Chapter Text
The summerhouse is full of flowers.
Conrad notices it the second he walks down the staircase. White roses crowd the bench near the entryway, pale colored lilies sit in a vase beside the dining room table; even more flowers are set across the kitchen island countertop, their petals slightly faded against the pearl-marble.
In the midst of it all stands his mother as she moves between multiple vases. He’s not surprised.
For this entire past week, she’s been getting the house ready for summer by washing sheets, dusting off furniture, and cleaning countertops over and over again.
Today it’s floral arrangements for all the rooms.
When he enters the kitchen, his gaze immediately lands on the bouquet his mom is currently working on: a cluster of hydrangeas opening beneath the sunlight. Their petals, like of the rest of the surrounding flowers, are almost painfully white—just like funeral flowers, right?
The thought arrives sharply and with no warning, filling his gut with burning hot liquid.
It continues to sit with him until his mom reaches into the bucket beside her feet, now adding blue hydrangeas into the vase. The muted cyan breaks apart the white, softening the arrangement until it finally looks like something that belongs in Cousins.
Conrad’s stomach still clenches uncomfortably until Susannah finally glances up at him, her smile soft and sweet as she greets, “Conrad.” He nods at the sound of his name. “Honey, could you please help me with something? The guest room needs fresh sheets.” He pushes away from the doorway, nodding once more before pivoting toward the bedroom downstairs—only to have his mom correct him quickly. “The upstairs one, I mean.”
He pauses, blinking a few times. That room is rarely ever used. Most summers it stays shut behind its white-painted door, reserved for family only while the downstairs guest room cycles through friends visiting for a few days here and there throughout the season.
His mother bends over another vase, humming quietly as she fusses over a drooping leaf. “It’s for Laurel’s cousin, Iz,” she tells him. “She visited us a couple of summers when you were younger.”
Conrad rakes through his memories. The name doesn’t draw out much beyond a vague shape of a girl’s face.
“Oh,” he says because it’s the only response he can really think of. “That’s... cool.”
“You’ll love her,” his mom says, her tone matter-of-fact, as though there’s no other possibility. Her attention never leaves the arrangement in her hands. “Sheet’s are in the laundry room. Thanks, Connie.”
Conrad takes that as his cue to leave, making it about halfway to his new destination before he peers back.
The kitchen’s bay windows stand open, allowing morning light to pool across the floors and surfaces. His mom continues to move between vases and surfaces like a golden spectral framed by flowers; for one fleeting second, it’s like the entire room glows around her.
Then, she presses a hand briefly against the edge of the dinning room table to steady herself. The movement is small enough that anyone else might not notice—
(—but Conrad does—)
—and it suddenly feels like his chest is being torn clean apart.
He turns away before she can catch him looking and hurries down the hall.
**
(To Conrad, there has always been something brutal about the act of keeping a secret.)
They never simply exist inside you. Instead, they stake claim—expanding, curling around your ribs, flooding into your lungs—until you realize much, much too late that they’ve somehow grown large enough to crowd everything else out, leaving us with only two choices:
The first is to keep them. Let them swell and rot against your insides until your body forgets what it felt like before carrying them.
The second is to let them seep out of you—dragging every sentence, every paragraph of medical terms and diagnoses you had to read over and over because your eyes were too blurry and your ears rang too loudly to comprehend any of it the first three times—until you’ve wrung yourself dry and empty of every last word. Your body left marked by it, branded by something so monstrous it changes the shape of you.
(The secret here is that keeping the secret itself has always been excruciatingly painful, but actually naming it out loud feels like an act of violence all on its own.)
**
Laurel and Steven arrive sometime in the afternoon.
From his opened bedroom window, Conrad can hear their car long before he sees it, its tires crunching over the gravel of the summerhouse’s long driveway. A moment later, he hears Jeremiah rush downstairs before barreling through the main entrance while their mom waits by the door, exactly where she always is when their cherished summer guests arrive. As greetings and pleasantries filter through the air, Conrad closes his window and draws the curtains, telling himself he’ll say hi later.
—he doesn’t. But he tries to; knows he should, because Laurel is here and some selfish part of him thinks that might make things easier, if only temporarily. Maybe if he just goes downstairs, if he just lets himself fall back into the familiar motions of summer, he can pretend for a little while that rot isn’t spreading beneath everything he loves.
