Every Summer After(2)

I also know I’ve gone more years without Sam than I spent with him. The Thanksgiving that marked seven years since I’d spoken to him, I had a panic attack, my first in ages, then drank my way through a bottle and a half of rosé. It felt monumental: I’d officially been without him for more years than we’d had together at the lake. I’d cried in ugly, heaving sobs on the bathroom tiles until I passed out. Chantal came over the next day with greasy takeout and held my hair back as I puked, tears streaming down my face, and I told her everything.

“It’s been forever,” I tell Charlie.

“I know. And I’m sorry to call you so late,” he says. He sounds so much like Sam it hurts, as if there’s a lump of dough lodged in my throat. I remember when we were fourteen and it was almost impossible to tell him apart from Charlie on the phone. I remember noticing other things about Sam that summer, too.

“Listen, Pers. I’m calling with some news,” he says, using the name he used to call me but sounding much more serious than the Charlie I once knew. I hear him breathe in through his nose. “Mom passed away a few days ago, and I . . . well, I thought you’d want to know.”

His words slam into me like a tsunami, and I struggle to fully understand them. Sue’s dead? Sue was young.

All I can get out is a ragged-sounding “What?”

Charlie sounds exhausted when he replies. “Cancer. She’d been fighting it for a couple of years. We’re devastated, of course, but she was sick of being sick, you know?”

And not for the first time, it feels like someone stole the script to my life story and wrote it all wrong. It seems impossible that Sue was sick. Sue, with her big smile and her denim cutoffs and her white-blond ponytail. Sue, who made the best pierogies in the universe. Sue, who treated me like a daughter. Sue, who I dreamed one day might be a mother-in-law to me. Sue, who was sick for years without me knowing. I should have known. I should have been there.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I begin. “I . . . I don’t know what to say. Your mom was . . . she was . . .” I sound panicked, I can hear it.

Hold it together, I tell myself. You lost rights to Sue a long time ago. You are not allowed to fall apart right now.

I think about how Sue raised two boys on her own while running the Tavern, and about the first time I met her, when she came over to the cottage to assure my much older parents that Sam was a good kid and that she would keep an eye on us. I remember when she taught me how to hold three plates at once and the time she told me not to take crap from any boy, including her own two sons.

“She was . . . everything,” I say. “She was such a good mom.”

“She was. And I know she meant a lot to you when we were kids. That’s sort of why I’m calling,” says Charlie, tentative. “Her funeral is on Sunday. I know it’s been a long time, but I think you should be there. Will you come?”

A long time? It’s been twelve years. Twelve years since I’ve made the drive north to the place that was more like home to me than anywhere else has been. Twelve years since I dove, headfirst, into the lake. Twelve years since my life crashed spectacularly off course. Twelve years since I’ve seen Sam.

But there’s only one answer.

“Of course I will.”





2



Summer, Seventeen Years Ago

I don’t think my parents knew when they bought the cottage that two adolescent boys lived in the house next door. Mom and Dad wanted to give me an escape from the city, a break from other kids my age, and the Florek boys, who went unsupervised for long stretches of the afternoons and evenings, were probably as big a surprise to them as they were to me.

A few of the kids in my class had summer homes, but they were all in Muskoka, just a short drive north from the city, where the word cottage didn’t seem quite right for the waterfront mansions that lined the area’s rocky shores. Dad flat-out refused to look in Muskoka. He said if we bought a cottage there, we might as well stay in Toronto for the summer—it was too close to the city and too full of Torontonians. So he and Mom focused their search on rural communities further northeast, which Dad declared too developed or too overpriced, and then further still until finally they settled on Barry’s Bay, a sleepy, working-class village that transformed into a bustling tourist town in the summer, sidewalks bursting with cottagers and European sightseers on their way to camp or hike in Algonquin Provincial Park. “You’ll love it there, kiddo,” he promised. “It’s the real cottage country.”

I would eventually look forward to the four-hour drive from our Tudor in midtown Toronto to the lake, but that first trip spanned an eternity. Entire civilizations rose and fell by the time we passed the “Welcome to Barry’s Bay” sign, Dad and I in the moving truck and Mom following behind in the Lexus. Unlike Mom’s car, the truck had neither a decent sound system nor air-conditioning, and I was stuck listening to the monotonous hum of CBC Radio, the backs of my thighs glued to the vinyl bench and my bangs plastered to my clammy forehead.

Almost all the girls in my seventh-grade class got bangs after Delilah Mason did, though they didn’t suit the rest of us as well. Delilah was the most popular girl in our grade, and I considered myself lucky to be one of her closest friends. Or at least I used to, but that was before the sleepover incident. Her bangs formed a neat red valance over her forehead while mine defied both gravity and styling products, jutting out in odd poufs and angles, making me look every bit the awkward thirteen-year-old I was, rather than the mysterious dark-eyed brunette I wanted to be. My hair was neither straight nor curly and seemed to change its personality based on an unpredictable number of factors, from the day of the week to the weather to the way I slept the night before. Whereas I would do anything I could to make people like me, my hair refused to fall in line.