by Susan Wiggs
“Right, like you’re not.”
He had her there. Daisy didn’t see any way around being a worrier, though. Having a kid tended to do that to a person.
“Maybe if we pool all our worries,” she suggested, “we’ll generate enough energy to fuel the van.”
“I only need enough to make it to the end of the month.” Zach guzzled the beer, belched and fell quiet, staring out the window at the utter nothingness that was the town of Avalon late at night. The locals joked that the sidewalks rolled up by nine, but that was an exaggeration. It was more like eight.
She and Zach didn’t need to fill the silence with chitchat. They’d known each other since high school, and they’d both endured their share of trials. While she became a teen age mom, Zach had been dealing with his dad’s financial meltdown and subsequent incarceration on corruption charges. Not exactly a recipe for serenity.
Yet somehow they had each muddled through, a little worse for the wear but still standing. Zach was methodically working his way through a mountain of student debt. And Daisy had made a series of bad choices. She felt as if she were living life backward, starting with having a kid while still a teenager. Then came school and work, and all that was swinging into balance, but one thing eluded her. It was the thing they photographed nearly every weekend, toasted and celebrated by her ever-changing array of clients. Love and marriage. These things shouldn’t matter so much. She wished she could believe her life was just fine, but she’d be kidding her self.
It was a challenge to avoid looking back and second-guessing herself. She could have had a shot at marriage. A surprise Christmas Eve proposal had come at her out of the blue and sent her reeling. Even now, months later, the very thought of it made her hyperventilate. Thinking back about a night that might have changed her life, she flexed her hands on the steering wheel. Did I make the right choice? Or did I run away from the one thing that could have saved me?
“So, is Charlie with his dad tonight?” Zach asked, breaking the silence.
“Yep. They’re the dynamic duo.” She slowed the van to avoid a small family of raccoons. The largest of the three paused, turning glittery eyes to the headlamps before herding the two small ones into the ditch.
Charlie’s father, Logan O’Donnell, had been as messed up and careless as Daisy herself was, back in the teen years. But like Daisy, Logan had been transformed by parenthood. And when she needed him to take Charlie for the night, he gladly stepped up.
“And what about you and Logan?” Zach pried.
She sniffed. “If there’s anything to report, you’ll be the first to know.” Things between her and Logan were complicated. That was the only word she could think of to describe the situation. Complicated.
“But—”
“But nothing.” She turned a corner and emerged onto the town square. At this hour, no one was around. Zach lived in a small vintage walk-up over the Sky River Bakery. As teenagers, they had both had jobs there. Now a new generation of kids managed the giant mixers and proofing machines in the wee hours of the morning. Hard to believe, but Daisy and Zach weren’t the kids anymore.
She swung into a parking spot. “I’ll be in the studio by ten tomorrow,” she said. “I promised Andrea a sneak peek by next Saturday.”
“Geez,” he groaned. “Do you know how many hours I shot?”
“Actually, I do. It’s only a sneak peek. I like this bride, Zach. I want to make her happy.”
“Isn’t that the groom’s job?”
“She has four younger sisters.”
“I know. They couldn’t stay away from the camera.” He shouldered open the passenger-side door and stepped down. The glow of the streetlights turned his hair to amber.
“Maybe they couldn’t stay away from you,” she suggested.
“Yeah, right.” He was probably blushing, but in this light, she couldn’t tell. Zach had never been much for dating. Though he’d never admit it, he’d been carrying a torch for Daisy’s stepsister, Sonnet, since preschool.
“’Night, Zach,” she said.
“See you tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late.”
He knew her well. She was usually pretty wired after an event and couldn’t resist loading the raw files. She liked to post a single, perfect teaser shot on her blog to give the bride a taste of things to come.
Her own place was an unassuming small house on Oak Street. She took her time letting herself in. One of the worst things about raising Charlie with a guy she didn’t live with was that she missed her son like mad when he was with his father.
She locked the door behind her, and the all-pervasive silence took her breath away. She’d never been very good with all-pervasive silence. It made her think too hard, and when she thought too hard, she worried. And when she worried, she made herself insane. And when she went insane, that made her a bad mom. It was a cycle that refused to end.
Maybe she should get a dog. Yes, a friendly, bouncy dog to greet her at the door with swirls and yips of delight. A funny, nonjudgmental dog that would completely distract her from the things she didn’t want to think about.
“A dog,” she said, trying out the concept aloud. “Genius.”
Wandering into the study nook, she took out a small deck of memory cards from the wedding and watched the images load, one by one. Some were familiar, shots she took at every wedding, because they were expected—the first dance, with the couple silhouetted dramatically against the night sky, the parents of the bride and groom sharing a toast. Others were unique, a pose or a look she’d never seen before. She’d caught the bride’s grandmother cross-eyed as she slurped down an oyster, the groom’s uncle making a rapturous face during a song, one of the bridesmaids visibly ducking to avoid catching the bouquet. And then there was one shot, the one she’d expected, that turned out to be transcendent.
It was the last-minute frame of the bride and groom hiking across the meadow, hand in hand. It told a story, it said who they were, it expressed them as a couple. Two together, linked by a handclasp that looked eternal.
