The Summer We Started Over, page 5
She had just gotten settled in her shop when Eddie called.
“I can’t find available cleaning people,” Eddie said.
“Good morning to you, too, Eddie. I know you can’t. It’s summer. No one is available. Trust me. No one.”
Eddie was quiet for second. Then she said, “Well, I am.”
* * *
—
Eddie stood in the middle of the kitchen with her phone in her hand. How had Barrett kept the house this tidy all by herself? Not that it was actually neat and dust-free, but the kitchen and downstairs bath were bright and shining, thank heavens for that. It was the other rooms that had been neglected. Eddie wandered through them, understanding why they were so dusty and chaotic. Every room had stacks of books rising from the floor, teetering as if on the brink of falling. Books were piled on the lovely old chintz sofa, on the matching armchair, on the coffee table, and even in the fireplace which hadn’t been used in years. The dining room table was clear of books at the end closest to the kitchen, but piled with towers of books at the other end. The old mahogany buffet had stacks of books on the top and the handsome family silver trays had been pushed under the buffet, as if in hiding. She didn’t need to go into her father’s study. She’d seen it yesterday and it was a sight she couldn’t forget. Besides, her father was in there, working.
She climbed the stairs. Her room was crowded but most of the books needed to go. Barrett’s room was a dream of sanity with its two beds, desk, dresser, and slipper chair all book-free. The bathroom was clean and had only a small pile of books in the corner, on a small table near the toilet. The guest bedroom, where no guest ever slept because they’d never invited one, had, not surprisingly, bookshelves against all four walls, floor to ceiling, spilling over with piles of books rising from the floor like colorful stalagmites.
Finally, she opened the door to her father’s bedroom.
Oh, dear.
His room was like a giant maze of books, with a clear but narrow path to his bed, his dresser, his closet, and his bathroom.
Eddie stood in her father’s room and was very, very, sad.
She took a deep breath and left the room She went down the stairs and into her father’s study.
“Daddy. What’s going on?”
William peered over his reading glasses. “Good morning, darling.”
Eddie removed a pile of books from a chair and set them on top of another pile of books.
“Dad, I think you really have become a bit of a hoarder.”
William nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” With his forefinger, he moved his reading glasses back in place and bent to his book.
Eddie lifted a book from one of the piles.
“The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. You don’t need this book. Let me take it to the Seconds Shop.”
William actually smiled. “Eddie, that book is absolutely necessary for my research. You know that Coleridge and others used laudanum and morphine. Huxley’s book is—”
At least she had his attention. She picked up another book. “The Magnificent Chicken? How does that fit into your subject?”
William scratched his head. “I haven’t decided how to work that in yet, but I’m sure many poets, or their wives, kept chickens. Also, we live on a farm. I think we should have chickens. Think of the eggs.”
“Really.” Eddie skewered him with her gaze. “We have a horse. We have a dog. Do you ever feed them?”
“Well, no. Barrett does that.”
“Ever take Duke for a walk?”
“Sometimes.”
“What does Duchess eat in the winter?”
William looked nervous. “That’s not in my purview.”
“Your purview. Dad, you aren’t teaching any longer. You’re—”
She paused. She almost said, You’re using books to hide from the world.
But why shouldn’t he want to hide from the world? Three years ago, his son died and his wife left him. He’d probably used up all his optimism and energy moving them here from the town where they’d remember Stearns at every street corner, school, and café. Her father had done what he could. He’d done all any father could.
“I need to think about this,” Eddie said.
“That’s nice,” William replied, and returned to his book.
Eddie went to the kitchen and sat at the table, lost in memories.
* * *
—
The Grant home in Williamstown was a handsome brick house in a charming neighborhood with winding roads and mature trees. Their father taught English at a small but prestigious college in a storybook town. Their mother was beautiful and unhappy. She didn’t enjoy being a mother, which she considered menial work. She was dissatisfied with her social position in the college town and always angry because her husband earned so little money. In desperation, she decided to be an artist, and set up a studio in the attic.
The three Grant children were stairstep children: first Eddie, next Stearns, one year younger, and Barrett, one year after that. They were a close little trio, because they seldom saw their mother, which was okay. Their presence never made their mother happy. Once, when she took them shopping for school shoes, she paused in front of a store window displaying a satin dress with a rhinestone buckle.
“I would look stunning in that,” she told her children. “And if I didn’t have to buy so much for you three, I could buy it.” Her shoulders drooped as she left the window.
The children were stung and anxious. Was their mother going to cry here in the mall?
Sabrina didn’t cry. But she stared down at their faces and said, “Don’t ever have children. They will ruin your life.”
After that moment, after they had their school shoes and had returned to their house, after their mother escaped to the attic and her art, the children understood what would help make their mother happy.
Eddie became the taskmaster who told them to take baths, do homework, brush teeth, eat vegetables. Barrett and Stearns grumbled at her, but they always did what she ordered. Eddie worried about them constantly. Why was Stearns spending so much time alone in his room? Why couldn’t she make better dinners than boxed macaroni and cheese? One morning, on her way out the door, Barrett said she needed a parent’s signature on a form giving permission for a class trip. She’d forgotten to ask her father, and he was at the college now. Would Eddie get in trouble for faking their mother’s name? (She didn’t.) But it was an enormous responsibility. She never wanted to do it again.
