LOST SUMMER

jamie blake

Prologue

"Do you know what the worst thing in the world is, Shaunie?" Daddy took a swig from a green and gold bottle. His hair fell in dark ringlets over eyes the same bright green as the liqueur. "It's growing up."

Shauna fidgeted with the frayed edge of her bed quilt. "Then how come everybody grows up?"

He stared out the window, down the hill and through the trees, where the lake shone flat and dark under the moon. "It’s a curse. We grow up and forget everything we used to believe in. We forget about the magic and the fairies, and when we do, there's nothing left. There's... nothing." The knuckles of the hand gripping the bottle turned white.

"But what about driving cars, and going out as late as you want, and nobody telling you what to do?”

"They don't mean anything." He shook his head, his eyes glittering in the dark like broken chips of glass. “You think they do, but in the end it’s all just… just stuff.”

“Well, I want to grow up.” She thought for a second. “And I want a pink corvette.”

“Like Barbie,” he said.

She nodded.

He turned finally to look at her, leaning down. “Promise me something, Shaunie.”

His breath smelled sharp and bitter, but she tried not to screw up her face. She wished he’d put the bottle away. He was the funnest during the day, taking her on hikes through the mountains and canoe trips across the lake. He taught her the names of the wildflowers, and how to feed the chipmunks from the palm of her hand. But at night the bottle came out, and his eyes got that look like he’d gone far, far away, and he was seeing things nobody else could see. He started talking about magic and dreams.

But during the day he was the best ever, he was Shauna’s Prince Charming, and for that Daddy, now she found herself nodding and saying, “Okay,” into the quilt.

The corner of his mouth tucked up in something not quite a smile. He petted a hand over her messy black curls. “Don’t forget the fairies, okay, kiddo?”

She squirmed, the old mattress squeaking under her. It was fun to pretend the woods were full of tiny winged people, full of bears that could speak, and the ghosts of people who’d lived long ago. It was fun to listen to Daddy’s stories. But six was old enough that she knew those things weren’t really real. Daddy should have known, too.

Staring past him, up at the broad old ceiling beams running below the peaked cabin roof, she nodded again. “I won’t. I won’t forget.” And then, feeling guilty, “I love you, Daddy.”

“Love you, too, kiddo.” He kissed her forehead and straightened up. His eyes seemed to focus a little better. “Get some sleep. We’ll go out on the lake tomorrow if you want, before Gran gets here.”

Now she did make a face. “Gran doesn’t have to get me. I could stay here. I’ll be good. And more quiet. You won’t even know I’m here.”

Daddy was already standing, reaching for the light string. “Go to sleep, Shaunie.”

“You don’t have to send me away.”

“I’m not sending you away. I’m sending you home.”

“This could be home. Couldn’t it? I like it here.”

Shadows covered his face, hid his eyes. “Go to sleep,” he said, and pulled the string, and the light went out.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “What about the monsters?”

There was a pause. She thought maybe he’d forgotten, and gone downstairs already. A shiver worked up her spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.

Then: “Monsters, monsters.” His voice slurred, echoed. “Monsters of the deep and monsters on high. Monsters of the underbed and monsters that fly. Have you come to take this child? I will not let you take her. Have you come to harm this child? I will not let you harm her. Have you come to steal her soul? I will not let you steal it. With these words, your power is broken, and you are banished from this place. Be gone. Leave this child in peace.”

Fairies were silly. Monsters were real.

Gran came in the early evening, when the August sun was sinking into the West. Shauna refused to speak while Gran buckled her into the backseat of her big brown Buick, and Daddy loaded her suitcases of clothes and toys into the trunk. She’d asked him that morning when he would be joining her at Gran’s, but he never answered. Not any time soon, she guessed. Maybe he would stay in the mountains forever, hiking and fishing and drinking, and forget all about her.

“Be good for Gran,” he said before they left, looking in at her through the open window.

She stared straight ahead the windshield at the lake, smooth as glass and reflecting the gold of the setting sun.

The smell of alcohol was already on his breath.

Gran said her glasses were no good for driving in the dark. Barely a mile down the state road from the cabin, they pulled into the Pickerel Inn to spend the night. They ate in the bar downstairs. Shauna pushed her fries around on the plate until Gran said, “Ladies don’t play with their food, Shauna.”

