Lily Dale: Awakening (3 page)

Just the rest of the summer?

Oh.

Just the rest of the summer.

Okay, but still . . .

“We’re going to California in August,” she reminds her father.

He’s about to start a two-semester sabbatical in the physics department at Shellborne College. At least . . . that
was
the plan.

Mom, a total workaholic, had even reluctantly arranged to take a few weeks of saved vacation so that she and Calla could spend the remainder of the summer out west with Dad before Calla began her senior year at Shoreside Day in Tampa. Of course, Mom was torn about going away for so long. She kept asking how her office was going to get along without her. Dad’s retort was the same every time: “Well, how am
I
supposed to get along without you?”

How bittersweet those words are now.

“Calla—” Her father breaks off, looking overwhelmed.

“You rented that place for us near the beach for the month of August,” Calla tells him. Then, seeing the look on his face, she adds in a small voice, “Didn’t you?”

“I did, yes . . . when you and your mom were going to come out with me. But without her . . . it’s expensive, Calla. Really expensive. More than we can afford . . . now.”

“Where are we going to stay, then?” She doesn’t dare allow herself to consider the larger question:
What’s going to happen when it’s time for me to go back to Tampa and start school?

“You and your dad need to talk,” Uncle Scott tells her.

“We just . . . we have a lot to figure out,” Dad says, more to Uncle Scott than to her. “It doesn’t have to be today, or even tomorrow.”

“There isn’t much time, Jeff. You have to make a decision.”

“No, I know. I just can’t think straight.”

Calla walks away, her heart pounding. So Dad doesn’t want her to go to California with him now? He’d rather send her off to be Aunt Susie’s summer slave? The cousins are brats, the house is a crumb-and-cat-fur-filled wreck, and where the heck would Calla “bunk,” as her uncle so charmingly put it, in his daughters’ tiny, toy-clogged room?

And what about September? What then?

Miserable, she crouches beside her mother’s grave as fat raindrops plop into the sandy soil heaped beside it. She reaches blindly for a handful and sprinkles it over the wet white coffin.

“Good-bye, Mommy,” she whispers.

At that moment, the loose clasp on the emerald bracelet releases.

Calla gasps, helplessly watching as it falls into the gaping hole, like it’s determined to go with its rightful owner.

She and her mother had a fight not long ago about Calla’s borrowing the coveted bracelet without asking. Mom said the clasp was loose and she was bound to lose it. Then Kevin broke up with her, and Mom, feeling sorry for her, gave her the bracelet.

“It’s yours to keep,” she said, hugging Calla. “I know it’s just jewelry. It won’t heal a broken heart, but it might make you feel better for a couple of minutes.”

It did.

Now, Calla searches for the bracelet in the shadowed depths of the grave.

“Come on, honey.” Her father is behind her, tugging her arm. “Get up. Let’s go.”

“But . . .”

“Calla, she isn’t in there. Not really. Don’t you remember what we talked about when we saw her at the funeral home?”

Yes. Of course she remembers.

She’ll never forget the macabre sight of her mother’s corpse in the open casket . . . or the startlingly cold, unyielding feel of her flesh beneath Calla’s lips when she kissed her good-bye one last time before they closed the lid.

“You have to let go now, honey,” her father says. “Come on.”

“I know, but . . . my bracelet.”

“What?” her father asks, and his voice is choked with grief, his face ravaged by it.

“Never mind,” Calla says softly, taking his hand as they walk through the falling rain toward the waiting limo.

TWO

“This is absolutely crazy,” Jeff Delaney mutters, pacing a short distance through the crowded gate area to check the Departures screen for the third time in as many minutes.

“Dad, planes are delayed all the time,” Calla reminds him, scrolling through the playlist on her iPod again as he plops restlessly beside her. “And it’s only by a half hour, which is actually not all
that
crazy. I’ve heard of people being stuck in airports for—”

“No, not the delay. I mean . . .
this
.” He waves his hand in her general direction.

“
I’m
crazy?”

“No,
I’m
crazy for sending you a thousand miles away for so long.”

“It’s only for a couple of weeks, really.” Three, to be exact. By Labor Day, Calla will join him out west as the new kid in some school she’s never even heard of.

