Summerlong: A Novel Part 4

Charlie has opened up all the windows in the musty, vacant house, but the wind is too faint to do much good. The scent that does waft in through the pollen-coated screens is a familiar one-earth, cut lawn, the blossoms of the pear and plum trees in the side yard, the sweetly dank manure that's been spread on the black earth of the cropland fields outside town. It's not yet light, but already he hears the first birds of the morning, the chatter of mating robins and grackles and wrens.

He goes to the front porch and he sees her, standing there.

"You're not asleep," he says.

"I have to go in a second," Claire says.

"I want to show you something," Charlie says. And he walks toward the backyard and she follows, still moving fast, as they make their way to the edge of the yard, through the gate of the tall cedar privacy fence, to the patio in front of the guesthouse, which was his father's study for three decades, and then Charlie disappears around the corner and lights flip on and before them, the pool-now full and clean and glimmering.

The sky seems to lighten along with the pool, as if the flipped switch has triggered the sunrise.

Claire stands on the deck, looking at the water, and even before Charlie reappears, she knows she should go.

"You did this?" Claire says.

"My mom hired a pool service. She wanted me to have an empty house and a clean pool. There's something Zen about it. Or something."

"That's very sweet of her," Claire says.

Charlie laughs, a sort of sad chuckle, and he says, "My parents did things for me, not with me. There's a big difference."

Claire crouches down and dips a hand in the water.

"It's nice," she says. "A perfect temp."

"I thought it'd be too cold."

"It's been a warm spring," Claire says.

"Let's swim."

"Um," she says.

"Come on," he says. "We're all grown-ups here."

He sheds his jeans and, in his boxers, dives into the water.

Claire is on a precipice. Not just the pool's edge. No, Claire's on a cliff, staring down at some abyss, scared but not scared. How easy life seems all of a sudden, though the day before, her husband had asked, "Why is it all so difficult?"

"It just is," she'd said. "I think you like it that way."

Charlie surfaces and treads water in the deep end.

"Come on!"

"Um," she says, "I'm not wearing underwear."

He goes underwater and slips off his boxers and surfaces and tosses them to the side of the pool where they land with a thud, and soon, off come Claire's shoes. Claire feels so hot, feels so in need of something to make this day different from so many others: what would it hurt to swim?

Charlie surfaces, smiles at her, presses himself out of the pool with one fluid stroke of all his muscles and walks to the outer wall of the office. She notices every inch of him, every gesture, as if he is glowing. He flips a switch and all is dark again, except for the growing sliver of dawn beyond the trees to the east.

"Is that better?" he says.

She lifts her dress over her head and she leaps into the water. When she surfaces, Charlie eases himself back in-she watches him enter the water slowly, and he swims up alongside her. They move to the s.h.i.+mmer and swale of the pool.

She feels his body moving the water, and she surfaces. He nears her, and when his hands go to her hips, she says, "We can't."

"No?"

"We just swim," Claire says.

But as they swim there, in the dark, closer than they should be swimming, it is as if she can feel him through the water, she can feel him so much that when she leans on the wall and he comes swimming up behind her, not touching her but almost touching her, she moans.

"You're not happy," he says. "But you should be."

In the water, she feels him, or the waves he's making, against her thighs.

"What?" she says. She can barely speak. She turns to face him and in the sky sees the river of orange light that is flowing just over the tree line now.

"It's beautiful," she says. "And we can't."

She gets out of the pool. He floats on his back, watching her.

"There are towels on that shelf there, do you see?"

But she is already wrapping herself in one when he says this, and she is s.h.i.+vering despite the warmth of the morning that is filling the air. He is getting out of the pool, and she steps into the guest house to dress, suddenly feeling more modest with the dawn.

Though it's been over a decade since she finished a book, her only book, what Claire has always been good at, for better or worse, is the reconstruction of certain narratives so that they contain a fictional element that makes the impractical seem practical. They had just gone swimming, she thinks to herself as she walks, and we are all adults here, and so we swam without suits-I would have swum in my underwear, she thinks, had I been wearing any, and furthermore, she thinks to herself, it was a onetime thing, a whim, and even if it was a bit over the edge of propriety, she had been faithful to her husband for over fifteen f.u.c.king years and so, what the h.e.l.l is wrong with a whim?

This is what she is thinking when she sees Don Lowry walking toward her, and he walks almost with a tremble, as if he is shaking with something like guilt but not quite guilt. What is it, lack of sleep? Hopelessness? The knowledge that his life has irrevocably changed?

Does he know where she's been?

What, exactly, did she just do?

Now the sky is alight with dawn. They meet on the sidewalk.

"I was just-" they both say, at once, and then stop.

"Out walking," Claire says.

"Looking for me?"

This question she doesn't expect.

"Well, I guess. Where were you?"

"I fell asleep."

"Where?" Claire says. "Downstairs?"

"Claire," he says. "It was the strangest thing."

She puts a finger to his lips.

"Shh," she says. "I don't want to know."

Whatever strangeness he is about to confess will only trigger something inside her and she isn't sure what-would she confess? And if she begins to talk, will she ever stop? Will she explode somehow-I don't love you, Don, and I can't explain why-releasing something dormant and pushed down that will spark then turn to flame amid the lush omnipresent green of dawn?

