The Lost Summer (18 page)

E
PILOGUE

T
here was a lot of catching up to do when I was released from the hospital. My emotions were haywire and my thoughts disorganized, and while I was lucky my language had returned, there were some cognitive setbacks. At school I wasn't exactly held back, but between rehab, doctor's visits, and the work I'd missed while recovering, it took me two more years to graduate. Katie Bell headed to college a full year before me. I guess that's what they call irony.

When she decided on Belmont University in Nashville, I had to ask, self-consciously, if it was because of me. I was doing fine, I told her. The doctors were amazed. I didn't want to be her charity case.

I wasn't, she scoffed, though she wouldn't deny that being in the same city was a perk. “Hels Bells does Nashvegas!” she'd crowed. I heard her grin over the telephone.

We have a standing coffee date at Bongo Java on Wednesdays and Fridays after school. That will have to end soon, though. I'm heading to college now too, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville—close enough that I can come home for doctor's appointments, but far enough that my mother can't drive me crazy.

It's a big school, but sometimes I'm afraid I'll see Ransome there, wandering around campus, in the bookstore, at a party. He'll be a senior now. I still picture him, his skin tan and his copper hair lightened by the sun, smiling with his crooked tooth, on the boat dock the day of the accident. Sometimes I want to see him. Sometimes the thought makes me feel as if all the blood is draining from my body.

He called me once, the week I woke up, to see how I was doing. He apologized he couldn't be there. He'd been to the hospital when I was . . . “asleep” (the word everyone preferred to use), but had to get back to school. He hadn't known when I would wake up. He avoided saying “if.”

We talked awkwardly for seven minutes exactly. Then he said he had to go but he'd e-mail me. He did and I did, a few times, the period between each correspondence lengthening until finally our communication petered out all together.

Winn and I, on the other hand, have been much better about keeping in touch. She stayed one more day with me in the hospital, with Katie Bell, and then called once a week to check on my progress and see what was coming back and what was difficult. She said she'd decided, in the hospital, to make her major pre-med.

We talk periodically now, and when we do, our conversations always drift back to camp. She's the only one not afraid to ask me about the accident, the only one who doesn't tiptoe around the subject—even more than the usually blunt Katie Bell. It's a relief and has brought us closer.

It was when I was packing for college, going through the drawers of the desk I rarely use in my bedroom, that I found the journals, the ones the psychologist asked me to keep in the weeks following the coma. Again it was my mother who insisted I see a therapist in addition to my regular doctors, but, unlike the divorce therapists, I liked this one. She didn't ask me to draw pictures with crayons. She asked me to record everything I remembered from that summer in neat, lined notebooks. My dreams too. “Everything” is a lot.

As I wrote, the summer flooded me. Sequences of events were muddy and jumbled at first, tattered memories like dreams, but the sights and sounds and tastes and smells were piercingly clear. Eventually I could remember almost everything leading up to the accident.

It's in the remembering that I've begun to understand. That summer the ground beneath me shifted— slowly and silently, like the continental drifts that created the hills and valleys that cradle Southpoint. The movement was almost imperceptible but for the changing of the landscape.

I do believe part of me died that summer—the part with a Kool-Aid–stained mouth that played tetherball for hours and ate sugar straight from colorful paper tubes. The part that believed childhood was a place that could be returned to every summer. But part of me was born too.

Even though I haven't gone back to camp, am not sure I
could
go back—it would be too different and too hard—I often return to it in my mind. Through the photos and memories and friendships, especially the friendships, Southpoint safely rests in the lap of an internal mountain range, one whose peaks are higher and valleys are lower for my summers there, and that is far more beautiful even than the hills of Tennessee. It's there that I am really home, and my Southpoint sisters are always with me.

There are so many people to whom I owe great thanks. First and foremost, my family and friends. I feel very blessed to have them in my life. My editor, Elizabeth Rudnick, who has over the past few years become one of the latter. She is patient and extremely talented. The team at Hyperion for all that goes into the making of a book.

I owe any success in my descriptions of Southpoint to my own time at summer camp. While Southpoint is not intended to be a reflection of that particular camp or a recollection of my or anyone else's experiences, I hope and believe this story is richer for the time I spent there. I am grateful for the camp owners and friends who I've also come to consider family.

I'd like to thank Jessie Yancey for her ideas and feedback; Reid Ward for his insights regarding some of my more subjec
tive medical queries; Nan Stikeleather for her knowledge of boating; and my early readers. Last but never least, I send my love and gratitude to Amma and Appa.

The overwhelming scent of magnolia wafted through my bedroom on a humid breeze. If I leaned out the window, I could almost touch the tree's glossy, dark green leaves. When the woman from the real estate company gave us a tour of the house, my mother had optimistically called the tree “charming,” but at the moment, in the August heat, the aroma was utterly noxious.

All morning I had been helping my parents unpack the kitchen, until, more out of an urge to get away from them than any irresistible desire to settle into our new home, I had firmly announced I was ready to tackle my room. Sitting amid the brown cardboard boxes stacked like building blocks, I considered how soul crushing it was to see all of my earthly belongings packed up and labeled “Annie's Things.” It was the end of the world as I knew it, and all I had to console myself were relics of my past life—pictures and ticket stubs, old notes, and a “care package” Jamie, my best friend, had sent with me, with the insistence that it should be opened only when I
really
,
really
needed it. I figured now was as good a time as any and fished the shoe box from its bed of packing peanuts.

