The Hidden Summer Page 2

  This also sounds believable. Mom has a talent for sensing people’s sore spots. Lydia’s mom is not single. She has a husband—Lydia’s dad. But he’s gone a lot. Like for months at a time. Lydia’s mom says he travels a lot for business, but she says it like there’s a period after every word—He. Travels. A. Lot. For. Business. You can tell she does not want to talk about it. And, of course, without anyone every mentioning it, my mother would know that. She’d smell it like sharks smell blood in the water.

  I can imagine Lydia’s mom’s face as she stormed away from our apartment. She wouldn’t have said anything nasty to my mom. She would have stewed about it all the way home, probably talking under her breath. She talks to herself when she’s angry.

  “She did seem upset,” says my mother, leaning back into the couch. She reaches for the remote control. “She seems very sensitive.”

  I hurry into my room, close the door behind me, and walk to my window. The top of a dark red sun is vanishing over the trees. The knees of my stubby legs are weak. I want to be sure she’s done with me before I relax. Soon I’ll curl up on the bed and lose myself in a book, and then my mother and Lydia’s mother and our whole apartment will go away.

  I’ve read plenty of books. I spend a lot of time trying to disappear at home, and I like to find some place where no one will find me, like under the honeysuckle or behind the basement stairs. When you tuck yourself into a small space and plan to spend a lot of time there waiting until it’s safe to come out, it’s nice to have a book.

  One thing I notice is that in books, a lot of kids’ parents are dead. Or they’re missing or on vacation. If they are around, the parents are kind and wise and do things like braid your hair and play board games with you. In books, parents aren’t bad unless they’re stepparents. (That’s not fair, in my opinion. I’ve had several stepparents, and some of them were very nice.) Real parents are nice to their kids.

  That is not my experience.

  I have a list of things I wish my mother had never said.

  “I wish you had brown eyes instead of blue ones.”

  “Why don’t you smile more?”

  “How can you love your father as much as you love me?”

  I don’t know where she came up with that last one. I figure I love my parents exactly the same. Which is to say that I love them but don’t really like them very much. My father lives a few miles away, and I see him every other weekend. He lives alone at the moment. Mom just keeps getting married. She’s always crazy about them in the beginning, but they never last long. At the moment she’s married to Lionel, who’s pretty okay. He likes doing crosswords with me and he makes great waffles. But I’m not going to let myself like him too much—it’s easier that way.

  Lydia has been my friend through five total stepparents and I don’t know how many boyfriends and girlfriends. Sometimes Dad forgets to pick me up on Fridays, and sometimes Mom won’t even look at me when I walk through the door, but Lydia is always there. She always wants to see me. She is the one person who I knew would never leave, and now she’s gone.

  Or she might as well be.

  I turn to my map wall. When you can’t concentrate on a book, maps are another good way to vanish and pop up in another place. The wall across from my bed is covered in maps. I have a city map of Boston and a funny map of the Gulf Coast with pictures of crabs and ice-cream cones. I have an old map of Iceland with really strange names and pictures of sea monsters in the ocean.

  My favorite is a map of Europe done in gold and silver. I like the names I haven’t heard of and the images they paint in my head. The Adriatic Sea makes me think of turquoise water and snow-colored shells. I like the names of all the little islands around Greece: Kythnos, Ios, Mykonos. I picture them shaped like giants coming out of the sea. I imagine Naples has grapevines everywhere, that Istanbul is shiny and bright like Christmas tree ornaments, and that Paris smells like coffee and bread.

  I hear the soft thuds of moths hitting my windowpane, and I look out at the sky. As much as I like thinking about other cities, I like Birmingham the best. Here’s the thing: I may not like what goes on in our apartment very much, but I love living in my neighborhood. I bet it’s as good as Paris or Istanbul or even Venice. We’re in an old part of the city that used to be elegant and stylish. Some of the houses are like castles, with turrets and balconies and big marble columns. A lot of them have their roofs fallen in and ivy growing up the walls, and they make you think of fairy tales or ghost stories, depending on your mood.

