She took her cell phone with her outside to the window boxes, where she’d learned was the best place to make a call.
“Is Charles Kingstad available?”
“One moment, please. May I ask who’s calling?”
“His daughter. Melanie.”
As she waited to be transferred, she plucked out a few stubborn weeds and tossed them on the grass.
“Melanie! How are you doing, kiddo? It’s so nice to hear from you,” her dad said. He sounded genuinely delighted, even though she knew that on a Friday afternoon, he was probably swamped with last-minute preparations for a Monday trial.
“I’m good, Dad. I’m good. I just wanted to let you know the lake house is officially on the market. I emailed you a link to the listing a little while ago.”
“Really? Wow, that was fast. Hang on. Let me see if I can find it.” She heard some paper shuffling and computer clicking. “Oh, here it is. Wow. That’s beautiful. Just beautiful.” More clicking. “Simply lovely. And the asking price seems just right. You must have a real pro working for you. Well done. I couldn’t be happier with this, Melanie. You girls are doing a great job. I’m sure it will sell fast, then you can use the money to make some investments, build an addition on your home, buy plane tickets to come visit us, whatever.” He laughed.
“Thanks, Dad. How are you?”
“Oh, you know, busy as usual. Catching up after the long weekend. Laila and I took the kids up to Phoenix to visit her parents and go to a water park. I’ve been digging out ever since. Hold on.” A short muffled conversation that Melanie couldn’t quite make out followed. “Sorry about that. Kelsey told me you girls were sticking around the lake for Memorial Day and crashing that barbecue over on Harris Beach. How was it? Do they still make those giant cream puffs? Man, I miss those. Even better than the ones at the state fair.”
“Nope, no cream puffs anymore, but we still had a nice time. We met our new neighbors.”
“Glad to hear it,” her dad said amiably. “So the basement renovation is almost finished, then? Have you been happy with the quality of the guy’s work? Remind me—it comes with a warranty, right? You should definitely include that in the property disclosure statement. Buyers will be looking for it.”
“Okay, will do. Thanks. Yeah, I’ve been pretty happy so far with how it’s turning out.” Melanie fingered the satiny petals of a pink impatiens. The flowers were the prettiest she’d ever seen them, perhaps because she was out there talking on the phone and watering them so often. “About those neighbors. They’re staying in the Fletchers’ house, and I wondered...”
“Oh, did Fletch sell?” She heard clicking in the background, quiet, like he didn’t want her to hear.
“I don’t know. That’s why I wondered if you knew anything about it.”
“When we first started renting the place, they were still spending their summers there, but that was quite a while ago. I obviously haven’t kept in touch.”
His “obviously” sounded bitter, and for the millionth time, Melanie wondered what exactly had happened that last summer they had spent together at the lake house as a family—the summer that Jilly had almost drowned. It had something to do with Vinnie, Melanie was pretty damn sure.
“Do Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher know that Mom died?” she asked.
“Of course. They sent a flower arrangement, if I remember correctly. Something big and expensive, I’m sure. They didn’t make it to the funeral, though.” There it was again, that bitterness, like he was carefully spitting each word out as if it were a cold, hard seed. Where is it coming from? Was there really an affair like Kelsey suspects? And if so, did Dad find out about it? Is that why we rented the place to the Holloways abruptly and never returned? He had never let on to Melanie and Kelsey, but then again, their mom had never let on that she had once been in love with Mrs. Fletcher either. Perhaps both her parents were just awfully good at hiding the truth.
“Dad, that last summer at the lake...” Melanie started. Why am I doing this? She had warned Kelsey against digging into the past, and there she was, doing the same thing. She was just as hungry, just as driven to make sense of it all as her sister. During her life, their mom had been like a folded paper fan to them, and they were slowly starting to unfurl her, fold by fold, to see the delicate, ornate pattern painted on her skin. It was hard to let that go, to simply snap the fan shut once she knew what fascinating complexities were inside. “Why did you and Mom decide to stop spending our summers there?”
