Blue Sky Days

DEDICATION

To the two most beautiful women in the world—Nancy Landry and Hazel Reynolds—this book is for you. Thank you for your endless support and encouragement, for always believing in me and my abilities, for being my biggest fans, and most importantly for being the best friends anyone could ever ask for. I love you both more than you can imagine. Grama, I miss you every day. And Mum…thank you for being the complete opposite of Emma's mother!

PROLOGUE

It was infatuation at first sight. An infatuation that quickly turned into love, but at that moment I didn’t know what love was.

I was sitting on a hilltop in the park when our eyes met, making my stomach flip like it had never done before. He was the most beautiful boy I’d seen in my entire life and he was looking at
me
. When he stood up from the bench at the bottom of the hill and walked in a slow, almost lazy gait toward me, my heart raced. I told myself to stay calm; he probably just wanted to know the time, or ask for a quarter to make a phone call. He wasn’t interested in me—he couldn’t be. Things like that just didn’t happen to me. In fact, I was so sure it
wasn’t
about to happen to me that I ducked my head and cast a look around to see if there was anyone else nearby that he might be heading for.

He neared the top of the hill, peering out at me from under long, dark lashes, with his eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat. A blissful floating sensation started in my stomach and rose slowly to my head, like a helium-filled balloon caught by the wind and set to dancing through the sky. I tried to force myself back down to earth as he got closer and closer, finally stopping in front of me.

With the air of a true old-fashioned, chivalric gentleman that is so rare these days, he took off his hat and held it in his hands, grinning at me with a mischievous look in his impossibly, piercingly blue eyes. “Is there room on that blanket for two?”

Just like that. In a matter of seconds, my life was changed forever.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; you can’t start a story partway through. When I think back to the beginning, sometimes I forget that I was a completely different person then. I had no idea that my safe, sheltered existence was about to be carried away like that imaginary helium-filled balloon and that my life would never be the same.

CHAPTER 1

I had just turned nineteen that spring. The past few weeks had been unseasonably rainy, the sky stained a gloomy gray that seemed to seep into everything and affect the moods of everyone around me. People appeared to be bogged down by the weather, waiting in limbo for the rain to break so life could get back to normal. But I didn’t want normal, or at least what normal had been for me the last nineteen years. As much as I longed for sun and blue skies, I had put my life on hold long enough and I refused to wait on the weather.

I was leaving my home in Toronto to spend time with my Aunt Daisy in the small town of Riverview, three hours to the north. Daisy was my mother’s much younger sister who had moved to Riverview ten years before to pursue an art career. She was fun-loving and carefree, the complete opposite of me, and I’d hoped this visit would instill some of her free-spirited nature in me.

I graduated from high school the year before, and was experiencing what I guess you could call an identity crisis—or what my mother liked to call a meltdown. I got a job right away, working days in a call centre and spending nights and weekends moonlighting as a waitress. My dream was to go to college, but I was determined to pay for it myself and do it on my own terms.

My parents had offered to help fund my education, but, as always, there were strings attached: I would have to live with them and take the courses they wanted me to, with the end result being a position at my father’s insurance company. I knew I didn’t want to work as an insurance agent any more than I wanted to work in a call centre or at a dingy, run-down diner, but they served their purpose in allowing me to save enough money to do things
my
way.

It was the first independent thing I had done in my entire life—something completely for me, separate from my parents and my ever-present need to please them and make them proud.

So, that rainy spring just before my nineteenth birthday, I collected college brochures and applications, sure that I could get into just about any school with my 4.0 GPA. But as I went through those brochures and visited the local college campus to check out job fairs, it hit me.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do
. I had a million possibilities, my pick of schools, yet I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I spent four years of high school surrounded by books, cramming my head with knowledge, assuming that when the time came I would just
know
where my future was headed. All my classmates seemed sure of what they wanted to do, so it should have been simple. But of course, nothing is ever that simple.

When I graduated from high school and informed everyone I would be taking some time off before college, I was told the odds of going back were slim. Apparently most people who find out what the real world is like—having to work and make money to live—decide not to return to school, or discover they aren’t able to afford it because they can’t take time away from work. For me, that just meant I had something to prove, not only to the naysayers but also to myself. I had lived up until that point trying to make everyone else happy, especially my parents, but I always fell short. I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted, but I was sure that pursuing higher education would be the answer to all my problems. Only, there was still one huge question: what did I want to do?

I knew I could pick a few courses at random and opt out of choosing a major for a while, but that seemed so aimless. My life always had a purpose and I’d always had a stronger work ethic than many of my classmates. The funny thing was, many of those same classmates were finishing up their first year of college while I was still trying to figure out where to begin.

