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Elise and Wayne both burst into full belly laughter as they scampered back to the car. Once inside, Wayne turned up the heat all the way, and Elise yanked off her gloves and rubbed her palms together. When she turned on the radio station, it was a song her mother had loved—Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
“Oh, my gosh. Grandma always sang this song as loudly as she could,” Penny cried from the back seat.
“It’s a classic,” Wayne said.
With that, the four of them began to sing the lyrics they remembered—messing up from time to time, laughing as they faked their way to the ending. They headed north: where it all had begun for all of them.
With each mile they passed on the highway, Elise grew increasingly anxious. She texted Tracey about a half-hour away from the ferry to give their arrival time.
TRACEY: Great! I’m taking Dad out for a birthday drink, which will allow everything to be set up over here at his place. Just swing over when you get here.
TRACEY: Oh! Why has Alex been overly nice the past week? What did you do to him? A spell, maybe?
Elise laughed inwardly as she responded.
ELISE: It is Halloween, isn’t it? I’m allowed a few spells and tricks.
TRACEY: Whatever it is, keep it up. I love this version of my brother. He’s much funnier than I remembered.
ELISE: I love it when people can surprise you like that.
TRACEY: Me too.
When Elise, Wayne, Penny, and Brad stepped off the ferry on Mackinac Island, she hung back and watched her children crunch through the snow on Main Street slowly, as though they walked through shadows of their own dreams. Main Street had been decorated for Halloween: spiderwebs hung from banister to banister, and little ghouls and goblins and ghosts hung outside of fudge shops and restaurants. Two horses drew a buggy toward them, and Penny whipped around, wide-eyed, and said, “It feels like the 1800s around here!”
Elise chuckled as she trotted up ahead of her children to lead them to the Bloomingfeld, which she had cleared with Alex to have for both of her children during the birthday weekend. As they entered the foyer, stomping their feet of snow, Rhonda fluttered toward them with warm greetings. On her head, she wore a witch’s hat, and her smile was electric save for one smudge of chocolate on her lower lip.
“Happy Halloween!” she called. “Oh, you must be Bradley and Penny Swartz.”
“Fletcher, actually,” Penny corrected. “Although I’ve heard that around here, that Swartz name is pretty powerful.”
“Oh, silly me. Of course.” Rhonda dropped her chin to her chest and said, “I’ve been told to keep your arrival a big secret. That’s been one of the biggest struggles of my life, mind you. Around here, gossip is the way we keep ourselves alive.”
Rhonda showed Penny and Bradley to their rooms, both down the hall from Elise’s, with stunning bay window views of the frigid lake outside. After they dropped off their suitcases, everyone changed into their birthday best: Penny in a black velvet dress with a thick black headband holding her hair in place; Brad in a suit jacket with a white t-shirt beneath it.
“Mom, I’ve never seen that green dress before,” Penny said, giving her mother a once over.
“Oh, this old thing?” Elise said.
From down below in the foyer, Wayne called, “That’s the dress she wore when I fell head over heels for her.”
“My sister sold it to me,” Elise said. “Before I even knew she was my sister. She helped me pick it out, even, on a day that I felt particularly lonely here on Mackinac.”
**
AS IT WAS TERRIBLYcold, Wayne rented a carriage to take them up to the Pontiac Trail Head. Elise and her children piled in the back beneath blankets, huddling close to one another, as Wayne sat up front and guided the horses. The carriage clopped along as they chatted.
“Wayne lives just a few blocks that way,” Elise said, pointing, “And that beautiful hotel there? That’s something of a big deal around here. Your grandfather used to sneak into that very hotel to see your grandmother at night after they had finished filming for the day.”
Penny’s eyes widened at the thought. “It’s so difficult to imagine Grandma as a mid-twenty-something, wrapped up in some kind of romantic affair.”
“I can assure you. She was always up to something,” Elise said. “I read enough of her other diaries to know that she had many other lovers. She kept them all a secret, until Peter, of course. That said, I really don’t think she loved anyone quite the way she loved your grandfather.”
“Gee. I wonder why,” Bradley said with a crooked grin.
“What do you mean?”
Brad and Penny shrugged in unison, in that strange, twin-like way they had.
“He’s your father—the father of her favorite person in the world. Of course, she loved him the most. He gave her the world,” Penny said.
