The Comeback Season

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “Pretend like I never told you?”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Then pretend like it’ll all turn out okay.”

  She tried to keep her voice from wavering. “It will,” she said. “Of course it will.”

  “Look at that,” he said with a humorless little laugh. “You’ve got the hang of it already.”

  This year’s Fourth of July begins with the sound of Mom throwing up in the bathroom down the hall. Ryan waits outside the door for a few minutes to be sure it’s just the usual morning sickness before climbing back into bed. She has no plans for the holiday other than to avoid all the places where her classmates are sure to be gathered for the day’s festivities. With Nick out of town, she has nobody to go with to the parade or the fireworks, and after last week’s conversation, these things now seem small and silly anyway.

  When Kevin knocks on the door to her bedroom, Ryan opens one eye.

  “Your mom’s not feeling well,” he says, from out in the hallway. “She asked if you and I would take Emily into town for the parade.”

  Ryan stumbles out of bed and pulls open the door. Emily’s standing beside Kevin, decked out in red, white, and blue and clutching a miniature flag. “Hurry up,” she says, hopping from one foot to the other. “We don’t want to miss the beginning.”

  “Fine,” Ryan says. “But I’m not wearing something patriotic.”

  “Wear anything you want,” Kevin says. “As long as you’re ready soon.”

  “It’s not like she doesn’t have a million Cubs shirts with those colors,” she hears Emily say as the two of them head downstairs.

  The parade, led by the volunteer firemen in their noisy trucks, runs through the center of the village, circling the small green and then winding alongside the shops. The show doesn’t vary much from year to year, and as they pick their way through the curbside spectators, trying to find a spot, Ryan can see the same familiar floats from when she was little. There are marching bands from area high schools, local political figures in antique cars, members of the garden club with their watering cans.

  Mixed among the families with plaid blankets and lawn chairs, dozens of kids from Ryan’s school wander through the crowd. She notices a few boys from her history class smoking cigarettes behind the post office, and others are gathered just down the block. Lucy’s there too—wearing a little red-and-white dress with a blue headband—the only one of the whole group dressed in the colors of the day, yet she somehow manages to make everyone else look dumb for not thinking of doing the same. One of the boys hands her a blue cup with a drink he’s mixed for her, and Lucy stands on the edge of the curb, observing the parade with a look of mild interest. Sydney and Kate are, of course, there beside her, tucked back on a blanket with a few of the other girls.

  Not one of them would be caught dead with their parents right now, much less a stepfather wearing an American flag pin and a little sister with red, white, and blue ribbons in her hair. Ryan couldn’t possibly feel less festive as they settle onto the curb beside an elderly couple straining to see the next float. When a church group marches by tossing candy for the kids, she gets hit in the head with a lollipop.

  “We’re not staying for the whole thing, are we?” she asks Kevin, who laughs as if she’s made some sort of joke, then offers her a juice box. Ryan stabs her straw into the top of it, watching a group of kids on bikes, their wheels decorated with streamers like pinwheels. She used to ride every year too, with Sydney and Kate, and Dad had always led the small procession dressed as Uncle Sam—complete with star-spangled top hat, shiny striped pants, and a fake beard—while Mom stood off to the side and clapped.

  He loved nothing more than holidays, but the Fourth was always his favorite. One year, he built a catapult out of a funnel and some rubber tubes, and after the parade, he’d organized a contest to see who could launch a water balloon the farthest. At the block parties, he was always the one in charge of the barbecue, and later, when the evening grew dark and the fireworks had yet to start, he was there to pass out sparklers, helping even the littlest kids light up the small piece of night around them.

  Ryan watches Emily now as she creeps up to the street, craning her neck to wait for the next float as the brassy sounds of a band die away.

  “The lawn mower guys are my favorite,” she says, bouncing up and down on her knees as a disheveled group of middle-aged men pushing lawn mowers marches by dressed like the Statue of Liberty.