Minus Jake, she reminded herself, opening the editing program. The pooping dog in the background would have to go. As she busily cleaned up the photo, she studied the gleam of light on the bending fronds of grass, the distorted reflection of the couple in the water, the unfurling emotion in the bride and the joy shining from the groom. The shot was good. Better than good. Entry-in-a-photo-competition good, that’s what it was, she thought.
As the notion crossed her mind, her gaze flicked to a folder in the tray on the desk. That was where she was supposed to file her entries to the photo exhibit contest for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The top entries each year would be placed on exhibit in the MoMA’s Emerging Artists section. The competition was the fiercest in the industry, because being selected would open doors and launch careers. Daisy was dying to submit her work.
However, the tray was woefully empty, the file folder like a barely cracked-open door showing only blankness inside. All the good intentions in the world, all the lofty ambitions, could not give Daisy the one thing she needed to complete the project and submit her materials. The gift of time. Sometimes she caught herself wondering when her life was going to finally be her life.
Pushing aside the frustration, she refocused on the bridal photo and quickly posted it on Wendela’s company blog, titling the entry, “Andrea and Brian sneak peek.” Sitting back and gazing at the shot, Daisy indulged in a private cry. She didn’t want people to know the sight of happy couples made her cry. She didn’t want anyone to see her need, her desire, her knife-sharp longing. Alone in the small hours of the night, she cried. And then she shut down her computer.
By then it was one o’clock in the morning, and she needed to get to bed. As she went around turning off the lights, she noticed a few envelopes on the floor below the mail slot of the front door. She bent down and went through the small stack. Fliers and junk mail. Solicitations, notices about neighborhood meetings. Coupons she would never use. And…a cream-colored envel
ope, addressed in a very familiar hand.
Her heart skipped a beat. She ripped open the thick envelope.
You are hereby invited to the commissioning of Julian Maurice Gastineaux as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force ROTC, Detachment 520 at Cornell University on Saturday 14, May at 1300 hrs in the Statler Auditorium.
On the back, scrawled in that same familiar bold script, was the message, “Hope you’ll come. Really need to talk to you. J.”
So much for sleep.
It was nuts, realizing a simple name on a piece of paper could send her spiraling through a past filled with what-ifs and paths not taken. Because Julian Gastineaux, soon to be Second Lieutenant Julian Gastineaux, was her own personal path not taken.
Two
Camp Kioga, Ulster County, New York
Five years earlier
The summer before her senior year of high school, the last thing Daisy wanted to do was stay in a musty lakeside cabin with her dad and little brother. She had to, though. They were making her do it.
Although neither of her parents said much to her and Max, their family was in the process of breaking up. Her mom and dad couldn’t keep up the pretense of being a happy couple, even though they’d been trying for years. Her dad’s solution was to retreat from their Upper East Side home to the Bellamy family compound—historic Camp Kioga on Willow Lake—and act like everything was dandy.
Well, nothing was dandy and Daisy was determined to prove it. She’d packed her bag with a summer’s worth of hair products, an iPod, an SLR camera and a goodly supply of pot and cigarettes.
Though determined to ignore the mesmerizing beauty of the lakeside camp, she felt herself being unsettled by the deep isolation, the pervasive quiet, the haunting views.
The last thing she was expecting, out here in the middle of nowhere, was to meet someone. Turned out a boy her age had also been sentenced to summer camp, though for entirely different reasons.
When he first walked into the main pavilion at the dinner hour, she felt a funny kind of heat swirl through her and thought maybe the summer was not going to be so boring after all.
He looked like every dangerous thing grown-ups warned her about. He had a tall, lean, powerful body and a way of carrying himself that exuded confidence, maybe even arrogance. He was of mixed race, with tattoos marking his café au lait skin, pierced ears and long dreadlocks.
He sauntered over to the buffet table where she was standing, as if drawn to the invisible heat coursing through her.
“Just so you know,” said the tall kid, “this is the last place I wanted to spend the summer.”
“Just so you know,” Daisy said, making herself sound as cool as he did, “it wasn’t my choice, either. What’re you doing here, anyway?”
“It was either this—working on this dump with my brother, Connor—or a stint in juvey,” he said easily.
Juvey. He tossed off the word, clearly assuming she was familiar with the concept. She wasn’t, though. Juvenile detention was something that happened to kids from the ghetto or barrio.
“You’re Connor’s brother?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t look like brothers.” Connor was all clean-cut and WASPy, a lumberjack from the wilds of the North, while Julian looked dark…and dangerous, alternative’s alternative.
“Half brothers,” he said nonchalantly. “Different dads. Connor doesn’t want me here, but our mom made him look after me.”
Connor Davis was the contractor in charge of renovating Camp Kioga to get it ready for the fiftieth anniversary of Daisy’s grandparents. Everyone was supposed to be pitching in on the project, but she hadn’t expected to encounter someone like this. Even before learning his name, she sensed something fundamental about this boy. In the deepest, most mysterious way imaginable, he was destined to be important to her.
