Summerlong: A Novel Part 32

Who would destroy such sacred pages so they might hide a key inside a book?

A small skeleton key: he sees the locked drawer of the handsome desk and he unlocks it and there he finds a gun. Does Ruth's husband have a gun? He might kill Gill with it; he must be considering it, if he knows about them.

Gill pockets the gun.

He repeats his name to himself. He doesn't know so many things. How old is he now? When did he see Ruth last? Is her husband even alive? He wants to stay in this s.p.a.ce where he knows who he is and what he is doing and he puts the gun in his hand and walks back to the streets and then across the campus to his home, the home he had made for himself, for his wife and child, when everything with Ruth was over.

In the backyard, there is his study. He goes out to it. He reaches for the door and finds it locked just as the motion lights come on near the pool. He knows then the spare key is always in the small shed that houses the pool's filtering system and pump and he goes there and finds his ring of spares under a five-gallon bucket.

He lets himself inside his beloved study-a think shack his old friend Merrick had called it. Where is Merrick? Where has he been? France again, maybe? Gill s.h.i.+vers a bit with confusion and some guilt, because he knows his wife is inside asleep with their young son, Charlie, and that he should go upstairs to the bed and find Kathy and make love to her. His attention on her has waned. He works too much. He feels worthless when he is not working. Does he have to teach tomorrow? He has no idea. He needs to check his calendar.

This does not feel like his study. It is too empty-the shelves thin with books, the file cabinets free of unruly stacks, the large desk bare, the floor free of the boxes and papers.

Where has all his work gone? Has someone done away with it?

There is, on the desk, a stack of yellow legal pads and an Iowa Hawkeyes coffee mug full of sharpened pencils. While he still has clarity-he is oddly cognizant of his current state of awareness-he writes a note: It begins, "Charlie, there is no-" He stops writing. Puts an X through those words. Then writes, in larger script now: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired. -GG."

But the pool. So inviting. So calm. How many hours of his life has he stared at it, thinking, unable to write, his mind awash in a kind of aimless longing for anything different. How often has he wondered about his life and thought, Really, this is it, this is what comes next forever?

He puts the gun in his mouth and the trigger gets pulled.

Gill staggers to the pool and falls in. Later, almost three days later, they will find the body when the stench reaches the neighbors: so many of the professors on that leafy street have gone off to summer homes that August that n.o.body will even report a gunshot. Later, a neighbor will say he thinks maybe he'd heard fireworks, but he thought then that it might be the engine of the train, misfiring somehow, because n.o.body expects gunshots in Grinnell. Don Lowry's father's gun has sunk to the bottom, but the body of Gill Gulliver, Henry Frederick Watkins '52 Professor of Letters, still floats among the first signs of the inevitable autumn, and, just as Gill Gulliver has so many times imagined, there is a cl.u.s.ter of leaves revolving slowly around him and a red slick of blood in the water.

Don finds his children at the trailhead very near the highway. The adrenaline begins to leave his body and seems to vibrate in his joints and skull as it does.

"We thought you were dead," Wendy says. She is holding her knees in a kind of upright fetal position as she sits in the gra.s.s and rocks.

"And how did that make you feel?" Don says, one of the questions he had learned to ask her years ago in family therapy, after Wendy's first brush with anxiety attacks. It is a way of letting her talk about her worries without first dismissing them.

"What do you mean?" Wendy says. "How did it make me feel? Horrible, Daddy. HORRIBLE!"

She screams that word and then bursts into tears.

"Hungry," Bryan says, grinning. "We left our lunch up there, half eaten, and we are still hungry."

"It was almost unbearable," Wendy says, and Don smiles, sad and not sad that his ten-year-old daughter knows and uses the word unbearable.

Then she says, "Daddy, it's a joke. Get it? Unbearable?"

He hadn't gotten it and now he laughs, almost too loudly, for the kids step back wide eyed when his big sonorous guffaw echoes off the river's stones.

"Let's go back to the lodge," Don says. "Let's just go home."

That afternoon is warm, cloudless, and still, and Claire wakes from a nap, rising in her bed in the lodge's master bedroom to see that the water outside her window has gone flat, a s.h.i.+mmering blue. The wind's gone still. She sits up higher and can see more of the water, sees the rocky beach, and she sees her children, splas.h.i.+ng. She hopes the hike has gone well; part of her had wanted to go, but part of her thought that Don should begin to grow used to being alone, more and more, with his kids. She flips off the covers and stands, finding a pair of yoga pants on the ground and sliding them on. She stands at the window and sees the kids are playing with ABC, and she sees Don sitting on the rocks and watching ABC. And then when she looks back into the water, she sees Charlie coming out of it. He is standing waist deep and looking up to the lodge as if he can see her. There is no way he can, is there? Claire feels as if she is making eye contact with him though, as if he is staring right at her. She waves. He does not raise his hand in return.

