This Summer Will Be Different(57)
“You still shouldn’t have told me the day before my wedding,” my mom said, her voice muffled. I had no idea what they were talking about.
“I admit my timing was poor.” Stacy saw me in the doorway then and gave me a sad smile. “I should have said something sooner.”
She was gone four weeks later.
She left me a note. It wasn’t in her handwriting—one of her nurses must have helped.
I loved you like you were my own.
Bridget felt Stacy’s loss like she was family. She worked through her grief by helping my parents with the funeral arrangements. I wasn’t sure when Bridget called her brother, whether it was when Stacy was in the hospital, fading before my eyes. Or if it was after the funeral, when she found me crying on the floor of the shower. And I didn’t know how Felix had freed one of his cottages for me. According to Bridget, they had been fully booked. But Ken and Christine were renovating Summer Wind in the wake of the storm damage. They weren’t ready for guests.
“I’m getting you out to the island,” Bridget told me through tears. “I wish I could go with you, but I can’t swing it with work. Wolf and I have it all figured out. You don’t have to do anything. Just get there. You need some fresh air, Bee. You need time to recover.”
I hadn’t seen Felix since his visit to Toronto last fall, but every month, a yellow envelope of seeds arrived at the store. I had ten packets now. Zinnias and snap dragons and daisies. And every month, I sent him a book back. A self-help about becoming a hotel magnate as a joke. An illustrated children’s book called Felix After the Rain that turned out to be more emotional than I’d anticipated. I wondered what his girlfriend, Chloe, thought of the books. I wasn’t sure what our exchange meant or how to explain it. Books and seeds felt like our secret language. Something just for us. I didn’t know how it fit into our rules. Maybe we didn’t need them anymore.
Felix was waiting for me in the terminal. There was a plane full of people between us, but I spotted the loveliest flecks of blue between the shoulders of strangers. He bundled me in his arms, swaying back and forth like a ship on tranquil waters, whispering, “I’m so sorry.”
The drive from Charlottetown to Salt Cottages seemed to take a lifetime. In reality, Felix and I were on the road for about an hour, but as the sea slipped away and the woods grew dense, it felt as if we were traveling to the end of the world. I told Bridget I would rent a car and chauffeur myself, but she said Felix insisted he pick me up, and now I was glad he had.
It wasn’t like the trip to Summer Wind, where the landscape was dotted with barns and churches and cattle, the roads brimming with signs of life, a potato truck here, a tractor there, a pickup shuttling a boat on a trailer. My vision was hazy from the tears I’d shed on the plane. It was as though I was viewing the spruce and birch through a warped glass bottle.
We barely spoke, but I was aware of Felix’s worried gaze shooting to me every few minutes.
“Why don’t you shut your eyes for a little while,” he said, and I leaned my forehead against the cool window.
I tried to nap, but my stomach turned over. I hadn’t eaten that day. I wasn’t sure if I’d eaten the day before. The farther east we went, the deeper into Kings County, the worse I felt. I became so nauseated, I had to ask Felix to stop the truck. He held my braids in one hand, rubbed my back with the other, whispering, “Good girl,” as I retched into the scrub on the side of the road.
I felt a bit better, or at least less pukey, by the time we passed the sign for Salt Cottages and Felix said, “We’re here now, Lucy.”
I straightened as he turned down a long driveway. Four identical houses stood in a row in the distance. Set back from the ocean, each had a peaked black metal roof and vertical wood siding painted bright white. Paths of gravel and flat stepping stones I knew Felix had laid himself led to each entrance, where ferns in black planters sat beside the doors. Felix parked beside the cottage on the far left, and we climbed out of the truck.
He brought my suitcase inside and said he’d let me rest, but I shook my head. I knew how important the cottages were to Felix. “Give me a tour?”
As he led me through the house, a strange feeling unfurled in my chest. Windows looked onto the deck and over the surrounding fields and ocean. There were gorgeous hardwood counters in the kitchen and high-end appliances. The shower was tiled in turquoise glass, a similar shade to Felix’s eyes. There were three bedrooms—not huge but spacious enough to be comfortable—decorated in white and seafoam.
Felix pointed out all the little details he was pleased with—the fancy showerhead, the dimmer switches on all the lights, the way the windows were arranged for optimal views and privacy, the backsplash he’d installed in the kitchen.
I kept saying “Wow” over and over, grief and car sickness temporarily forgotten. I knew Ken was handy and had taught Felix how to use a table saw and lay flooring, and the importance of precision. Bridget told me how much of the work Felix had done himself, but I was blown away. He was so skilled.
Felix pointed to the dining table, where a welcome basket sat at the center. Inside: a bag of Covered Bridge chips, potato fudge, a map of PEI like the one I had at home, two Red Island ciders, and a small booklet, bound with blue string. An Islander’s Guide to PEI was printed on its brown card stock cover. I flipped through the pages, scanning the suggestions for restaurants, lobster suppers, shops, cafés, ice cream, kids’ activities, beaches, locally made beer and cheese and soap. Each included a thoughtful sentence or two explaining what made it special. He was a beautiful writer. I turned back to the first page, reading the paragraph that welcomed the reader to the island and to Felix’s favorite spots on it—recommendations he’d collected over his twenty-seven years of living on PEI.