His misplaced hope runs dry before it even has the chance to bloom when he makes it about halfway down the staircase and catches fragments of a muted conversation drifting from the kitchen.
“Where’s Iz?” he hears his mom ask.
Right. Laurel’s cousin. Who, out of all the summers she could’ve chosen from, conveniently decides on this one to visit.
Laurel lets out a short breath of air. “Still on her way here. Her flight got delayed.”
“Got delayed or did she miss it?”
A small, shared laugh spills between them; it reminds Conrad of the wind chimes hanging on the porch outside.
“You know how she is.” There’s a fondness that curves Laurel’s otherwise steady voice; a crack in the careful composure she tends to wear around everyone else. Conrad imagines she’s even grinning a little bit and he feels slightly lighter from it. “She said she’ll get here sometime tonight.”
“Last time I saw her she had to be what? Twenty-one, twenty-two? Just about to head off to Paris for grad school, I think. Oh, she was in bloom then,” Susannah affectionately croons, the warmth in her words sinking pleasantly into Conrad’s chest despite himself. “You could just tell she was meant to live an exciting life.”
“Exciting enough to never set foot in this country again for almost a decade,” Laurel affirms rather dryly.
There’s a pause and then an abrupt pop-fzzt sound of a bottle being uncorked and Conrad thinks his mom’s opened some champagne—the good kind too; the brand his father keeps mostly for appearances, only reserved for special moments or celebrations.
Thing is, there’s nothing to celebrate right now. In fact, it feels like the party’s already over from where Conrad stands.
He leaves before he can hear the clink of his family’s expensive flute glasses being pushed together, sudden nausea fizzing up his chest.
**
Acidic bile sits stubbornly in Conrad’s throat for the rest of the night, simmering to dangerous levels when he eventually relents and lets Jeremiah and Steven drag him to the summer’s first bonfire. His only reward is in the form of two, maybe three, hits from a spliff being passed around. By the time it comes back to him after its fourth trip, it’s nothing but the filter, so he pivots to drinking next.
The first beer takes the edge off things, allows him to bask in the weed as it settles low in his lungs. The second pushes his harboring thoughts a little farther away. By the third, the weighted secret that has lived between his ribs the last few weeks feels less immediate; a little blurred out at the margins.
The fourth beer is quickly chased by the swipe of Nicole’s tongue in his mouth. He’s known her for a while now, maybe three years. He remembers when he first saw her holding Gigi’s hair back as her friend puked in the front of some stately, white-paneled house’s lawn. Remembers thinking how polished and confident she was; someone probably way out of his league—but she still asked him to be her Deb Ball escort last year; still let him finger her in the backseat of his car after he apologized for stepping on her feet twice that night.
Now the ocean stretches long and black behind her. Firelight glints off the grooves of the sand around them, more patterns appearing every time she moves closer until her hands finally settle against his shoulders.
Without thinking, he kisses her back; she tastes better than cheap beer and the dry aftertaste of weed, and he laughs, a little drunk, when their teeth accidentally knock together. The sound of nearby waves meeting the shoreline in a steady crash mixed in with Nicole’s sweet sighs cloud his head. It’s like he’s half here, half somewhere else, and it sort of feels... good being like this. Not caring, not grieving. Not really anything.
He tries to relax into it. Just for a little while.
**
Blood is still dripping from his mouth when Laurel gently examines his face, her hands feather-light against the lines of his throbbing jaw. Disappointment flickers clearly across her dark eyes right before she completes her inspection and hands him a small towel to tend to his injury.
“You’re lucky,” she tells him with a frown, “you only busted your lip. The bleeding should stop soon.”
For a split second, he thinks about correcting her. Thinks about telling her that he wasn’t the one who split his own lip; that a cheap shot from some smarmy townie did. But instead he just presses the cloth harder against his mouth, wincing as fresh blood blooms across the fabric.
“Susannah won’t be mad, will she?” Steven asks, his voice drifting from somewhere behind Conrad, thin with nerves. He appears the least worse for wear out of the three of them, his shirt only slightly rumpled with a few dark stains from spilt beer. When his mom levels him with a measured look, he rushes on to add, “Con was only defending, Jere. We all were.”
