Jill Barnett - The Days of Summer

Again he’d made her feel young and foolish, like some thirteen-year-old with a silly crush making a pest of herself. He called her a little girl to put her down for being seventeen—as if she could change the year she was born. And no one wanted to be twenty-one more than she did, instead of stuck in some kind of hinterland between a teenager and an adult. She didn’t belong anywhere: on this island, with those girls, in Seattle; even her age was undefined. There was a time when she could have talked about what she felt with high school friends. Now, whenever she spoke with them, scattered as they all were in colleges all over the country, there were more long silences than meaningful words. None of them knew what to say to one another anymore.

Things would have been easier, maybe, if her father were alive. Somehow she knew he could have given her the answers she needed during the moments when living became so hard and ugly. Without a dad, she felt as if she were hobbling through life on one leg, when most other people had two.

Her grandmother Julia claimed her dad had been a star and made Laurel promise to never forget. It was important to her grandmother, the star thing. At first Laurel had been too young to understand the difference between a music star and a star in the sky. To children, stars were stars. Confused, she’d asked her aunt, Evie, what stars were, one night when they were standing together outside and the night sky was filled with them. Her aunt had told her that the stars were magical things, other worlds so far away that sometimes it was impossible to believe they really existed. Laurel had been probably seven at the time, an age when she had blind faith in magical things and grew up trying to believe in fathers who were never there.

He was an image in a faded photograph, a name on a record that hung on the wall of her room. He was a star—something impossible for her to believe ever existed. And now, as she sat there feeling inconsequential, she looked up in the sky and searched those stars, wanting them to magically spell out the answers to all her most important questions, like why did people have to die? Why did life move so slowly? What was real love like? Why was she so lonely? She felt as if she were in a different dimension than everyone else and destined to watch life from outside.

Sitting on the edge of the fountain, she could see copper and silver coins sparkling back at her, the water and lights making them seem bigger than they actually were. There must have been close to a thousand forgotten wishes in the bottom of the fountain. When you didn’t believe in magical things like wishes, you never set yourself up for disappointment. You understood that all too often things looked bigger than they really were.

Laurel pulled a couple of pennies out of her pocket. Two cents. There was a joke in that somewhere. She turned her back to the fountain and closed her eyes, then tossed the pennies over her shoulder and made a wish for someone to love her.

* * *

Kathryn could hear the night frogs in the side garden through an open window in the living room, so she sat down in there with a book. It was almost eleven when Laurel came in the front door and hung up her coat. “Hi, Mom.” Exhaustion was in her voice, her shoulders sloped in defeat.

“How was the movie?”

Laurel shrugged.

“You look so pretty,” Kathryn said brightly. “I bet you turned some heads tonight.”

Her daughter looked at her as if she’d slapped her, then ran out of the room sobbing and slammed her bedroom door closed.

“What did I say wrong now?” Kathryn said to the empty room. Everything had been so much easier when Laurel only worried about a Halloween costume or a book report or if she performed some complicated ballet position correctly. In those days, Kathryn had all the right answers.

She tapped lightly on Laurel’s door. “It’s me.”

“Just leave me alone, Mom. Please.”

A blank white door stood between them, a wall of Kathryn’s wrong words and wrong choices. She heard Laurel’s muffled cries and reached for the doorknob, but a voice in her head said, Don’t barge in . She understood self-pity and despair, feeling helpless, confused, and frustrated—apparently the normal state for a mother with a teenage daughter. She sagged down into an overstuffed chair and stared at the empty hallway as if she could divine answers from there, a thread and needle for the worn and unraveling seams of their relationship.

The awful truth was that the move here had made Laurel miserable. Laurel was miserable, but Kathryn wasn’t. She liked living in Evie’s house. It was well over sixty years old, with a small floor plan, tall ceilings, crown molding, and hardwood floors. Lazy beach furniture filled the rooms—Victorian wicker, an antique French daybed, rattan—so different from Julia’s formal white furniture. There had been little color in Kathryn’s life except her own blue bedroom.

Evie had painted every room a different color. The place was all spring and sunshine, yellows and pinks. It felt like a woman’s house. Here she wanted to drink tea from a flowered mug instead of a three-hundred-year-old tea service, her mother-in-law serving her without ever asking whether she wanted the lemon and sugar.

Moving to Catalina had freed Kathryn’s spirit. But her freedom came at a price, one Laurel had paid.

Kathryn waited for the sound of crying to stop. This time she didn’t knock. Inside, a muted hanging lamp and sandalwood candles lit the room. In the corner, flat on the floor, sat Laurel’s bed, covered with an ethnic print throw and mirror-trimmed pillows from India. Evie was right. George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and the Hare Krishna who stuck carnations in your face at the airport would feel right at home in this bedroom.

But the candles flickered softly against the walls, where Jimmy’s guitar hung beside his records, some photos, awards, and framed copies of his handwritten music. Beneath this shrine to her father, Laurel lay curled in a lump on her bed, facing the wall and leaving no doubt that Jimmy’s daughter still belonged to the day he died.

Kathryn sank down beside her. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

“No.” Laurel gave a sharp, caustic laugh.

She’s too young to be so bitter. It’s by my example . Her mouth was dry when she asked, “Do you want me to leave?”

“No.” It was a while before Laurel spoke. “I want someone to think I’m special and beautiful and wonderful.”

“I think you’re special and beautiful and wonderful.”

Her daughter wasn’t rude enough to say, Big deal , but the words hung there in her silence.

“I don’t know what I can do to make you happy.”

Laurel reached out and touched her hand. “Look, Mom. It’s not your fault. Sometimes, like tonight, you just say the wrong thing.”

“What did I say?”

“It’s a long and miserable story.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I have hours and hours.” She settled back against a couple of those gaudy pillows. It took a moment before Laurel started talking, and once she did, everything spilled out of her in a rush of emotion—the boy on the boat, the kids necking in the theater, the fistfight—all told with that double-edged intensity of youth.

Laurel looked at her. “I feel like I’m completely invisible.”

Kathryn had watched her grow up and felt so proud, and so scared. One day, not that long ago, she turned around and no longer had a child for a daughter. The years had turned into a white blur while her daughter became a beautiful young woman. She wanted to tell her she was far from invisible, but Laurel wouldn’t believe her. Kathryn pointed to a black-and-white photograph of Jimmy onstage with his guitar. To anyone who looked at the shot, it appeared as if he were looking at the audience. “See this photograph of your father?”