First Frost (2 page)

“You should talk to your mother,” Claire said simply, her dark eyes calm and sympathetic. As different as they were in looks, in temperament, in
everything,
Claire and Bay's mother talked every day. Sometimes, when Bay would walk into the living room at home, she'd find her mother, Sydney, leafing through hair magazines, the phone at her ear, saying nothing. No sound came from the phone either.

“Who are you talking to?” Bay would ask.

“Claire,” her mother would answer.

“Why aren't you saying anything?”

“We're just spending some time together,” her mother would say, shrugging.

The Waverley sisters hadn't been close as children, but they were as thick as thieves now, the way adult siblings often are, the moment they realize that family is actually a choice. Bay didn't know many particulars about their childhood. But from listening to conversations through open windows and behind couches as a child—the only way she'd been able to learn any of the good stuff—Bay had gleaned that they were basically orphans. Their mother, a wild, lost soul, had brought them here to the Waverley house when Claire had been six and Sydney a newborn. They had been raised by their reclusive grandmother Mary. Claire had embraced everything Waverley as easily as breathing, but Sydney had rejected the notion that she was anything but normal until much later in life.

And, as magical as her mother was, Bay
still
wasn't sure she totally accepted it. It was one of many reasons Bay felt closer to her aunt.

Regardless, it was just a matter of time before Claire told Bay's mother about the boy.

“I don't think Mom would understand,” Bay said.

“She would understand. Trust me.”

“You know me better than she does.”

Claire shook her head. “That's not true.”

Bay turned to look out the window over the sink. The back garden was surrounded by a tall iron fence covered in honeysuckle vine two feet thick in places, and topped by pointy finials, like that of an old cemetery. She couldn't see the tree, but she knew it was there. That always gave her a small measure of comfort.

“It's finally getting cold. When will the apple tree bloom?” she asked. It was autumn, and the only time the strange apple tree in the Waverley's backyard, the one that had been there long before the house was built, was dormant. For no reason anyone could explain, the tree bloomed all winter, then it produced small pink apples all spring and into the summer. Some of Bay's fondest memories were of lying under the apple tree in the summer while Claire gardened and the apple tree tossed apples at her like a dog trying to coax its owner into playing catch. But as fall approached, the tree would lose its leaves overnight, and then it could do nothing but shake its bare branches miserably until the first frost of the season startled it back awake. The entire family felt its frustration.

“The almanac is calling for first frost on Halloween this year,” Claire said. “A week from Saturday.”

“That's late. Later than I ever remember. Will you have a party?” Bay asked hopefully.

“Of course,” Claire said, kissing the top of Bay's head as she passed. Copper pot in hand, she began to pour the tart, yellow, lemon verbena candy syrup into small round molds to harden. “We always celebrate first frost.”

On the day the tree bloomed in the fall, when its white apple blossoms fell and covered the ground like snow, it was tradition for the Waverleys to gather in the garden like survivors of some great catastrophe, hugging one another, laughing as they touched faces and arms, making sure they were all okay, grateful to have gotten through it. It was a relief, putting their world back in order. They always got restless before first frost, giving their hearts away too easily, wanting things they couldn't have, getting distracted and clumsy and too easily influenced by the opinions of others. First frost meant letting go, so it was always reason to celebrate.

Everything was okay after that.

To Bay, the day couldn't get here soon enough.

Because the way things had been building up lately, there was a lot that could go wrong between now and then.

*   *   *

After working a few hours for her aunt, Bay left at dusk and cut through neighborhoods and backyards, heading toward downtown Bascom.

As she approached the green in the center of town, she immediately noticed an old man standing in the park alone, a beat-up, hard leather suitcase on the ground next to him.

There was something magnetic about him. He had a self-contained, silent confidence, as if a simple glance or a smile from him would feel like a secret he knew that would change your life, would change everything. Maybe he was a preacher or a politician or a salesman.

Bay considered it for a moment. Yes, definitely a salesman.