Laurel’s mouth tightens, though some of the tension leaves her shoulders as she says, “What those boys said to Jeremiah was inexcusable. But—” her gaze cuts back to Conrad, “—I need the three of you to look after one another. Being right isn’t worth getting yourselves hurt in a fight.”
Jeremiah flinches as he presses a bag of frozen peas against his swelling eye before he begins to explain, “It was my fault, Laur. I—”
As the story spills out of his brother, Conrad slips away. He feels Laurel watching him as he disappears down the hallway, but he knows she won’t call after him. Not with blood still soaking the towel in his hand and Jeremiah’s eye still bruised and swollen shut. It’s the perfect opportunity for him to escape.
Well, mostly perfect.
When he rounds the corner near the staircase, he nearly catches the toe of his shoe on a pair of white canvas sneakers abandoned near the bottom step. He stumbles, irritation instantly flaring hot in his chest, and for one brief, ugly moment, he imagines sending them skidding across the floor but instead, he bends to pick them up.
They’re small in his hands, the dim light spilling over from the adjoining room paints shadows against the weathered canvas. He sees years of wear etched into the fabric like age lines hidden in the bark of trees; they’re just another unassuming pair of worn sneakers. Probably belongs to Laurel, or maybe even his mom. Either way, he doesn’t spare them another thought as he lines them neatly beside the rest of the carefully arranged shoes located a few feet away before finally disappearing up the stairs.
**
Rust orange and dewy pink stain the sky when Conrad wakes the next morning, the beginnings of the day trickling through the narrow gap in his curtains.
When he moves to stretch, only one thought surfaces: everything hurts, maybe even worse than it did the night before, so he forces himself out of his bed to inspect the damage. Over the bathroom sink, he scrubs away dried blood to reveal speckles of dark purple bruises now splattered along the corner of his mouth. It looks like a storm cloud brewing beneath his skin.
Gingerly, he presses his fingers against the discolored area and immediately regrets it when pain instantly blooms through his entire jaw. It’ll take a week, he estimates, maybe two for his face to completely heal. Until then—or, at least, for right now—the only relief he can think of comes in the form of Tylenol and the half-smoked joint buried in the back of his desk drawer.
(If Conrad were younger, he probably would’ve reminded himself that smoking actually slows down the healing process. He would’ve cared about the temporary fog it left behind, the possible damage it did to his body.
What he does instead is tuck the joint safely in his pocket and quietly slip downstairs.)
**
The air’s already muggy when he steps onto the back porch outside. Dew hangs from the tips of the backyard grass, silvered like fragments of moonlight that never quite disappeared with dawn. Beyond it, tall beachgrass that lines the narrow pathway to the beach bends and sways like ocean waves. Conrad’s eyes are fixed on the trail, already thinking about the feel of sand beneath his feet, the first drag of his joint and—
Suddenly, the pool ripples.
The movement catches his attention just as someone breaks to the surface with a sharp intake of air. For a moment, all Conrad can do is stop and stare.
It’s a girl—or, more accurately, a woman. Dark, dark hair is slicked back from her face; her skin sun-kissed and luminous beneath the golden wash of the morning. She looks strangely unreal, as though she’d been carved from light itself.
When she finally glances his way, it feels like he’s staring into the sun, all instinct telling him to look away despite not wanting to.
“Oh!” he hears her squeak out, a flicker of surprise sliding across her face for a moment, and then—then, she starts moving and—
—suddenly, Conrad feels excruciatingly nervous; unsure what to do next—leave? Introduce himself? Sit on the edge of the pool and watch her rise from the water like some kind of divine vision?
In the end, the only thing he does is remain awkwardly rooted in place.
Meanwhile, with her eyes still locked on him, the woman hoists herself up from the edge of the pool and Conrad’s throat burns with immediate regret. He should’ve left when he had the chance.
But it’s much too late for that.
Now all he can do, with a very dry mouth, is watch as she slowly pads over to him. She’s close enough where he can see small droplets of water begin to trace random pathways over the slope of her shoulders, around the dip of her collarbones, and down the swell of her—Jesus fucking Christ—perfect tits.
