrs. Itani, rushes into the parlor with a casserole dish. She nearly throws down her dish when she sees Gracie, closing in for a hug. “Welcome! Welcome back!” she cries.
I’m next, but for me she puts on a playfully scolding voice. “Did you tell my Bashar you would be back today? I would have given him the weekend off! What is going on with you two? He says nothing, nothing, nothing, but something isn’t nothing!”
I relax just a little. He’s not with her. Thank god.
“I know how busy he is,” I say with a shrug.
She flaps her hands dismissively. “Talk to each other, Orlando. I’m begging you.”
“I’ll swing by the shop,” I assure her.
There’s another knock, and another unannounced guest with another casserole dish. Neighbors and friends swarm over Gracie and me, hugging and kissing us, welcoming us home, handing us ready-made dishes, babbling about all we’ve missed. In the jovial chaos, I find Sam’s hand and drag him upstairs to the window nook on the second-floor landing.
“Damn, how long were you guys on vacation?” Sam laughs over my shoulder as I spy on the street below, seeing if anyone else is heading for Singing House.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“I’m figuring that out.”
The blood in my veins is superheated, and it takes me a few breaths to steady my heart. For a moment I was sure Bash and Elisa would show up, but it sounds like they’re both working after all. I just dodged two bullets, but Anchor’s Mercy is too small to avoid them for long.
“So you’re shy or something?” Sam asks. He is so annoyingly observant.
“Or something.”
“I don’t see why.”
Sam drifts down the hall, taking interest in the many seashells framed in glass on the walls. The shells are placed to form intricate designs, called sailor’s valentines. There’s more cluttering the shelves, and even the lamps are scaled in iridescent oysters.
“Gracie is a seashell mom,” I explain, trying to change the subject. “All moms have an animal, right? That shows up on all their stuff? Like butterflies, or bees, or pigs. Gracie is a seashell mom.”
Sam nods. “My mom really loves horses. They’re everywhere in our country house.” He reaches for a hanging photo. At first I think he’s inspecting the shells glued to the frame, but no. He turns it toward me. “This is you, isn’t it?”
The photo is of three little kids holding up a guitar, so big and heavy compared to them that they appear pinned down by it. They’re laughing, though. I’m the one in the middle. And the other two …
“Let me guess. The long-lost Bash and Elisa?”
Sam is right, but by now he’s noticed the silence I’m unwilling to fill. All he adds is “They keep coming up. I bet they were important to you.” Then he joins me in the nook, looking out the window at the tops of the houses.
“This place is amazing, you know.”
“Singing House? Yeah, it’s one of a kind, for sure.”
“No, I mean this town. This whole island. I bet it was so fun growing up here.”
I’m starting to see all the beauty I left behind but never let myself miss. It’s not just the fun of downtown but the homes, glamorous in their seaside shabbiness, with their cedar shingles and flowers frothing from every sill. And it’s the families pushing strollers, and the sound of distant disco from a pool party, and the way even the air itself smells like honey, salt, and sunshine. Piano music echoes up the stairs, the adults singing the house back to life. It feels like a dream, because it is a dream, and that’s what makes it dangerous.
I turn my back on it. “It’s different when you live here.”
Sam bumps me with his shoulder. “Oh, come on. What’s so bad about being on vacation forever?”
* * *
I knew my mom was going to die when she sat me down one August evening last year and told me we were going on vacation, because we didn’t go on vacation. We lived on vacation. But something had gone wrong in paradise, and now it was time to run.
There were signs before that. Singing House was empty when it should have been full of guests. My mom had lost weight. At the beach, she refused to swim, and when her shawl slipped from her shoulders, her skin was splattered with scarlet bruises. I knew she was going to her doctors on the island’s lone health clinic, and I knew she was sent to the mainland for some tests, but this was the first time she acknowledged to me what was happening.
Just a little vacation. She said it with so much shame, like a confession. Like she had failed me. And then she asked me not to tell anyone. I smiled for her and played along. Why would I tell anyone? It’s just vacation. She left me to pack a bag. I fell asleep to the sound of her downstairs in the kitchen, singing to herself as she scrubbed her latest basket of seashells, which was a sign, too. My mom mostly collected shells when she needed a pick-me-up, and that summer they began to appear everywhere in our house, like they could fill the new encroaching emptiness.
Vacation brought us to a tiny rental apartment on the mainland, near a hospital in Portland, Maine. I made Gracie take me to her appointments. At first the doctors were optimistic, and it really did look like we would go home soon. When Bash and Elisa called, I told them with confidence vacation would be over soon.
Vacation went on for a month. Then another month.
Gracie got me enrolled in school. I was the first kid to ever go to vacation-school, we joked. We joked a lot, about all of it, and even though vacation on the mainland was not fun, I acted like it was the most fun ever. When things got harder, they had to become funner. Helping my mom to bed was a raucous good time. Shaving our heads ahead of chemo was a gas! Going to the grocery store was the adventure of a lifetime, even if I would have to come back later, alone, to get what we needed because my mom was too weak to stay standing for long.