From across the street, Bay stopped to stare, a tendency she tried to curb because she knew it bothered people. Once, when she had stared too long at a woman in the grocery store, the woman had become angry and said to Bay, “I belong with him. He's going to leave his wife. Don't try to tell me otherwise.” This had startled Bay because, number one, she'd had no idea Ione Engle was having an affair and, number two, she'd simply been staring at the tiny twigs caught in Ione's hair as, just an hour before, Ione had been rolling around the riverbank with another woman's husband. But people were always suspicious, because that was Bay's gift. Or curse, as her mother would say. Bay knew where things belonged. Just as her aunt Claire's gift was with the food she made from the edible flowers from the Waverley garden. And her mother's gift was her uncanny way with hair, how a cut from her could inexplicably turn your day around. Bay could put away silverware in a house she'd never been to before, in exactly the correct drawer. She could watch strangers in parking lots, and know exactly which cars they were walking to.

Bay watched the old man, his hands in his pockets, as he took in everything around him with a steady gaze—downtown Bascom's touristy stores, the fountain on the green where college kids would sometimes hang out. His eyes lingered curiously on the outdoor sculpture by the fountain, which had been made by the winning art student from Orion. The sculpture changed every year. This year it was an eight-foot-high, ten-foot-wide cement bust of the founder of Orion College, Horace J. Orion. The huge gray cement head was half buried in the grass, so that only the top of the head—from the nose up—was visible. Horace J. Orion looked like he was returning from the dead, peering out from under the ground, taking stock, before deciding if it was really worth the effort. It was actually pretty funny, this giant head in the middle of downtown. Local fervor had died down in the months since its installation, but it was still a source of conversation when gossip became thin.

The wind had died down, but the stranger's silver hair and trouser cuffs were moving slightly, as if he had attracted what little breeze left to him, the way birds flock to seed.

His light, silvery eyes finally landed on Bay. There was a road between them but, strangely, all the cars seemed to have disappeared. He smiled, and it was just as Bay had suspected. It was as if he could tell her everything she wanted to hear.

“I was wondering,” the man called to her in a pearly voice, “if you could tell me where Pendland Street is?”

Bay paused at the coincidence. She had just come from the Waverley house on Pendland Street. Pendland Street was long and winding and contained the oldest homes in Bascom, rambling, shabby-chic houses that tourists like to see. He could belong at any number of them. She looked at his old suitcase. Maybe at the inn on the street.

She pointed back the way she had come.

“Thank you,” the man said.

Cars suddenly appeared again, racing down the busy downtown street, obscuring her view. She jogged to the nearby newspaper box and climbed on top of it, steadying herself with the lamppost beside the box.

But the green was empty now. The man had disappeared.

As Bay stood there on the box, a blue Fiat drove by. Inside were the upper-crust girls from Bay's high school—Trinity Kale, Dakota Olsen, Riva Alexander and Louise Hammish-Holdem. Louise leaned out the window and yelled to Bay in a singsongy voice, “We're going to Josh's house! Do you want us to give him another
note
from you?”

Bay, used to this, just sighed as she watched the car drive on. Then she jumped down from the newspaper box and walked to her mother's hair salon across from the green.

When she entered the salon, she saw her mother deep in conversation with her last appointment. Sydney was thirty-eight, but looked younger. She was a confident dresser, her preferences leaning toward shorts paired with striped tights and midcentury vintage dresses. Her skin was smooth and her hair was a delicious caramel blond—usually. Today, Bay could swear there were new, electric shadows of red in it, ones that hadn't been there that morning.

Bay dropped her backpack behind the reception desk where Violet, her mother's new (totally ineffective) receptionist was fast asleep in her chair. She was even snoring slightly. Bay took a tattered paperback out of her backpack and held it up for her mother to see, then she hitched her thumb at the door, telling her mother that she'd be outside reading.