Those old classmates started coming into the diner during the last week of April, filling the booths and sharing their college experiences: the new friends they’d made, the parties they’d been to, the classes they had taken and loved or hated. I caught snippets of their conversations as I served them, sometimes shamelessly eavesdropping as I refilled their coffee cups, taking a brief moment to live vicariously through them, which is something I’d never done before. Some of them looked at me as if they should know me; one or two even realized who I was when they read my nametag. I imagined them thinking of me as ‘that girl who always sat at the front of class with her head down, books open, taking notes’.

With each passing night listening to them, I felt worse. Whenever I was home, my mother hassled me about choosing a school, picking programs, and getting my applications filled out and sent away before it was too late. I couldn’t escape the pressure, no matter where I went.

With an uncertain future looming ahead of me like a dark cloud about to burst into a raging storm, I felt lost and more alone than ever. I had planned my entire life out from the time I was in grade school. While the other little girls played dolls and hopscotch, I sat in my room creating a
Life Plan
.

As with most plans, it hadn’t exactly gone the way I’d hoped, yet the detours—like having to work to save for college—were necessary and unavoidable. I figured once I was back in school I would stick to the plan without fail, but that was beginning to look unlikely as well.

After all, where had my hard work gotten me so far in the grand scheme of things? Yes, I was young and had my whole life ahead of me, but I had never done a spontaneous or daring thing in my life. I had never been in love. I’d never even had one single close friend. I felt like a pathetic shell of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams.

I knew the moment that overly dramatic, self-pitying thought entered my mind that it was time for a change. Rather than sit around hosting a pity party for one—I had never hosted
any
type of party before, so I wasn’t about to start there—I knew something had to be done. And I was sure that something, at least right then, wasn’t college.

When I told my mother my new plan, she was furious. “Why do you need to go live with that
hippie
to figure things out?” she asked, all but spitting the word ‘hippie’. “You can stay right here and get yourself together. Start school in January if you need more time!”

I ignored the dig at Daisy, knowing that anything I said about her would just make things worse. My mother had never liked her younger sister, and the animosity grew when I was a child as it became obvious how special Daisy was to me. “It’s not time I need, Mother, it’s space,” I told her wearily. We’d had a similar discussion when I graduated high school and had contemplated moving into a place of my own.

“Fine. That’s just fine, Emma. You go off and have this little meltdown of yours. Just don’t come crying to me when you realize Daisy’s not as big a help as you think she is.”

And that was it. I cringed at the memory, picturing my mother’s stony face, her pursed lips, and the cold look she’d shot over her shoulder as she stormed away. She’d barely spoken to me over the next two weeks. If I could have left that night, I would have, but I needed to give notice at work and make arrangements with Daisy. If my aunt hadn’t been so excited about the prospect of me spending the summer with her, I might have given in to my mother like I’d always done before. But this wasn’t about my mother anymore—it was about me.

With that thought in mind, I gave my notice at work and began gathering all the cash I’d received as graduation gifts the year before, along with the money I had saved for college. It didn’t take me long to pack, because all I really had was a meager selection of clothes and a few books.

The morning I left, my mother shut herself away in her bedroom and refused to come out. My dad had already left for work, but I found a short note from him on the kitchen counter, accompanied by an envelope stuffed with several twenty-dollar bills. It was an unexpected gesture—especially the part of the note where he told me he loved me and would miss me—and it made my throat tighten with emotion as I slid the note and money into my pocket and headed out the door.

After throwing my suitcase into the backseat of my trusty old Chevy Cavalier, which had been a surprise gift from my dad when I got my driver’s license, I looked up at the house I’d lived in the past nineteen years. In the back of my mind I thought I should be feeling something more—sadness, regret, maybe even guilt—but all I actually felt was anxious to put distance between my old life and myself.

A few minutes into the three-hour drive, I turned on the radio, hoping it would drown out the thoughts that had been pestering me for weeks. With each song that played, I realized I didn’t recognize a single one, let alone the artist performing it. I rarely listened to music while I studied because I found it distracting. The music they played in the diner turned me off completely and made me wish for earplugs. I remembered loving music as a child; it was something Daisy had instilled in me before she moved away. She loved everything from rock to country to pop to classical, and she always had the stereo on while she worked, her body swaying naturally to the rhythm.

It had been a long time since I’d seen Daisy. We kept in touch via email most of the year, and snail mail at birthdays and holidays, but our visits dwindled once I started to really concentrate on school. She came to Toronto every few months to attend art shows and sell her pieces to various galleries, but I was always too busy with school and then work to see her.

I had a small niggling fear that Daisy would be disappointed in the person I had become—reserved and studious, quiet and thoughtful—really just downright boring. She was the complete opposite, so full of energy and laughter and a passion for life that I had never known. I knew deep down that my fears were unfounded; Daisy would never judge me or think less of me, no matter what I did or what kind of person I was. Whenever I expressed my guilt over being too busy to see her, she would reassure me that it was okay and that she was grateful we could at least communicate via email.