There were times when all Gracie could do was sit in a wheelchair while I pushed her around. We went to the big home goods store, and we entertained each other by reading the cheesy decor.
LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE.
She looked at that one a long time and then told me, It really is that simple. We bought it. I thought of it as a souvenir.
When it got bad and my mom wouldn’t let me help her anymore, Willy visited us on vacation. One time I overheard them talking in my mom’s bedroom, and she was whispering, Will, I’m ruining his life. Willy surprised me with an offer after that. What if we switched, and I went home to Anchor’s Mercy for a while? Just a few days, to see Bash and Elisa? Wouldn’t I like that?
I wouldn’t. It was better keeping certain things unsaid. I couldn’t afford to waver in the lie that all this was temporary.
I made Willy promise not to say anything to Bash and Elisa, because I would handle it. Soon. Another month passed. Then another. My mom turned as pale as seafoam, and just as translucent under the fluorescent lights of the ICU. I still said nothing to my friends. I kept my smile bright and held my mom’s hand until my muscles turned to marble, and I told her about all the stuff we would do together, at home, once vacation finally ended.
* * *
“I wasn’t on vacation,” I tell Sam.
“I know,” he says, and he doesn’t ask me to explain.
I think, maybe, I love him.
As night comes, so does the storm.
Sam and I hide in the upper den, where all the junk from my childhood seems to fascinate him. He asks about every old board game and toy, and for almost an hour we sit captivated by the aquarium set into the bookshelf. Predictably, Sam loves the tiny treasure chest that belches a constant stream of bubbles. I explain all the fish to him, and the coral and anemones, and the snails that wipe away the algae like tiny bejeweled thumbs. I make a mental note to thank Aunt Maddie for not killing it all while I was gone.
Downstairs the adults laugh, and laugh, and laugh.
Eventually, hunger wins out, and we sneak down the back stairs to the kitchen to load up plates of pastry-enfolded meat pies (thank you, Mrs. Itani), cold macaroni and cheese, and cinnamon cookies still warm from someone’s oven. We eat fast, then lie on the carpet in the ultramarine glow of the aquarium and watch the lightning flicker against the rain-spattered windows. Sam gets quiet. I’m waiting for him to finally admit he’s bored, but instead he props himself up on his elbows, looks at me, and asks, “So it’s just you and your mom, huh?”
I hate this question. The word just makes it sound like Gracie and I are incomplete, some kind of minimum family, when really it’s the opposite. We are more than enough for each other. Together, our world is so big that people come from all over just to rent a room in our lives.
Sam isn’t pitying me, though. He’s curious.
“I never knew my dad, if that’s what you’re asking. Since forever, it’s been me and Gracie,” I say. “But it’s also been Aunt Maddie, and Willy, and the drag queens, and everyone you met downstairs, and a million guests who have known me since I was a baby. Growing up here was like being raised by an entire island. Everyone pitches in.”
“It sounds nice.” Sam sighs. “Really nice, actually.”
I hear the blue note of longing in Sam’s voice just in time to stop myself from asking about his own family. The way he looks at all the photos on the walls of Singing House, with such wide-eyed envy, I get the feeling he spends a lot of time alone.
Sam rolls onto his back. “Are you curious?” he asks.
A bold question. Of course I’m curious about my dad. A fisherman, maybe? A musician passing through town? I’ve had a million fantasies about fathers washing in and out of our life, but the dreams leave behind a sticky guilt. It’s no wonder that now, beneath Sam’s innocent probing, I reach for Gracie’s well-worn story of my origin.
“My mom always said that her first and most formidable love affair was with the sea, and from that watery affair swept all sorts of treasures. The greatest of all being …”
“You?”
“So the legend goes.”
Even in the dark, I can see Sam grin at the cheesiness. “Why is everything so magical here?”
“It’s sickening. I know.”
Perfectly timed, the lightning dances through the clouds outside, and a soft rumble squeezes Sam and me closer on the rug. Downstairs, someone is on the piano. Willy, I think, with “La vie en rose.” Sam’s pinkie reaches through the shag of the rug, toward mine. I’m amazed to feel myself reaching back.
“Wait!” Sam jumps to his feet.
Oh no. Did I misread him? Did I mess it up?
“I owe your mom a song!”
Oh. I scamper after him down the hall, saying, “You really don’t have to! Honest. She says that to everyone.”
“Nonsense! I just realized what I want to play. It was my recital piece last year!”
“Really, I can drive you home whenever. The storm is just rain right now.”
I almost walk into his back as we hit the stairs. He spins around, a step below me, so we’re the same height.
“I like it here,” he says. “I like you, too.”
Then he dives ahead. My heart either isn’t beating or it’s fluttering so fast it’s gone hummingbird-invisible. This boy just left me stock- still and reeling. Below, the adults buzz as Gracie introduces Sam, and then comes a reverent silence as they await his song.
