First Frost

  Josh stretched his leg out and tapped her foot with his own. “So what are you going to do with your life, Bay Waverley?”

  “I’m going to end up at the Waverley house. That much I know,” she said, without hesitation. “I like decorating. Maybe I’ll do something like that. I’ll know when I get to college.”

  “You did a great job at the dance,” he said, suddenly remembering the moment he saw her on the bleachers. She’d stood up in that dress, with those flowers in her hair, looking like a dream he’d had when he was a boy, and all he could think of was getting out of there so he wouldn’t have to face the fact that he couldn’t live in that dream, that he’d never actually gotten anything he’d really wanted. And none of what he had was really his to keep, anyway. “You looked amazing that night. I should have told you. By the time I thought of it, you were covered in zombie blood.”

  She straightened her shoulders and gave him a proud look. “I thought I carried the look pretty well.”

  “Yes, you did.” He stared at her a long time, so long that even she, who was a consummate starer, looked away.

  “So how does this thing work?” he finally asked. “This belonging together?”

  She laughed and scooted over next to him, to lean against Horace’s head and look up at the cold night sky, like she was expecting something to fall. She had on a pink knit ear-flap hat, the strings from the flaps falling from either side to rest on her shoulders. “I don’t expect you to kiss me or anything,” she said, still looking up.

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “No. This thing between the two of us right now, how this feels, this talking and laughing, and sometimes the quiet, too? That’s how it works. My aunt will call my mother and sometimes they’ll just sit and not say a word to each other. That’s how it works.”

  He felt unexpectedly emotional hearing that. It was a relief. She was such a relief to him. Belonging, she seemed to be saying, shouldn’t take so much work.

  “Do you think it will snow tonight?” she asked, bringing her gaze back to him, and finding that their faces were unexpectedly near to each other. She smelled like cold air and roses. She’d told him she’d been making rose candy at her aunt’s house that afternoon. When she’d gotten into his Pathfinder earlier that evening, it was like she’d brought the entire month of July with her.

  Their faces were so close now they were almost touching. His eyes went to her lips.

  And that’s when his phone suddenly rang in his pocket.

  They both jumped. Bay spilled her coffee on her jeans and she immediately stood up, trying to brush it off. He reached for the phone in his jacket pocket, confused when he saw the screen. “It’s you. How did you do that?”

  Bay stopped wiping at her legs. “Do what?”

  He turned the ringing phone around and showed her the screen. It had BAY WAVERLEY on it. He chuckled. “You’re calling me.”

  Bay suddenly felt around in all her pockets. “I must have dropped it outside when I…” she didn’t finish her sentence.

  “If it’s not you, then who’s calling me on your phone?”

  “Wait—”

  But it was too late. Josh answered. After a few seconds, he handed the phone to her.

  “It’s your mom.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Bay said as they sat on a bench on the green, side by side, looking straight ahead.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I mean really sorry,” Bay said.

  “It’s partially my fault. I knew something was up when you met me at the road instead of in front of your house.”

  Bay looked at him in his scull cap and his North Face jacket, calmly waiting for the consequences. He had retreated back into misery, that slow burn curling off his skin again. His problem, she was gradually understanding, was that he was numb with indecision and fear. The only thing he could feel was miserable, until someone offered him an alternative, and then it was like giving him oxygen when he was suffocating.

  They were just getting to the gist of this. Why did her mother have to call when she did? She was making this hard, when it didn’t need to be hard.

  Her mom was so bad at the grounding thing that she’d forgotten to ask Bay for her phone again. Bay had put it on vibrate and, after Josh had called to tell her he was on his way to pick her up with sandwiches and coffee, she’d put the phone in her pocket and crawled out her bedroom window. She met him at the road, telling him her dad went to bed early and she didn’t want Josh’s car to wake him up. Which, to her credit, was true. But she must have dropped her phone when she’d climbed down the tree (which was harder to do than it sounded). Josh’s number was the last one that had called her, so when her mother had found the phone under the tree when she’d discovered Bay missing, she’d hit redial and voilà! Here she was.

  Bay watched sullenly as Henry’s king cab truck circled the green and came to a stop. Henry got out wearing jeans, a T-shirt and his barn coat. Her mother got out wearing her red kimono robe. She hadn’t even changed.

  Bay covered her eyes with one hand, as if she could make them disappear.

  They silently crossed the green toward them.

  “Come over here with me, Josh,” Henry said as they approached. “We have some things to discuss.”

  “Dad!” Bay said, outraged that they thought Josh had done anything wrong.

  “It’s okay, Bay,” Josh said as he got up.

  “You’re overreacting,” Bay said to her mother when Sydney came to a stop in front of her and just stood there, glaring at her.

  “Do you have any idea how scared I was? I went to your room tonight to call a truce. I had two cups of tea and a box of Mallomars. I was going to put an end to this once and for all because we’ve both been miserable and we needed to talk it out. But I opened your bedroom door and you weren’t there. Your window was wide open. I thought you’d been kidnapped!”

