Page 2 of The Sandy Page Bookshop

Lucy

Lucy!” her mother’s voice called up the stairs. “We don’t want to be late for your sister.”

Late was a stretch, given that her eighteen-year-old sister, Ella, did not keep time. That she had no idea what day it was. And, as Lucy feared in private moments, might never keep time again.

“Coming,” she called back, obediently.

She could hear her mother’s impatient sigh all the way up the stairs, and it grated on her nerves. But Lucy did not let on. Not like she would have a few weeks ago, groaning audibly, pushing back against being dragged out somewhere she did not want to go. That was then.

Now, Lucy kept her thoughts and feelings to herself.

Always. Since that night, there were so many feelings roiling in the Hart house on Bay Street that Lucy sometimes feared the walls would blow out, or the roof might cartwheel into the sky from the force of it all.

So where there were plenty feelings, there were few words.

She brushed her teeth quickly, knowing her father was already waiting in the car, his face grim.

It was the only expression he wore nowadays, leaving Lucy and her mother to discern his thoughts, though it was not hard.

Since that night, the heartache was shared silently among the three of them like airborne particles, breathed in and out each night in slumber, swallowed with morning coffee, choked down with whatever they threw together for dinner if someone remembered to shop.

Some days the air was so thick with it that Lucy struggled to breathe, even as she forced a smile at anyone she bumped into in town, especially when they asked how her family was doing.

The well-meaning inquiries were the worst, the uncertain expressions and awkward consolations offered little comfort.

Lucy never repeated these conversations to her parents.

Lucy dragged a brush roughly through her hair and considered her reflection.

It was still startling how unchanged she appeared on the outside, when her heart had basically been torn out of her ribs.

There were the same large brown eyes, unlike Ella, who was the only member of the family to inherit their grandfather’s sea-glass green eyes.

There was her ordinary face, (also unlike Ella), and the same long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight it was perhaps the only thing holding her head together.

Long ago Lucy had decided she was neither pretty nor ugly, which landed her in the safe if wholly forgettable zone as far as looks went in their high school hallway.

She had never kissed a boy, never kicked a winning soccer goal, though she’d come close, but also never failed a test in her life.

As her grandmother liked to say, Lucy was dependable as the sun in summer.

She’d meant it as a compliment. But how Lucy yearned to be interesting. Impulsive. Wild, like Ella.

Today, just like yesterday and the day before, they were making the drive to Spaulding Rehabilitation in East Sandwich to visit her. But was it really Ella who lay in that bed? Lucy was not convinced.

Her mother was. “We have to talk to her,” she urged, in the small breathless voice she’d acquired since that night.

“Ella needs to know we are here. It may make all the difference.” Her mother’s eyes, brown and deep and sorrowful like Lucy’s, would widen with emphasis and Lucy would try to do as she was asked.

As such, she brought books to her sister’s bedside, books that she knew Ella loved, just as dearly as she did.

The well-read dog-eared pages were probably the only thing the sisters still shared in full.

They were favorites from childhood, before Ella grew up and away from all of them, busy with soccer and her popular friends, and most recently, her boyfriend.

Ella was older by only three years, but lately it had seemed light-years.

And though there had still been glints of Ella’s old self, like when she tackled Lucy playfully from behind in the kitchen to steal her ice cream bar or slipped into her bed late at night for girl-talk, their foreheads almost touching as they whispered so their parents wouldn’t hear, those moments seemed few and far between.

Lucy loved her big sister, obviously. But there were also moments she felt betrayed by the leggy and vocal young woman who strode confidently through their front door and seemed to draw the whole family out of whatever separate rooms they were in, like a magnet.

The same as she did in the high school cafeteria or the swanky boutique she worked in on weekends or the one party Ella had convinced Lucy to go to, where she danced on Mason Farrell’s kitchen island and sang “American Pie” at the top of her lungs before showing Lucy how to climb up the rose trellis to sneak back in the house after curfew.

The sisters had grown up in the same quiet house with the same loving, if serious, parents.

They shared the same bloodlines. So why hadn’t the glittery aura that enveloped Ella ever hovered over Lucy?

A few weeks before that night, Ella had graduated from their tiny coastal high school. She was getting off the Cape, would be attending Tufts, in Boston. The whole community was proud of her. Now they were pulling for her. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t possible.

It had been just over two weeks since the accident.

Two weeks since the police banged on the front door so hard that all three of them tumbled out of their beds to see what was the matter.

Two weeks of numbly registering texts and calls from worried well-wishers.

Two weeks of digging forks through tasteless casseroles and tearing open the pastel envelopes of get-well cards.

Now, Lucy dragged the brush through her ponytail so hard it hurt.

If she opened one more card with flowers on the front of it again she would set it on fire.

“Lucy!” her mother called more shrilly. “Be a good girl and hurry.”

“I’m getting the book.”

She snagged the old copy of Anne of Green Gables from her bed and raced down the stairs and out the door and into the back seat of the car.

As an ordinary summer day swept by the car window, Lucy gripped the book.

Today, once more, she would pull up a chair beside Ella’s bed and open the book to the page marked.

Lucy understood she was the only person who could perform this task.

Her voice did not shake like her mother’s.

Nor was it mute, like her father’s. It rang loud and clear and bright, a sound Lucy could not believe came from her own chest. But that was the power of the page.

While Lucy read aloud it gave her mother permission; permission to let slip the silent tears that streaked her cheeks.

To still her hands and steady her breath, things she did not otherwise allow herself to do anymore.

Her father, too, was affected. His gaze would swing to the window overlooking the woods and soften, if just a little.

Lucy was not sure if she read more for Ella or her parents, but it was clear that the act of reading aloud was as vital as oxygen to each of them.

Whether Anne of Green Gables was sitting in her schoolhouse or sharing her lonely thoughts from the dusty hayloft of the barn, it was an escape hatch for them all.

The words, belonging to someone else, allowed the Harts to feel the things they could not express.

These were not the words of their sudden tragic story.

Or from the inside of a get-well card. They were not words of any heartache that belonged to them.

But there they were, nonetheless, and the three of them hovered close every afternoon by Ella’s bed while Lucy’s voice spoke them aloud.