A short time ago, that would have been a fate worse than . . .

No. No fate is worse than what she’s just been through. She knows that now.

“What was I thinking?” Dad shakes his head.

“You were thinking logically,” she assures him, tucking the iPod into her pocket. “You were thinking that I can’t come with you now because you’ll be too busy getting settled, and there’s nowhere for me to even stay with you.”

The beach house is history. He’ll sleep on a friend’s pullout couch in a cramped condo until he finds an affordable place to rent in a good school district starting in September. Public school—not private, like Shoreside. He seems much more worried about money now than he did before Mom died. Calla figures their finances are pretty dire without Mom’s salary or even a life insurance policy. She overheard Dad say that Mom didn’t have one. When Calla asked about money, he said they’ll be fine, that they’ll have more than enough. Somehow, she doubts that.

He needs a haircut,
Calla notices as she watches him rake a hand through his shaggy black hair. That was Mom’s department—along with his wardrobe. She had planned to go shopping to buy him some decent clothes for the sabbatical. She wanted him to get contact lenses, too. She thought the glasses made him look too “professorish,” as she said.

“I
am
a professor,” Dad protested, more than once . . . because she said it pretty frequently.

Mom is—
was
—big on appearances. That was why she talked Dad into moving, a few years back, from their bungalow in the historic district to a nice new home off Westshore. Dad said they couldn’t afford it. Mom said they could. She won that argument. She usually did.

Not that she had to have the most expensive designer clothes or extravagant jewelry, but she liked to be well put together, and she expected Calla and her father to follow suit.

Which was fine—at least, for Calla. Why argue with a mother who enjoyed taking you shopping for hours on end?

But Dad . . . well, he was the kind of man who would— and once did—absentmindedly walk out the front door wearing only boxer shorts.

He still
is
that kind of man, Calla reminds herself now.

Dad = present tense; Mom = past. You’d think that after a few weeks, she’d have her tenses straight.

Yeah, well, this isn’t an English test. It’s Calla’s life, sad as it is. A life that’s about to take yet another dramatic turn. At least this is one she instigated herself. With a little help from her grandmother. Which is where the “crazy” part comes in.

But her only alternatives to Lily Dale are Chicago—
no way
—or staying here in Florida with Lisa’s family—also
no way
. They offered, and Lisa did her best to talk Calla into it, but . . .

Well, Lisa’s parents are Kevin’s parents. Lisa’s house is Kevin’s house, and he’s still home for the summer. What if he decides to bring his new girlfriend home to meet his parents?

He does have one. He wouldn’t admit it when they broke up, and Lisa swears he hasn’t mentioned anybody, but Calla
knows
, the way she just
knows
she’s meant to go to Lily Dale.

It was Odelia’s idea. And when her grandmother first brought it up before she left Tampa after the funeral, Calla decided she really
is
a whack job.

Then Jeff, without even hesitating for a split second, adamantly said no way. At which point Calla found herself deciding it might not be such a bad idea after all.

She couldn’t help it. Dad, who used to be such a nonissue in her life, has been bugging her. Mom was the one who used to fill that role—and who was also the one she confided in, the one whose time and attention Calla craved. Probably because she was always so busy with work. Calla missed her when she was away at banking conferences—which was more and more often this past year—and part of the reason Dad had insisted she take some time off.

Calla feels guilty now admitting, even to herself, that as much as she missed her mother when she was gone, she also appreciated the break from the household tension. Her parents argued a lot lately, and so did Calla and her mother.

Calla might look like Mom, but she’s always acted more like her father. They’re both quiet and a little absentminded, both can get caught up in something—like reading a book or listening to music or surfing the Internet—only to realize they’ve wasted away an entire day. That sort of unproductive behavior drove Mom crazy, and it was the source of some frustrating, no-win arguments around their household.

Life would probably be a lot easier for Calla if she had her mother’s super-efficiency and organizational skills, her practicality, and above all, her supreme confidence. Calla sometimes has a hard time thinking of things to say to people.

Especially guys.

Guys who aren’t Kevin, anyway. Kevin she’s known since kindergarten, so she never thought of him as a “guy.” He was just Lisa’s brother . . . until the day he suddenly noticed her during sophomore year.