  Oh, God. Mallomars. She’d brought Mallomars. Truce food, they always called it, because no one could argue over Mallomars. There wasn’t anything her mother could have said that could have made Bay feel more guilty at that moment. She’d snuck out on the night her mother was going to call a truce. A truce. It sounded so good. She was tired of everything being so hard.

  “I called your aunt Claire, asking if you were there. That’s when she told me about this strange man you told her you’d seen on Pendland Street.”

  This was just getting worse. “He looked like a salesman,” Bay tried to explain. “Just sly and fake, not dangerous.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t have worried when I walked into my daughter’s room and discovered she was missing?”

  “I wasn’t missing.” She looked over to where Josh was standing with Henry. Henry was leaning in toward Josh, his arms folded over his chest. Both their heads were low. Henry was saying something Bay couldn’t hear.

  A van drove around the green and parked behind Henry’s truck. Claire, Tyler and Mariah all got out. Claire was at least dressed. But Tyler and Mariah were in their pajamas, too.

  “What are they doing here?” Bay moaned.

  “I called Claire and told her where you were,” Sydney said. “She was worried, too.”

  “Is Evanelle going to show up next?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bay! Hey!” Mariah said, running up to Bay. “What are we all doing here at night?”

  “Sydney?” Claire said as she approached. “Sydney?”

  Sydney finally turned her evil eye off of Bay.

  “Did you leave the lights on in your salon?” Claire asked.

  “No.”

  Claire pointed across the green to the White Door, where lights were shining, forming lemon-yellow squares on the dark sidewalk in front of the salon. “Then I think something’s wrong.”

  * * *

  “I didn’t bring my keys with me,” Sydney whispered as they all approached the salon cautiously, like a band of cat burglars really bad at their jobs.

>   “I don’t think you’ll need them,” Henry said, trying the door and finding that it swung wide open. Henry had left Josh on the green with orders to stay there. And he did. Josh was sitting on the bench, watching their odd little family with an expression Sydney found curious. He didn’t look embarrassed or amused or superior. He looked like he wanted, more than anything, to join them. She hadn’t expected him to be so nice. She hadn’t expected him to take his share of the blame, even though her daughter was clearly the one who had made all this happen. She hadn’t expected to see what her daughter so evidently saw in him. Someone lost.

  She hadn’t wanted to like Josh Matteson.

  After Henry had done a tour of the salon and hadn’t found anyone there, the rest of them entered.

  “Are you sure you didn’t just forget to turn out the lights?” Tyler asked, which was such a Tyler thing to say. He forgot everything. He got lost going to work. He was on his fourteenth pair of reading glasses this year. And he was currently wearing two different shoes. Sometimes Sydney completely understood how he’d gotten past her sister’s walls. He’d obviously gotten lost looking for a way in, and had stumbled onto a secret passageway. That was the only way to get to Claire, those secret passageways, the vulnerable places: family, acceptance, longevity.

  “I was the last to leave,” Sydney said. “Even if I forgot about the lights, I’d never leave the door unlocked.”

  “Who else has a key?” Henry asked.

  That’s when it hit her. Sydney went immediately to the reception desk and found the safe under the cash register open, and empty.

  “You’ve been robbed,” Claire said from behind her. “We should call the police.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” Bay said, throwing her hands in the air. “Josh is going to think you’re having him arrested!”

  “I don’t care what Josh thinks,” Henry said. Bay wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “We’re not calling the police,” Sydney said. “I know who it was, and she’s long gone by now. Let’s all just go home.”

  They filed out. Sydney closed the safe and followed them. Before she turned out the lights, she looked over to her station.

  Violet had taken the money, but left the bouncy swing.

  * * *

  When Sydney, Henry and Bay got home, Bay went immediately to her room.

  “Go to bed,” Sydney told Henry as they wearily climbed the stairs together. Parenting was tough. Maybe she was crazy to want to do it again. “Get what sleep you can. I’m going to talk to her.”

  “You don’t need me in there?”

  Sydney shook her head. “You did the boy stuff. I’ll do the girl stuff.”

  “Good night,” Henry said, kissing her. He walked down the hall, but then stopped at their bedroom door. “Was Tyler wearing two different shoes tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “I should have thought of that. I don’t think we embarrassed Bay enough.”

  Sydney smiled as she opened Bay’s door.

  “It wasn’t Josh’s fault,” Bay immediately said. She was sitting on her bed, hugging a pillow. “I didn’t tell him I was grounded. We just talked. That’s all we do.”

  Sydney walked over to her. The box of Mallomars and the two cups of tea, now cold, were on the bedside table where she’d left them earlier that night, when she’d discovered Bay missing. Her first thought had been that someone had taken her daughter and the panic had made the room pulse in time to her heartbeat. Until she’d found Bay’s phone outside, it had never occurred to her that Bay would sneak out on her own. Bay never snuck around. She was too upfront. But Bay had entered the Matteson world before Sydney could stop her. Upfront wasn’t in their vocabulary. “That’s funny, because as of last Saturday he didn’t even know who you were, according to you.”

