The summer after Bailey’s death

The summer after Bailey’s death is a stretch of time in which Lennie Walker’s grief repeatedly collides with the demands and possibilities of ordinary life. School is out, family routines have been broken by Bailey’s absence, and Lennie alternates between retreat and sudden intensity. The season’s significance lies not in a clean recovery, but in her growing recognition that carrying grief and moving toward life are not mutually exclusive.

An unsettled beginning

The summer opens with school having been out for two weeks and the household seeming to scatter in different directions. Gram tries to revive her old late-afternoon tea ritual with Lennie, following her upstairs with a full teapot and two mugs. Tea had once been their shared occasion to talk before the others came home; now Lennie refuses the conversation and pretends to read in The Sanctum. Her withdrawal leaves Gram reaching for a familiar form of closeness that Lennie cannot yet accept.

The grief is shared, though not always openly. Lennie hears Gram taking unusually long showers and understands that Gram is trying to cry where Big and Lennie will not hear her; they hear anyway. The scene places the family’s mourning inside the house, where familiar gestures continue but no longer work as they once did.

Lennie’s own distress also emerges as bewildering physical and emotional restlessness. She finds herself kissing a pillow and recalling how little her earlier experiences with boys had meant to her. Now, after Bailey’s death, she imagines kissing Toby Shaw, Bailey’s boyfriend, despite having promised Bailey she would not. Lennie is ashamed of the boundary she has crossed and unsettled by how strongly she wants the person who makes her feel less afraid. The summer therefore begins with grief entangled in desire rather than set apart from it.

Retreat, friendship, and music

Lennie’s days move between avoidance and brief returns to connection. When Sarah calls, Lennie has assumed her friend’s silence means anger. Sarah confirms that she is furious and refuses to speak to her, but immediately launches into the summer gossip Lennie has missed. Their exchange makes room for both their hurt and the familiar current of their friendship. After Lennie has practiced Cavallini’s Adagio and Tarantella for two straight hours, she is exhilarated by the music and begins to consider attending summer band practice after all.

Lennie arranges to meet Sarah at Flying Man’s, eager to tell her about Joe Fontaine but determined not to talk about Toby. At their secluded pool and small falls, the two spend more than an hour floating on their backs. Lennie asks Sarah about her night with Luke Jacobus partly to avoid thinking about Toby’s urgent text. They climb beneath the falls and shout into the roar as they have since childhood. The meeting restores an embodied, shared routine between the friends, while Lennie’s effort to steer the conversation away from Toby shows that reconciliation does not immediately make her ready to face every part of her grief-driven entanglement.

A changed sense of self

Walking home from the river through the woods, Lennie decides that Toby probably feels terrible too and wants to make sure what happened will not happen again. This is Lennie’s interpretation of the urgent text, not a settled account of Toby’s intention. Sitting beneath gathering summer clouds, she writes a few lines on a discarded to-go cup and buries it under pine needles before lying on the forest floor.

There, Lennie imagines how she might feel if Bailey were still alive: happy, perhaps, but only mildly so, sheltered in the emotional shell she once inhabited. She now thinks of herself as a shell-less turtle, more exposed to devastation but also newly capable of wanting to make music that turns air into color. She wonders whether she prefers this heightened state, and whether Joe Fontaine would have noticed her if she had remained safely withdrawn. The possibility troubles her because she cannot accept that anything good should come from Bailey’s death. Yet she also remembers that Bailey had lived without such a shell and had urged Lennie to do the same. In that moment, it is Bailey’s life, rather than her death alone, that helps Lennie imagine how to live.

The future alongside grief

As the summer’s later scenes turn toward school and music, Lennie challenges another clarinetist and proposes that they let the best player win when September comes. She then runs from the music room through the woods to write a poem to Joe Fontaine. The forward motion does not erase her awareness that she has a future and Bailey does not. Instead, it brings that painful difference into the same breath as her decision to act and create.

Lennie recognizes that Bailey will die again and again in her memory: grief will remain because her love will remain. She does not treat this as a problem that the passage of summer can solve. The season’s movement is toward living with the loss, and toward loving the world with the daring and joy she associates with Bailey.

That movement becomes physical when Lennie finally runs to the cemetery. As she moves through alternating patches of sunlight and shade, she feels the fabric of death that has clung to her for months begin to loosen. At Bailey’s grave she rests her head and arms against the warm stone, whose small reliquary cabinet bears an engraved bird. She traces Bailey’s name and age, then the words Lennie wrote and gave Gram at the funeral parlor, The color of extraordinary. Remembering that the grave was chosen so Bailey could see, hear, and smell the river, Lennie approaches the place not by leaving her sister behind but by meeting her there. The summer’s defining change is therefore not the end of mourning: it is Lennie’s first movement toward a future in which grief and love travel together.