“I’m not a lady,” she said. But she stopped. The air in the bar smelled like beer, and she wondered if Daddy was drinking right now. She wondered if he was lonely without anyone to tell stories to.

Gran didn’t smell like alcohol when she tucked Shauna into bed in their room. Instead her breath smelled sour like pickles and mayonnaise.

“Can you say your prayers on your own?” she asked. “Or do you want me to say them with you?”

Shauna didn’t know what she meant.

Gran’s mouth pinched tight at the corners. She sighed. “You can listen this time, and tomorrow night you can say them with me.” She folded her hands and bowed her head. “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

Shauna didn’t like it much. It was nothing like what Daddy sang her at night, “Twinkle, Twinkle.” But when she asked for that song, Gran did it all wrong, replacing the little bats with little stars. It sounded like she was making it up as she went along.

“Sleep tight,” Gran said, kissing her on the forehead, her pickle relish breath washing over Shauna’s face.

But Shauna couldn’t sleep. First the television laughter kept her awake, Gran watching Everybody Loves Raymond while sipping a can of ginger ale and making little throat-clearing noises. Later, after the TV was turned off, the throat-clearing noises gave way to great open-mouthed snores that were even more jarring than the low murmur of the television. Then, too, Gran had turned the light off without saying the monster spell. The monsters might be creeping out from under the bed now, with their shadowy limbs and winking yellow eyes.

Shauna buried deeper into the blankets, tempted to scoot closer to Gran. But that would mean showing fear, and Daddy always said that was the worst thing you could do with monsters. Besides, Gran was old and not much good at fighting off a cold, much less a monster.

Minutes passed, feeling like hours. The wind made a whistling sound against the windowpane. The sound would be worse in the cabin, where the windows and doors let in cold drafts. Was Daddy sitting by the window now, missing her? Worse, what if he didn’t care that she was gone? She’d been trouble, she knew, complaining about the smelly outhouse and wandering into the woods alone even though he’d told her not to. What if he’d wanted all along to be alone, and now that he was, he wouldn’t ever come to get her? Just like Mommy.

She tried hard to picture Mommy, and couldn’t. All she could ever remember was a fringe of blond hair and a voice like a sparrow singing in the springtime. But she couldn’t remember Mommy’s face. She’d been too young, and Daddy had burned all the pictures.

Maybe Mommy had left for the same reason Daddy sent her away, because Shauna was too much trouble. It was her fault, maybe, all the crying and fighting.

Gran snorted in her sleep and let out a loud huff. Shauna glared at her back. Who did Gran think she was, taking her back to Maryland, back to her stupid little house with that dumb poodle? This was Shauna’s home, here in the mountains with Daddy, here where they’d come when Mommy left. She could barely remember that other place, that apartment with the peeling paint and the shouting neighbors. She loved the mountains, the lake, the woods. Maybe Daddy didn’t know it, but she belonged here. She belonged with him. She could teach herself to complain less about the outhouse. If it kept her with Daddy, she could do anything.

She snuck a look at Gran. In the dark her body was just a long lump under the blankets, her snores the only sign that she was alive. Probably she wouldn’t even notice if Shauna slipped out of bed and left the room. It wasn’t far back to the cabin. She and Daddy walked to the inn sometimes to get Guinness and cigarettes.

Could she just leave? Was she that brave? She thought she might be.

The first step was getting out of the room without waking Gran. She couldn’t turn the light on; she would have to face whatever was in the dark.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of the monster spell words. Be gone, was all she could think, and she mouthed the words, hoping they worked silently as well as they did when Daddy spoke them. Monsters, monsters, your power’s broken, leave me alone.

She opened her eyes. She could see the shadowy outlines of the room, nothing moving in the dark. The spell had worked. As quietly as possible, she climbed out of bed and stepped into her pink flip-flops. She didn’t want to risk the noise of getting dressed. In her ruffled white nightgown, she crept out the door.

Down the dimly lit hallway she hurried, down steps that led her past the bar—still noisy and smoky—and out into the summer night. The air smelled sharp and electric. Gray clouds were piled in the eastern sky, and thunder rumbled far away. In the west, the moon hung over the lake like a giant moonpie in a shoebox planetarium.