  “We just started, you know, hanging out on Monday. I wrote him a note earlier this year, telling him if he ever wanted to talk, I would wait outside school in the afternoons.”

  “You wrote him a note?” A note. There was no time in your life when the power of a note was this strong, how writing down what you felt made it real somehow, how awaiting a reply felt glacial, like eons passing.

  Bay tossed the pillow aside and slid down the bed, staring at the ceiling where she had taped old covers of tattered paperbacks she’d bought at a library sale years ago. She would read a book hundreds of times, carrying it with her until the pages were torn and the covers were falling off, then she’d paste the covers to the ceiling where she could stare at them, like remembering a good dream. “The first time I saw him, really saw him, was the first day of school, and I knew I belonged with him.”

  Of all the things she could have followed in Sydney’s footsteps, it had to be this. “Oh, Bay.”

  “I don’t know what’s so wrong about it.”

  Sydney sat on the bed beside her. She took the pillow Bay had tossed aside and tucked it behind her back. She paused to compose her thoughts, then said, “I dated Josh’s father in high school.”

  Bay immediately sat back up.

  “Not just casual dating. We were inseparable, together for three years. I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone at the time. But I also loved what being with him meant, that I belonged to that group, that I was accepted. We talked about marriage. I would go on and on about the wedding and about living in the Matteson mansion.”

  “What happened?” Bay asked.

  “He broke up with me on graduation day. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I thought you understood.’ Matteson sons follow in their fathers’ footsteps. They go into the family business. They marry girls from the right families. I wasn’t one of those girls. That’s why I left Bascom. He broke my heart, but more than that, he broke my dream of being normal. I figured, if normal wasn’t here, I was going to find it somewhere else. But I never did.”

  “That’s why you left?”

  Sydney nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Sydney reached out and touched Bay’s cheek, which was still red from the cold, making her look like a china doll with painted circles of blush. “I guess I thought that why I left was less important than why I came back.”

  Bay looked at Sydney as if seeing her for the first time through adult eyes. Bay was so close to that shore it almost brought tears to Sydney’s eyes. She was too damn emotional these days. “There’s so much I don’t know about you,” Bay said.

  Sydney knew this day would come. She’d just been hoping to put it off for another few years. Say, twenty. She said with resignation, “Ask away.”

  Bay crossed her legs yoga-style and settled in. “Was Hunter John Matteson your first?”

  “Yes. Next question.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Older than you. Next question.”

  “What was your mother like?”

  Sydney wasn’t expecting that one. She thought about it and said, “I don’t remember her very well. She left Bascom when she was eighteen, too. She came back for a while. She was nine months’ pregnant with me and Claire was six. A few years later, she left again for good. She was a troubled person. Evanelle once said that it was because she ate an apple from the tree in the backyard and saw what the biggest event in her life would be. She saw how she would die in a horrible car pileup, and that’s the reason she went so wild, like she was trying to make something even bigger happen, so it wouldn’t come true.”

  “She ate an apple?” Bay grimaced involuntarily at the thought of it. “Waverleys never eat the apples!”

  “I don’t know if it’s true, sweetheart. I’ve never put much stock in it. It’s like a lot of things when it comes to our family. Rumor. Myth. I think she might have had mental problems. What I remember of her was manic, and when she wasn’t manic, she was depressed. And Grandmother Mary tried her best with me and Claire, but she was a peculiar lady.”

  Bay started playing with the ends of her long hair, making tiny braids. “What was your mother’s Waverley m
agic?”

  “Claire and I have talked about it. We don’t really know.” Sydney shrugged.

  “Is that all you remember of her?”

  “I have one strange memory of her. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this,” Sydney said with a laugh. “I was young, maybe three or four, and I was sitting in the grass somewhere, maybe the garden, sweating and crying because I’d fallen and scraped my elbow. My mother knelt in front of me, trying to tell me it was all right. That didn’t work. The more attention I got, the more hysterical I became. I was a little … dramatic as a child.”

  Bay smiled, as if not much had changed.

  “Anyway, I remember her saying to me, ‘Watch this.’ She opened her hand in front of me, but nothing was there. But then she blew on the palm of her hand and sparkles of ice flew into the air and landed on my face. It was so soft and cool.” Sydney put her hand to her face, remembering. “I’ll never know how she did that. It was the middle of summer. I was so startled I stopped crying.”

  Bay was transfixed, like Sydney was telling her a fairy tale. Which she supposed she was. The Waverley version. “Who is your father?”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney said. “She never told me. Claire doesn’t know who her father is, either. But we’re fairly certain it’s not the same man.”

  “What did Grandmother Mary think of you dating Hunter John Matteson?” Bay asked, dashing Sydney’s hope that they wouldn’t get back to that.

  Sydney took a deep breath, trying to remember something she’d tried so hard to forget. She reached for the Mallomars. She took one and handed one to Bay. “She liked it. I think she was a little conceited when she was younger, and she liked to think of me marrying into the Matteson family as her coup. A little like how teaching Claire to be such a good cook was her coup. We are her legacies, for good or for bad.”