Free The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson Page A

feel prickly.
    “Okay,” he said, and hoisted the next planter—the same size as the ones she’d been wrestling for an hour—into his arms like it was a feather. He lifted a second planter in his left arm and walked in the direction of the cellar. Maggie sighed and lugged one behind him.
    They worked for about half an hour, digging, filling, hauling, until sweat covered their bodies and dirt covered their arms, legs, calves, faces. Gnats kept hovering around their sweat. Finally Liam laid the last planter near the cellar door and sank down on the grass. Maggie knelt a couple of feet away.
    “So what’s in the cellar?” he said.
    “Besides the washing machine and dryer, I actually don’t know.”
    “You’re not curious?”
    Maggie shrugged.
    He opened the cellar door, and the smell wafted out to them, the cool air on their faces.
    “Smells like the old days,” Liam said with a grin. He climbed in and then helped her down, and her feet landed with a thud on the cold ground. The room was low and tight—the ceiling just over their heads.
    He’d been joking, but it did smell like the past—like dust and things that people didn’t use anymore: old oils, old metal, old leather, and air, Maggie imagined, that people had last breathed in the fifties, or the twenties, or the late 1800s. It was the kind of place where people used to store vegetables and jars and things like that. She could barely see more than a few feet in front of her—only the space illuminated by the open cellar door and then black beyond that.
    They began loading the planters in, having to pile them farther and farther back. Suddenly, inexplicably, Liam closed the door and they were in darkness. There was only the tiniest crack of dim light coming from a small window on the wall to her right, covered in cardboard.
    She could hear Liam breathing beside her, quiet as usual. “I just wanted to see what it feels like,” he finally said. “Do you mind?” Maggie didn’t tell him to open the door or say she was scared. Liam seemed comfortable with the silence, but it began to make her antsy.
    “Isn’t it weird how you see colors when the lights first go out?” she said, to break the silence. “Right now I can see green dots following each other. Green-dot parade.”
    “I just see red lines,” Liam said. “Pretty standard.”
    “When I was a kid, it always frustrated me that when you opened your eyes, the dots disappeared,” Maggie admitted. “I wanted to catch them. Weird, huh?”
    “Everyone who ends up on this peninsula has some kind of issue,” Liam teased. “Water Street is like the Island of Misfit Toys.”
    They breathed and listened to the quiet of the cellar.
    “How many years old is this house?” Liam asked. “Do you know?”
    “My dad said it was built in the 1880s,” Maggie answered. “What are your issues?”
    “Loving an unattainable girl my entire life,” Liam said easily, without hesitation. “Who does that?” He didn’t sound embarrassed. He seemed to want to go on, like he needed to explain himself, but it took a few seconds. “Pauline loves to go on and on about how life is short and how you have to live it up. But, I don’t know, I think it’s just her way of dodging real stuff sometimes.” Maggie could hear his feet shifting on the dirt in the dark. “She talks about her mom being stuck in the past, on what happened with her dad, but in a way she’s stuck on it too. It’s like she doesn’t think she has a future, just because her dad died young.” Liam paused, sorting through his thoughts. “She won’t make any real choices—I’ll bet you anything she ends up working at the tea company all her life, because she won’t decide anything big for herself. And I think her mom likes it that way. I don’t think her mom wants her to grow up and find her own path or anything. She just wants her close.”
    “You think she’ll come around to you one day?” she asked.
    “To me? I doubt it. But I