  Our apartment building is more in the ghost story category. It’s three stories tall and there are cracks in the plaster walls. Some people have balconies, but you wouldn’t want to stand on them because they’d probably fall off the building. We have roaches the size of house cats, which could be okay if they actually ate the mice that sneak through the holes in the cabinets and the rotten spots in the staircase.

  But all you have to do is look through my window, and you’d see what I love most about being here. Our honeysuckle spot is only the beginning. The honeysuckle and the dead tree are in a big wild expanse of undergrowth—a sea of weeds that are as high as my waist, plus vines and small trees and wildflowers and dead stumps. We call it the Wasteland, and it’s between my yard and the golf course.

  I mean an actual golf course, an old one that hasn’t been used in years, and it’s maybe a hundred feet from my back fence. It still has a wooden sign at the closed-off entrance: THE LODEMA GOLF COURSE AND TENNIS CLUB. Lydia’s mom said the owners went bankrupt or something. It’s an eighteen-hole course with a putt-putt course attached, the kind with big fake animals and windmills and mountains at the holes. From our apartment you can see the overgrown trees—wide strong oaks and puffy white Bradford pears and Christmassy rows of pine trees—and past the trees you can see the lights and skyscrapers of downtown Birmingham. In winter I can see the course itself, which still has the flags sticking up out of the holes. The grass is tall and shaggy, though—not at all like those golf courses you see on TV with grass like carpet. But the best thing about Lodema is that you can see the main attractions at the putt-putt course—there’s a dried-up waterfall, some kind of tower, and the head and neck of an orange dinosaur. I call him Marvin. I named him after Stepfather No. 2, my favorite of the temporary dads.

  You can appreciate it all from Lydia’s house much better than mine, though. She’s got the best views. And a balcony that won’t fall off the house.

  I look out my window at Marvin’s tiny head and muscular neck, and I think how much I would like him to rise up, alive, and come pounding through the trees toward me. He’d smash our fence with one swipe of his tail. I’d lean out of my window and climb on his head, then I’d slide down his neck to his back. He’d carry me away back to the golf course, where I’d live happily ever after with dinosaurs and other plastic pets.

  I can hear my mother banging pots in the other room. I wonder if she will remember that I haven’t eaten any dinner.

  Here’s a warning: Don’t go thinking that this story will end with my mother coming to her senses and realizing her mistakes and begging me to forgive her. She will not hug me and tell me she loves me. It’s not going to happen. She isn’t a bad person. She isn’t evil. I think she just wishes I didn’t exist.

  CHAPTER 3

  FAVORITE WORDS

  The next day, I decide to visit my grandparents since Mom is still in a bad mood, and I haven’t figured out how to see Lydia. I called her right after breakfast, and she picked up just long enough to whisper that she couldn’t talk because her mom was home.

  It’s about a forty-five-minute walk to Memama and Grandpops’s place, and the whole walk is along winding neighborhood streets. When it’s not 90 degrees, it’s pleasant. But now my shirt is stuck to my back, and my sweat mustache is dripping into my mouth. It’s worth it, though, because I like seeing my grandparents. They like seeing me, too. In fact, I’m sure
if they realized how bad it was at home, they’d ask me to come live with them.

  But they really don’t have much space, and I’m not sure kids are even allowed to live in the Beachhaven Retirement Center. (There is no beach, by the way. I’ve looked over the entire grounds, and I never found anything other than an empty bird fountain shaped like an oyster. I told Memama the name was false advertising. She told me that Across-from-the-Winn-Dixie Retirement Center did not have a very appealing ring to it.) Still, I like having them at the center—they’re a lot closer than they were when they had their own house. Now I visit them almost every Tuesday afternoon, and, sometimes, like today, I go on days when I just can’t stand to stay home.

