The bathroom wasn’t big enough.
This became massively apparent when we all ended up trying to get ready for bed—what Warren called his “evening ablutions,”—at the same time.
“You didn’t leave me any space,” I said. I nudged past Gelsey, who was brushing her teeth with excruciating slowness, to look in the medicine cabinet. It had been filled with Warren’s contact paraphernalia, Gelsey’s retainer case and lip balms, and too many tubes of toothpaste to make any logical sense.
“You should have gotten here sooner,” Warren said from the doorway, making the already-small space seem smaller. “Can you hurry?” he asked Gelsey, who just gave him a toothpaste-filled smile and started brushing even more slowly, which I wouldn’t have believed was possible without seeing it.
“I didn’t know that I would have to claim cabinet space,” I snapped, as I shoved some of his boxes of contacts to the side, trying to make room for my face wash and makeup remover.
Gelsey finally finished brushing her teeth and rinsed off her toothbrush, placing it carefully in the holder. “You can keep stuff in the shower if you want,” she said with a shrug as she pulled back the striped forest-green shower curtain that had been there forever. “I’m sure there’s some room—” Gelsey stopped talking abruptly, and started to scream.
I saw why a second later—there was a huge spider crouched in the corner of the tub. It looked like a daddy longlegs, which, I’d learned long ago on some nature walk, were actually not dangerous. But that didn’t mean that I necessarily wanted to see a spider the size of my head just hanging out in our tub. I took step back, and bumped into Warren, who was also scrambling out of the way.
“Daddy!” Gelsey shrieked, bolting for the door.
When my father appeared a few moments later, my mother behind him, the three of us were huddled around the doorway, and I was keeping my eyes on the spider in case he decided to make a break for it.
“Spider,” Warren said, pointing toward the tub. “Pholcidae.” My father nodded and took a step into the bathroom.
“Are you going to kill it?” Gelsey asked from where she was practically hiding behind my mother—which seemed a tad melodramatic to me.
“No,” my father said. “I’m just going to need a piece of paper and a glass.”
“On it,” Warren said, hustling out and returning with one of my magazines and a water glass. He handed them across the threshold to my dad, and then the rest of us all hung back. It wasn’t only arachnophobia—my father took up almost the whole of the small bathroom. He’d gone through college on a football scholarship, playing linebacker, and still was big, despite some of the weight he’d lost recently—tall, with broad shoulders and a booming voice, trained over years to carry across courtrooms to jurors’ ears.
A moment later, my dad emerged from behind the shower curtain, holding the glass pressed to the magazine. The spider scrambled frantically from one end of the glass to the other, over the features of the starlet who adorned the cover. My dad grimaced as he straightened up, and my mother immediately took the magazine from him and thrust it out to me.
“Taylor, set this free outside, would you?” She took a step toward my father, and asked, her voice more quiet, “Are you okay, Robin?”
While Robin was my dad’s full name, he went by Rob, and the only times I heard him called Robin was when my mom was angry or worried, or my grandfather was visiting.
My father was still wincing, and I didn’t think I could stand to see it, something I’d almost never seen before—my dad in pain. Magazine and trapped spider in hand, I turned away, glad for an excuse to leave.
I headed out the front door and down the steps to the gravel driveway, where I lifted the glass. Expecting the spider to crawl away immediately, I was surprised when it stayed where it was, frozen over This Summer’s Top 10 Beauty Tips. “Move,” I said as I jiggled the magazine, and finally it got the message and skittered away. I shook out the magazine, and was about to go back inside, but the thought of the expression on my dad’s face caused me to leave the magazine and glass on the porch and walk down the driveway toward the road.
I was barefoot, and every step made me flinch, reminding me just how long it had been since I’d been able to do this without shoes on—how long, in fact, since I’d been back here. When I was halfway down the driveway, I reached our bearbox—a wooden, weighted contraption designed to keep the bears from getting into the trash—and had to stop and give my feet a little rest, noticing the fireflies’ lights starting to blink on and off in the grass. Then I practically hopped my way to the end of the driveway, and stepped onto the paved road.
Though I didn’t want to, I found myself gravitating next door. The lights were on in what I now knew was Henry’s house, spilling out from the windows into squares on the gravel driveway. I looked at the lighted windows, wondering if he was home, and if so, which room was his, when I caught myself and realized I was being ridiculous. I looked away and noticed, for the first time, that there was a tent pitched next to the house, a round camping one. As I stared, the tent lit up, throwing whoever was inside into silhouette. I turned and took a few steps up the street quickly, walking nonchalantly, as though I were just out for an evening stargazing session.
Which actually seemed like a pretty good idea, I decided, as I took in the moon above me, huge in the sky, sending sheets of light down onto the road. I tipped my head back to search for stars.
I’d loved them ever since I was little, and my grandfather, a naval officer, had sent me a book about constellations. I hadn’t ever been good at identifying them, but the stories stuck with me. Lovers exiled to the ends of the universe, goddesses punished for vanity and hung upside down. Whenever the night was clear enough, I’d look up, trying to make out patterns in the sky, trying to see what had caused those long-ago people to tell stories about what they saw. The stars were always easier to see in Lake Phoenix, and tonight they seemed to take over the entire sky. I just stared up at them until it felt like I could breathe, maybe for the first time that day. Maybe for the first time in the last three weeks.
I really didn’t know how I was going to get through the summer. It had only been a few hours, but it already felt like more than I could handle. It was like we were all just pretending that nothing was happening. We weren’t even talking about the reason that we had all decamped there. Instead, we’d spent dinner listening to Warren go on about how pizza was invented.