Lily Dale: Awakening Read online

  Calla turns her head again, this time a little farther, still looking for him.

  The piercing scrutiny boring into her from behind, somewhere to the right, might just as well be a hand on her shoulder, so strong is the presence. This, she knows on a gut level, is different from the stares of her classmates who came to the funeral home last night, some out of genuine sympathy, others, she knows, out of mere morbid curiosity.

  It has to be Kevin. Who else can it be? Who else would be focused solely on Calla?

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. . . .” The minister is spewing cliches—okay, so maybe they’re prayers—seemingly oblivious as the thunder grows closer and lightning slashes the purple-black summer sky, low, beyond the cemetery.

  The storm is coming right at them, off the distant Gulf. Calla fights the potent urge to flee—not just the storm, but all of it, the minister, the heat, the coffin, the grave—even as a stronger, more pressing urge takes hold.

  She gives in to that one swiftly, swiveling her neck around completely to the right, not caring that it’s probably impolite to turn your head at a funeral.

  Nope. No Kevin there.

  But she immediately spots the person who’s been watching her.

  To her surprise, it’s a total stranger.

  The woman, clad in a flowing white dress, is standing apart from the black-clad crowd of mourners. Just a few feet, but enough of a gap to make Calla wonder why she isn’t standing with everybody else. She isn’t way over there under the cluster of palm trees for the shade, because there’s no sun; she isn’t there for shelter from the rain, because it has yet to start falling.

  She stands in stark isolation, black hair pulled back into a bun, eyes so darkly intense that Calla feels goose bumps rising on her arms as she meets the woman’s gaze.

  It isn’t that her expression is unkind . . .

  More that it’s just . . . odd.

  Oddly focused only on Calla, in the midst of Stephanie’s bereaved husband and mother, friends and colleagues.

  Why is she staring at me?

  Who is she?

  And why is she wearing white at a funeral?

  A sudden clap of thunder followed by a frighteningly close flash of lightning startles Calla into turning her head away from the strange woman.

  The minister’s words grow rushed; the crowd stirs uneasily.

  Still unsettled by the stranger’s stare, Calla turns to look for the woman again.

  The spot beneath the stand of palm trees is empty, as is the grass around it.

  A quick scan shows that the woman didn’t join the crowd of mourners, and she’s not hurrying toward a waiting car to escape the rain.

  She’s simply gone.

  But . . . how can that be? People don’t just disappear into thin air.

  She had to be a figment of my imagination in the first place, Calla tells herself uneasily.

  What other explanation is there?

  The storm has blown in full force, drawing the service to a hasty close.

  The coffin has been lowered into the waiting vault, now pooled with rainwater.

  “Let’s go, honey,” Odelia says from beneath a black umbrella. Somebody must have handed it to her, because she isn’t the type to carry one—that would mean planning ahead— and even if she were, it certainly wouldn’t be black. Electric orange, maybe. Or neon green. Or polka dots.

  For a moment, Calla forgets to be grief stricken.

  Then she glances at her father and remembers.

  She watches him being tearfully embraced by his only brother, her uncle Scott, who lives in Chicago.

  “Calla.”

  She looks up at the sound of a familiar voice. There he is. Kevin.

  Gone are the sun-streaked surfer-boy locks he used to have. His blond hair is stubble short and he’s wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and black tie. She’s seen him dressed up on only two occasions, at the prom and at his graduation. But that was over a year ago. He’s changed. He looks older. Almost like a man now.

  “Hey,” he says softly.

  She opens her mouth but can’t find her voice.

  “Are you okay?”

  She just stares mutely at him. Is she okay? Is he freaking kidding her?

  “I’m so sorry, about your mom, and . . . about . . . everything.” He reaches out and wraps his fingers around her upper arm.

  She desperately wants to pull away from him, but she can’t.

  She won’t, because his touch is warm, familiar—and right now, nothing else is.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Are you . . . is it that you can’t talk, or that you won’t? I mean, to me?”

