The Charm Bracelet(79)

She was always there for me, Arden remembered.

Arden came to the top, gasping for air, her body covered in goose bumps.

Perhaps my mother never left me. Perhaps, just perhaps, I had abandoned her when she needed me the most.

Jake swam over to Arden and reached out to her. “Are you okay? I’m sorry. Just wanted to have some fun.”

“I’m fine. But I lost my glasses,” she said, running a hand through her dripping hair. “I must look a mess.”

“Actually, you look … beautiful,” Jake said. “Wait here.”

Without warning, Jake dove down.

Arden leaned forward to get a better look, but only her reflection stared back.

Arden gasped when she saw herself in the glassy surface of the big lake. Without her glasses and with her hair wet and tousled, she looked years younger. She looked softer, more feminine.

She looked like her mother and her daughter.

“Got ’em!” Jake yelled as he surfaced, holding Arden’s glasses over his head like a prized pearl he had just plucked from the ocean’s depths.

Suddenly, Arden leaned in and kissed Jake. Jake took Arden’s body into his arms and chest. Her body exploded in more goose bumps.

Arden had never kissed or been kissed like this—with such abandon—and the blood rushed through her body, warming her even in the chilly lake water.

She looked up into the sky, the water rushing down her face.

“I’m right here,” Jake said, holding her tightly. “You’re safe.”

For the first time in a very long time, Arden knew he was right. She thought of her mom and dad, of their first date here so long ago, and how life seems so big and yet is really made up of the smallest of moments, the most intricate of memories.

The two began to splash each other in the water, and that’s when Arden realized something else, too: She was actually having fun.

Suddenly, she yanked her glasses out of Jake’s big hands and tossed them into the sky.

“How can you see?” Jake gasped.

“I have contacts back at the cabin,” Arden said. “I’ll rely on you for now.”

She hesitated, then continued, “But, with or without my glasses, I finally realized something.”

“What?” Jake asked.

Arden smiled at Jake, but didn’t respond. Instead, she dove back into Lake Michigan and let loose a happy scream that seemed to release decades of insecurity, unhappiness, obsessiveness, and worry. It was a scream that answered Jake’s question of what she finally realized, even without her glasses:

I can see everything clearly for the first time in my life.





Forty-five




Lolly’s voice drifted from her bedroom window and floated out to the dock where Lauren was painting.

Her grandmother was humming an old tune with which Lauren wasn’t familiar, but it didn’t matter: Her happy, lilting voice delighted Lauren, as well as the birds zipping about the lake, and they began to sing in unison with the oldest bird on Lost Land.

Lauren smiled and studied her painting of the three Lindsey ladies.

Something is missing, she pondered.

And that’s when she heard it: The echo of her grandmother’s charm bracelet jangling like the backbeat of a drum’s cymbal to all the chirping.

That’s it! Lauren exclaimed.

Lauren dipped her brush in the paint and began to add bracelets to the wrists of her and her grandmother, before slowly adding in the charms her grandmother had given her over the years as well as the charms whose stories her grandmother had shared the past week.

Oh, why not?

Lauren laughed and began to add a charm bracelet to her mother’s wrist, too.

She stopped and studied her work, and then looked out over the lake. Hundreds of tulips were in bloom—a crayon box of colors—giving the lake a paint-by-numbers feel.

Lauren stared at the flowers, tipping to and fro in the gentle breeze. Suddenly, her heart began to race. She picked up her paints, palette, and easel and began to run toward the cabin, screaming, “Grandma, Grandma, Grandma!”

“What is it, my dear? Are you okay?” Lolly yelled, alarmed, from her window. Her face, painted as brightly as the tulips, appeared at the screen. “Are the ground hornets already out? Did you get stung?”

“No!” Lauren yelled, stopping, out of breath. “Can I go with you into town?”

“I have to work until six,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Never been surer of anything in my life,” Lauren said.





Forty-six




“Excuse me! Excuse me!”

Lauren wove through the crowded sidewalks of downtown Scoops, weaving through fudgies moving at the pace of zombies.

“Sorry,” she said, bumping arms laden with ice cream cones and lattes. “Pardon me!”

She had escorted her grandmother to Dolly’s, acting casual but checking the time on her cell every minute, her pulse racing each time a group stopped Lolly to get their picture taken with her character, Dolly. As soon as her grandmother had entered the sweet shop, Lauren told her she wanted to go shopping and took off like a bullet, darting through the resorters like a crazed salmon swimming upstream. She zipped down the main drag before cutting toward the river, taking off in a sprint down the warped boardwalk, zipping past pontoon boats and yachts, sailboats and paddle boarders, outdoor bars jammed with revelers.