Wishful Thinking (15 page)

The song ended and people around them stopped dancing to applaud. A sharp crackling noise popped overhead and Hazel looked up to see an explosion of lights in the sky. The fireworks had begun.

“You guys mind if we watch with you?” Reid appeared behind them, Jaime’s arm tucked into his elbow. “It’s getting dangerous out there.” A trickle of white sparks fell from the sky toward the water.

The four of them found a long bench on the sand and squished side by side. Hazel took a seat between Luke and Jaime.

Bursts of red, white, and blue shocked the sky above them, and Hazel felt Luke squeeze the top of her shoulder. She turned to him and smiled.

“Happy summer, Hazel,” he said, and leaned in to give her a kiss.

Later that night, after the fireworks and champagne toasts, Hazel had her very first sleepover.

It wasn’t the boy kind. And it wasn’t the first time she’d shared a room, of course. There had been plenty of nights with Jaime before that one. Not to mention all of the many roommates she’d had in the group homes, or the various stepcousins she’d been forced upon over the years.

But this was different.

When they got home, Hazel and Jaime hurried to change into their pajamas, no longer taking special care to face the
wall or strategically cover themselves as they undressed. They brushed their teeth at the same time, giggling as they took turns spitting into the sink. And then they turned off the lights and jumped into bed.

Hazel watched as Jaime pulled her grandmother’s quilt up under her chin. The room was dark, but just enough moonlight fell through the open window for Hazel to make out the permanent smile on Jaime’s face. She looked like a completely different person, as if her features had been rearranged and softened. Hazel suddenly felt bad for disliking Jaime so much at first, when she’d been going through all kinds of complicated things. Things that Hazel hadn’t had a clue about.

“Tonight really happened,” Jaime said softly now, her eyelids low and heavy. “Didn’t it?”

Hazel smiled in the dark. “I hope so,” she said, rolling onto her side.

“You know what Reid told me?” Jaime asked. Her eyes popped open and she stared up at the ceiling. Every so often, her legs shook beneath the blanket, as if she were too excited to lay still. “After the fireworks, when we were sitting on the beach. He said he thought about me all of the time. He said it was like a piece of him was missing when we weren’t together.”

Jaime’s voice was dry and hushed, like she still couldn’t believe the girl Reid was talking about was her. Hazel knew exactly how she felt.

“I had no idea he even liked me that much,” Jaime said. “I mean, we had fun last summer. And when he visited this spring. But I thought for sure that was it. I thought when he went to Dartmouth in the fall…”

Jaime sat up and faced Hazel, wrapping her bare arms around
her knees. “I just never thought things would work out like this,” she mused. “I guess I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”

Hazel smiled in the dark. She’d made the perfect wish. Having Reid back was going to change everything, for all of them. Jaime would have her baby on the island and she and Reid would raise it together. Hazel rubbed her feet together, unable to lie still.

“Jaime?” Hazel asked suddenly, perched on one elbow. “Have you thought about when you’re going to tell him? About the baby, I mean?”

Jaime rolled over on her back and stared up at the ceiling, exhaling a full, heavy sigh. Hazel hoped she hadn’t ruined the moment.

“Not yet,” Jaime said softly. “But I’ll know when the time is right. I just feel like everything’s happening this way for a reason. Like all of my wishes are coming true, or something. I know that sounds crazy.…”

Hazel closed her eyes and rested her head back onto her pillow. “No,” she whispered through a smile, her voice slurred with sleep. “It doesn’t sound crazy at all.”

It was close to three in the morning when the girls finally drifted off, not because they’d run out of things to say, but because they were too exhausted to go on saying them. Hazel lay awake a few minutes longer, listening to the soft sounds of Jaime’s breathing.

And then Hazel slept like she’d never slept before, like she’d been on a long, rambling journey, and was finally back in her own bed, heavy limbs finding familiar spots on a warm mattress. Home, home at last.

“C
an you please stop fidgeting?” Hazel asked Luke with a laugh in her voice.