Gravel crunched under Shauna’s flip-flops as she left the parking lot. Pine trees stood guard at the edge of the lot, forming a dark tunnel where the road cut through them and bent around to follow the lakeshore. There were no lights there, nothing but the gloomy dark, and Shauna felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. There were black bears in the woods, she’d seen them with Daddy, and coyotes, maybe even wildcats. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if she met one on the road.

But the only other choice was to go back inside, and gritting her teeth, she stepped onto the road, into the darkness.

It was quiet under the trees. She counted her steps—one, two, three… thirteen, fourteen—until she lost count. She sang instead, “Twinkle, Twinkle” like Daddy sang it, like the Mad Hatter sang in Alice in Wonderland.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,

How I wonder where you’re at.

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,

How I wonder where you’re at.”

Seven times she sang the verse, until her throat hurt, and her feet, too, from walking. No cars had passed on the road, but no bears either. She began to feel better. It wouldn’t be long before she was back at the cabin. Once Daddy saw how determined she was to stay with him, he wouldn’t send her away again.

Please, she thought. Please don’t send me away.

She came at last to the old pump beside the road where she and Daddy came to get water. A few paces ahead, a narrow dirt trail split off from the state road and bent even closer to the lake. She followed it. After only a minute on the trail, she came to the driveway that led up to the cabin.

Her feet hurt, but she broke into an uneven run, her shoes slapping the ground, tall dried August grass whipping at her bare legs. She followed the stone path around the side of the log cabin to the back door. There was a small brass key hidden under a flat rock beside the door; she retrieved it and let herself in, careful not to let the screen door slam behind her.

There was no light on inside, and she nearly tripped over the doormat. Daddy must be sleeping already. That was good; most nights he stayed up late drinking from his bottles, then walked around the next day with great dark circles under his eyes.

After her vision adjusted to the even more lightless dark of indoors, she made her way silently toward the stairs, avoiding the worst of the creaking floorboards. If Daddy was already asleep, she’d just slip into bed and wait for morning to surprise him. She was more tired than she’d thought; her eyelids felt heavy.

Upstairs, something thumped.

Shauna stopped and stood still, waiting. A minute passed with no more sound. Then, again, a heavy dull thump.

“Daddy?” Was he still awake after all? She continued to the base of the staircase and looked up into the darkness. “Daddy?”

No answer.

She hesitated, then started up, using the oak railing to pull herself up each steep step. Beneath her hand, wooden knots were polished smooth by generations of hands. Daddy had held onto this rail when he was a little boy, and his daddy before him, back to Great Granddaddy Hennessy who’d built the cabin a hundred years ago when he came over from Ireland. Shauna wished he’d thought to make the steps a little lower.

“Daddy, are you awake? It’s me. Don’t be mad.”

The bedroom was pitch black, the curtains drawn. Probably the sound had been Daddy turning in his sleep. When he did sleep, he was restless. Probably she should just slip into her bed and do the same.

Thump.

It was a sick sound, the thumping, the sound of something big smacking against the wall.

Shauna’s chest tightened. “Daddy…” In her mind she saw the monsters, huge and hairy with sour breath and oozing soars. She wanted light, bright blinding light, but she wasn’t tall enough to reach the light string.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Monsters, monsters, go away.”

Monsters climbing out from under the bed. Monsters creeping through the shadows toward her.

“Go on and leave here.”

Thump.

She could smell them. They smelled like rotting fruit.

“You don’t have any power.”

They must be within reach now, ready to grab her with long double-jointed fingers.

“Please, please, leave us alone.”

She opened her eyes. Darkness, and no monsters. “Daddy?” she whispered. “Are you here?”

Thump.

With her heart beating in the back of her throat, she slid along the wall and pulled back the window curtains. Moonlight spilled inside, and the shadows retreated into the far corners of the bedroom. There were no monsters, none at all. What was there was so much worse that a scream froze in the back of Shauna’s throat, and she couldn’t breathe around it.

A rope hung from the ceiling beams. At the end of the rope was a loop, and Daddy hung from the loop, the thick rope digging into his neck. His bare feet dangled inches from the floor. His face was swollen, his eyes bulging and unseeing, his tongue fat where it stuck out between his lips. His body swung gently and smacked against the wall.

Thump.

Shauna’s voice unfroze. She screamed as loud as she could, until her scream was the only thing she heard. She screamed until her breath ran out, and the darkness swallowed her, too.