As Beth went on about Leona’s latest act of defiance, wanting to drop out of high school and move in with twenty-year-old Dave, Kelsey let her thoughts drift elsewhere—to her mom and the drowned boy, Kevin; to Melanie all alone at the lake house, probably obsessing in that uniquely Melanie way she had; to the alternate reality of the lake house in the 1970s, with her mom’s teenage years unfurling, hour by hour, day by day, and slipping away into the ether, unobserved; and to Everett and his hazel eyes and cute butt. She was missing it, all of it, and she couldn’t help feeling both resentful and slightly desperate.
“So what do you think?” Beth asked with a worried look on her face.
“Umm...” Kelsey chewed the bite-size Milky Way to buy herself time. She had no idea what her boss was asking her. She vaguely recalled hearing Beth say something about her parents’ house in Tennessee. Is she planning to send Leona to stay with them, hoping that their influence will reform her wild ways? “I think that could work...” she said in as noncommittal of a voice as she could muster.
“You do?” Beth leaped up from her chair and squashed her in a hug. “Oh, Kelsey! You have no idea how much this means to me! I know it’s going to be the busiest weekend ever, but there’s no one I trust more to take care of things around here than you. And I’m just so hopeful that a visit to my parents will do both Leona and me some good. And I promise you, I promise you, I will make this up to you. How does a nice, long paid one-week vacation sound? As soon as we’re not so busy...”
She rattled on, but Kelsey was too distressed to listen. Oh crap. She’d just agreed to work that Sunday and Monday—her only two days off, the light at the end of her tunnel, the days that she had promised Melanie she would return to Lake Indigo and they would dive back into the time portal with a vengeance. It was a holiday weekend, no less, when so many families boarded their dogs, and it was bound to be pure chaos.
“Just to clarify,” she ventured, “Josh isn’t available this Sunday and Monday?”
“He’s already working,” Beth said distractedly, scrolling through her cell phone. “I’m going to text Leona right away. She loves her grandpa. If anyone can get her to see reason, it’s him.”
“What about Alan?”
“He asked off ages ago. He and his family always go to their cabin up north for Memorial Day.”
Lucky him, Kelsey thought. “Have you considered asking Taylor to help out?” she asked, her last resort, even though she knew she was grasping at straws. Their receptionist was a sweet girl who loved dogs and was always offering to get more involved in the animal-care side of things, but she wasn’t a quick learner. She did best following basic directions, which was tedious for whoever else was working with her.
Beth made a face. “In a real pinch, maybe. But not over Memorial Day weekend. I know you and Josh can handle it, though. You guys make such a great team.” She stood up, cell phone still in hand, and started walking toward the door. It was clear Kelsey was being dismissed.
How am I going to break the news to Melanie? Her sister already thought she wasn’t pulling her weight and was even more frantic to have her around since the discovery of the door. And it would be weeks until Kelsey could drive out there again for a visit, weeks until she could glimpse her teenage mom—if she was still a teenager by that time—weeks until she could enjoy sitting out on the twilit dock, eating strawberry shortcake, and weeks until she could flirt with Everett again, if he was even still working on the basement at that point.
Beth opened the door, and Kelsey nearly collided with Josh, who was standing right outside. Behind him, astonishingly, was Melanie, dressed in a crisp white blouse and a denim skirt. Seeing her sister in her place of employment was like seeing a minor celebrity on the street, like spotting the Channel 4 news anchor in the restaurant booth next to hers. Kelsey did a double take. Her first thought was that Melanie somehow already knew about Beth’s request to have her work more days, and she was there to take Beth to task. No, Melanie was shrewd, but she wasn’t clairvoyant.
“Wow,” Kelsey said, stepping forward to embrace her sister and give Melanie’s hazelnut braid an emphatic tug. “What a nice surprise! What are you doing here?”
“I realized I couldn’t come all the way from Ohio and not see the place where you spend so much of your time,” Melanie said. She was smiling broadly, but her gaze was directed somewhere over Kelsey’s left shoulder. “I wanted to meet the people and dogs you speak so fondly of.” Her eyes flicked guiltily toward Kelsey, and Kelsey’s initial wariness slunk off into a corner.