It was Saturday, a few weeks later, and Jaime’s first full day off in almost a month. She’d woken Hazel up early, scrounging around her dresser drawers for a swimsuit, and insisting that it was their one chance for a double date to the beach. Luke and Reid didn’t need much convincing, and after a standoff in the crowded parking lot of the most popular beach in Chilmark, the foursome had set up blankets on a secluded patch of soft white sand.

Reid was already throwing himself against the head-high waves, Jaime had gone for a walk along the red clay cliffs looming large behind them, and Luke was fidgeting on a towel while Hazel attempted to take his picture.

“I’m not fidgeting,” Luke insisted, leaning dramatically back on his elbows and turning his sharp jaw from side to side. “I’m just trying to give you my good angle.”

Hazel rolled her eyes and pulled Luke back up to sitting.
“I don’t need your good angle,” she sighed. “I need you to sit still.”

Ever since Rosanna had offered to include some of her “work” in the next big show, Hazel had been trying to decide what kind of photographs to take. Clearly, she couldn’t submit the types of random, cavalier shots she usually ended up with. If she wanted to impress people, and be a
real
artist the way Rosanna was, she’d have to try a new approach.

Which was when she’d remembered the portraits. The expressive face of the fisherman in the studio, the story in the old woman’s eyes. What better to hang next to Rosanna’s paintings of the important people in her life than photographs of the important people in Hazel’s?

And, for better or for worse, she’d decided to start with Luke.

“Now, please, stop moving,” Hazel begged, and Luke folded his knees, affecting a studious stare. “Just look out at the water, and pretend you see something that scares you.”

Luke turned to Hazel, his sandy eyebrows raised. “What? Why?”

“Come on,” Hazel insisted. “If I want Rosanna to put my stuff in the show, it has to be good. Can you please take this seriously?”

Luke cleared his throat and turned back toward the ocean. Hazel brought the lens to her eye and focused Luke’s face in the frame. She watched as his brow became heavy, his light brown eyes narrowed and concerned.

“Nice,” she said softly. She pressed her finger on the button, and just as she snapped the shot, Luke’s eyes popped open, his jaw dropped, and he screamed.

“Shark!” he shouted. “Everybody out of the water!”

Hazel dropped the camera to her lap and spun to face the ocean. The waves were breaking right on the shore, and beyond them, the water was clear and flat and decidedly sharkfree. Reid was the only one swimming, and he was either less gullible than Hazel, or had been too busy dodging the incoming waves to hear Luke’s phony cry.

Hazel looked back at Luke, who was grinning mischievously, his star-shaped dimples twitching in place. “Sorry,” he said, and shrugged. “I was trying to find my motivation.”

Luke nuzzled his head playfully against Hazel’s neck as she flapped the wasted picture dry. She tried not to smile but failed.

“Hey, Blondie,” Jaime called from behind them. Hazel turned to see her crouched by the edge of the red clay cliffs. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

Hazel pushed herself up to her feet, lightly kicking sand onto Luke’s towel as she passed. “Thanks for your help,” she deadpanned, tucking her camera and the drying photo in her bag and walking up the beach. Maybe her luck would be better with Jaime.

Hazel walked to the edge of the cliffs, where Jaime was huddled in the sand, the thick straps of an all-black racing suit peeking out of the top of her oversize Boston Celtics T-shirt. Hazel had tried to get Jaime to wear a two-piece, but she was convinced that Reid would notice the slightest thickening that had settled down around her hips. She still wasn’t ready to tell him about the baby, and she didn’t want to take any chances of him finding out on his own.

“Check this out,” Jaime said, tracing a patch of the rock
wall with one hand, as Hazel settled next to the cliffs beside her. “If you look carefully, you can find all kinds of things in here.” Her voice was wistful. “My grandmother used to take me on walks here all the time.”

Hazel squinted at the dark crevices hidden in the sandy rock wall. “What are we looking for?” she asked. It all looked like dirt and pebbles to her.

