Awakening (Lily Dale #1)(8)

The sudden ringing of her cell phone in her pocket is a welcome distraction. “Hello?”

“I miss you already.”

Lisa. Calla smiles wistfully. “I miss you already, too.”

“Then don’t go! Come here.”

“You know I can’t do that,” she says, casting a glance at her father, who appears to be lost in thought. “And you know why.”

“He’s going back to school in a few weeks. You can avoid each other till then.”

“Under the same roof? I doubt it.”

“Who knows? Maybe if you come here, you’ll get back together,” Lisa says, and Calla’s heart—oblivious to things like logic or likelihood—soars.

“That’s not going to happen,” she tells Lisa resolutely.

“I honestly think he still loves you.”

“He has a funny way of showing it,” she says bitterly, remembering the shocking text message he sent back in April. He couldn’t even wait to dump her in person. It was too urgent to put on hold until his spring semester at Cornell drew to a close; it required immediate action via cell phone. “Look, Lisa, I’ve got to go. My flight is boarding.”

Seeing her father look up at that statement, she realizes he’s been eavesdropping. Well, he can hardly help it, sitting right beside her. Still, it bugs her. Even though she knows he’s probably wondering what happened between her and Kevin. Comforting her through the breakup was Mom’s department. Dad never even acknowledged it—before or after Mom died. Maybe it was too awkward a topic for him. Or maybe he was just too caught up in his own grief that he didn’t consider her recently broken heart. Or maybe he is glad that as a newly single parent, he doesn’t have to deal with a college-aged boyfriend.

She promises Lisa she’ll call or IM her later, hangs up, and sighs.

“Lisa?” Dad asks. As if he didn’t know. “It’s not too late to change your mind and stay.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

“I just wish there were somewhere else you could go. Or would go,” Dad adds, obviously thinking of Uncle Scott.

“Well, there isn’t.”

“Yeah. I know,” he says flatly—and sadly. He’s probably thinking of his parents now.

Dad’s mother, Calla’s Nana Norma, died a few years ago, and his father, Calla’s Poppy Ted, lives in a nursing home not far from Uncle Scott. He has Alzheimer’s. When Nana died, Calla’s father and Uncle Scott went together to tell him. He sobbed inconsolably. He even went to the funeral. The next day, he asked Dad why Norma hadn’t paid her daily visit. Dad was forced to break the news all over again that she had died. Poppy sobbed inconsolably. And the next day, he woke up looking for her again.

Poor Poppy. Now that Calla understands the profound shock and grief of losing the person closest to you, she can’t imagine having to wake up and relive it every single day for the rest of her life.

“Dad, for what it’s worth, I’m glad I’m going to Lily Dale,” Calla feels obligated to assure him—or maybe both of them—yet again. “It’ll help me to feel closer to Mom.”

“Calla . . .” He stops, as though he has no idea what he wants to say.

“Dad, I need to see where Mom—”

“Calla, she left home when she was your age and never went back. She didn’t even like to talk about it, so I don’t know how—”

“Lily Dale was her life for eighteen years,” she cuts in. “Maybe she didn’t talk about it much, but she wasn’t big on reminiscing. You know that.”

He nods. Of course he knows that. Mom was all about the here and now. She never wanted to look back, and she never wanted to look ahead.

“Let’s just be,” she used to say. “I don’t like remember-whens or what-ifs, and I don’t like plans.”

“Lily Dale used to be her home,” Calla tells her dad gently, noticing that he’s once again wearing the now-familiar expression he gets when he’s about to cry. “It was home to Mom the way Tampa is home to me.”

Not that it feels like home anymore, she thinks glumly.

Everything has changed. Mom’s gone, school’s out, Kevin’s no longer in her life. Even her friendship with Lisa is different. Calla can hardly pop in and out of her friend’s house the way she used to—not when she’d risk running into Kevin there. Lisa comes over to the Delaneys’ when Calla asks, but she can tell her friend is uncomfortable there now. Spooked, almost. Whenever she walks in the front door, she glances nervously at the spot at the foot of the stairs where Stephanie died.

Calla herself goes out of her way to avoid it, which means getting out of the house whenever possible. It isn’t easy to escape her father’s watchful eye, but every time he’s otherwise occupied, she’s out of there.

She’s spent a lot of time these past few weeks wandering aimlessly along the winding streets of her development, gazing longingly at the houses occupied by people whose lives haven’t been shattered. Every glimpse of strangers going about their daily business brings a pang: the retiree pruning her gardenias, the businessman checking his mailbox, the little girls practicing cartwheels on the grass.

Shocking, to Calla, that the rest of the world is still carrying on as usual.