Sydney nodded and gave Bay a look that had
driver's ed
written all over it. She'd been nagging Bay about signing up for driving lessons for months now. But Bay didn't want to learn to drive. If she did, there was no telling what sort of embarrassment she'd cause herself before first frost. No, she was fine walking and taking the bus to her aunt Claire's house and waiting for her mother to get off work in the evenings.

Too much freedom was a dangerous thing for a girl in love.

“Take your phone. I'll call you if I get through early,” Sydney said, and Bay grudgingly went back to her backpack and took out her phone and put it in her pocket.

Her mother said she was, quite possibly, the only teenager in the world who didn't like talking on the phone. That wasn't necessarily true. It was just that no one but her mother called her.

Bay walked across the green, wondering for a moment where that strange elderly man had gone, and considering going back to her aunt Claire's house to see if that's where he'd ended up. But doing that would mean she couldn't walk over to Josh Matteson's house and back in time to leave after her mother's last appointment.

So she trekked through more backyards, then through the woods by the cold rush of the river, where the best homes in Bascom were. The new chancellor of Orion College lived there, as did a few doctors. And the Mattesons, who owned the largest manufactured housing plant in the state. Live in a double-wide? It was probably made here in Bascom, by the people who lived in this seven-bedroom Tudor. In the shadow of the half-bare trees, Bay climbed the hill that overlooked the Matteson's back lawn. She could see straight past where their pool had been covered for the season, to the hot tub and the open patio doors.

There were a lot of kids there already, some in the hot tub, some watching television in the sitting room off the patio. They were taking advantage of the fact that Josh Matteson's parents were away for the month. They were all trying a little too hard to look relaxed, like something they'd seen in a movie, but the truth was, none of them really belonged there.

The girls from the Fiat, for instance. Trinity Kale, whose parents were divorcing, belonged in Florida with her grandparents. And Dakota Olsen wanted to be working on her college essay, because she clearly belonged at Princeton. Riva Alexander, just this shy of plump, always on the bottom of the cheerleader pyramid and always on a diet, wanted to be home, cooking. And Louise Hammish-Holdem, well, Bay couldn't tell exactly where Louise belonged, she just knew it wasn't here. That was high school in a nutshell. No one was where they belonged. They were all on their way to someplace else. It drove Bay crazy, and also made her something of an outcast, because Bay knew exactly where she belonged. She belonged here in Bascom.

With Josh Matteson.

She'd known about belonging in this town the moment her mother moved back here from Seattle when Bay was five years old. It was the fulfillment of a dream Bay had had a long time ago, a dream of lying under the apple tree in the Waverley garden, everyone happy, everyone in the right place. It took a while longer to realize that Josh was who she was supposed to be with. Bay and Josh had never had a chance to socialize, not until this year, when Bay finally entered high school, where Josh was now a senior.

Josh was sitting at a patio table, engaged in some animated conversation with another member of the soccer team. He was blond and beautiful and funny and good-hearted, but so clearly miserable that Bay was surprised no one else could see it. It radiated around him like smoke, like he was smoldering, slowly burning away.

She belonged with him. That alone was hard enough to bear. But the fact that she knew he also belonged with her, that he was on a path he wasn't meant for, was excruciating. Getting him to believe that was the hardest thing she'd ever tried to do. She'd made a fool of herself two months ago, writing that note to him, giving herself a reputation she didn't really need, on top of being a Waverley. So she kept her distance now.

She finally understood that, no matter how hard you try, you can't make someone love you. You can't stop them from making the wrong decision.

There was no magic for that.

*   *   *

Late that evening, Claire Waverley woke up and shivered. The bedroom window in the second-floor turret was open, letting in cold air. The chill hovered above the bed, twinkling in tiny white stars she could almost reach up and touch.

She got up quietly and went to the window to remove the board her husband, Tyler, had used to prop it open. Last night's big rain had finally blown colder weather into town, following a particularly scorching Indian summer. Outside, the neighborhood streetlights glowed in a blue haze, the way a warm glass will haze over when put in the refrigerator.