  She clears her throat, manages to say, “It’s not you. I’m upset, okay? Obviously. And not about you. Okay?”

  She expects him to release his hold on her arm, but he doesn’t.

  “Calla . . . look, I still care about you. I said I wanted us to be friends and I meant it.”

  “No you didn’t. Not then.”

  You only mean it now because you’re feeling guilty.

  At last, she finds the strength to pull her arm from his grasp. His hand lingers in the air, making him seem helpless. Less like a man, more like a little boy who doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

  He hesitates. “Listen, if you need . . .” He pauses, and she expects him to say me.

  But he doesn’t. He says anything.

  “If you need anything, I’m around.”

  She shrugs. She wants to tell him that she doesn’t need anything. Not from him.

  But it would be a lie. And if there’s anything her mother taught her, it was never to lie.

  Calla watches Kevin walk away, hands in his pockets and head bowed, to join his parents and Lisa. They get into their white Lexus and drive away. Mrs. Wilson is sitting in the back with Lisa, her arms wrapped around her, comforting her.

  For a moment, Calla is so insanely jealous that she feels physically sick.

  She wants to be Lisa, wrapped in her mother’s arms.

  No, she doesn’t.

  She wants to be Calla, wrapped in her own mother’s arms.

  She blinks away tears, steps closer to her father, and stares at her mother’s grave.

  A shadow falls over the ground in front of her, and she looks up to see a man in sunglasses and a dark suit passing by. His head is bowed in sorrow, and she can’t tell who he is. Just another person who’s mourning Mom. Calla never realized just how many people Stephanie Delaney touched in her life, until she saw the crowd here today.

  “So let me know if you want her to come stay,” Uncle Scott is telling Dad as Calla listens idly, her insides twisting in agony. She still feels sick.

  What if I throw up?

  She supposes it really doesn’t matter now. People have dispersed quickly, running through the rain to their cars.

  The cool droplets feel good. . . .

  But we shouldn’t be hanging around out here with lightning splitting the sky.

  Then again, what does it matter? If she’s struck by lightning, she’ll be with Mom again.

  The man passing by the grave raises his dark glasses to his forehead and looks up at the sky. Catching a better glimpse of his face, Calla recognizes him . . . sort of.

  Who is he, exactly?

  Oh. He’s one of Mom’s coworkers or something. Right. She met him when he stopped by the house one day not long ago to give something to Mom, and Calla answered the door.

  His name was Todd. Or Tom. Something like that. She watches dully as he walks away toward the thinning line of cars parked at the edge of the cemetery.

  Her father, looking as out of place in his dark suit as Calla feels in hers, removes his wire-rimmed glasses to dab away the tears that seem to just keep coming. “I don’t know, Scott . . . ,” he’s saying. “That would be such an imposition and you guys already have a full house.”

  “There’s always room for one more
. She can bunk with the girls and help Susie out around the house. She could really use a hand. And you know how the kids love Calla.”

  What?

  Talk about a lightning bolt. . . .

  They’re discussing her?

  No. No way.

  No way is Calla moving in with her aunt and uncle and their four kids, all under seven years old.

  Has her father lost his mind?

  Or . . .

  Hurt washes over her.

  Is he so reluctant to be a single dad that he’s shipping her off to another family?

  Numb, she opens her mouth to protest, but she can’t seem to find her voice.

  “What do you think, kiddo?” Uncle Scott asks, turning to Calla as a hard lump swells in her throat. “How would you like to spend the rest of the summer in Chicago?”

  Just the rest of the summer?

  Oh.

  Just the rest of the summer.

  Okay, but still . . .

  “We’re going to California in August,” she reminds her father.

  He’s about to start a two-semester sabbatical in the physics department at Shellborne College. At least . . . that was the plan.