His name was Julian Gastineaux, and like her, he was between his junior and senior years of high school, but other than that, they had nothing in common. She was from New York City’s Upper East Side, the product of a privileged but unhappy family and a tony prep school. He was from a crappy area of Chino, California, downwind of the cattle lots.
Like moths around a candle flame, they danced around each other through dinner; later they were assigned cleanup duty. She didn’t raise her normal objection to the manual labor. An intimate camaraderie sprang up between them as they worked. She found herself fascinated by the ropy strength of his forearms and the sturdy breadth of his hands. As they were hanging up their dish towels, their shoulders brushed, and the brief encounter was electrifying in a way she’d never felt with a guy before. She’d known her share of guys, but this was different. She felt a weird kind of recognition that both confused and excited her.
“There’s a fire pit down by the lake,” she said, searching his strange, whiskey-colored eyes to see if he sensed anything, but she couldn’t tell. They were too new to one another. “Maybe we could go down there and have a fire.”
“Yeah, we could hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
“A couple of nights without TV or internet, and you’ll be begging for ‘Kumbaya.’”
“Right.” His cocky smile quickly and easily gave way to sweetness. Daisy wondered if he realized that.
She found her dad as he was leaving the dining room. “Can we go make a fire on the beach?” Daisy asked.
“You and Julian?” His suspicious eyes flicked from her to the tall kid.
“Duh. Yeah, Dad. Me and Julian.” She tried to maintain her attitude. She didn’t want him to think she was actually starting to like it here, stuck in this rustic Catskills camp while all her friends were partying on the beaches of the Hamptons.
To her surprise, Julian spoke up: “I promise I’ll be on my best behavior, sir.”
It was gratifying to see her dad’s eyebrows lift in surprise. Hearing the word sir come from the mouth of the Dreadlocked One was clearly unexpected.
“He will,” Connor Davis said, joining them and passing a look to his brother. The stare he fixed on Julian showed exactly which brother was in charge.
“I guess it’s all right,” her dad said. He could probably tell Connor would kick Julian’s ass if the kid stepped out of line. “I might come out to check on you later.”
“Sure, Dad,” Daisy said, forcing brightness into her tone. “That’d be great.”
She and Julian were both pretty lame at making a fire, but she didn’t really care. They used a box of kitchen matches down to the final one before the pile of twigs finally caught. When the breeze wafted smoke right at her, she happily wedged herself snugly against Julian. He didn’t put the moves on her, but he didn’t move away, either. In fact, simply being near him felt amazing, not like making out with guys from school, under the bleachers at the athletic field, or at the Brownstones at Columbia, where she lied about her age in order to get into a college party.
Once the flames were dancing nicely in the fire pit, she saw him studying the reflection on the black surface of the lake.
“I was here once before,” he said. “When I was eight.”
“Seriously? You came to summer camp?”
He laughed a little. “It’s not like I had a choice. Connor was a counselor here that year, and he was stuck watching me that summer.”
She waited for a further explanation, but he stayed silent. “Because…” she prompted.
His smile faded. “Because there was no one else.”
The loneliness of his words, the thought of a child having no one but a half brother, struck her in a tender place. She decided not to press him for details, but man. She wanted to know more about this guy. “So what’s your story now?”
“My mother’s an out-of-work performer—sings, dances, acts,” he said.
What, did he think she was going to let him off the hook? “That’s your mother’s story. I was wondering about yours.”
“I got in trouble with the law in May,” he said.
Now that, she tho
ught, was interesting. Fascinating. Dangerous. She leaned forward, pressing even closer. “So what was the incident? Did you steal a car? Deal drugs?” The minute she said the words, she wanted to die. She was an idiot. He’d think she was racial profiling him.
“I raped a girl,” he informed her. “Maybe I raped three.”
“Okay,” she said, “I deserved that. And I know you’re lying.” She looped her arms around her drawn-up knees.
He was quiet for a bit, as if trying to make up his mind whether or not to be ticked off. “Let’s see. They caught me using the high dive at a public pool after dark, skate-boarding down a spiral parking lot ramp…stuff like that. A couple of weeks ago, I got caught bungee jumping off a highway bridge with a homemade bungee cord. The judge ordered a change of scenery for me this summer, said I had to do something productive. Trust me, helping renovate a summer camp in the Catskills is the last thing I want to do.”
The image she had of him did a quick one-eighty. “Why would you go bungee jumping off a bridge?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, let me see. You could break every bone in your body. Wind up paralyzed. Brain dead. Or plain dead.”
“People wind up dead every day.”
“Yeah, but jumping off bridges tends to hasten the process.” She shuddered.
“It was awesome. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve always liked flying.”
He’d given her the perfect opening. She reached into her pocket and took out an eyeglasses case, flipping it open to reveal a fat, misshapen joint. “Then you’ll like this.”
With the glowing end of a twig, she lit up and inhaled. “This is my kind of flying.” Hoping she’d succeeded in shocking him, she held it out to Julian.
“I’ll pass,” he said.
What? Pass? Who passed on a hit from a joint?
He must have read her mind, because he grinned. “I need to watch myself. See, the judge in California gave my mother a choice—I had to leave town for the summer or do time in juvenile detention. By coming here, I get the bungee-jumping incident wiped off my record.”
