First Frost (20 page)

Claire pointed across the green to the White Door, where lights were shining, forming lemon-yellow squares on the dark sidewalk in front of the salon. “Then I think something's wrong.”

*   *   *

“I didn't bring my keys with me,” Sydney whispered as they all approached the salon cautiously, like a band of cat burglars really bad at their jobs.

“I don't think you'll need them,” Henry said, trying the door and finding that it swung wide open. Henry had left Josh on the green with orders to stay there. And he did. Josh was sitting on the bench, watching their odd little family with an expression Sydney found curious. He didn't look embarrassed or amused or superior. He looked like he wanted, more than anything, to join them. She hadn't expected him to be so nice. She hadn't expected him to take his share of the blame, even though her daughter was clearly the one who had made all this happen. She hadn't expected to see what her daughter so evidently saw in him. Someone lost.

She hadn't wanted to like Josh Matteson.

After Henry had done a tour of the salon and hadn't found anyone there, the rest of them entered.

“Are you sure you didn't just forget to turn out the lights?” Tyler asked, which was such a Tyler thing to say. He forgot everything. He got lost going to work. He was on his fourteenth pair of reading glasses this year. And he was currently wearing two different shoes. Sometimes Sydney completely understood how he'd gotten past her sister's walls. He'd obviously gotten lost looking for a way in, and had stumbled onto a secret passageway. That was the only way to get to Claire, those secret passageways, the vulnerable places: family, acceptance, longevity.

“I was the last to leave,” Sydney said. “Even if I forgot about the lights, I'd never leave the door unlocked.”

“Who else has a key?” Henry asked.

That's when it hit her. Sydney went immediately to the reception desk and found the safe under the cash register open, and empty.

“You've been robbed,” Claire said from behind her. “We should call the police.”

“Oh, that's just great,” Bay said, throwing her hands in the air. “Josh is going to think you're having him arrested!”

“I don't care what Josh thinks,” Henry said. Bay wouldn't meet his eyes.

“We're not calling the police,” Sydney said. “I know who it was, and she's long gone by now. Let's all just go home.”

They filed out. Sydney closed the safe and followed them. Before she turned out the lights, she looked over to her station.

Violet had taken the money, but left the bouncy swing.

*   *   *

When Sydney, Henry and Bay got home, Bay went immediately to her room.

“Go to bed,” Sydney told Henry as they wearily climbed the stairs together. Parenting was tough. Maybe she was crazy to want to do it again. “Get what sleep you can. I'm going to talk to her.”

“You don't need me in there?”

Sydney shook her head. “You did the boy stuff. I'll do the girl stuff.”

“Good night,” Henry said, kissing her. He walked down the hall, but then stopped at their bedroom door. “Was Tyler wearing two different shoes tonight?”

“Yes.”

“I should have thought of that. I don't think we embarrassed Bay enough.”

Sydney smiled as she opened Bay's door.

“It wasn't Josh's fault,” Bay immediately said. She was sitting on her bed, hugging a pillow. “I didn't tell him I was grounded. We just talked. That's all we do.”

Sydney walked over to her. The box of Mallomars and the two cups of tea, now cold, were on the bedside table where she'd left them earlier that night, when she'd discovered Bay missing. Her first thought had been that someone had taken her daughter and the panic had made the room pulse in time to her heartbeat. Until she'd found Bay's phone outside, it had never occurred to her that Bay would sneak out on her own. Bay never snuck around. She was too upfront. But Bay had entered the Matteson world before Sydney could stop her.
Upfront
wasn't in their vocabulary. “That's funny, because as of last Saturday he didn't even know who you were, according to you.”

“We just started, you know, hanging out on Monday. I wrote him a note earlier this year, telling him if he ever wanted to talk, I would wait outside school in the afternoons.”

“You wrote him a note?”
A note.
There was no time in your life when the power of a note was this strong, how writing down what you felt made it real somehow, how awaiting a reply felt glacial, like eons passing.