“Anything that seems out of place,” Jaime said, and shrugged. She ran her hand along a curve of the wall and pulled it back, her dry palm covered in a thin layer of crumbling red mud. “Some people think the clay is healing. But I just like to see what’s hidden inside.”

Hazel studied Jaime’s face as she carefully surveyed the surface of the cliffs. Every day with Jaime was new and surprising. Since Reid had come back, there’d been a lightness to her, a sense of fun that hadn’t existed before. Even when they worked together at Rosanna’s, she was more patient, and less neurotic about getting everything done. And even though she’d been spending the majority of her nights off with Reid, on dinner dates in town or hanging out at his house, every night before bed she and Hazel would rehash the events of the day. It was like having a sister, or exactly like what Hazel had always dreamed having a sister would be like.

Only, in that dream, her sister wasn’t also her mother. But most of the time, Hazel didn’t think about that. She’d been having too much fun to think about much of anything, really, except that everything was going so well. And if it continued to go well, and Reid and Jaime stayed together, then maybe, when Jaime had her baby, they would keep her and raise her themselves. If things worked out the way Hazel hoped, she’d
have nothing but more good times to look forward to. Maybe for the rest of her life.

“Look!” Jaime gasped, scraping away at layers of sand and pulling out what looked like a small, triangular rock. “It’s a shark’s tooth.”

Jaime opened her hand and Hazel peered inside. The tooth was delicate and cracked, with little black lines running across its jagged, flaky surface. “There are tons of these in here, and they’re thousands of years old,” Jaime said, closing her fingers tightly around the artifact. “Arrowheads, too. It’s like an entire history of the island is frozen in time. All you have to do is look for it.”

Jaime’s eyes looked far away and Hazel wondered what it must be like to feel so connected to a place. To have a history built inside the very earth that you walked on every day. More than just family, it was a history of a people. Jaime’s people.

Now Hazel’s people, too.

Hazel reached into her bag and pulled the camera out again. Without thinking, she trained the lens on the tooth in Jaime’s open hand. Jaime’s fingers were crusted in clay and sand and the jagged white tooth blinked between the creases of Jaime’s palm.

The camera spat the image free, and it wasn’t until Hazel had it in her hand that she remembered she was supposed to be taking portraits.

“Don’t move,” she commanded, and took a few careful steps away from where Jaime sat.

“What are you doing?” Jaime asked, folding the shark’s tooth into her small palm.

“Just pretend I’m not here,” Hazel said, squaring Jaime’s
face in the lens. But Jaime quickly buried her head in the sleeve of her T-shirt, just as Hazel snapped the shot.

“I look like a whale,” Jaime huffed as she escaped to another section of the cliffs, farther down the beach. “Not every moment has to be preserved for posterity, you know.”

Hazel sighed and stuck the photo in the pocket of her bag. She didn’t need to look at the blurry image to know that all she’d gotten was a blur of pink fingers and dark hair.

“Nice camera.” A voice spoke suddenly from over Hazel’s shoulder. She turned to see Reid standing, wrapped in a towel and dripping in the sand.

“Thanks,” Hazel said, squinting up at him and leaning into his long, skinny shadow. “Too bad I can’t get anyone to sit still.”

Reid smiled and knelt in the sand beside her. “Don’t look at me,” he said, drying his hands on his towel. “I get enough of that with my dad. He’s a big photo nerd.”

Reid held out a hand and Hazel passed him the camera. She watched as he turned the machine over in his palms. Since he’d gotten back, Reid had spent almost all of his time with Jaime, so it was rare that he and Hazel had a chance to talk by themselves. It was easy to forget that he was so much more than just Jaime’s boyfriend. He was Hazel’s
dad,
and she still knew almost nothing about him.

“Is he a photographer?” Hazel asked, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “Your father?”

“He tries to be,” Reid said, holding the lens up to his clear blue eyes. “He’s more of a collector. He has some pretty amazing prints in his study. We should all take a ride over and see them later.”