  “They were Dad’s, too,” Ryan tells her, and Emily turns around. “And mine.”

  This makes her smile. “We have good taste.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan says. “We do.”

  All four of them make it down to the beach later for the fireworks, after Mom emerges from her room feeling better. They spread a blanket out onto the sand, which is peppered with families like their own, gathering together as the light begins to fail over the water.

  While Emily helps Kevin assemble dinner, Mom and Ryan take off down the beach, their feet sinking into the soft sand as the color continues to disappear across the sky. Mom clasps her hands behind her back, and from the look on her face, Ryan can tell she has something to say. But they move along in silence, dipping in and out of the water as the surf creeps up the beach. A few kids run past with buckets, and a bit farther down, others watch while their dads set off tiny firecrackers in the sand.

  “So,” Mom says finally. “Should I be worried?”

  Ryan looks up at her sharply. “About me?” she asks, then frowns. “No.”

  “You know we learn this stuff in Parenting 101,” Mom says. “If your kid gets sullen and withdrawn, you’re supposed to have the ‘Just Say No to Drugs’ talk.”

  “Trust me,” Ryan says with a smile. “I’m not doing drugs.”

  Mom stops walking and puts a hand on each of her shoulders, forcing Ryan to look her in the eye. “I know,” she says, turning serious. “And I also know you haven’t had an easy time of things. But the last few days …” She trails off and shakes her head. “I don’t know. You’ve seemed sadder than usual.”

  “I’m fine,” Ryan insists, trying her best to look it.

  “I know,” Mom says. “I also know you’re a good kid. And that freshman year wasn’t easy for you.”

  “Mom …”

  “But it’s not really supposed to be,” she continues. “You know what your dad would have said.”

  The answer comes easily. “Keep your chin up.”

  Mom smiles. “Always keep moving.”

  They say the last part together. “It’ll all work out in the end.”

  The beach is now nearly completely dark, the water at their feet an inky color. Ryan digs at the sand with her toe, her shoulders curled forward.

  “Hey,” Mom says. “It’s okay to be unsure about things. That’s what high school’s all about.”

  Ryan chooses her words carefully. “I know he was probably right, that if you just push through hard enough, everything will eventually be okay.”

  “But?”

  “Don’t you ever wish you could go backward, instead of forward?”

  Even in the dark, she can see the smile slip from Mom’s face, replaced by a cloudy look, her eyes liquid and far away. For a moment, Ryan thinks that maybe she feels the same way. That perhaps Mom, too, might know what it’s like to lose your grip on the moment, one finger at a time, white-knuckled and shaky with fear. But it doesn’t take long to recognize the look on her face as one of concern.

  “We don’t have that sort of choice,” Mom says. “Forward is all we’ve got.”

  Ryan nods, understanding that she’s the only one who’s still stuck. But even as she follows her father’s words like bread crumbs—what other choice does she have but to try?—she’s still clinging to that backward glance, that one last look, that inside-out, upside-down feeling that’s less hope than regret. It’s a kind of sadness that has lodged itself in the back of her
throat like a pill that refuses to go down.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Mom asks, putting an arm around her shoulders and steering them back up the beach.

  “I’m sure,” Ryan tells her. The fireworks are starting now, the littlest ones first, red and blue and silver starbursts that light up the sky for a brief moment before disappearing. When they find Emily and Kevin in the darkness, they lie on their backs, eyes to the sky.

  “Those are my favorite,” Emily says, watching an enormous gold one explode and then fizzle in great dusty streaks, melting into the sky like a weeping willow.

  “Mine too,” Ryan says, and Mom gives her hand a squeeze.

  “They were your father’s, too,” she says, and they all watch, afraid to blink as one after another brightens the sky, flickering brightly before giving way to the next.

  On the way home, they pass Sydney’s house, and Ryan sets down the picnic basket she’s been carrying to stare at the cars lined up in the driveway. She’s listening to the laughter drifting from the backyard, the splashes and high-pitched shouts from the pool, when Mom notices she’s fallen behind.