  My mother hates coming here to visit them—she says it smells like sick people. But I enjoy it. Everyone smiles and says hello to me, and several of the ladies like to hug me or pat my arm as I walk by. They don’t smell sick to me. Mostly they smell like baby powder and perfume, and the thin skin on their hands is soft like flower petals. Along the hallway to my grandparents’ apartment, I pass huge bouquets of lilies and carnations, gleaming mirrors, and, my favorite, a big glass cabinet full of live canaries.

  I knock on the door and Memama answers—she wraps her arms around me and she kisses my cheek with a little smack. A wave of ice-cold air-conditioning washes over me. I smell something baking, something sweet. I’m betting on cookies.

  “Hi, sugar,” she says. “You look beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” I say. Compliments make me uncomfortable.

  She touches my cheek with her flower-petal fingertips and calls back to my grandfather, who’s in the den. “Doesn’t she have the most beautiful skin, George? She’s just lovely.”

  “Skin like a gopher,” he says.

  Memama says Grandpops has a knack for unique phrases. Mostly he says things that don’t make much sense. But they’re usually interesting things.

  I go and hug Grandpops in his recliner. He has a lot of trouble standing, so usually he just sits. He likes to squeeze me until I make an oof sound. He always smells like fresh grass to me, even though he hasn’t mowed a yard in years. He’s got stubble that’s pleasantly rough against my cheek.

  “You feel like sandpaper,” I say. It’s what I always say.

  “Trying to get the rough edges off you,” he says. Which is what he always says.

  I plop down on the sofa with a thump, look toward the kitchen, and wait.

  “Ladies sit,” Memama says almost immediately. “They don’t collapse in a heap.”

  I smile and inhale the cookie smell again.

  “I’m not a lady yet,” I say.

  Their apartment is filled with polished wooden furniture and rugs and blankets and pillows and candleholders and glass. Memama loves glass—she has bells and paperweights and colored flowers and birds sipping at nectar and a unicorn, and all of them catch the sunlight when it comes in through the window.

  By the time she brings in cookies and lemonade, I’ve almost stopped sweating. I say thank you, bite into a snickerdoodle, and take my time licking the cinnamon and sugar off my lips.

  Grandpops is as happy with the cookies as I am. “Tastes like leaves falling,” he says.

  We nod. Memama runs a hand through my hair, and I melt a little deeper into the sofa. Things that make me feel happy: cookies, fishing, a good book, Lydia, the touch of Memama’s hand. Memama’s big into touching. And I don’t mind at all. I may not be all that comfortable with her saying I’m beautiful, or even with her saying “I love you”—that sort of talk makes me turn pink—but when I feel her hand soft against my hair, when she hugs me tight or presses her powdery cheek against mine, I feel beautiful and loved and all sorts of good things without her saying a word.

  I close my eyes and enjoy my cookie.

  “When did you learn how to make snickerdoodles, Memama?” I ask.

  She wrinkles up her forehead and thinks. Her gray hair is curled tight like she’s had a permanent recently, and everything about her from her chin to her earlobes is delicate.

  “I guess I learned from my mother,” she says. “Or . . . wait. I think I had them for the first time on a picnic. A friend’s mother made them, and I asked for the recipe.”

  “How old were you?” I ask.

  I love it when Grandpops and Memama tell me stories while I’m curled up on the couch with the glass shining around me. I especially like it when they tell me about growing up. Both of them grew up in the country, although they were hundreds of miles away from each other. Memama’s father worked in a steel mill, but he also had a little plot of land where they grew vegetables and raised chickens. Grandpops’s dad owned hundreds of acres, a real giant farm with men he paid to work on it. They had horses and cows and cats that caught mice in the barn and big machines to make the dirt ready to plant.

  It sounds nice, all that space.

  They talk about growing up in the country; they talk about how they couldn’t get much sugar or meat during the Great Depression. They talk about riding on trains and how they used to sit around a radio at night instead of the television.

  “I was in high school,” says Memama. “It wasn’t much of a picnic. There were several of us girls there, and we were picking apples mainly. It wasn’t easy, either, trying to climb a tree in a dress and stockings.”

  I have trouble imagining Memama in a tree. But that’s another good thing about their stories. They let me see Memama and Grandpops before I’d ever met them. If I look close now, I can see the young girl under my grandmother’s face.