When she'd left Charlie's, after drying off and dressing and peeing and composing herself in the guesthouse/study she'd slipped into, he'd been asleep in a deck chair, covered in a large white towel. Looking at the bookshelves in the guesthouse she'd found, surprisingly, among the books in Gill Gulliver's study an old hardcover copy of her first and only book, Everybody Wants Everything, and she had pulled it from the shelves and found a black marker and she had, for some reason, signed it: To Charlie. She had almost stopped there but then she added something: Tell me what you want. Before putting it back on the shelf, she looked at the jacket photo, now nearly fifteen years old. Claire, in 1999, a black tank top, short hair swept back and slick, big hoop earrings, a wide black belt, faded jeans. Her face serious, not exactly a pout, but a pensive wince. She both hated and loved to see herself like that. Her publicist then, an Ole Miss graduate named Amber who, she was sure, no longer worked in publis.h.i.+ng, had said, "You need an author photo that makes you look, pardon my French, like a good lay."

Sometimes she thinks that one comment is why she stopped writing.

Now the light is in the sky, and Don moves Claire's finger from his lips.

"What's going on?" Don says.

"I thought you were downstairs watching Netflix."

"I wasn't. I was just-"

"Shh!"

"Do you not want to know where I've been because you don't want me to know where you've been?"

"The kids will be up any minute, Don. We have to get home."

"Have you been swimming?" Don asks.

She looks up at him, as if she hasn't understood the question at all. As if it were a non sequitur, completely insane.

"Why are we still married?" she says.

Now a police car comes up alongside them and an officer asks them to get in. Don knows the officer. He calls him Steve. Claire is not sure who he is but follows Don's lead.

"You know Steve Halverson," Don says.

"h.e.l.lo, Steve," she says, though she doesn't know him at all.

Halverson explains that he and another deputy had arrived that morning to serve papers-strictly doing my sworn duty, Don, I wish it could be different. Foreclosure papers, a notice that the sheriff would be auctioning off their home in thirty days, and what Halverson and his partner found, when knocking on the door, were two confused and sleepyheaded kids, neither of them knowing where their parents had gone.

"I thought Don was home," Claire says as they ride the few blocks across town. "Or I thought he was about-foreclosure papers? Don't we get more warning about those? Weren't you in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Don?"

"No," Don says.

"Well, ma'am," Halverson says, "by this point in the process, the home owner has generally had numerous notices from the county. And for months before that, from the bank."

"I don't understand," Claire says.

"Claire," Don says. He reaches for her arm then pulls back. Looking at him, she knows that he knows the whole story, everything, and that there is no misunderstanding here at all, but a secret he has kept from her.

"Anyway, ma'am," Halverson says, "yes, you would have been given, according to the usual process, at least six months of warning. These days, people get longer. The system is backed up. It's the least pleasant part of my job. Next to dead bodies."

Don smells of sleep, morning breath, sweat, beer, smoke. The dank smell of damp vegetation seems to come off him, as if he had stepped out of a leaf pile.

"Not that we get many dead bodies around here," Halverson says, "but when we do, it's awful. It gets to you."

"Don? Where were you?" she asks.

Don puts his hand on her knee and whispers. "We got the notices," he says.

"What?" she says, her voice a high involuntary whistle, like a broken flute. She thinks she might be sick in the back of the car. She wants to roll down the window. She feels as if it is too much to ask. She doesn't deserve to roll down the window.

"We got lots of notice," Don says. "I just thought I could-"

"We see this a lot, Claire. We see this more than you would think," Halverson says as he eases down the cul-de-sac. "One spouse is often in the dark. It's shameful for men. They are breadwinners. All of that. I feel for you, Donny, I really do. I've been there, if it helps. Lori and I went broke about nine years ago, and then I became a cop. You know all of that. My business went belly-up and-"

"Okay, last night, Don," Claire says and interrupts the cop. "Where were you?"

Don turns and looks out his window. "It's hard to explain."

"Because I was . . . ," Claire begins, but stops. Don is right. How does one explain something that seems like a dream, separate from real life?

In the light of morning that narrows the shadows on their front lawn, Claire sees her children outside, gathered near another cop. They are in pajamas, drinking from boxes of juice.

"The kids were a little frightened. My partner knocks loud. He's new. He's from Milwaukee. The kids, I'm afraid, woke to some pretty loud knocking," Halverson says. "You wake up to that kind of knocking, I guess, I mean, if you're a kid, it's just-anyway, they want us to serve these in person, but when you didn't come to the door, we nailed it to the door, which involves hammering and which broke into your door, which is not really good wood. Those doors, from Home Depot, they don't last."

Claire leaves the car to go to the kids before Halverson has the car in park. The children stare at Claire as she comes toward them: like victims of some natural disaster, they have had blankets put over their shoulders. Cop blankets. What kind of mother allows her children to end up wrapped in cop blankets while she skinny dips the night away?

A bad mother.

"We gave them some juice," says the other cop, a younger one who has been waiting with the kids. "The littler one, your girl? She got a sucker. The other kid didn't want one. He demanded a phone call and a lawyer, like he was on a cop drama. He's a cool customer."

Bryan smiles at this, a big grin.

A few neighbors are out on porches, in robes, but none of them come over.

Claire lets out another whistle and waves her arms at the kids as she runs and shrieks again in that flutelike manner, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Hey! Hey!" and then, "Everything's okay! It's all okay!"

She gets to them and begins kissing them, hugging them, trying not to make eye contact with the grim deputy who has been a.s.sisting Halverson; she turns and sees finally that Don Lowry has not yet left the squad car.

It is as if he's hoping to be taken away.