26. Summer
Summer
“Sum?”
A warm hand lands on my knee, and I’m jolted from my daze. “Huh?”
“You okay?” Addie smiles back at me, but it quickly fades. “You don’t have to do this if you’re not ready.”
“I can turn the car around right now and bring you back to ours,” Rhonda offers.
I stare at the two-story building I spent four years planning to escape.
Those four walls broke me.
The yard is overgrown and unkempt, which doesn’t surprise me.
I was the only reason it ever looked decent.
Mowing the lawn. Watering the plants. Scrubbing life into a house that never felt alive after she was gone.
It looks like no one’s put any love or effort into the garden in—well, over a decade.
Mom loved her garden, which is why I bothered maintaining it after she passed.
Her favorite thing was to pick the brightest hydrangeas and geraniums and set them in a vase on the kitchen table every Saturday morning.
My shoulders deflate when I see the dead camellia bushes, their leaves brown and curled inward.
My breath catches when I glance left and see a tarp-covered car in the driveway, exactly where it was parked the day my father drove it home from the hospital.
He kept it.
After all these years.
“Summer?” Addie’s voice is soft. “Talk to me.”
“The Beetle,” I whisper.
“What?” Her brows knit before understanding settles in. “Oh. Your mom’s car?”
I nod.
“Here,” Rhonda says, already climbing out and opening my door. “I’ll get your bags from the trunk.”
I step onto the pavement and Addie is beside me instantly, looping her arm through mine as she carefully guides me forward.
My attention drifts to the house next door and my heart squeezes when I see the old lattice leading to the upstairs window, still standing. I quickly avert my gaze.
Look forward.
The wheels of my suitcase thud against the uneven pavers as Rhonda drags it behind her.
Pinning my focus back on my childhood home, I slip out the old house key I took with me that day ten years ago and slide in into the lock, turning left. When the latch clicks, I inhale, count to four slowly, and push the handle down.
I don’t think anything could adequately prepare me for what I’ll feel when I opened that old, rickety front door.
Grief. Sadness.
I’m assaulted by the scent of dust, stale air, and aged wood as I step into the foyer.
When my sight lands on the staircase, I’m taken aback by the memory of racing down, stair by stair, and launching myself into Mom’s arms.
She’d catch me and spin around and laugh as I’d squeal in delight.
A sound catches in my throat as my eyebrows pinch together.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I murmur. “Fine.”
“You’ve said that a lot,” Addie says, her tone flat as she trails behind me.
“Because I am.”
“Summer.”
I turn back to face her. “Addie. I’m standing in the house where my father beat me for four years. I’m obviously not going to be jumping for joy, but I’m fine. I just need a minute.”
She lowers her gaze to the floor, nodding slowly. “You’re right. Sorry. Take your time. I’ll be right here.”
Rhonda sets my suitcase by the door alongside a woven hemp bag, regarding me with a soft expression.
She’d organized a little bag of groceries for me before she picked me up from the airport.
She said I shouldn’t have to worry about those things.
“Shall I put the kettle on? I think everyone could use a nice, hot cup of coffee.”
She disappears down the hall toward the kitchen, the floorboards creaking underfoot.
The living room is to my right. It’s weird. Someone’s covered the couch with a white sheet. A sliver of light shines through the grimy windows, throwing a strip of sunshine through a gap in the curtain, highlighting the dust floating through the air.
I cross the room and sharply peel the sheet back, gathering it in a heap and dumping it on the carpet. Everything is the same. The old hall table. The rim-stained coffee table. The navy-blue couch. The old-school flat-screen TV.
It’s all still here.
I follow that remnant of hope upstairs, taking a few moments to gather myself before opening my bedroom door. When I do, my insides splinter.
There, pushed against my bedroom wall, exactly where it’s always been—
A sound is torn from my throat, and I cup a hand over my mouth.
Mom’s piano.
The wood remains dull. I flip open the lid and hover my hand over the keys, closing my eyes. That feeling I got as a teenager—the one when everything goes quiet—settles over me.
For a moment, I feel her.
Mom standing in the stillness, watching over me from a shadowed corner of the room. Her memory envelops me in her warm embrace, reminding me that a love like hers never truly leaves you. No matter how badly someone tries to batter and bruise you, they can never steal that love away.
You carry those precious morsels of each other always.