  Mom, a total workaholic, had even reluctantly arranged to take a few weeks of saved vacation so that she and Calla could spend the remainder of the summer out west with Dad before Calla began her senior year at Shoreside Day in Tampa. Of course, Mom was torn about going away for so long. She kept asking how her office was going to get along without her. Dad’s retort was the same every time: “Well, how am I supposed to get along without you?”

  How bittersweet those words are now.

  “Calla—” Her father breaks off, looking overwhelmed.

  “You rented that place for us near the beach for the month of August,” Calla tells him. Then, seeing the look on his face, she adds in a small voice, “Didn’t you?”

  “I did, yes . . . when you and your mom were going to come out with me. But without her . . . it’s expensive, Calla. Really expensive. More than we can afford . . . now.”

  “Where are we going to stay, then?” She doesn’t dare allow herself to consider the larger question: What’s going to happen when it’s time for me to go back to Tampa and start school?

  “You and your dad need to talk,” Uncle Scott tells her.

  “We just . . . we have a lot to figure out,” Dad says, more to Uncle Scott than to her. “It doesn’t have to be today, or even tomorrow.”

  “There isn’t much time, Jeff. You have to make a decision.”

  “No, I know. I just can’t think straight.”

  Calla walks away, her heart pounding. So Dad doesn’t want her to go to California with him now? He’d rather send her off to be Aunt Susie’s summer slave? The cousins are brats, the house is a crumb-and-cat-fur-filled wreck, and where the heck would Calla “bunk,” as her uncle so charmingly put it, in his daughters’ tiny, toy-clogged room?

  And what about September? What then?

  Miserable, she crouches beside her mother’s grave as fat raindrops plop into the sandy soil heaped beside it. She reaches blindly for a handful and sprinkles it over the wet white coffin.

  “Good-bye, Mommy,” she whispers.

  At that moment, the loose clasp on the emerald bracelet releases.

  Calla gasps, helplessly watching as it falls into the gaping hole, like it’s determined to go with its rightful owner.

  She and her mother had a fight not long ago about Calla’s borrowing the coveted bracelet without asking. Mom said the clasp was loose and she was bound to lose it. Then Kevin broke up with her, and Mom, feeling sorry for her, gave her the bracelet.

  “It’s yours to keep,” she said, hugging Calla. “I know it’s just jewelry. It won’t heal a broken heart, but it might make you feel better for a couple of minutes.”

  It did.

  Now, Calla searches for the bracelet in the shadowed depths of the grave.

  “Come on, honey.” Her father is behind her, tugging her arm. “Get up. Let’s go.”

  “But . . .”

  “Calla, she isn’t in there. Not really. Don’t you remember what we talked about when we saw her at the funeral home?”

  Yes. Of course she remembers.

  She’ll never forget the macabre sight of her mother’s corpse in the open casket . . . or the startlingly cold, unyielding feel of her flesh beneath Calla’s lips when she kissed her good-bye one last time before they closed the lid.

  “You have to let go now, honey,” her father says. “Come on.”

  “I know, but . . . my bracelet.”

  “What?” her father asks, and his voice is choked with grief, his face ravaged by it.

  “Never mind,” Calla says softly, taking his hand as they walk through the falling rain toward the waiting limo.

  TWO

  “This is absolutely crazy,” Jeff Delaney mutters, pacing a short distance through the crowded gate area to check the Departures screen for the third time in as many minutes.

  “Dad, planes are delayed all the time,” Calla reminds him, scrolling through the playlist on her iPod again as he plops restlessly beside her. “And it’s only by a half hour, which is actually not all that crazy. I’ve heard of people being stuck in airports for—”

  “No, not the delay. I mean . . . this.” He waves his hand in her general direction.

  “I’m crazy?”

  “No, I’m crazy for sending you a thousand miles away for so long.”

  “It’s only for a couple of weeks, really.” Three, to be exact. By Labor Day, Calla will join him out west as the new kid in some school she’s never even heard of.

  A short time ago, that would have been a fate worse than . . .

  No. No fate is worse than what she’s just been through. She knows that now.