Is Melanie finally making an effort? Is she really here to meet my coworkers and get a tour of the place, in the same way I flew out to Cleveland to tour the campus when she got her tenure-track gig? Her stomach gave a cautious little leap. Melanie was taking her seriously for once and showing an interest in her work. It dropped back into place within seconds, and she began wondering what Melanie would think of Green Valley Pet Lodge and if her suspicions would be confirmed that Kelsey really was a glorified pet sitter. Maybe she would wrinkle her nose at the funky smells back in Pooch Place. And afterward, she might try to give Kelsey another pep talk about returning to college and making something worthwhile of herself. Kelsey’s hackles rose at the thought. Slow down, girl, she warned herself, and don’t assume the worst of Melanie. She hadn’t said or done anything wrong—yet.
“Is this your sister?” Beth asked, grabbing both of Melanie’s hands and squeezing them. “The doctor?”
“Not that kind of doctor,” Melanie corrected with a charming, self-deprecating smile. “I teach college biology. You must be Beth. I’ve heard so many good things about you.”
So Melanie did listen to her, at least some of the time. Kelsey rocked back on her heels and watched the two women interact. Nearby, Josh was trying to catch her eye. He wiggled both eyebrows upward in a meaningful way, and she remembered all the less-than-flattering things she’d confided to him about Melanie. She wiggled her eyebrows back at him.
He hooked his thumb in the direction of Pooch Place. “I’ll take care of the dogs, K. K.,” he mouthed. “You take your time.”
“Thanks,” she mouthed back to him. “I won’t be long.”
“I was trying to catch you around your lunch break,” Melanie said, glancing over her shoulder as Josh departed. “I know you guys are swamped this week, but I was hoping to steal Kelsey away for a quick bite to eat.”
“I don’t know—” Kelsey started, thinking about all of her unfinished duties piling up and all of the new pets arriving that afternoon, but Beth interrupted her.
“Of course! You two go! Enjoy yourself. Josh and I can take care of things. It’s the least I can do.” Beth was clearly delighted that she was able to do a good turn for Kelsey so quickly. But Kelsey hoped Beth didn’t consider it paying her back completely and that a week of paid vacation was still on the table. The two things were hardly equivalent.
“Great,” Melanie said. “Thanks so much. Where should we go, Kels-Bels?”
“I know just the place.”
THEY SETTLED INTO A cozy corner table at Kelsey’s favorite café in Bartlett: Soup, Sandwiches and Such. On the drive, Melanie had filled her in on the photo shoot and Everett’s day off while the basement was drying out. Kelsey had broached the subject of the Sunday and Monday shifts she had accidentally agreed to pick up, but instead of seeming pissed off, Melanie had seemed only slightly disappointed and even sympathetic. She had only nice things to say about the pet lodge—how friendly Beth and Josh were and how they clearly both thought the world of Kelsey, how clean the kennels were, and how cool the playground equipment in the fenced-in yard was.
As Kelsey sat across from her sister and sipped her herbal tea, a sense of well-being settled over her. Yes, she still had to work for ten days straight, and yes, she and Melanie were still at odds about selling the house, and yes, her heart still hurt for her mom and the tragedy that had happened the summer she was sixteen, but there she was, sitting with Me
lanie, and they were acting like real sisters, or at least the kind of sisters Kelsey had always wanted to be. I wish Mom could see us like this. Maybe it would somehow erase the mean comments Kelsey had made about Melanie right before her mom’s pulmonary embolism. It saddened her that her mom had died thinking her daughters didn’t get along.
Their lunch arrived, and Melanie leaned forward on her elbows. “I need to confess something,” she said, and Kelsey was tempted to stop her. Whatever Melanie was going to confess was probably going to ruin their pleasant moment, and she wanted to linger in it as long as possible. She studied her sister’s face and read the guilt there she had noticed earlier—not guilt that she had never shown an interest in Kelsey’s job before but guilt over something else.
“Last night, I went inside the closet,” Melanie said.