A knock at the door startled me. When I didn't answer immediately, it creaked open to reveal my mother. The stifling heat was bothering her, too, I could tell. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, and sweat stains had appeared under the arms of her orange T-shirt. With the air-conditioning on the fritz, we'd had to use knives to pry open the windows, most of which were painted shut, to avoid suffocation. Not that this was much help with the humidity, through which we could have breaststroked. And the cherry on top: we were evidently below the “gnat line,” where there were more bugs than humans.

“Are you still moping?” my mom asked from the doorway.

“I prefer ‘mourning,'” I answered, running my hand over the lid of the shoe box, which Jamie had decoupaged with photos and magazine clippings. “And yes.”

Crossing the room to plant herself on my quilted bedspread (entirely too hot, I'd already realized, for the Seventh Circle of Hell in which we now lived), my mom sighed. I could feel her watching me, but I refused to return her gaze.

“Haven't you ever wished you could have a fresh start?” she pleaded. “This is a chance to reinvent yourself!”

“I've spent seventeen years inventing myself,” I said, finally looking up from my new itchy, ugly carpet. “Why would I want to start all over again?” Wiping at the beads of sweat collecting on my upper lip, I stared at her and fought the building pressure of tears. An all-too-familiar feeling these days.

She didn't have an answer. And, all joking aside, I didn't want a fresh start. I wanted Connecticut and Deer-wood Academy and Jamie. A framed picture of us stared up at me from her package. It was from Halloween, the year we'd dressed as ketchup and mustard. Our skinny legs stuck out from painted foam-board costumes as we grinned at the camera. Jamie was making the peace sign, her middle and forefinger spread into a triumphant V.

Under different circumstances, the photo would have made me smile. Now it made me feel entirely lost. Lost and adrift. Which, if you were to ask Jamie, were two feelings I valiantly opposed on a general basis. I was
not
a girl who liked change. I had lived in the same house for thirteen years, from the age of four. I'd had the same best friend since third grade and the same poster above my bed since roughly the same era. I even hated getting a haircut. Adaptation was not on my agenda.

“Well,” my mother sighed again as she stood to leave, “I just wanted to remind you that we have dinner at the country club with your grandparents at six.”

I stifled a groan. I hadn't seen my grandparents since I was ten, when Camp Chinakwa and field hockey clinics started to replace my annual summer visit to Gram and Pawpaw MacRae's. But I still vividly remembered my days at Belmont, the creaky, old plantation house where my father was raised. The house was magical; unfortunately, the company was not. Gram was always too busy to play (besides the fact I'd never been convinced she actually
liked
children), which left me with the twin terrors, Virginia and Charlotte, or Roberta, Gram's housekeeper, who didn't talk much but let me snap green beans on Belmont's sagging front porch.

It wasn't all bad. I remembered nights of spotlight tag and chasing lightning bugs around mammoth magnolias. And the sour, metallic smell the bugs gave off if you kept them in a jar too long or forgot to poke airholes. One summer I'd convinced Virginia and Charlotte that the house was haunted by the ghosts of slaves. Of course they'd told their mother, Aunt Nonny, who'd chased me around the yard with a switch from the weeping willow, only causing me to laugh harder.

Yet despite those moments, I always came away from my visits at Belmont with the sinking feeling that there was an essential disconnect between who I was and who Gram thought I should be. The older I'd gotten, the more interest she had taken in me, but it was interest I could have done without. One summer—my last at Belmont coincidentally—Gram had driven me to Beaufort's fanciest department store and told me I could pick out any dress I wanted. After staring at the rows and rows of pink smocking and lavender ruffles, I had opted instead for a pair of jean overalls because Jamie owned ones just like them. Gram had gotten me a dress—with ruffles—anyway.

Since that fateful summer, my relationship with my grandparents had been reduced to biannual monetary installments at Christmas and birthdays. Without fail, twice a year, I could expect a big, fat check, along with a demitasse spoon on my birthday. (My mother had to explain to me that the tiny silver spoons weren't for babies, but for fancy tea. I didn't think I'd ever use them, but as long as they were accompanied by that check, I'd take them.) I could also count on the mandatory thank-you notes my father made me write—the only time I ever used the monogrammed stationery Gram had given me when I turned thirteen.

“And you might want to wear a dress,” my mother said now, flooding me with the same panicky feeling I'd experienced seven years ago in the department store.

“No way,” I insisted. “That's ridiculous. I'm not dressing up for Gram and a bunch of her snobby old friends at ‘the Club'!”

Turning, her hands on her hips, my mom assumed her irritated look. “I'm not asking you to get dressed up, Annie. Why don't you just wear that green sundress? The one with the big flowers.”

I glanced around the bare, white room, at all the boxes still to be unpacked and the skeletal hangers in the empty closet. “Maybe. If I can find it,” I granted, which roughly translated into “fat chance.”

“Thank you,” she said before disappearing down the hall. Two seconds later she poked her head back in the room. “Annie,” she said softly this time, “I really hope you can try to be happy here.”

I looked at her but didn't answer. I had really
hoped
they'd wait until after I'd graduated to move. But, as I was quickly learning, you don't always get what you want.

The Debutante
is available now
wherever books are sold.