And then she looks in the water and sees Ruth Manetti, in an ancient black-skirted swimsuit that comes almost to her knees, inching her tiny, pale body into the waves. Charlie goes over and holds her as she goes deeper, almost to her waist. She seems as if she will wash away, so tiny is she, and as she enters the water, ABC and the kids go to the water's edge and cheer her on and Ruth waves and looks up at the sky and Claire can see on Charlie's face a huge and unprecedented grin.

On the beach to the left, Claire sees Don is not just sitting on the beach, but he is building a roaring fire in the fire pit, and once he has significant flame, he begins to arrange a sleeping bag in a camp chair. Charlie is then helping Ruth out of the water and ABC holds open a robe for her and Claire can see the old lady's dazed but real smile. She knows exactly where she is and she, excited, is led to the fire.

Claire puts on a kettle of hot water, and later, as she goes out with a mug of hot tea for Ruth, who is huddled and bundled by the warm fire, Wendy yells to Claire, "Mom! They let Mrs. Manetti go swimming!"

And Claire says, "I know! I saw!"

"Mom! We saw a bear!" Bryan yells.

When Claire hands Ruth the mug of tea, Ruth winks at her. "Don said I'd catch my death out here, Claire. And I said, what better place to finally catch it!"

That night, all seven of them gather in the lodge for a chili supper, and the kids and Don recount the tale of the bear. How Don had been brave and stood between the kids and the bear, how the bear had cubs with her, how Wendy had gotten a bee sting, and Bryan had gotten scared but still acted bravely. Don lets the kids talk. He is exhausted, says nothing about it other than giving a few smiling, affirming nods, as if he is approving of the way the children are telling the story.

After supper, Claire and Charlie take the kids to the beach to build a fire, Ruth goes back to the cabin to turn in early, and ABC and Don wash the dishes.

As he scrubs a cast-iron pot, and ABC dries the large soup bowls, Don says, "Did you see them?"

"Who?" ABC asks.

"Claire. And Charlie. She's choosing him. She can barely stop herself."

"I didn't notice, really."

Don drops his sponge and looks at her, his eyes big.

"I mean, yes. Yes, I saw it," ABC says.

"I want to thank you for what you did for me, ABC. Whatever happens, that means the world to me. You've been a good friend, maybe the best one I've had in a long, long time."

"And I feel like I have to tell you something, Don. I've been looking for a moment alone with you."

"If it's about what happened in the Jacuzzi that night, please, I understand. You don't have to explain. We were very drunk. I'm not dumb enough to think you're in love with me, ABC."

"I do love you, Don, in a strange, strange way-viscerally-and I need you to know that before I go away. And I need you to know you're going to be okay. You've got this, Don Lowry. You can get through it."

"Where are you going?" he asks.

She doesn't answer.

"We had a deal," he says.

Ruth Manetti wakes in the guesthouse and realizes she is alone. She gets up and dresses and feels the wakefulness that tells her it must be one A.M. She goes to make her tea. ABC has not come home.

ABC and Charlie are walking the gravel roads, drinking bourbon, and watching the meteor shower in the sky. They are drunk.

"Another one!" Charlie says. "Another one!"

"Shhhhh . . . ," ABC says, laughing so hard she almost pees herself.

"Another one!"

"How do you keep seeing these?" ABC says.

"I look up at the sky when I walk. You look down on the ground."

"Let's stop and drink some more," ABC says. "I don't want to move until I see one."

They sit on a damp rock at a small cleared s.p.a.ce at the edge of the driveway. They both look up at the sky. They are far enough from the lodge and the cabins to not know if anyone is awake or if everyone is asleep.

"Just keep watching," Charlie says. "You'll see one."

ABC stretches her neck and looks up and Charlie pretends to but actually is looking at her neck, which he has never seen her elongate before, has never seen her hold her head so high. He kisses her neck and she sits still as a statue for what seems like a long time. They see what must be thousands of fireflies twinkling amazingly across the vast darkness. Above them, the stars are almost as abundant. It looks as if a million yellow and orange and green glowing embers are falling on the earth, blown about by a soft wind.

"I've never seen anything like it."