She saw it happen. She and Lisa were in the Wilsons’ pool, and Kevin came out of the house, jangling car keys, just as Calla climbed onto the diving board. He more or less stopped short, and she could feel his eyes on her in a way they had never been before.

He tossed aside the keys and hung around by the pool with Calla and Lisa instead—a first. And he offered to give Calla a ride home that night, courtesy of his newly obtained driver’s license. She could feel the vibe between them as they drove through the darkened streets of Tampa, not saying much, listening to Alicia Keys.

When he pulled up in front of her house, she thanked him and started to climb out of the car. He reached past her, pulled the door closed so that the interior light went off again, took her into his arms, and kissed her.

That was the beginning. After two great years, last spring was the end. But not the worst
end
that can happen to a person.

Oh, Mom. I can’t believe I’ll never see you again.

Never again will she look at her mother and feel as though she’s seeing herself a couple of decades in the future; never again will they stand back to back, laughing, as Calla’s father checks to see who is taller. It’s been a draw at five foot seven since Calla was a freshman.

I was supposed to grow taller than you. It was going to happen any day now. You said it yourself. You said you had one last growth spurt when you were my age
.

You never said you were going to die, dammit! How could you leave me?

“Are you okay?” Dad asks anxiously, and she looks up to see him watching her.

“I’m fine.” She flashes a bright, fake smile.

She
has
to be fine. She can’t go with him to California. She can’t stay at the Wilsons with Kevin home for a few more weeks. She
won’t
go to Chicago with Uncle Scott and Aunt Susie.

That leaves Odelia and Lily Dale. Case closed.

Look at the bright side.There probably aren’t a whole lot of rules in Odelia’s house.

That isn’t based on intuition, it’s based on common sense. Anybody who eats gummy worms for breakfast and cold hot dogs, straight from the package, for a midnight snack—both of which Odelia did while she was staying with them— probably isn’t a stickler for rules.

Mom had a lot of rules; rules Dad didn’t bother to enforce whenever she was away on business. He was just . . . well,
there
. She loved him, but she never paid much attention to him, and vice versa.

Now he’s all she has, and she’s all he has, and . . . well, he’s kind of driving her crazy. He’s grown much more strict since Mom died. He’s barely let Calla out of his sight, almost as if he thinks that if he can’t see her, something awful might happen to her, too.

She looks down at her plane ticket to Buffalo with a sudden stab of regret.

Less than an hour from now, she’ll be at thirty-five thousand feet, winging her way more than a thousand miles away from her dad. Not long after she gets on her plane, he’ll return to the airport with his luggage to get on his, which will take him to the West Coast.

The sudden ringing of her cell phone in her pocket is a welcome distraction. “Hello?”

“I miss you already.”

Lisa. Calla smiles wistfully. “I miss you already, too.”

“Then don’t go! Come here.”

“You know I can’t do that,” she says, casting a glance at her father, who appears to be lost in thought. “And you know why.”

“He’s going back to school in a few weeks. You can avoid each other till then.”

“Under the same roof? I doubt it.”

“Who knows? Maybe if you come here, you’ll get back together,” Lisa says, and Calla’s heart—oblivious to things like logic or likelihood—soars.

“That’s not going to happen,” she tells Lisa resolutely.

“I honestly think he still loves you.”

“He has a funny way of showing it,” she says bitterly, remembering the shocking text message he sent back in April. He couldn’t even wait to dump her in person. It was too urgent to put on hold until his spring semester at Cornell drew to a close; it required immediate action via cell phone. “Look, Lisa, I’ve got to go. My flight is boarding.”

Seeing her father look up at that statement, she realizes he’s been eavesdropping. Well, he can hardly help it, sitting right beside her. Still, it bugs her. Even though she knows he’s probably wondering what happened between her and Kevin. Comforting her through the breakup was Mom’s department. Dad never even acknowledged it—before or after Mom died. Maybe it was too awkward a topic for him. Or maybe he was just too caught up in his own grief that he didn’t consider her recently broken heart. Or maybe he is glad that as a newly single parent, he doesn’t have to deal with a college-aged boyfriend.