Neverworld Wake(2)

“?‘The purpose of this exercise is to construct a positive meaning around the lost relationship,’?” she read from chapter seven, handing me a Goodbye Letter worksheet. “?‘On this page, write a note to your lost loved one, detailing fond memories, hopes, and any final questions.’?”

Slapping a chewed pen that read TABEEGO ISLAND RESORTS on my desk, she left. I could hear her on the phone out in the hall, arguing with someone named Barry, asking him why he didn’t come home last night.

I drew a screeching hawk on the Goodbye Letter, with lyrics to a made-up Japanese animated film about a forgotten thought called Lost in a Head.

Then I slipped out the fire exit and never went back.

I taught Sleepy Sam (giant yawn of a teenager from England visiting his American dad) how to make clam cakes and the perfect grilled cheese. Grill on medium, butter, four minutes a side, six slices of Vermont sharp cheddar, two of fontina. For July Fourth, he invited me to a party at a friend of a friend’s. To his shock, I actually showed. I stood by a floor lamp with a warm beer, listening to talk about guitar lessons and Zach Galifianakis, trying to find the right moment to escape.

“That, by the way, is Bee,” said Sleepy Sam. “She does actually speak, I swear.”

I didn’t mention Whitley’s text to anyone, though it was always in the back of my mind.



* * *



—

It was the brand-new way-too-extravagant dress I’d bought but never taken out of the bag. I just left it there in the back of my closet, folded in tissue paper with the receipt, the tags still on, with intention of returning it.

Yet there was still the remote possibility I’d find the courage to put it on.

I knew the weekend of her birthday like I knew my own: August 30.

It was a Friday. The big event of the day had been the appearance of a stray dog wandering Main Street. It had no tags and the haunted look of a prisoner of war. He was gray, shaggy, and startled with every attempt to pet him. A honk sent him skidding into the garbage cans behind the Captain’s Crow.

“See that yellow salt-bed mud on his back paws? That’s from the west side of Nickybogg Creek,” announced Officer Locke, thrilled to have a mystery on his hands, his first of the year.

That stray dog had been the talk all that day—what to do with him, where he’d been—and it was only much later that I found my mind going back to that dog drifting into town out of the blue. I wondered if he was some kind of sign, a warning that something terrible was coming, that I should not take the much-exalted and mysterious Road Less Traveled, but the one well trod, wide-open, and brightly lit, the road I knew.

By then it was too late. The sun had set. Sleepy Sam was gone. I’d overturned the café chairs and put them on the tables. I’d hauled out the trash. And anyway, that flew in the face of human nature. No one ever heeded a warning sign when it came.

My mom and dad assumed I was joining them at the Dreamland Theater in Westerly for the screwball comedy classics marathon, like I did every Friday.

“Actually, I made plans tonight,” I said.

My dad was thrilled. “Really, Bumble? That’s great.”

“I’m driving up to Wincroft.”

They fell silent. My mom had just flipped the Closed sign in the window, and she turned, wrapping her cardigan around herself, shivering even though it was seventy-five degrees out.

“How long have you known about this?” she asked.

“Not long. I’ll be careful. I’ll be back by midnight. They’re up there for Whitley’s birthday. I think it’ll be good for me to see them.”

“That’s a long way to drive in the dark,” said my dad.

My mom looked like I’d been given a prognosis of six weeks left to live. Sometimes when she got really upset, she chewed an imaginary piece of gum. She was doing that now.

“Part of the grieving process is confronting the past,” I said.

“That’s not the point. I—”

“It’s all right, Victoria.” My dad put a hand on her shoulder.

“But Dr. Quentin said not to put yourself in stressful situations that—”

“We’ve established that Dr. Quentin is an idiot,” I said.

“Dr. Quentin is indeed an idiot,” said my dad with a regretful nod. “The fact that his name is one-half of a state prison should have been a red flag.”

“You know I don’t like it when you two gang up on me,” said my mom.

At that moment, someone—some red-faced weekender in seersucker shorts who’d had too many stouts at O’Malligan’s—tried to open the door.

“We’re closed,” my mom snapped.



* * *



—

That was how I came to be driving my dad’s ancient green Dodge RAM with the emphysema muffler fifty miles up the Rhode Island coastline.

Wincroft.

The name sounded like something out of a windswept novel filled with ghosts and madmen. The mansion was a sprawling collection of red brick, turrets, gardens, and crow gargoyles, built in the 1930s by a Great White Hunter who’d supposedly called Hemingway and Lawrence of Arabia his friends. He had traveled the world killing beautiful creatures, and thus Wincroft, his seaside estate, had never been lived in more than a few weeks in sixty years. When Whitley’s weird ex-second-stepdad, Burt—commonly called E.S.S. Burt—bought it in foreclosure in the 1980s, he gut renovated the interiors in an unfortunate style Whitley called “if Madonna threw up all over Cyndi Lauper.”