Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Mia
As soon as the car parked outside our cabin, I opened the door, letting my yellow rain boots hit the wet gravel. It had rained a lot this summer, and the ground was continuously damp.
“Mia, get back here! You need to help us unload the car!” I ignored my mom and took off toward the lodge. Toward Bower.
I still had the boots he’d given me. I’d never gotten a chance to give them back.
Bower had never come back to the resort last year.
The morning after his arrest, I’d gone up to the lodge to see him, but his grandmother had shooed me away.
He’s not coming back this week, Mia, Betty had told me. I could tell she’d been disappointed in me. I was supposed to be Bower’s shield that week, keeping him protected from his bad decisions. I had failed.
You’re going to let him sit in there? I’d asked. The thought of Bower sitting in a jail cell or even a juvenile detention center had made me angry. He hadn’t deserved to be there.
Mia, Betty had begun. She’d sounded tired, worn out.
Probably from being up all night dealing with Bower.
This isn’t a onetime occurrence. Bower’s been having trouble for a while now.
I know you don’t see that side of him, but Gill and I do every day you’re not here.
We can’t help him anymore. We don’t know what to do.
For the rest of our vacation, Dean had kept his distance and I’d tailed Ruby in my yellow rain boots. They’d never left my feet except when I’d slept.
Bower didn’t have a cell phone, so I’d called the resort phone every month for the last year hoping it would be him who picked up the phone.
It never was. It’d always been Betty or Gill who answered, letting me know that Bower wasn’t available and skirting around any of my questions about when he would be available.
After winter, they’d stopped answering my calls entirely and I’d been too embarrassed to leave a voicemail.
Now I was back at Agate Harbors and finally had the chance to track him down and find out what had happened last year.
The lodge looked the same as it always did. Nothing really changed up here. I liked that about it. Stability.
I looked through the screen door of Bower’s cabin. Through the haze of the metal screen, the cabin looked empty. I knocked on the wooden panel of the door. “Hello?” I called.
They were usually around the lodge and their cabin. I heard shuffling from the side of the cabin that housed the bedrooms. Inside, I saw the door to Betty and Gill’s bedroom slowly open, Gill’s gray head of hair popping out.
“It’s me, Mia.”
“Oh, hi, Mia.” He made his way out of the bedroom and walked over to the screen door. I moved out of the way as he pushed it open.
“Where is Bower?” Greetings and small talk would have to wait.
“Bower isn’t here, Mia,” Gill said.
“Will he be back this afternoon?”
He ran his hand through the thinning hair on the top of his head. I sometimes forgot that they were Bower’s grandparents. They had raised two generations of children.
“He isn’t coming back, Mia.”
I froze, my body numbed. What?
“He’s joined the Marines.”
I took a step back, tripping down the steps that led to the cabin.
“I’m sorry, Mia. I know you two were close,” Gill said. “Betty and I just couldn’t do it anymore. We gave him a choice: enlist or get out.”
I steadied my feet but couldn’t stop my knees from weakening. “But I called…so many times last fall.”
The outer ridges of Gill’s eyes turned red and pooled with tears. “We just couldn’t watch him turn into his parents.”
My jaw dropped. Bower wasn’t like that. He’d had a few beers at the party last year, but he wasn’t an addict.
Gill continued to explain, seeing the look of shock on my face. “You were with him one week out of the year. We were with him the other fifty-one. He wasn’t doing well. We caught him so many times with alcohol and drugs, we just—”
“Yeah. I got it,” I cut him off. I had heard enough. I didn’t want to believe it.
Bower had never shown me that side of himself.
I had shown him every facet of myself. Even the ugly parts.
The parts that my parents were embarrassed of.
The parts that I was embarrassed of. He didn’t feel comfortable enough around me to let me all the way in.
Apparently I had read the entire relationship wrong.
I’d thought we were closer than that.
I’d thought Betty, Gill, and I were closer. “You couldn’t have told me on the phone that he was going to enlist? That he wasn’t just unavailable—he was gone?”
“We didn’t know how to tell you.” Gill rubbed his face with his hand. “We didn’t want to upset you.”
I bit my tongue. It was more upsetting to find out this way. It was more upsetting to have been ignored for the last year, especially when I saw Betty and Gill as my second family.
I stepped out of the yellow rain boots I had held on to for the past year.
They’d sat in the back of my closet, an everyday reminder of summer and the freedom it brought me.
Even on tough days, when my sensitivities overwhelmed me and my parents were jumping down my throat, they reminded me that better times and acceptance were there for me at the resort.
The socks I was wearing instantly absorbed the moisture on the gravel.
I could feel the grains of sand penetrate the woven fibers of my socks.
“Here.” I held out the boots. “Bower let me borrow them last year.”
“Keep them, Mia,” Gill said.
“I don’t want them.” I put them on the wood porch and walked away.
He didn’t call out or beg me to stop. Our relationship was over. Like the one between Bower and me.
I’d thought I meant something to Bower.
That night on the beach last year, the way he’d looked at me before it had all fallen apart… I knew that’d meant something to him. He couldn’t have left me a note before he left? Snuck my home phone number from the resort’s records?
The Marines were serious business. How long was he going to serve for? When would I see him again? Would I ever see him again?
The tiny particles of sand from the gravel road worked their way through my socks and rubbed against my skin.
It made my teeth hurt. I could feel the grains between my toes, scratching with every step.
I practiced holding my breath, trying to forget about the uncomfortable feeling overwhelming me.
It didn’t work. In the end, I just let my teeth hurt.
It felt like an appropriate punishment for me.
Letting myself open up to someone who was essentially closed off.
Letting myself feel comfortable, feel loved and wanted by adults who weren’t even my family.
Ultimately they were just acquaintances, people I saw once a year for seven days.
There were three hundred fifty-eight days that I wasn’t a part of their lives.
A lot could happen in three hundred and fifty-eight days—birthdays, holidays, happy and sad times.
I wasn’t a part of their family. Just a girl who was a guest at the resort they owned.