Return to Willow Lake by Susan Wiggs

around her stomach. Despite the fact that she no longer
had a friendship with Zach, she had never known him to lie to her, or to make
such a tasteless joke.
    “Oh, my God,” she said.
    The water lapped quietly and rhythmically against the hull of
the boat.
    “Zach?”
    “Shit. I’d give anything to not be having this conversation. I
told Nina she should tell you but she refused to listen.”
    “Cancer? Oh, my God, Zach. My mom has cancer ?” It was right up there with her worst nightmares.
    “It sucks to have to break a confidence, but I know some
things. I know because of my own mom. They kept her illness from me when I was
little, and it was wrong. I know she thought she was protecting me, but all it
did was make it a lousy shock when I finally found out. You’re her daughter.
Despite what she’s thinking, you need to know. And you need to know now, not
after you’ve moved away.”
    “What is she thinking?” Sonnet asked desperately. “What in the
world is she thinking?”
    “She didn’t want to tell you because she doesn’t want you
changing your plans for her sake.”
    A trembling began inside Sonnet. Everything felt heightened,
more intense. She could hear the water trickling past the hull, the sharp call
of killdeer in the trees along the shore, the sunlight dancing along her bare
arms. “My mom has cancer,” she whispered.
    “I’m sorry,” Zach said quietly, still watching her. “I’m sorry
as hell. She said she didn’t want to worry you—”
    “My mom’s pregnant, and she has cancer, and I’m not supposed to
worry?” Sonnet nearly reared up out of the boat. “And how does anybody know
she’s going to be all right?”
    He didn’t answer. She saw his gaze shift and darken, as though
a shadow passed over him. Then a memory struck her, an echo of a time long past,
a time she’d nearly forgotten. Zach, still just a boy, standing alone in the
brick-paved driveway of his father’s house, bouncing a pink rubber ball against
the garage door, again and again in a rhythm as regular as a heartbeat.
    Sonnet had gone to visit him on her bike. It was an afternoon
in early fall, the leaves of the maple trees in town edged with the colors of
fire. They made a peculiar dry sound as the wind rustled through them,
punctuated by the rhythm of Zach’s thrown ball.
    “Want to go climb up to Meerskill Falls?” she had asked him. It
was one of their favorite things to do, riding their bikes to the trail at the
edge of town and then hiking up the steep gorge to the top of the falls, spanned
by a hanging bridge where, according to local legend, two lovers had once jumped
to their death nearly a century before.
    “Nah,” he said. Sunlight glinted off his hair.
    “Come on. It’s not a school night. We don’t have any homework.”
She knew this because they were in the same class, Mr. Borden’s sixth grade.
    “Can’t,” he’d said.
    “What do you mean, you can’t?”
    “I have to go to Seattle.”
    “Seattle? That’s where your mom lives, right?”
    “That’s where my mom died.” The rhythm of the ball never
faltered.
    Sonnet dropped her bike with a crash, letting her library books
spill across the driveway bricks, ignored. “Oh my gosh, Zach. That’s so sad.
That’s the saddest thing in the world.” Mothers weren’t supposed to die.
Grandparents, sometimes. And great-grandparents definitely, like Nonna Romano,
who had been so old there was actually a celebration with people dressed in
costumes from the various eras of her life. Sonnet and her mom had worn flapper
dresses.
    That was what a mom did—she went to parties with you, or
dressed you to go on your own. Every once in a while, a mom got a divorce and
moved away, like Zach’s had. But she wasn’t supposed to die.
    Zach still hadn’t said anything. He kept bouncing the ball.
    “It’s just wrong.” She barely remembered Zach’s mother. Pale
blonde like Zach, quiet, hard to know. Zach had adored her, and he’d been
shattered