Summer Days, Starry Nights

by Vikki VanSickle

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the restaurant and how it had failed, seeming to suck the life from Mimi. She took things harder than most people, suffering from dark moods that kept her locked away for days at a time.

  Daddy had been unsure of her plan from the beginning. He’d said the kind of restaurant Mimi had in mind was too grand for the area, and no one wanted to eat a three-course meal in a building with an exposed timber frame and sand between the floorboards. But Mimi had insisted. “A little class never hurt anybody,” she’d said. Then, narrowing her eyes at Daddy, “It wouldn’t hurt you to dress up for dinner once in a while. You look like a fisherman.”

  I remember Daddy laughing. “No one in their right mind is going to be looking at me when they could be looking at you,” he’d said. “Besides, I think I look like a man who runs a resort. People see these boots and these work clothes and think, ‘Now there’s a man who knows what he’s doing.’ A man in a cummerbund and bowtie isn’t likely to help you bring your boat in, now is he?”

  Daddy had leaned in and given Mimi a quick peck on the cheek, being extra careful not to brush against her good dress in his dusty old work shirt, yellowed around the collar and smelling of lake water and sweat. “You’re the face and I’m the muscle,” he’d said.

  Mimi had smiled, taking one of Daddy’s rough, dirty hands between her own, which were clean, white and perfectly manicured. “So who’s the brains?” she’d asked, a twinkle in her eye.

  Daddy had winked at me. “Reenie, of course.”

  My heart had soared, and I’d wondered if he meant it, or if he was just buttering me up, like one of our guests.

  He knew I loved Sandy Shores with all my heart. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Sometimes Bo talked about how great it would be to travel the country on a bus with his band, doing a show in a different town every night. When he got on that train of thought, it was best just to let him go on until he’d talked himself out. He was more stubborn than a bird with a worm, and when Bo decided something was so, there was no use arguing. But the truth was, I’d take the lake and a pair of white sand dunes over a stage and a tour bus any day.

  * * *

  A door slammed and I sat straight up in bed. I glanced at Scarlett, but she was sound asleep. I inched out of bed and silently flew out the door. A razor-thin blade of light shone under the office door. I knocked softly and went in. Daddy was slumped in the chair, the phone in his hand. I could hear the dial tone from where I was standing. Bo was standing by the doorway, rain pooled on the brim of his hat.

  “Where’s Scarlett?” Daddy asked.

  “Asleep.” I looked at Bo. “Where have you been?”

  “Out searching.”

  “Any luck?”

  Bo shook his head, sending rain flying in every direction.

  “Maybe she’s on a bus. Or a train,” I suggested.

  “A train going where?” Bo said.

  I shrugged, miserable. “Maybe she had a doctor’s appointment she forgot about.”

  Daddy shook his head. “There’s nothing on the calendar.”

  “Maybe she forgot to write it down, and they called and she left in a hurry.”

  Daddy sighed. “That may be, Reenie, but where is she now? It’s ten thirty at night.”

  “Maybe she missed her bus. And the storm knocked down the telephone lines and she can’t call. She probably had to stay in town for the night.”

  “I called all the hotels in Orillia.”

  “Maybe she stayed with someone in town, a friend.”

  Bo frowned, and I looked away. We both knew Mimi had no friends in Orillia, not real ones. She often lamented the lack of eligible companions out here “in the boonies.” Maybe if she had more friends she would be here right now.

  “I’m just trying to help,” I said weakly.

  Daddy sighed. “I know that. You’re a good girl, Maureen.”

  An idea flashed in my brain. “Did she leave a note?”

  Daddy turned ashen. “A note?” he repeated.

  “You know, telling us where she was going.”

  Bo hung his hat on the hook by the door and headed for the stairs, grabbing my elbow along the way. “Come on, it’s late.”

  “But Mimi—”

  Bo whispered in my ear. “Let it alone, Reenie.”

  I wished Daddy good night and followed Bo upstairs, worried about Daddy, scared for Mimi and mad at Bo for treating me like I was stupid. Once we were on the second floor and out of earshot, Bo spun me around by my elbow and hissed, “Don’t you know when to say when? Don’t you think he’s had a hard enough day as it is?”