Her hand extends outward and Conrad gulps so hard the clicking sound in his throat echoes in his ears, there’s absolutely no way she didn’t hear it standing this close to him. But if she does, she doesn’t mention it; instead, continues to reach for a towel draped over a nearby chair before wrapping it around herself.
“Good morning!” she greets him pleasantly, completely unaware of the static building beneath his skin as he rakes his brain for a response.
“Hi,” is all he manages to force out for the moment; his thoughts then kicking into overdrive, scrambling for what he’s supposed to say next.
Logically, he should probably introduce himself, assuming this is Iz, Laurel’s cousin. The realization pulls a few scattered memories from the back of his mind, bringing them into sudden, sharp focus.
The last time Conrad saw her, he had to be about ten years old at the annual barbecue his mom throws every summer. He doesn’t remember talking to her much, but recalls Jeremiah tripping at one point and knocking over half the desserts arranged on the table. While the other older adults rushed to clean up the mess, she sat with Jere and gingerly patched up the small cuts on his knees, laughing as she pinched his brother’s cheek and watched him turn bright red.
The only other memory that surfaces in vivid detail is from even further back, when he was maybe eight. That summer had been unbearably hot with record temperatures and air that stuck to your skin like an extra set of damp clothes. They spent most afternoons in the pool until their fingers wrinkled. He remembers sunlight fracturing across the surface of the pool the exact same way it is now, breaking into tiny pieces of gold; her smile wide and bright as she encouraged him to jump off the edge and—
“Belly,” he blurts out before he can stop himself, his mouth immediately snapping shut as embarrassment rushes through him.
Belly?—Iz?—laughs in easy response, tipping her head back slightly. “I haven’t heard that name in a while,” she says, beaming from his recognition. “I forgot I taught you boys how to belly flop.”
She lets the silence linger for a beat, one hand settling against her hip as she studies him. The attention is a bit unnerving in a way Conrad can’t quite explain. Something about her dark eyes fixed solely on him stirs an unfamiliar feeling in his chest. It’s as though, for one improbable moment, he’s become the center of her orbit.
Then, she straightens with a wide smile and finally concludes, “you must be... the older brother, right? Conrad?”
Heat hotter than the morning sun crawls up his neck at her acknowledgment while his jaw clenches tight. Experience tells him opening his mouth right now is a terrible idea, so he sticks to a stiff nod.
(That decision lasts about two seconds.)
“You remember me?”
“Of course I do,” she says, her pink lips curving into a smile. It takes a concerning amount of effort for him to tear his gaze away from her pretty mouth, settling it elsewhere as she fondly recalls, “you used to call Laurel your girlfriend. You were adorable back then.”
“And now?”
The words spill out before he even registers they’ve left him. Talking to her feels strangely like an out of body experience, like he’s watching the conversation unfold from somewhere just outside himself.
For a moment, she mulls over his question, her smile widening with her answer sitting just behind her teeth.
—but it never comes, cut short by Steven’s voice before it can even reach the air.
“Iz?”
Her eyes—and attention—flick over Conrad’s shoulder and it’s like the sun has shifted away from him, taking all its warmth with it.
“Steven!” She beams as he pulls her into a hug. Conrad watches her laugh into Steven’s shoulder before she steps back, rising onto her tiptoes to ruffle his hair. “What the hell has your mom been feeding you? You were this big the last time I saw you.” She holds her hand about waist height. “Now you’ve gotta be taller than your dad!”
Steven ducks his head with an embarrassed laugh. Somewhere beside him, Conrad catches the familiar shuffle of flip-flops against the patio panels. When he looks over, he sees Jeremiah is already making his way toward them, drawn in by the sound of their animated conversation.
His black eye looks worse this morning, the swelling and discoloration a sharp reminder of Conrad’s own dark bruise blooming near the edge of his mouth like spilled ink. God, they must look ridiculous. She probably already knows about last night’s fight; how fucking stupid they were to think they could take on seven other guys and somehow come out untouched.
“Morning,” his brother greets, flashing her a smile as he slips effortlessly into his usual charm. “I’m Jeremiah.”