  “Why did y’all want to pick apples?” I ask.

  “For pies, of course. That tree had the best pie apples. Sweet and tart. We’d fill our skirts up with them and then dump them into buckets on the ground.”

  “Eating as you went,” says Grandpops. “Like squirrels.”

  I look down at my lap. Squirrels make me think of the time Lydia tried to catch one for pet. The squirrel darted up a tree, and when Lydia dove to grab it, she ran straight into the tree like some scene out a cartoon. Usually that memory makes me smile. Now it doesn’t, though. It reminds me of how different life will be without Lydia. And if just a mention of squirrels makes me think of Lydia, how many other random words will make me think of her?

  Usually being with Memama and Grandpops helps me forget everything but stories and hugs and the smell of sugar. But I can’t forget Lydia, not even here.

  “By the time we got home, we wouldn’t want to see another apple for quite a while,” Memama is saying. “But that’s what you can’t understand now, Nell—you didn’t go to the grocery store. You walked outside. Apples and plums and blackberries, vegetables from the garden, pecans and poke salad, and fish in the creek.”

  “We bathed in the creek,” says Grandpops. “One time we found a dead cow floating upstream, and we waited about bathing in the creek for a while. But not too long.”

  “Oh, we bathed in the creek, too, of course,” Memama says.

  “I spent the night in the woods for a whole week once,” says Grandpops. “Me and the rest of the boys shot birds with pellet guns and fished with worms we dug up. Cooked everything over the fire. You kids all spend too much time inside now. You don’t know what it’s like to get out and escape.”

  I almost tell him that “escape” is one my favorite words.

  “The house was our parents’ space,” Memama says. “We didn’t have the money to go to movies or restaurants, and there weren’t any shopping malls. Our place was the woods or the creek or walking along the side of the road. You got out into the wide open space, and it made you feel free.”

  Another memory comes to me, and this one does make me smile. When I was younger, sometimes Memama and Grandpops would take me camping in their backyard. We’d bring sleeping bags into a tent, and they’d tell not-scary ghost stories. Memama would bring a Tupperware container of cookie
s with us, and Grandpops would bring an armload of pillows for me to lie on. When I needed to go to the bathroom, I could run into the house real quick—it was the best camping possible. And it was really the closest I’d gotten to wide open space.

  Long after I’ve eaten my last snickerdoodle, I walk very slowly back to the apartment. I stop at a magnolia tree and bury my nose in a flower. I blow a few dandelions and watch the little parachutes drift off on the wind. I follow a trail of ants to a smashed caramel. Once—at Stepdad No. 3’s house—Lydia and I followed a trail of ants from under the kitchen window, around the side of the house, over the brick wall, under the hydrangea bush, all the way to a dead stump in the neighbors’ yard. It was maybe a quarter mile of single-file ants. That was during our experiment phase. We laid out a buffet for the ants to see which they liked the best—a Fig Newton, peanut butter, or a peppermint. The Fig Newton won. Around that same time, we tried to grow a tadpole into a frog, but we left the bucket out in the sun and the tadpole got cooked. We did a better job of turning a daisy pink by putting red food coloring in its water.

  The experiments lasted a few weeks before we moved on to something else. That’s what we do: we make discoveries. We learn things. Lydia and I are each other’s escape routes. We take each other away from the old, unpleasant things—mothers with their weird silences and bad tempers and dads with their long absences—and we uncover new, incredible things. We know every cluster of honeysuckle in the neighborhood. We can hula-hoop and fly kites and name every kind of butterfly, and we both speak excellent Pig Latin. We came up with a pretty good mind-reading act. It started with me picturing different objects in my head, and she’d try to name the objects. Out of maybe two hundred tries, she guessed one right: pepperoni pizza. So I started imagining pepperoni pizza every time, and she started guessing pepperoni pizza every time. It was pretty impressive. (When I say that it was impressive, I really mean it was impressive to anyone who was under five years old.)