  I tore my elbow from his grasp and rubbed it. “It’s a reasonable question — did she leave a note?”

  “Come on, Reenie, use your brain! Even you can’t be that slow.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bo looked over his shoulder, as if expecting to see someone, but the hallway was empty. His next words left me cold. “Suicides leave notes.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but only a squeak came out. When I was able to speak, words rushed out of me like blood from a wound.

  “You’re the one who doesn’t know when to say when! Mimi would never do anything like that! She loves us! Women with three children don’t just up and kill themselves.”

  Bo looked at me sadly. “Women with three children don’t just get up and go, leaving their families behind, either.”

  I watched him climb the stairs to his attic kingdom, abandoning me with a head full of dark thoughts.

  The Mimi Hunt

  In the morning, I woke with a kink in my neck and pins and needles up and down my left arm, which Scarlett had rolled over and taken possession of in the night. She hugged it to her chest fiercely, like a teddy bear. I slipped from her grasp, one careful inch at a time.

  Outside, it was bright and sunny; a perfect summer day. Last night’s rain had washed away all the dust, and everything looked so freshly scrubbed, I wouldn’t have been surprised to reach out and find that the leaves squeaked between my fingers. Already I could hear laughter and the slap of screen doors as people headed down to the beach for the day. It felt wrong. How could it be such a beautiful day when everything was falling apart?

  Eventually, the smell of bacon got to Scarlett, and she sat up, bleary-eyed and rubbing her stomach.

  “Is Mimi back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I only just got up.”

  Scarlett brightened. “Maybe she’s downstairs!” she said, throwing on some clothes, then running ahead of me toward the dining hall, taking the stairs two at a time.

  But all we found when we got there was Elsa, frying strip bacon in a pan. Scarlett ran to the office, then up to Mimi and Daddy’s bedroom, only to return looking disappointed. But at least she didn’t cry. I doubted she could if she’d wanted to, having wrung herself dry of any tears last night.

  Elsa cracked two eggs in the pan above a piece of sputtering bacon, making a smiley face just for Scarlett. She sang songs and tickled her sides, but Scarlett remained a sober version of herself.

  After, I shooed Scarlett upstairs to wash up, and I went to talk to Daddy in the office. He looked up as I walked in, his whole face tensed and hopeful. Then his shoulders dropped, and I could tell by his sad smile that he’d hoped I was Mimi.

  He did his best to hide this by coming over, kissing the top of my head and wrapping me in a bear hug so tight, he squeezed the breath right out of me.

  “I can’t breathe!”

  Daddy released me and stepped back, ruffling my hair. “Sorry.”

  I hated to wreck the moment, but I had to ask. “Well?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  My breakfast rumbled in my stomach, threatening to make a surprise appearance all over the desk.

  “I’d appreciate it if you looked after Scarlett today.”

  “What should I tell her?”

  Daddy sighed the kind of world-weary sigh I associated w
ith Mimi, but not with him. “Tell her she’s on a shopping trip.”

  “A shopping trip?” I repeated.

  Daddy shrugged. “Maybe she is.”

  “But what are we going to do when she shows up here without any shopping bags?”

  “We don’t know that she won’t.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. It was clear by the set of his chin and the calm in his eyes that he believed it. In that moment he reminded me of Scarlett. Beautiful, sunny Scarlett, whom everyone always thought of as Mimi’s child. She may have had Mimi’s colouring and glamour, but Scarlett had inherited Daddy’s disposition — an unshakable faith in others that worried me.

  “Just keep her distracted, would you, Reenie? I’ll get the serving staff to take shifts in the office,” he said.

  “I’ll try,” I agreed, though secretly I had no idea how I was going to keep a five-year-old from thinking about her missing mother.

  It turned out I had no reason to be worried. Sometime between breakfast and getting washed up, Scarlett had decided that she was going to find Mimi herself. She emerged from her bedroom with one of Mimi’s old purses slung over her shoulder.

  “What’s in that?” I asked.