“I know.” She grins, eyes flicking toward Jeremiah’s black eye. Conrad watches her notice it, watches the question form and disappear before she decides not to ask it. Instead, she pivots back and says, “Conrad and I were just talking about the time I taught you boys how to belly flop.”
“Oh shit, I forgot about that,” Steven says with another laugh. “I can’t believe you let us call you Belly that entire summer.”
“I liked it,” she says with an earnest shrug of her shoulders, “I thought it was sweet you guys gave me a nickname.”
“Sweet even now?” Jeremiah edges his way back into the conversation. “Or should we call you Iz like our parents?”
“I don’t mind either one.” Her smile softens a little. Her gaze drifts briefly over to Conrad before she says, “Belly makes me feel a little nostalgic, I think.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
She lets out an amused noise. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Cool,” Jeremiah beams. He glances toward Steven, then back to Belly, his smile wide and bright when he says, “We’re heading to the beach if you wanna join us?”
“Think I got enough sun for the morning,” she politely declines. When he deflates a little, she offers him a small grin as a consolation prize. “Maybe next time. Have fun!”
She gives them a small wave before heading toward the house, disappearing behind the patio French doors. For a few seconds, Jeremiah doesn’t move, staring at the doorway like he’s hoping she’ll reappear again.
Conrad rolls his eyes. Jeremiah’s always been a bit shameless when it came to things—and people—like this. He’s just about to open to his mouth to drag his brother back to reality when Steven groans loudly beside them.
“Dude,” their friend scolds, bumping his shoulder against Jere’s.
Finally, Jeremiah looks away. A slow grin spreads across his face, entirely unapologetic. “What? I was just appreciating the view.”
Steven’s face clinches at that. “Gross.” He drags a hand over his face, slight exasperation curving his voice when he reminds his friend, “She’s practically, like, my aunt. And a decade older than us.”
“Technically she’s Laurel’s cousin,” Jeremiah shrugs half-heartedly. “Whatever. She’s hot either way.”
“What the fuck, man.”
Jeremiah only laughs in response, completely unbothered by how perturbed his friend is.
Conrad lets their unfolding argument blur into the background. It’s familiar and easy; a trivial conversation he’d normally have no trouble being part of. This morning, though, he just doesn’t have the energy for it. Not with his bruised mouth, the dull ache in his jaw, and his hangover still clinging to him.
While they’re distracted, their conversation now shifting to the hot girl who works at the ice cream store downtown, he slips away.
**
The beach is relatively empty by the time he reaches it. The crowds haven’t arrived yet; for now, the ocean belongs mostly to the pale blue morning and the endless sweep of sand beneath his feet.
He quickly finds a quiet spot away from the handful of other beach inhabitants scattered along the shoreline, and drops down, stretching his legs out in front of him. For a while, he simply sits there, turning his joint over between his fingers.
It’s strange, he thinks, how nothing here feels like it’s changed much over the past almost two decades.
From where he sits, the tide still crawls in and out with the same unrelenting rhythm. Generations of gulls continue to circle overhead; further back, fields of beachgrass bend with the wind. It all feels so achingly familiar.
This entire town has held so much of his life it almost feels like a vault, preserving every summer phase of him that’s ever existed. Like the one who spent entire afternoons collecting seashells for Laurel until his pockets sagged. Another who shared melting ice cream with his mom after wandering through the shops downtown. Another who dove headfirst into the surf beside Jeremiah, daring each other to catch the next incoming wave. Another who cheered and yelled through endless video game nights with Steven while their moms laughed over glasses of wine in the kitchen. And one—
—One that he can almost hear now, his voice mixing with Steven and Jere’s, water sloshing around them as they chant Belly, Belly, Belly over and over again, begging for her to join them in the pool.
The memories crest all at once before receding, leaving behind nothing but a painful prick in his chest. For a long stretch of time, he lets himself sit with this unkind and unwavering reminder that all those summers belong to people who don’t exist anymore. He doesn’t know why it stings so much.
But what he does know is this:
The summerhouse is filled with flowers, there’s an unlit joint still held loosely between his fingers, and a secret rests in the back of his throat that’s all sharp edges and makes him taste blood every time he thinks about giving it a voice.
My mom is—
my mom’s—
mom’s—
dying.