“A lot of things, really,” her dad said, and the bitterness was gone. So not the discovery of an affair? Or is he just a really good actor? “I could only come out on the weekends to see you guys because I was still working in downtown Milwaukee. And the whole time I was there, I couldn’t enjoy myself because I was doing little odd jobs around the house that had accumulated over the week. I couldn’t ever sit still and relax—it drove your mom crazy. It was such a big house and required so much maintenance, and your mom could never be bothered with that kind of thing. You know her—always with her nose in a book. She thought I should hire someone, but that gets expensive.
“Anyway, we went round and round about it, until the day that neighbor girl hit her head on a rock and nearly drowned. Your mom was really shaken up about it. She was worried something like that might happen to you girls. So we decided it might be best to take a break, rent the house out for a while, and maybe do a few road trips to different parts of the country in the meantime. Remember our trip to Washington, DC? Wasn’t that fun? We should plan another one of those, get the whole gang together—Kelsey, you and Ben, Laila and me, Ezra and Joni. I know the kids would love to see Mount Rushmore.”
“Yeah, definitely, we should sometime,” Melanie said as noncommittally as possible. A family road trip with Laila instead of Mom sounded awful. She plopped down in the grass. “But we were strong swimmers by then. Fourteen and twelve. And you guys didn’t rent it out for just ‘a while.’ You rented it out for fifteen years.”
“Ah, well. When your mom made her mind up about something...” He chuckled. Some high-pitched beeps emitted, and Melanie couldn’t tell if it was her phone or something in her dad’s office.
Does he honestly not know about the lifeguarding accident, the drowned boy? Where Mom’s dread of the water came from? Or is he just not sharing the information with me because Mom asked him not to?
“Did she ever say anything about—”
“Sorry, kiddo. Just got another important call on the line here. I’m going to have to let you go. But thanks so much for calling, and good luck with the house sale. I’m so proud of you girls that I’m going to... I’m going to send you an enormous fruit basket. No grapefruit, though, because I know you can’t stand them. Promise me we’ll talk again soon, okay, kiddo?” And he was gone. Even before Melanie had time to say goodbye, the line was dead.
FOR PURELY SCIENTIFIC reasons, Melanie needed to know how the time portal worked, if the tapestry was the source of the magic or the closet or a combination of the two. Or maybe it was the house itself. She spent a good twenty minutes walking in and out of all of the closets—and crawling in and out of the cabinets that were big enough—and feeling downright silly. She was glad no one else was in the house to see how ridiculous she looked.
Next she needed to make sure the door behind the tapestry was in working order before she started tampering with it. She entered the tiny closet, feeling like the world’s biggest hypocrite—If only Kelsey knew!—and immediately tossed the contents of the bench, looking for a note. The cardigan and the books were there but no cigarettes that time. She examined the books more carefully and saw that they were The SS Edmund Fitzgerald Wreck and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and even shook them upside down to see if anything would flutter out but no such luck.
Maybe the photograph hadn’t gotten to her mom. Maybe it was lost somewhere in time, sent back to the early 1900s. Perhaps her mom had gotten the photograph but was struggling with how to respond to
them. Or maybe she was icing them out, plain and simple, ignoring their attempts to communicate in the hopes that they would just “keep out of her business,” as she had demanded in her last missive.
Then Melanie saw a scrap of yellow paper peeking out between the buttons of the cardigan. Her blood roared in her ears as she reached for it. It wasn’t a full sheet like last time—just a quarter sheet ripped cleanly along a folded edge, not a lot of space to write. She unfolded it slowly.
Thank you for the picture. The little girls are lovely. Are they mine? I assume so, because the blonde has my curls, and the brunette has my nose and mouth. I can’t wait to meet them one day. –C. A. K. P.S. May I ask who this is?