Thank heavens for the Fletchers.
The Fletcher family moved into the large, classic Victorian next door with a turret, a wraparound porch, and stained-glass windows. They were wealthy and glamorous. Mr. Fletcher was an officer in a bank. Mrs. Fletcher sold real estate and drove a dark green MG convertible. When Sabrina Grant saw it, she burst into tears.
“I’ll never have anything like that,” she cried.
Stearns had tried to console her. “I’ll buy you one when I’m older, Mom.”
“Sure you will,” his mother had said bitterly and went up the stairs to the attic.
The Fletchers had one child, a gorgeous little girl with blue eyes and a waist-long tumble of white-blond hair.
Dove.
Dove Fletcher was a year younger than Eddie and a year older than Barrett, exactly Stearns’s age. She was magic. It wasn’t just her enormous house where the four played hide-and-seek for hours, or the little cottage her parents had built especially for Dove in the back garden. It was her imagination, her sparkling energy, her happiness. The rainiest day was a delight for Dove. She invented entire worlds where a cup became a chalice and an umbrella became a sword. Inside with Dove, Eddie, Barrett, and Stearns became superheroes with capes and masks, or doctors with a ward full of sick baby dolls, and it wasn’t just that Dove’s parents had given her doctor kits, it was the stories Dove invented, enclosing them all in their own realm. Outside with Dove, they slipped like spies through the neighborhood, leaving secret codes inside tiny porcelain boxes they’d purloined from the Fletchers’ attic and chalking signs on the trunks of trees. In the winter, they made snow people and an entire snow house for the four of them to live in, even though it was a tight squeeze and snow drifted onto their noses. On summer nights, when they crawled into the backyard tent Stearns had put together, they ate marshmallows and ginger snaps and made fun of their teachers and planned to run away from home, all of them together, in a VW bus like the one in Little Miss Sunshine. Stearns liked to make graphic novels about the four of them. They all had enormous heads and tiny stick bodies, but it was amazing how he could make each face look like the real thing. He gave them adventures. All four of them riding a missile to Mars. All four of them floating in space with cosmic vacuum cleaners that sucked the excess carbon out of the Earth’s air. All four of them in a personal submarine blasting down to the ocean floor to meet creatures never known before to mankind. He gave each character a name. Eddie was Nice. Barrett was Funny. Dove was Beauty. Stearns was Genius. The sisters agreed that Stearns was a genius, and for the first time they became aware that Stearns had special feelings for Dove.
When they were older, their mother took a job at a fine jewelry shop. Sabrina was much happier and even less interested in the responsibilities of motherhood. It was understood that the Grant kids would spend after-school time at the Fletcher house, even though Dove’s parents weren’t always around.
Eddie, Barrett, and Stearns spent countless hours in the Fletcher rec room, watching DVDs, eating chips and cookies, playing video games, singing and jumping around to the karaoke machine. Dove’s parents never complained when they left the rug littered with Cheez-It crumbs or candy wrappers. The Fletchers had a housekeeper who came three times a week when they were at school. When the four were in their early teens, they did their homework together in the rec room while Stearns lay on his stomach on the floor, reading graphic novels.
Occasionally, they helped themselves to the Fletchers’ liquor cabinet, tasting not only gin and vodka but crème de menthe and cognac. Dove had become an expert in refilling the bottles so her parents didn’t notice, but Eddie, Stearns, and Barrett hated the liquor. It burned. It tasted like fingernail polish remover. They favored chocolate milk and sinful Cherry Cokes.
For years, the four were an informal club, and if they’d had a motto, which they didn’t, that would have been too cheesy, plus there were four of them, not three, it would have been “One for all, and all for one.”
As they grew older, the relationships changed, shifting slightly. Stearns was brilliant. His mind raced through lessons and lectures and books. He aced his tests and worked Rubik’s Cubes under his desk while listening to his teacher. He clowned around in class to disguise his boredom. Dove’s father told Eddie that Stearns would either win the Nobel Prize in physics or be the next Robin Williams.
By fourteen, Stearns was also heartbreakingly handsome. He shot up to six feet and let his butterscotch hair fall around his face like a rock star. He was a wizard with computers. He helped friends troubleshoot their video games and laptops, and when he was fifteen, he was hired for the weekends and evenings by a computer shop in North Adams. When he had time to hang with his sisters and Dove, it was always Dove he sat next to. His gaze lasted longer on Dove’s face than on his sisters’. Dove’s face shone with a special light when Stearns entered the room.
“Do you think Stearns really likes Dove?” Barrett asked Eddie one evening. “I mean—that way?”
“I hope so,” Eddie replied. “They could get married and she’d be part of our family.”
One afternoon, the Grant sisters came home from school to find Stearns’s bedroom door locked. The first time, they tiptoed away, assuming he was sleeping, maybe with a flu. The next time, they banged on the door and called his name.