  “Supplies,” she explained, clicking open the clasp to show me her collection. “I’m going on a Mimi hunt.”

  The purse bulged with pencils, ribbons, a notepad, a plastic toy compass that had come as a gift in a cereal box, an old whistle on a red string and a fat romance novel.

  “What’s the book for?”

  “It’s Mimi’s. I took it from her nightstand. She hasn’t finished it. I thought it would remind her that she still has things to do here.”

  I dropped to my knees and hugged Scarlett just as Daddy had hugged me, so she would know she was loved. When she had had enough, she squirmed in my arms and muttered, “Ouch,” in my ear.

  I let her go, blowing the bangs from her eyes, and said, “What a great idea.”

  I took the book from Scarlett’s purse. It looked like every other romance novel. On the cover, a woman swooned in the arms of a handsome man. They both had faces drawn in lusty expressions that made me blush. Mimi had stuck a nail file between the pages as a bookmark. I opened the book to where she had left off and started to read: Jeanette could bear it no longer. The days were endless and offered no comfort without David’s warm embrace. “If I stay here, I will die,” she thought.

  I closed the book and shoved it back into the purse.

  “What’s it about?” Scarlett asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just another silly romance novel with lots of kissing.” I made smacking noises with my lips, trying to cheer her up.

  Scarlett wrinkled her nose. “Yech! Are you coming with me?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Just let me get some more supplies.”

  Scarlett rattled her purse, frowning. “I have everything here,” she insisted.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of sandwiches and lemonade, and maybe hats.”

  “Okay,” Scarlett agreed. “But hurry.”

  * * *

  I spent all morning and the better part of the afternoon trailing behind Scarlett as she marched around Sandy Shores looking for Mimi. We looked under cottages, behind the fish hut, in the trees and even in the boathouse, which was usually avoided at all costs. Bo had once told Scarlett a wild story about monster rats living in the rafters. To be fair, he’d done it to keep her from wandering in there when she was alone, and it could be a dangerous place. But Scarlett’s determination to find Mimi trumped her fear of two-headed, man-eating rats, and we searched every inch of the boathouse, Scarlett gripping my hand the whole time.

  On a beautiful day like this, most of the boats were out on the lake, or tied up at the docks, but three motorboats were housed in the building.

  “Search every one,” Scarlett insisted.

  The play of shadows against the wall and the sound of the waves slapping against the boats set me on edge, but I peeled back the tarps on all three, squinting into their dark bellies, for Scarlett’s sake. We found nothing but old lures, waterlogged maps and tangles of fishing line, which looked like old spider webs.

  Before we left, Scarlett tied an old yellow hair ribbon to the door handle. “That way we know we’ve been here,” she explained.

  My job was to take notes. I recorded our every step, along with anything that might be a clue. Down the road, near the bluffs, Scarlett found a suspiciously thinned patch of Queen Anne’s lace, the gauzy blossoms nodding in the breeze.

  “Flowers have been picked here recently!” she cried. “It’s a clue! Write it down!”

  In the playground, we found a child’s shovel, five marbles and a pair of cracked sunglasses. I recorded them in the notebook as Scarlett collected them and put them gently in her purse. She paused to examine the sunglasses, oversized with white frames, dirty from being buried in the sand.

  “They aren’t Mimi’s,” I said softly.

  Scarlett turned on me, rage crossing her face like a storm cloud. “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything.”

  I didn’t scold her, I didn’t even contradict her. I just nodded and wrote, Sunglasses, white, by the slide in the playground. Scarlett tied one ribbon to a metal link in the chain of the swing set and one to the stem of a particularly tall dandelion.

  “Are you hungry? Do you want a sandwich?” I asked.

  Scarlett shook her head. “Detectives don’t get hungry,” she said.

  * * *

  That night, Scarlett took the marbles she had found in the playground and put them in a dish on her nightstand. She had washed them in soapy water until they shone as good as new, leaving a gritty ring of sand on the white enamel of the bathroom sink.

  “What are those for?” I asked.

  “Luck,” she said. “Five marbles for five Starrs.”