Bay tossed the pillow aside and slid down the bed, staring at the ceiling where she had taped old covers of tattered paperbacks she'd bought at a library sale years ago. She would read a book hundreds of times, carrying it with her until the pages were torn and the covers were falling off, then she'd paste the covers to the ceiling where she could stare at them, like remembering a good dream. “The first time I saw him, really saw him, was the first day of school, and I knew I belonged with him.”

Of all the things she could have followed in Sydney's footsteps, it had to be this. “Oh, Bay.”

“I don't know what's so wrong about it.”

Sydney sat on the bed beside her. She took the pillow Bay had tossed aside and tucked it behind her back. She paused to compose her thoughts, then said, “I dated Josh's father in high school.”

Bay immediately sat back up.

“Not just casual dating. We were inseparable, together for three years. I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone at the time. But I also loved what being with him meant, that I belonged to that group, that I was accepted. We talked about marriage. I would go on and on about the wedding and about living in the Matteson mansion.”

“What happened?” Bay asked.

“He broke up with me on graduation day. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘I thought you understood.' Matteson sons follow in their fathers' footsteps. They go into the family business. They marry girls from the right families. I wasn't one of those girls. That's why I left Bascom. He broke my heart, but more than that, he broke my dream of being normal. I figured, if normal wasn't here, I was going to find it somewhere else. But I never did.”

“
That's
why you left?”

Sydney nodded.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

Sydney reached out and touched Bay's cheek, which was still red from the cold, making her look like a china doll with painted circles of blush. “I guess I thought that why I left was less important than why I came back.”

Bay looked at Sydney as if seeing her for the first time through adult eyes. Bay was so close to that shore it almost brought tears to Sydney's eyes. She was too damn emotional these days. “There's so much I don't know about you,” Bay said.

Sydney knew this day would come. She'd just been hoping to put it off for another few years. Say, twenty. She said with resignation, “Ask away.”

Bay crossed her legs yoga-style and settled in. “Was Hunter John Matteson your first?”

“Yes. Next question.”

“How old were you?”

“Older than you. Next question.”

“What was your mother like?”

Sydney wasn't expecting that one. She thought about it and said, “I don't remember her very well. She left Bascom when she was eighteen, too. She came back for a while. She was nine months' pregnant with me and Claire was six. A few years later, she left again for good. She was a troubled person. Evanelle once said that it was because she ate an apple from the tree in the backyard and saw what the biggest event in her life would be. She saw how she would die in a horrible car pileup, and that's the reason she went so wild, like she was trying to make something even bigger happen, so it wouldn't come true.”

“She ate an apple?” Bay grimaced involuntarily at the thought of it. “Waverleys never eat the apples!”

“I don't know if it's true, sweetheart. I've never put much stock in it. It's like a lot of things when it comes to our family. Rumor. Myth. I think she might have had mental problems. What I remember of her was manic, and when she wasn't manic, she was depressed. And Grandmother Mary tried her best with me and Claire, but she was a peculiar lady.”

Bay started playing with the ends of her long hair, making tiny braids. “What was your mother's Waverley magic?”

“Claire and I have talked about it. We don't really know.” Sydney shrugged.

“Is that
all
you remember of her?”

“I have one strange memory of her. It's funny, I don't think I've ever told anyone this,” Sydney said with a laugh. “I was young, maybe three or four, and I was sitting in the grass somewhere, maybe the garden, sweating and crying because I'd fallen and scraped my elbow. My mother knelt in front of me, trying to tell me it was all right. That didn't work. The more attention I got, the more hysterical I became. I was a little …
dramatic
as a child.”

Bay smiled, as if not much had changed.

“Anyway, I remember her saying to me, ‘Watch this.' She opened her hand in front of me, but nothing was there. But then she blew on the palm of her hand and sparkles of ice flew into the air and landed on my face. It was so soft and cool.” Sydney put her hand to her face, remembering. “I'll never know how she did that. It was the middle of summer. I was so startled I stopped crying.”