  “Parents out of town?” she asks, walking back over.

  “Yup,” Ryan says, squinting at the fence through the darkness. “I’m sure the whole school’s in there.”

  Mom reaches out and gives her ponytail a little tug. “We’re more fun to hang out with anyway,” she says.

  Ryan looks skeptically up the street to where Emily’s turning cartwheels on the grass, and Kevin is staring up at the stars from his perch on the cooler.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Mom says, “this kind of thing happens your whole life. It’s not just high school. Your friendships are always going to be changing.”

  “It’s not that,” Ryan says. “At least not just that.”

  Mom tilts her head. “Well, then is it Nick?”

  “Sort of,” she admits, looking away. “But probably not what you think.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Ryan hadn’t realized that this is what she’d been waiting to hear, but now that it’s out there, now that she has Mom to herself, right here beside her and ready to help tackle any problem, she hesitates. Because what is there to say, really? What they know with certainty has already passed—that he’d had cancer, that he’d beat it—and what might still happen is nothing more than a possibility.

  In just a few weeks, Nick will return from Wisconsin, and this is what Ryan thinks about as she steels herself against the sounds coming up over the hedges from Sydney’s house. She lets her eyes flutter shut. Right there in the dark, she makes a decision. He’ll be okay, she thinks, and then thinks it again. He will be okay.

  And so there it is: a small, wobbly step forward. It is, for now, the best she can do. It’s the closest she can get.

  When she doesn’t answer, Mom asks whether she’s okay for the second time tonight. “I am,” Ryan says, because it’s what she needs to believe, because—if nothing else—she knows how little it would take for her to come undone right now.

  There are more scattered cheers beyond the fence, and Ryan gives a little shrug.

  “Look at it this way,” Mom says, patting her stomach. “At least now you’ll have plenty of time to baby-sit.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Super.”

  Mom laughs and loops an arm through Ryan’s, and they make their way up the sidewalk to join the other two on their slow journey home, four pale figures in the dark, all of them ready for bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  * * *

  WHILE SHE ENDURES THE REMAINDER OF JULY, waiting for Nick’s return and avoiding the heat, Ryan makes a project out of the new baby’s room, scraping the cakey beige paint from the walls and then using a long roller to cover them in a soft blue. It pleases her how meticulous she’s become, carefully taping the corners and using a tiny brush to avoid splattering. It’s easy to get lost in the room, to spend long hours escaping into the endless blue of the walls, the dizzying smell of the paint. She tries not to worry as she works, but as August approaches, Ryan grows nervous that things will have changed with Nick when he returns. He’d left just after revealing a part of himself almost too huge to imagine, and secrets like that, once out in the open, have a way of wedging themselves between people. She wonders whether he’ll regret having told her at all.

  The Cubs, meanwhile, have moved into the second half of the season without any sort of fanfare, closing the gaps in the standings as they inch from fourth place to third, and then on to second in their division. There is a quiet determination to their style of play now, a late season surge that might go unnoticed by anyone not watching closely.

  Ryan, however, is watching closely. And she’s sure that Nick must be too.

  It’s been nearly three weeks since they’ve spoken by the time he finally calls, and Ryan’s in the backyard helping Mom water the flowers when Emily runs outside with the portable phone.

  “It’s your boyfriend,” she says, grinning, dancing from one bare foot to the other, a hand loosely covering the receiver.

  Ryan frowns at her—mortified that Nick might have heard—and snatches the phone away, slipping inside the screen door and up to her room. She hesitates before answering, thinking briefly of their last conversations before he left, those grim revelations that had left them both heart-heavy and drained. But when she finally puts the phone to her ear, any worry she felt disappears.

  “How’s the lake?” she asks, struggling to keep the giddiness from her voice, and when Nick answers—a typically laconic “not bad”—she’s pleased that in spite of himself, he sounds equally enthusiastic, the two of them like actors overplaying their roles, booming and eager and altogether thrilled by the fragile trail of wires connecting them across the miles.

