“Well, I’m not,” I snapped. I felt the urge to toss my hair at him. The heroine in the book I was reading tossed her hair a lot, and I’d been looking for an opportunity, even though I wasn’t quite exactly sure how to pull this off.
He shrugged. “Okay,” he said. He turned and started to walk in the other direction, and after he’d gone a few steps, I yelped, “Wait!”
I hurried to catch up with him, and he waited for me until I got there. “I’m maybe a little lost,” I confessed as I reached him. “I’m just trying to get back to Dockside. Or really, any road. I’ll be able to find my way back.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know where that is,” he said. “But I can take you back to the street my house is on, if you want. I think it’s called Hollyhock.”
I knew exactly where that was—but it was a ten-minute bike ride away from my house, and I realized just how turned around I had actually gotten. “Did you just move in?” I asked as I fell into step next to him. He was a little shorter than me, and as I looked down at him, I could see an explosion of freckles across his nose and cheeks.
“This afternoon,” he said, nodding.
“Then how do you know where you’re going?” I asked, and I could hear my voice rise a little, as I started to panic again. Were there now two of us lost in the woods? Were we going to provide the bears with multiple entrée options?
“I know the woods,” he said, in the same calm voice. “We have some behind our house in Maryland. You just have to look for markers. You can always find your way out again, no matter how lost you think you are.”
That seemed highly unlikely to me. “Really.”
He smiled at that, and I could see his front teeth were slightly crooked, the way Warren’s had been before he got his retainer. “Really,” he said. “See?” He pointed through a gap in the trees and I saw, to my amazement, the road, with cars going by.
“Oh, wow,” I said as I felt relief flood through me. “I thought I was never going to get out of here. I thought I was bear food. Thank you so much!”
“Sure,” he said, with a shrug. “It was no big deal.”
As he said this, I realized he wasn’t bragging, or telling me that he’d told me so, or being a jerk about the fact that I’d lied and then needed his help anyway. And as I looked at him, and his steady green-brown eyes, I was suddenly glad I hadn’t tried to toss my hair. “I’m Taylor, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said, smiling at me. “I’m Henry.”
chapter thirty-four
MY DAD RETURNED FROM THE HOSPITAL THE NEXT DAY, BUT IT was clear that things weren’t going to go back to whatever normal we’d established. His doctors no longer wanted him to go unmonitored, and apparently, he was going to need help soon that we wouldn’t be able to provide. So, as a condition of being able to come home, we would now have round-the-clock home health care workers. He also wasn’t supposed to climb stairs any longer, so a bed—the kind with a remote that could raise and lower it, the kind in hospitals—had been installed in our living room, the table we never used pushed aside to make space. A wheelchair sat in the corner of the screened-in porch, like a terrible sign of things to come.
And adding to the feeling that the summer as we’d known it had ended was the presence of my grandfather. After I’d had my conversation on the dock with Henry, I’d gone inside and cried for an hour. This seriously frightened Warren, who’d come home with Wendy and a pizza in tow for dinner, and hadn’t expected either the news about Dad or to find his sister in an emotional meltdown. When I’d composed myself, with Warren standing by for emotional support, I’d called my grandfather in New York and told him the situation. I’d barely gotten the words out before he was telling me what bus he would be on, and when I should pick him up. So as my mother was dealing with the medical-supply people and setting up the bed, and Warren was taking Gelsey out for ice cream to tell her what was happening (never mind that it was ten in the morning), I was driving to Mountainview to meet my grandfather’s bus.
I arrived early and parked near the bus station, but it wasn’t until I got out of the car to wait that I realized I probably should have pulled myself together a little more. I wasn’t even wearing shoes, which was never really a problem in Lake Phoenix. My feet, by now, had toughed up so that I could easily run up the driveway barefoot, and I preferred to drive barefoot, always with a few lone grains of sand clinging to my feet and the pedals. Nevertheless, I almost always remembered to throw some flip-flops into the car so that I wouldn’t look like a total hick when I got out of it. But between lying awake the night before, wondering if I’d done the right thing with Henry, and this morning, with the new equipment and people traipsing through the house, I wasn’t really in the best frame of mind.