I’m grateful I was an only child. I never felt like I needed anybody else when I had Mom. And after she was gone, I was even more grateful that I didn’t have a kid sister or brother to worry about protecting—I could barely protect myself.
Shaking the thought away, I tentatively reach out, running the tip of my index finger through the thin layer of dust and debris coating the walnut.
It even smells the same.
I study the fine powder, rubbing my thumb and finger together before I press a single key.
The flat note rings out. The soft patter of footsteps fills my doorway, and I know it’s Addie without having to look.
“It’s still here,” she says, her voice choked.
“She used to sit me on her lap while she played,” I manage, my voice barely above a whisper.
“She’d place my hand over hers and guide my fingers over the keys, teaching me notes.
” I laugh. “I would get so pissed off when I couldn’t get it right.
She’d just kiss my head and say ‘Music isn’t about perfection, baby.
It’s about feeling. If you can make a person feel something, you can set them free, even if only for a short while. ’”
Addie appears beside me, resting her head on my shoulder.
I drop to the bench and collapse over the piano; my head cradled in my hands as I cry.
Addie sits with me, letting me fall apart. My eyes are sore, my shoulders shake, and my throat is raw, but I can’t stop. Every emotion I’ve bottled and tossed away oozes out of me like taffy.
When I’m wrung out and reduced to hiccups, my fingers splay across the keys. I play a broken chord. Then another. And another. It’s jangly and unmelodic, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m playing.
I fall into a rhythm, banging out one of the songs she used to play me when I was small. After a few minutes, I let my body take over, the song morphing into something completely different.
“I miss her,” I choke out. “I miss her so much, Addie.”
“I know, babe. I know.” She rubs my back, her head still on my shoulder.
“She was the only good thing in this house. This piano is the only reason I survived.” I slam my palms flat, producing a thunderous clash.
“He took everything from me. Everything!” Slam.
“And now he’s gone, and I can’t even—” Slam.
“Scream at him!” Slam. “I hate him, Adds! I hate him, I hate him, I HATE him!”
Slam.
Slam.
Slam.
“Hey. Hey,” she soothes. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
She swipes my arms away from the piano and bundles me in a hug. I tuck my head in the crook of her neck.
“Just breathe, Sum.”
“I hate him,” I repeat in a whisper.
“He didn’t deserve you.”
“It doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No,” she mumbles. “It doesn’t.”
Eventually, my chest loosens and I pull back, wiping my face with my hoodie sleeve, and look around the room. Addie eyes me cautiously.
I gulp when I look at the bed, remembering the last time I was in it. Who I was in it with.
The lamp from the dresser is gone, along with the frame that housed the picture of me and Mom—the picture Addie managed to save for me, along with my sheet music.
“Where’s her guitar?” My voice is hoarse. “I always kept it in the corner,” I add, pointing to the end of my bed.
Addie scans the room. “Maybe he moved it?”
“Maybe.” The thought of him in my bedroom, touching my things, withers my insides.
I push off the bench and drift toward my wardrobe. The doors creak as I pull them open to reveal what’s left of my teenage self.
The smell of musty, forgotten clothes and dampness fills my lungs. A few hangers swing empty, but the rest … it’s as if I’m transported back in time.
My old denim cutoffs with the frayed hem. The black cardigan that saw me through winter shifts at the diner. My tattered Converse among the pile of worn shoes. A box of old mix CDs. Stitch—my old patchwork teddy bear that Mom repaired over and over again.
Still no guitar.
“I wonder if he put it in the attic,” I think aloud.
“Let’s go see,” Addie offers.
A chill seeps through my skin and deep into my bones.
I hate that attic. I always have.
After Mom passed, it’s where he banished all her belongings. Neither of us could bear to look at them, but I never believed it was right to stash her away. Covering her things and leaving them to rot in a dark, airless room was horrendous to me.
He insisted the piano be stored up there too.
I fought him. Literally. Tooth and nail.
I begged him to let me keep it in my bedroom and promised I would play it every day as quietly as possible.
He agreed, but I soon learned the hard way that he never wanted to hear me play at all. A belt to my bare back left scars that seared the reminder into my skin.
One thing I inherited from my mother that I wished I never had: loving things—all things—too much.
Another lesson learned twice, punctuated by the boy next door.
I must be wearing my thoughts like a mask because Addie tilts her head, appraising me. “Or,” she drawls, “we could look another day?”
I swallow hard. “No. Let’s get it out of the way.”
The words come out dry and flat.
She nods as I pass her.