Melanie almost laughed in relief. The note wasn’t guarded and resentful, like she’d feared, but it also didn’t display that her mom had figured everything out, either—who her mysterious pen pals were and every last detail of what the future held in store for her. It was, for the most part, utterly benign. She wondered how old her mom had been when she’d written it—definitely not a teenager anymore. How much time whizzed by after Kelsey planted the photo the night of the bonfire? It hadn’t escaped Melanie’s notice that her mom’s initials were C. A. K.—Christine Ann Kingstad.
She pocketed the note and reemerged to find her room had changed, not to the pink twin-size bed this time, though. Instead, a queen-sized bed was piled high with pillows. A pair of men’s white tennis shoes had been kicked off near the door, and a briefcase was on the desk.
She had found her mom’s correspondence and established that the time portal was still working, so she should pop back out and move on to phase two. But it was clear that her parents were married, presumably in the early years of their marriage, if they were still staying in that room, and Grandpa Jack and Grandma Dot hadn’t turned over the full run of the house to them yet. It would be so easy just to catch a glimpse of them.
No, Melanie told herself firmly. God knew what she would stumble across that time. She reemerged safely in the present and clicked the silver latch in place behind her, temptation averted.
Phase two consisted of her removing the Tree of Life tapestry from the wall and laying it across her bed. She studied the two pairs of birds for any clues she had initially missed, but they just perched placidly on their golden branches. She returned to the door, which was so exposed and naked looking without its protective covering. When she went into and came out of the closet, she was still in her own bedroom, laptop and cell phone on the desk, patchwork quilt on the bed.
That surprised her. She had been almost one hundred percent certain it was the closet itself that housed the magic. Why else was it hidden behind the tapestry? But apparently, the Tree of Life had something to do with the enchantment. Otherwise, Melanie had just somehow broken the time portal, and her sister was going to kill her.
She rushed through phase three, too worried that she had irreparably screwed up their one connection to her mom to try hanging the tapestry in several locations and instead chose just one. Her parents’ bedroom had a hook above the closet door where her mom had hung party dresses, so Melanie hung the tapestry there. She waited one minute before opening the door and stepping inside then another minute before emerging—still in her parents’ room in the present day. Kelsey had forgotten some of Sprocket’s toys on the wooden floor.
So it wasn’t just the tapestry either. She couldn’t just slap it anywhere in the house and expect to create a tunnel to the past.
Melanie carried the midnight-blue wall hanging back to her bedroom to restore it to its rightful place. She flopped down on her bed and closed her eyes. She was too nervous to retry the closet again immediately. She didn’t know what she would do, how she would explain things to Kelsey, if she had somehow damaged the “mystical seal,” as she had embarrassingly come to call it in her head, between the tapestry and the hidden door.
She reviewed what she had just learned. Time traveling into her mom’s past seemed to require two things—both the Tree of Life and the secret closet. One didn’t work without the other. In some ways, that was a relief. When they sold the house and took the tapestry with them, some strange man, woman, or child couldn’t go innocently stumbling into her mom’s bedroom in the 1970s. In other ways, it was a crushing blow. She couldn’t simply give the tapestry to Kelsey to hang in her apartment and pop in to see their mom whenever they particularly missed her. When the house was sold, their gateway to the past would be closed off for good.
But what puzzled Melanie was how the particular combination of the wall hanging and the door had come to be. It had made sense to her that someone, most likely her mom, had discovered the magical properties of the closet and attempted to cover it up. But with her new understanding, she saw how that thinking was backward. Instead, what had happened was someone wanted to hide an ordinary closet—to hide some sort of contraband, maybe?—concealed it with the tapestry, then voila. The mystical seal occurred, and a time portal was born. Ha-ha. Take that, Stephen Hawking.
But who did it? Grandpa Jack or Grandma Dot? Or maybe even one of the great-grandparents? While that was an interesting possibility to ponder, what was even more interesting to Melanie was when her mom had discovered it. How old was she? How often did she time travel? What moments in the house’s history did she see? Glimpses of her childhood and adolescence? Glimpses of her own mother’s?