Kelsey almost laughed. It sounded ridiculous spoken in such a melodramatic hush. She stared down at her pomegranate-and-millet salad and tried not to embarrass herself by shouting. Is this why Melanie wanted to treat me to lunch? So we would have an audience and things would have to remain civil? Leave it to Melanie to try to orchestrate even Kelsey’s reaction. She always, always, always had to have the upper hand. She had been the one to dictate their time-traveling rules, but since they were her rules and meant to suit only her, she didn’t mind flouting them.
“Why am I not surprised?” Kelsey scowled at her sister.
“I’m so sorry,” Melanie rushed on. “I know I’m the one who suggested we always go in there together, and I know there’s no excuse. But I was just so worried about how Mom was doing after we left her, and I couldn’t sleep, and I thought just peeking in on her for five minutes would put my mind at ease.” She fingered the paper-napkin-wrapped bundle of silverware, avoiding Kelsey’s disapproving gaze. “But it didn’t. I saw something that made things worse.”
Kelsey considered not taking the bait—for about two seconds. She imagined her mom getting fired from her lifeguarding job and the small lake community shunning her and wondered if her mom had been clinically depressed or maybe even suicidal. “What did you see?”
“Mom was in bed, clearly grieving,” Melanie said. “And Vinnie was there, trying to cheer her up. They were talking and smoking cigarettes”—she widened her eyes momentarily at the mention of the cigarettes but gave no other comment and sped right on—“then Vinnie kissed Mom. And Mom kissed her back. Like a real kiss. Not a friendly peck on the cheek but serious making out.” She exhaled heavily, winded, as though she had just sprinted one hundred meters.
Kelsey sat back in her chair. “Mom was making out with Vinnie? You mean Lance, right?” Melanie had the names confused. It was an easy mistake since Vinnie was a boy’s name.
But Melanie shook her head back and forth slowly. “Not Lance. Vinnie. La-vin-ia.” Then, as though Kelsey might be dumb and needed it spelled out further, she added, “Mrs. Fletcher.”
In her mind’s eye, Kelsey saw her mom and Mrs. Fletcher standing at the kitchen counter, elbow to elbow, making sandwiches for the kids. Her mom slathered the mayonnaise on the bread. Mrs. Fletcher slapped on the slice of bologna and cut the sandwich into two halves. Her mom poured everyone glasses of cherry Kool-Aid while Mrs. Fletcher swatted Stephen’s hand away as he tried to steal more pickles. Those were the two people Melanie had seen kissing in bed—it was unfathomable.
“Are you sure you didn’t somehow misinterpret what was going on? Catch it out of context?” she asked, scooping spinach, radicchio, millet, and avocado onto her fork. “I mean Mom was grieving. She wasn’t in a good place. You said Vinnie was comforting her.”
“That’s true,” Melanie conceded, frown lines settling around her lips like parentheses. “But what I saw was pretty hard to misinterpret. They were wrapped around each other, in bed, kissing. Fully clothed, though. At least they were when I left.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Kelsey murmured around a mouthful of salad.
“I hadn’t thought of that, but I suppose you’re right,” Melanie said, and a snorting laugh escaped.
Melanie rarely snorted when she laughed, but when she did, it usually indicated the onset of a case of the giggles, which tended to set Kelsey off on her own laughing fit, too, then they fed off each other’s laughter like an explosive chain reaction. The more inappropriate the situation, the more hilarious and difficult it was to stop laughing. Once, at a funeral for their great aunt, the elderly man behind them had farted, and they had been tearfully breathless from their silent giggles until their dad had sternly ushered them outside and told them to calm down and rejoin them when they had themselves under control. They hadn’t gone back inside for twenty minutes, ten of which they’d spent laughing, and the other ten they’d spent just talking and hanging out because the funeral was boring.
Now Kelsey was laughing so hard she was worried she was going to choke. She tried to wash her food down with a swig of herbal tea, but her shaking hands caused it to dribble all over her T-shirt. “Stop it. Stop it. It’s not funny,” she wheezed, half scolding herself, half scolding Melanie.
Tears were streaming down Melanie’s face, and the couple at the table next to them was staring at them as though they’d just escaped from the looney bin.