He keeps kissing her neck and she makes no move to stop him, nor does she try and kiss him back or touch him in any way. She stays there, looking up, at the light. And when she has an idea, an idea that her last act on earth, before she journeys off the earth, will be for Don Lowry, she just says, "Come on, Charlie," and she says, "hurry," as they walk down the dark path and they get back to his cabin, walking fast, and they undress there in the doorway, and they flop onto his unmade bed naked and already sweating and moaning before they even become part of each other, which they had done before, and which feels so easy right now, so easy, in fact, that when ABC whispers in his ear, "I want you," she thinks that she might almost mean it.

Not much later, but later: Claire goes to Charlie's cabin and stands in the yard behind it, not on the beach, but on the gravel drive where his car is parked. It's well after midnight. She stands in the shadows of the birch trees next to which he has parked his car. She has just showered some minutes before and her hair is damp and this heightens the feeling of cold. Charlie has some of the lights in his cabin on and the small fireplace is going because the night has turned cold. Claire has shaved her legs and under her arms in the shower, has applied skin lotion to her body and makeup to her eyes, and then she put on the black lace camisole and s.l.u.tty underwear she has packed, if she admits it, for the purpose of this evening. Over all that silk and lace, she wears a simple sweater and jeans, and Ugg boots on her feet. Not s.e.xy. She looks as if she might be coming by to borrow a novel or some wine or tea. He will be surprised when she begins shedding her clothes. She tries to decide on a next step. They could not start talking. She wants him not to talk. If they began talking, they might never have s.e.x. She knows her patterns. She knows they have all talked enough this summer. Someone must make a final gesture, must cross an unseen line, go through the one-way gate.

She will go in and go to his bed and if he speaks, she will kiss him and tell him, "No talking." She will undo his pants as he sits and make him slick and hard with her mouth. Then she will undress for him, slowly, in the light of the fire. She will relish his eyes on her, all of his surprised desire-and then, well, then it will be inevitable. She hopes he will stand up and grab her hips and take over from that point. It will be fast and it will be far from tender.

Thinking of this, already ready for him, she does not move. She stays near the birches. The stars have s.h.i.+fted. She looks at the sky. A meteor streaks across it, and then another. Two shooting stars with s.h.i.+mmering tails, straight from a Disney film. It is August and the night is clear. A meteor shower. She has seen them up north, on this sh.o.r.e, before. Another meteor pulls across the sky and then down, as if it has landed with a splash in the endless lake. She thinks, for a split second, about Don: that she should go and tell Don, that she should go and wake her children, so that they all could see the meteor shower together. It is something Don loves. It is something Don always wants to see on these trips north. But she does not go and wake them.

Because she does not go out to the beach, because she walks on the gravel road between the lodge and the cabin, she does not know that Don is watching the meteor shower too. She does not know that Don has woken up and has seen those same three shooters, has seen the surprise of their s.h.i.+mmering tails and has seen that last one plummet into the lake, or at least appear as if it has done that, and has gone into the woods across the road, wrapped in a wool blanket, a hat over his ears, so he can watch from the hill near the waterfall where he had encountered the bear.

Claire lets herself inside the cabin. She stands for a long time listening, wondering if she should leave. Her eyes grow accustomed to the dark. Her heartbeat escalates to an all-out drumming, the blood in her neck pulses and her eye twitches as if a migraine might come on without warning. In the small kitchen, she can see enough to make out a half-drunk, open bottle of red wine. She picks it up and drinks from it. She tries to breathe more slowly.

She hears a faint snore coming from Charlie's bedroom, the hum and woosh of a sound sleep. In her fantasy, she'd pictured him awake. She drinks from the bottle of wine again. She will wake him. She will wake him and she will not let him talk. She sits down in the dark at the kitchen table. The notebooks Charlie has been writing in are arranged in a neat stack, two sharpened pencils in an X atop them. There is a small candle set on a small metal plate and next to that a book of matches. Claire lights a match. It takes her three tries to get one that lights, that stays lit long enough for her to light the candle.

If anyone is on the beach, well, maybe they will see the candle, but they will not know anything else. She hopes the kids aren't going to wake up from bad dreams, or an earache, or a need to pee. Don is a heavy sleeper only up here in the north woods. He might not hear the sound of children crying, not with the dull roar of the lake and the constant wind outside his window and the utter exhaustion that came after his eventful hike.

She drinks more wine. The cabin's woodstove, still lit, full of enough fire to give off some heat, warms her and she slides off her Ugg boots and rubs her feet together. She is softening, warming, melting everywhere, and she cannot resist much longer. Their first time, after the heat wave party, could be considered a mistake, an error in judgment. Tonight, Claire knows, is a deliberate act. A step into a new life.