  “What was I thinking?” Dad shakes his head.

  “You were thinking logically,” she assures him, tucking the iPod into her pocket. “You were thinking that I can’t come with you now because you’ll be too busy getting settled, and there’s nowhere for me to even stay with you.”

  The beach house is history. He’ll sleep on a friend’s pullout couch in a cramped condo until he finds an affordable place to rent in a good school district starting in September. Public school—not private, like Shoreside. He seems much more worried about money now than he did before Mom died. Calla figures their finances are pretty dire without Mom’s salary or even a life insurance policy. She overheard Dad say that Mom didn’t have one. When Calla asked about money, he said they’ll be fine, that they’ll have more than enough. Somehow, she doubts that.

  He needs a haircut, Calla notices as she watches him rake a hand through his shaggy black hair. That was Mom’s department—along with his wardrobe. She had planned to go shopping to buy him some decent clothes for the sabbatical. She wanted him to get contact lenses, too. She thought the glasses made him look too “professorish,” as she said.

  “I am a professor,” Dad protested, more than once . . . because she said it pretty frequently.

  Mom is—was—big on appearances. That was why she talked Dad into moving, a few years back, from their bungalow in the historic district to a nice new home off Westshore. Dad said they couldn’t afford it. Mom said they could. She won that argument. She usually did.

  Not that she had to have the most expensive designer clothes or extravagant jewelry, but she liked to be well put together, and she expected Calla and her father to follow suit.

  Which was fine—at least, for Calla. Why argue with a mother who enjoyed taking you shopping for hours on end?

  But Dad . . . well, he was the kind of man who would— and once did—absentmindedly walk out the front door wearing only boxer shorts.

  He still is that kind of man, Calla reminds herself now.

  Dad = present tense; Mom = past. You’d think that after a few weeks, she’d have her tenses straight.

  Yeah, well, this isn’t an English test. It’s Calla’s life, sad a
s it is. A life that’s about to take yet another dramatic turn. At least this is one she instigated herself. With a little help from her grandmother. Which is where the “crazy” part comes in.

  But her only alternatives to Lily Dale are Chicago—no way—or staying here in Florida with Lisa’s family—also no way. They offered, and Lisa did her best to talk Calla into it, but . . .

  Well, Lisa’s parents are Kevin’s parents. Lisa’s house is Kevin’s house, and he’s still home for the summer. What if he decides to bring his new girlfriend home to meet his parents?

  He does have one. He wouldn’t admit it when they broke up, and Lisa swears he hasn’t mentioned anybody, but Calla knows, the way she just knows she’s meant to go to Lily Dale.

  It was Odelia’s idea. And when her grandmother first brought it up before she left Tampa after the funeral, Calla decided she really is a whack job.

  Then Jeff, without even hesitating for a split second, adamantly said no way. At which point Calla found herself deciding it might not be such a bad idea after all.

  She couldn’t help it. Dad, who used to be such a nonissue in her life, has been bugging her. Mom was the one who used to fill that role—and who was also the one she confided in, the one whose time and attention Calla craved. Probably because she was always so busy with work. Calla missed her when she was away at banking conferences—which was more and more often this past year—and part of the reason Dad had insisted she take some time off.

  Calla feels guilty now admitting, even to herself, that as much as she missed her mother when she was gone, she also appreciated the break from the household tension. Her parents argued a lot lately, and so did Calla and her mother.

  Calla might look like Mom, but she’s always acted more like her father. They’re both quiet and a little absentminded, both can get caught up in something—like reading a book or listening to music or surfing the Internet—only to realize they’ve wasted away an entire day. That sort of unproductive behavior drove Mom crazy, and it was the source of some frustrating, no-win arguments around their household.

  Life would probably be a lot easier for Calla if she had her mother’s super-efficiency and organizational skills, her practicality, and above all, her supreme confidence. Calla sometimes has a hard time thinking of things to say to people.