“She started it,” Kelsey addressed them, pointing at her sister. “I swear, I can’t take her anywhere.”
This caused Melanie to laugh even harder. The couple smiled tolerantly and looked away.
Eventually, they managed to contain themselves, mostly by taking deep breaths and pointedly not looking at each other. But Kelsey could feel the giddiness just below the surface, threatening to bubble up at the slightest smirk or chuckle from Melanie. The laughing fit and the news about her mom had left her feeling hollow and muddled, like she’d just woken up from a strange but very realistic dream.
“Do you think it was their first kiss?” she asked soberly. “Like a one-time thing?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Melanie said, picking up and nibbling on her untouched croissant sandwich. “When I was leaving, I heard Mom say, ‘Stop. We can’t do this.’ So maybe it was their first time and they just got swept up in the moment. Maybe they laughed about it afterward. Or maybe Mom meant, ‘Stop, we can’t keep doing this,’ like it had been going on for a while, and it was something she wanted to put an end to. I really have no idea.”
Do you think Mom loved her? Kelsey wanted to ask next but knew it was an impossible question and one that Melanie would probably scoff at. But it was what she most wanted to know. Like a wife who had found out her husband had cheated on her: Do you love her, the other woman? Because the emotional betrayal was somehow worse than the physical one. Although that analogy didn’t work because Kelsey wasn’t the betrayed spouse in the situation, and her mom hadn’t cheated on anyone. Vinnie had come well before her mom had even met her dad. So why do I feel so betrayed?
She had always considered herself to be an open-minded person. Her best friend in high school, Ingrid, had come out as a lesbian their junior year, and Kelsey had done her best to support her, even helping her break the news to her less open-minded parents. But it was somehow very different to discover that her mom might be gay or bisexual. For starters, it was hard acknowledging her mom had a sexuality at all—the woman who wore large, shapeless nightshirts and seemed to use her bed primarily as a cozy reading place—but to imagine it as something separate from the bonds of her marriage and the birth of her children was even more problematic. Kelsey had been willing to believe that her mom had had crushes and first loves—had been tickled even by her flirtations with Lance Fletcher—but realizing Vinnie was the object of her mom’s affection somehow changed that. Why? Am I not as progressive as I thought I was?
No, she thought adamantly. It wasn’t that her mom had kissed another girl. It was that certain bedrock beliefs she had held were being shaken to the core, tiny things she’d taken for granted—for example, when Mom called cigarettes a “disgusting habit,” she meant smoking was someth
ing she had never done—and larger things she had counted on as indisputable facts—that Mom was heterosexual, she only had eyes for Dad, and she had a perfectly ordinary friendship with the neighbor lady at their summer lake house. Kelsey had anticipated—even relished—the possibility that the time portal would reveal some surprises about her mom. But she hadn’t anticipated such a big revelation. She couldn’t have when her mom had always been such a closed book.
“Well, we obviously need to figure out what their relationship was,” she said, scooting her chair closer to the table. “As soon as I finish this block of shifts, we’ll go back into the portal—together. And we’ll observe Mom and Vinnie as much as possible.”
Melanie fiddled with her braid, her eyes cast down. “But don’t you see? That’s the thing. I don’t think we should go in there anymore. It feels like a huge invasion of Mom’s privacy. Initially, it was just observing her childhood memories, like paging through pictures in a scrapbook. But now, it’s really big, personal stuff that Mom chose not to share with us. It’s like snooping in her diary but even more intrusive. I mean, would you want someone digging around in your teenage years without your permission? Viewing your stupid mistakes? Your first sexual encounters?”
Kelsey’s face felt warm. “Are you being serious? You act like we’re doing it maliciously, but we’re doing it with the best of intentions—to be close to Mom and better understand her. She never had a chance to tell us these things because she died unexpectedly. How do you know that the magic of the time portal isn’t in some way connected to her? That she isn’t showing us all the important moments that made her who she was?”
The parenthetical frown lines were back, and Melanie’s forehead was creased too. “If she was so eager for us to find the time portal, Kelsey, then why did she keep it hidden behind the tapestry? And why did she stop taking us to the lake house and rent it out to the Holloways instead?”
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