Bay was transfixed, like Sydney was telling her a fairy tale. Which she supposed she was. The Waverley version. “Who is your father?”

“I don't know,” Sydney said. “She never told me. Claire doesn't know who her father is, either. But we're fairly certain it's not the same man.”

“What did Grandmother Mary think of you dating Hunter John Matteson?” Bay asked, dashing Sydney's hope that they wouldn't get back to that.

Sydney took a deep breath, trying to remember something she'd tried so hard to forget. She reached for the Mallomars. She took one and handed one to Bay. “She liked it. I think she was a little conceited when she was younger, and she liked to think of me marrying into the Matteson family as her coup. A little like how teaching Claire to be such a good cook was her coup. We are her legacies, for good or for bad.”

“Josh is different,” Bay said with absolute certainty.

Sydney looked her daughter in the eye, the serious look, the one that said
pay attention.
“I've always challenged you to explore more, to look outside of this Waverley legacy, because I never wanted you to limit yourself. But you've always challenged me right back. There's never been a time in which you weren't absolutely certain of who you were and where you belong. I never, ever want a boy to take that away from you. I don't want anyone to ever make you believe you're someone else, and then take it all back and say, ‘I thought you understood.'”

“I can't make him feel what I feel for him. I know that,” Bay said. “But I do know, without a doubt, that I'm meant to be in his life in some way. And he's meant to be in mine.”

“If you're meant to be in his life, why is he sneaking around with you?” Sydney pointed out. “Why not just be open about it?”

Bay was silent, that stubborn tilt to her chin a familiar sight to Sydney. She always looked like that when someone disputed her sense.

“Bay, I can guarantee you one thing: Josh knows about me and his father. He knows, and he's doing this anyway. And while his parents are
away.
”

“He's not like that,” Bay said again.

“We'll see,” Sydney said. “But no more sneaking around.”

Sydney made a move to get off the bed, but Bay stopped her and said, “Will you stay with me for a while?”

Sydney smiled at her daughter, who had this amazing ability to turn from woman to child in a matter of seconds. She sat back and welcomed Bay into the crook of her arm.

And that's where they stayed, until late into Thursday morning, Bay having slept through her first classes and Sydney through her first appointment.

It was the phone that woke them up, Claire on the other end, hysterical.

The Waverley first frost woes, it seemed, had finally decided to pay Claire a visit.

 

11

It happened earlier that morning when Claire was in her kitchen office, taking a break from the stove to check her orders. Her mornings were usually spent alone. Buster and Bay came in the afternoons, then Tyler picked Mariah up from one of her dozens of after-school activities and brought her home in the evenings, and that's when everything became lively, the air becoming light, like it was dancing across her skin. But mornings, like this morning, were quiet, save the bubbling of syrup in the kitchen and those particular creaks and sighs old houses occasionally made, as if complaining about their bones.

The doorbell rang.

Claire turned in her desk chair, startled, when she heard it. The chime started out strong, but then faded, like a plug being pulled. Maybe the bell was broken. Or maybe the house was just reminding her to go back to the kitchen and watch the sugar pot boil before she burned the entire place down.

A knock followed the chime.

No, someone was there. A delivery, maybe? She wasn't expecting anything.

She got up and walked through the house to the front door, but it stuck when she tried to open it.

“Stop it,” she told the house. “I'm not in the mood for this.”

But it still wouldn't let her open it.

“Is everything all right in there?” a muffled voice called from the front porch.

“Yes, fine,” Claire called to him. “I'll be with you in a moment.”

Claire turned on her heel and walked back through the kitchen and left by the screen door on the back porch, which never stuck because it was a new addition.

She rounded the driveway to the front of the house. She was wearing her yoga pants and one of Tyler's old dress shirts, covered with her apron. She wished she would have grabbed a jacket because the morning was still chilly and slightly foggy, like the neighborhood was wrapped in wax paper.