Melanie wondered if she would ever be able to ask her mom—and while she was thinking of it, how she and Kelsey should reply to their mom’s note. She might be less cordial if she knew her pen pals were in fact her grown-up daughters. With more information exchanged and more interactions came more risk of “butterfly effect” moments. Melanie could already foresee Kelsey and herself arguing about the most prudent way to respond.
Opening her eyes, she sat up in the bed. She needed to check out the time portal once more to make sure it still worked after her experimentation. Her heart galloped in her chest as she reached to open the doorknob from the inside of the closet. She hadn’t known how much the portal meant to her until she realized how easily it could disappear. Melanie had meant all of her pleas to Kelsey not to use it, but still, she just wanted to know that it existed, that it was still there if she ever desperately needed to lay eyes on her mom or hear her voice.
She pushed the door open, and there it was again—the queen-size bed. She let out a deep breath. The white tennis shoes had been moved, but that was because a man was kneeling down to lace them up—her dad. She stepped into the room, just to get a better look at him, really. He was so thin, and his hair was so dark, and he had so much of it. But it was Charlie Kingstad, all right, just younger and dressed in eighties clothes—cutoff jean shorts, a tight polo shirt, and tube socks. She couldn’t believe it was the same man who had just rushed her off the phone. He grabbed a plastic bottle of something off the desk, pills of some kind, and dashed out the door.
She had to follow him.
Just five minutes, she told herself as she chased him down the stairs. He made a beeline to the empty kitchen for a glass of water and headed for the wraparound porch. Muffin wrappers and half-finished glasses of orange juice were strewn on the outdoor table, and sitting on the porch swing, rocking, in the exact same spot that Melanie had been sitting the previous night, was her mom. She was wearing some kind of pale-blue smock, like a swimsuit cover-up. It had a white Peter Pan collar and wasn’t particularly flattering. It was a maternity dress.
Melanie stood still, watching her dad hand her mom what she now saw were chewable antacid tablets. Her mom was having heartburn—because she was pregnant. The grace of the moment took Melanie’s breath away, and she suddenly understood Kelsey’s claim that their mom wanted them to see these glimpses of her life, that she was somehow guiding them to particular flashes of the past, events she hoped would provide illumination for them.
“Thanks, honey,” her mom said. “You can probably still catch them if you go now. The boat hasn’t left yet.”
Sure
enough, down at the dock, a small knot of people was boarding the pontoon boat: Grandpa Jack in a sun visor and aviator shades, Grandma Dot in a flowery sarong, and two people in orange life vests Melanie didn’t recognize.
“I’d rather stay here with my wife and baby,” her dad said, sliding into place next to her mom. He reached for her hand, and their fingers interlocked.
Melanie’s heart gave a happy squeeze. She was seeing where it all began. Melanie and Kelsey had been born to parents who wanted them, who loved them, and who loved each other. She didn’t know there were tears in her eyes until she felt them drip off her chin.
“I’m afraid it might be a somewhat dull afternoon.” Her mom closed her eyes, a smile on her lips. “A nap might be in order.”
Her dad rested his head on her shoulder and whispered something in her ear.
“A real nap,” she clarified, and they both laughed.
Time to go, Melanie thought. Surely, five minutes had passed, and the scene was the kind of luminous, perfect memory that could nourish her for weeks, months even. It could get her through the emotional difficulty of selling the house. Maybe it could even get her back to Ohio and back into Ben’s arms, willing to patiently wait the requisite time to try again—because it was clearly worth it. The glow of her parents’ faces... it was like they were sharing the world’s greatest secret.
“I know it’s kind of boring here, staying with your in-laws and a wife who won’t swim,” her mom said. “I would understand if you didn’t want to come up again next summer. I think my parents would, too, since we’ll have this little one by then.”
“I’m not bored. Are you bored?” He took a sip of water. “I know how much this place means to you and your family, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that. Plus, I think it’s kind of wonderful that it’s been in your family for so long. Your dad grew up here. You grew up here, and now our child will grow up here too. What a way to put down some roots.”
Versions of Her Page 19