Eventually, it will be dawn. She looks at the clock on the microwave in the kitchenette of Charlie's cabin and sees it is 2:22. The time seems a lucky time though she does not know if this is true. She drinks more wine and stands and undoes the b.u.t.ton on her jeans, undoes the zipper. She folds the jeans on the back of a kitchen chair, tucks her boots neatly under the chair. She is straying, slightly, from the seduction script. Next she slips off the sweater, and now in her underwear she is s.h.i.+vering again. She's suddenly lost all that heat from the fire. She drinks more wine, and walks, bottle in hand, to the woodstove and tries to warm herself again, but it is cooling. She needs to add a log. It doesn't matter. Charlie will be warm. In his bed, he'll be buried in his covers, trapped in his own heat. She wonders how he will be sleeping. Has he pa.s.sed out in his clothes, drunk? She hopes not. She hopes to keep the logistics minimal. Boxers will be fine. Naked might be best. She will surprise him, waking him like she has planned. Tasting the first burst of flesh and breathing on him, then breathing him in, the moist sleepiness of him.

She s.h.i.+vers some more, wishes she could climb inside the stove and find heat. Now she needs to pee-for f.u.c.k's sake-and she walks in the almost pitch darkness to the small bathroom, sits down on the freezing toilet and s.h.i.+vers some more and p.i.s.ses. She doesn't flush. Her underwear is already wet, and now feels cold as she pulls it back onto herself. Enough, she thinks, goes back and has the last of the wine, spinning now, a bit; a kind of throbbing heartburn beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she goes into his room. There had been a lot of peppers in the chili. Too many?

It is even darker in the bedroom. She can see vaguely the edge of the bed, but the curtains on the bedroom window are drawn and so what can she do? She cannot even imagine what she should do now. She goes back to the table, picks up the plate with the candle, and stands there in the kitchen for a moment. Breathing deeply, she inhales some of the candle's heat, its vaguely b.u.t.tery wax, and she goes back to the bedroom.

Inching closer to the bed, she sees his bare feet, his bare legs, and sees that they are intertwined with another pair of feet, another pair of legs. She doesn't have to see their hips or their chests pressed together or ABC's wild hair next to Charlie's sleeping face. She has seen enough to know she is a fool.

In Charlie's cabin, ABC wakes from a dream of Philly, a dream of Philly coming from the lake, dressed not in white this time, but in black. She has a dream in which she watches Philly undress, in which Philly stands at the edge of the bed in candlelight and stares at her naked body next to Charlie's. She, in a half-sleep state, almost feels as if she has seen her there, and when she finally wakes and sits up in bed, it sounds for all the world as if someone has slipped out the cabin door.

Philly.

This is the night.

"Philly?" ABC says in a whisper that seems to break her from her sleep.

This will be her last night on earth, and she is glad that she has spent it with Charlie and that he will remember her that way, making love with him in the dark of the cabin. She hopes his grief over her death may even make him avoid falling in love with Claire. Claire will go back to Don. ABC is also glad that she had, before this, told Don that she loved him, because in a way, she does. She loves all of these people for what they have led her to and now it is time to go to it.

Claire does not see him there on the dark beach, but Don sees her, hears her first, hears a strange whimper and the slap of the cabin's screen door, sees her in the darkness, pulling on her boots and her jeans and a sweater over her head, dressing herself as she leaves Charlie's cabin.

Now he watches her nearly trip down the steps, watches her stumble back behind the cabin and into the shadows, into which he cannot see from the beach. He watches that darkness, hears, or thinks he hears, faintly, the smack of her Ugg boots on the crunchy gravel beneath her feet. He watches for a while longer, until he sees one of the lights come on in the lodge, sees her walking through the living room and sees her finally in the kitchen of the lodge, drinking a gla.s.s of water. And then the lights go off, and he wonders where she is sitting, there in the dark, drinking, staring off at the water, or is she looking out at the woods, the hill behind the cabin, at him?

Don bundles himself in his blanket and walks along the rocky path in the dark, the one along the Little Marais River, where he saw the bear. He is going back to face it. He wants to see it again, alone. He will charge at the cubs, and let the bear take him.