  “The cottage is like a clown car,” he says. “There are a million little cousins running around in swim trunks, and the whole place smells like wet towels.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” Ryan says, leaning back on her bed. “Definitely more exciting than my house.”

  “And cards,” he says. “My grandma keeps trying to teach me bridge whenever it rains. Bridge!”

  “I could see you being good at bridge.”

  “I bet you don’t even know what bridge is …”

  “How do you know?” Ryan challenges, but Nick only laughs.

  “I just do,” he says.

  “What else?” she asks.

  “My dad’s teaching me how to drive the motorboat,” he says. “He keeps telling stories about when his dad taught him, and how it was so much harder back then, because the boats didn’t have this or that.”

  “Typical dad stuff,” Ryan says, and though she hadn’t meant it as anything significant—hadn’t at all been thinking about her own dad and all the many things he would never teach her—they both fall into an abrupt and worried silence. It takes Ryan a moment to rescue the conversation. “I bet you’ll be good at it,” she says. “Driving the boat.”

  “Doubt it,” Nick says cheerfully. “So what have you been up to?”

  “Let’s see,” she says, humming a little. “Yesterday I helped Kevin pull weeds in the front yard, and then Emily and I made orange juice popsicles. And then last night, Mom and I watched a special on surfing in Australia before going to bed embarrassingly early.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being a surfer in Australia,” Nick says, then adds, “if being manager of the Cubs doesn’t work out.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to watch the games down there, though.”

  “True,” he says. “I guess I’d have to get into cricket. Do you know they have tea breaks? I mean, there’s no way it can count as a real sport if they stop for a cup of tea.”

  Ryan giggles. “It sort of sounds like golf.”

  There are a few muffled yelps on his end of the phone, and then a vague cheering sound, and Nick groans. “My uncle just threw my cousin into the lake.”

  “Sounds like you
could be next.”

  “It’s possible,” he says. “So, I’m back next Tuesday. I’ll call you then?”

  “Sounds good,” Ryan says, leaving the phone pressed to her ear even once he’s hung up, imagining his dad and his uncles waiting to pounce, nudging him into the lake—a bit more gently than his cousins, whose arms are not so prone to fractures, whose lives are not so knowingly fragile—and she smiles at the thought of it: Nick pinwheeling off the end of the pier, all pale limbs and freckles and laughter.

  On the last weekend before he’s due home, Ryan spends an entire day up in the attic, sneezing as she rummages through sagging cardboard boxes filled with books and toys from when she and Emily were little. She carts all of it downstairs to the tiny room at the end of the hallway, and when Mom appears at the doorway, Ryan is sitting cross-legged on the floor, a picture book spread in her lap.

  “I can’t remember,” Ryan says, looking up. “Did Dad used to read these to us?”

  Mom lowers herself carefully beside her, a hand on her stomach. “I’m afraid it was usually me,” she says. “I had bedtime duty. He was in charge of wake-up calls.”

  Ryan smiles. “He used to make a bugle out of his hand and march around my room in the mornings.”

  “Sounds about right,” Mom says.

  “I’m sorry this baby won’t have someone like him,” Ryan says, then shakes her head. “I don’t mean anything bad about Kevin. I’m just saying that we were lucky to have Dad, and it’s sad that he won’t.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll have you,” Mom says, reaching out to take her hand, and to Ryan’s surprise, she pulls it over to rest on her belly. It takes a moment, but when she finally feels it, Ryan widens her eyes. There’s the tiniest thump beneath her fingers, a faint hiccup of movement.

  “Wow,” she says, sucking in a breath. She keeps her hand still, but the baby has fallen quiet again. Ryan doesn’t blame him; he still has three more months tucked away from the world in there, three more months to doze in peace. She pats Mom’s stomach once before folding her hands in her lap.