  Then she picked them up, one by one, and bid them each good night with a kiss before settling them back in the dish.

  “Good night, Daddy; good night, Bo; good night, Reenie; good night, Scarlett; good night, Mimi, wherever you are.”

  Five Marbles for Five Starrs

  After two days, it became clear that the Mimi hunt was a bust. Scarlett’s optimism began to flicker, and I was desperate to do whatever I could to keep its flame alive. She followed me around like a little rain cloud, gloomy and sad. And so I did whatever I could to distract her. I took her fishing, and we collected flowers to make bouquets for all the tables in the dining hall. I even taught her to climb the Lookout, my favourite tree. It dominated our front lawn, and if you went up far enough, you could see for miles around. Scarlett took to climbing like it was something she had been born doing, without a lick of fear or hesitation. But best of all, I knew Mimi wouldn’t approve. It felt like a small victory, teaching her to do something that Mimi wouldn’t like. If she was so worried about us, then where was she?

  One night, I spied three figures silhouetted in the window of the office. Daddy, Bo and someone else: someone tall, wearing a hat. I peered around the lodge and saw a police car parked on the grass. My stomach lurched.

  “Scarlett, you go on up and get your PJs on. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “I want to see Daddy.”

  “No!” I practically shouted it.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s busy. He’ll come up later.”

  I must have sounded serious, either that or Scarlett was too tired to argue, because she pushed open the screen door and made her way up the stairs. I followed her in, but turned and headed in the opposite direction, toward the office. The door was shut, but voices drifted into the hallway. They were low, but they didn’t sound angry or sad. Daddy answered on the first knock, but no one opened the door.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Reenie. Can I come in?”

  The door swung open and I blinked in the light. Bo was leaning against the desk and Daddy was showing the police chief, Chief Bowen, his fishing rod.
Chief Bowen touched the brim of his hat and smiled at me. My heart felt like it was clenched inside a cruel fist. He was wearing his police hat, which meant this was an official visit, despite the casual way he was smiling at me.

  “Good evening, Reenie. You’re getting tall.”

  I couldn’t be bothered with manners. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where’s my mother?”

  “Reenie, go on up to bed. We’re just talking through the events with Chief Bowen here. There’s nothing to worry about,” Daddy said.

  Wrong, I thought. There is everything to worry about. “But I—”

  “I’ll come up later when we’re done and kiss you good night.”

  I had said practically the same thing to Scarlett minutes before. I blushed, embarrassed to be treated like a five-year-old in front of the police chief.

  I made my way upstairs and fell into bed without even brushing my teeth or washing my face. I stepped out of my shorts but left my shirt on. I couldn’t be bothered with PJs. Scarlett came in from the bathroom smelling like toothpaste and trees and joined me in the bed, wrapping herself around one arm and resting her chin on my shoulder. It was too hot to be that close, but I didn’t have the heart to pry her off.

  “Kiss the marbles,” she murmured in my ear.

  I picked up the marbles and kissed each one, whispering, “Good night Daddy; good night Bo; good night Reenie; good night Scarlett; good night Mimi, wherever you are.”

  Within minutes Scarlett fell asleep, leaving me lying awake with nothing to do but think. Daddy says too much thinking is bad for a person, and that it’s just as important to get out and do things. Maybe that was Mimi’s problem. Too much thinking had poisoned her mind and now she had gone and done something crazy. And what about me? Surely talking things over with me was better than leaving me alone in the dark thinking about them?

  Downstairs, I heard a door click closed, and then a car started and rumbled into the night. Chief Bowen had left. I could still hear Daddy and Bo in the office. They were having one of their secret, grown-up meetings that I wasn’t invited to. Daddy said it was because someone had to stay with Scarlett, but I knew it was because he thought I was too young for such conversations. That stung almost as much as Bo’s stupid, thoughtless comments about Mimi. I spent all day entertaining Scarlett and all night sleeping beside her in case she woke up crying, or needed a glass of water. I made sure she got enough sun and fresh air so that she was tuckered out by nightfall and slept soundly, even without Mimi to tuck her in. Hadn’t I earned a place in important family discussions?