When Stearns opened the door, they saw Dove in his room. Sitting on his bed.
“You guys!” Eddie stood just inside the room, too surprised to know what to say.
Barrett tried not to laugh. “Stearns, you have lipstick all over your face.”
“We’re talking about homework?” Dove said, her voice rising on homework, as if she was asking a question.
“This is cool,” Eddie began awkwardly.
Barrett added, “But you won’t pay attention to us anymore.”
Stearns reached out and took Barrett’s hand. “Come sit down. Let’s talk.”
The four sat cross-legged on the floor, the way they did when they played poker or Monopoly.
Eddie folded her arms over her chest defensively. “So what’s going on?”
Dove patted Eddie’s arm like a mother soothing her baby. “You guys, everything is changing. You’re going to college in September, Eddie, and then I’ll go and then Barrett.”
“What about Stearns?” Eddie realized as she spoke that she hadn’t noticed where her brother was applying for college, and she experienced a sudden stab of guilt, before remembering how she’d been too busy cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning the bathrooms, because their mother was never around.
“I’m taking a gap year,” Stearns told her. “I’ve got a sweet job at a computer company in Troy. I’ll make a ton of money. I may not go to college.” He smiled, embarrassed, adding, “I may not finish high school. But I’ll make enough to help you both pay your tuitions.”
“But what about Dove?” Barrett asked. “Are you with Dove?”
Stearns sounded serious when he answered. “I’m with Dove. Totally. I’m saving up for a bike so I can get to Amherst to see Dove.”
“You get Dove.” Barrett spoke slowly, realizing what that meant. “I don’t know if I’m jealous or happy.”
“Come on, Barrett, it’s not like this is a shock,” Eddie said. “We’ve known they’d be together for years. But she’s still ours.”
Stearns put his arm around Dove’s shoulders and pulled her against him. “Maybe mostly mine.”
* * *
—
Slowly at first, and then suddenly, like an iceberg cracking and plunging into the sea, their lives as they had lived them for years vanished.
It was March, Eddie’s final year in high school. Stearns was a junior, acing classes effortlessly, and Barrett was a sophomore.
During lunch period, Barrett got a text from Eddie.
Have you talked to Dove today?
Barrett answered: No. What’s up?
Not sure.
Barrett and Eddie kept in touch all that day. They each called and texted Dove, but she didn’t answer. They decided she must be sick.
When Eddie and Barrett got home from school, they saw a moving van in the Fletchers’ driveway. Mr. Fletcher’s BMW wasn’t there. Mrs. Fletcher’s MG convertible wasn’t there. Dove’s antique red Mustang was there, but not Dove.
Barrett hurled herself up the steps and through the open door of the Victorian house. Most of the furniture was gone. She ran yelling Dove’s name through the house, but saw only heavy-muscled moving men lifting the remaining boxes from Dove’s bedroom and TV room and rec room.
When Eddie entered their own house, she found their mother talking on the phone. She held up her finger—wait.
“You won’t believe this!” Sabrina said when she put her phone down. “Mr. Fletcher has been arrested for embezzling money from the bank. They’ve lost their house, their cars, everything. Jeanine Fletcher will have to sell her jewelry!”
“Have you talked with Dove?” Eddie asked.
“You’re so sweet, worrying about your friend.” Sabrina picked up her purse and hung it on her shoulder. “Got to run.”
“Where’s Stearns?” Barrett asked.
Sabrina shrugged. “God knows.”
Barrett was crying. “What can we do? We have to see Dove!”
“Girls, I know you were good friends with Dove. This will be an opportunity for you to make new friends.” Sabrina tweaked a twist in her hair. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
The sisters called and texted Stearns, but got no answer. Finally, when he came home from work, they tackled him at the front door.
“Where’s Dove?”
Stearns was flushed, his eyes desperate. “I haven’t heard from her since yesterday. I’ve called. She doesn’t answer. I’ve texted. She doesn’t reply. I don’t know where she is. Probably hiding because of this mess with her parents. I don’t know why she would hide from me.”
“Oh, Sterny.” Eddie’s heart hurt for her brother. “Oh, honey.” She hugged him. “She’ll get in touch with you. You know she will.”
“Yeah.” Stearns pulled away. “I’ll let you know.”
* * *
—
For weeks, the local news focused on the Fletcher embezzlement and arrest.
Trees budded and blossomed. The sweet fragrance of mown grass drifted in the air. A new family moved into the Fletcher house. The Brooks family had two small children, and soon Barrett was babysitting for them. It was odd to be in the big Victorian, with completely new furniture and curtains, but it was all right. It would have been so sad to be in rooms that reminded her of Dove. Eddie left for college. Stearns continued to attend classes and work at the computer shop. His parents were astounded at his salary. It was a new world for everyone.
One day at school, Barrett heard a group of girls in the corner of the hall, humming like a hive of bees. She heard Dove’s name mentioned.
She elbowed her way into the group. “What about Dove?”
“OMG, Barry, you should see her!” Skye Becker gushed. “She’s wrecked. She’s like totally drunk and hanging out with some older guys and—”