Claire sits in the darkness of the lodge drinking wine. She is still aroused from her planned but failed seduction of Charlie, and she wonders, really, why she had felt compelled to go to him. She had convinced herself, after the night of the heat wave party, up in the bedroom, up against the window, that she had gone over a precipice. That she could never right her old life-she had erased it. But there comes to her in that brisk northern air a feeling of smallness, of foolishness. Staring out at the big waters, the sky of meteors, the moon, the s.h.i.+mmering shadows of trees, the glimmer of each wave, she understands how insignificant her actions really are, how all of it, all of this seemingly urgently significant summer is small. Life is big. What she and Charlie do or don't do matters to n.o.body but Don. He would think all of this is important, all of this is an irreversible course of events-the frailty of marriage, the foreclosed home, the regret-that he could never let go. She knows that this is what Don will be thinking. She knows he will believe that his life has s.h.i.+fted into some other life. And that perhaps he has wasted some of his life too.

But one can't waste a life! One can only live it a day at a time. Claire knows that now.

She goes to the room where Don sleeps and finds the bed empty.

She pictures Don, suddenly, crying at the top of the ridge, where the waterfall begins. She feels as if she can almost hear it. And then, in her mind, she hears Don saying something he had said to her so many years ago, one night, their last spring in college, after they'd sneaked into one of the academic buildings and f.u.c.ked in a book-lined alcove across from Gill Gulliver's office-she hears Don saying, as he did that night, sweaty and crumpled on top of her: If you ever love another man, I think I'd kill myself.

Now, she knows that he knows. In her mind's eye, she pictures Don hurling himself off the cliff and into the waterfall and she gets up from her chair, spilling some wine on Merrick's sheepskin cus.h.i.+on, and she walks, in her boots, in the dark, toward the slick, rocky ledges that lead to the falls where Don Lowry has gone hoping to find that bear.

Just as ABC is going back up to the guesthouse, walking from Charlie's cabin across the beach, a meteor streaks across the sky and she swears she sees it splas.h.i.+ng into the lake. It's so startlingly bright that she says, "f.u.c.k. f.u.c.k!"

She's glad to finally see the meteor because she can take it as a sign. A confirmation of the dream she just had. Anybody would take it that way, she's sure of it.

It is Philly. Philly has come for her and Philly is going to lead her out of this world. ABC enters the guesthouse as quietly as she can, but finds Ruth awake in a chair, staring out the window.

"Fireflies," Ruth says, though ABC sees none of them.

"A meteor shower," ABC says, and then covers Ruth with a blanket and kisses her on the forehead. "Good night, Ruth," she says. "You need your sleep."

"You feel it too?" Ruth says.

"I feel what?"

"Tonight. It's tonight," Ruth says.

"Yes," ABC says. "Good-bye. Get some sleep."

They embrace for what feels like a long time and they feel the tears in their eyes are not enough, and they say something like this to each other. At the same time, they say, "These tears are only half of what you mean to me."

ABC startles, jumps back. How had that happened?

"The spirit world," Ruth says, "gives us the words we need to leave this world."

ABC rolls a joint for Ruth, lights it for her, then gets her things and goes back outside to the porch of the guesthouse. A pleasant night, but turning colder. And so many stars, and meteors every few minutes in front of those stars, and the wind picking up enough so she feels that the lake will be rough in the early morning, which is what she wants.

She believes in the morning, once Ruth tells them what has happened, that everyone will understand. How easy it would be right now to go back to bed with Charlie-to crawl beside his naked body, to make love again in the dark cold air. Or to go and find Don, taking comfort in his warmth, feeling his desire, which was a desire, yes, for her flesh, but also for something more, something he seemed to want but that he and she could not name.

She is dressed in her layers. She has, per Ruth's calculations, taken two sleeping pills and two Advil PMs. She begins to drink a beer. Stars spread out over the sky like scattered bits of gla.s.s and the glowing cloud of the Milky Way seems to hover just above the canoe.

It is time for ABC to go into the big water and find Philly.

In her pocket, she has a small baggie of Ruth's heaviest painkillers, morphine, essentially, which she will take in the boat. Twenty of the pills, just in case. She has the Xanax too, twenty of those. She has a six-pack of beer and a pint of bourbon that she puts into the canoe with the folded-up blankets, and she sips on these to keep her calm while she waits. It's not the best way to go, Ruth has said, maybe, but as long as you can fall asleep on that water, by dawn you will be waking up in another realm. The lake will take you. By wind or by water, your soul will enter the lake.

The idea, of course, seems suddenly absurd; though rather than discouraging her, this realization strengthens her resolve. She has no other choice but to do this. She trusts Ruth. Ruth has grown up here, and if ABC looks back on the last year, did it not all seem like fate, like it was all meant to be: coming back to Grinnell, being hired to take care of Ruth, meeting Don, watching Don lose his home, having Ruth offer money to be taken to the lake, the fireflies abundant as ever that summer, and even the comfort she had taken from loving Charlie.