Summer People (28 page)

Lights flicked on throughout the first floor, and eventually in a corner room upstairs. Suspecting he might be able to see them better from higher ground, Nathan scrambled up the footpath toward the Point. Moonlight gave the gray earth a silvery luster and touched the tops of large cumulus clouds rolling slowly above the ocean. Near the top of the hill, however, Nathan realized he would not be able to see into the house any better than he had on the street. Because curtains hung in most of the second-story windows, he couldn't see more than moving shadows, and after the first-floor lights were turned off, he ambled back down the hill.

Of course, Nathan had suspected for some time that this was where Mr. McAlister was now living. But having his suspicions confirmed was depressing. He thought of Mr. McAlister's ability to laugh even though
Ellen now lay in the hospital, and it reminded him of the last time he'd seen Sophie with her new boyfriend. She had been on the way out of Dugan Florist, the Cro-Magnon's heavy arm draped casually around her neck, and the sound of her laughter, so lighthearted, had made Nathan tremble in the heat of the summer.

On Harbor Avenue, he walked off the gravel and onto the grass, where his steps made less noise. He paused in Eldwin's front yard. The house was dark, but lamplight shone faintly from Leah's bedroom window. He walked closer to the house and whispered her name, waited, then glanced behind him at the gravel road. Gathering up a few pebbles, he lofted them as gently as possible toward her window. The first rattled off the clapboard siding, but the next two pinged so loudly off the pane that Nathan was torn between wanting to run and wanting to wait for her to respond. He could hear his heart beating. He whispered her name again and tossed another pebble just as a nearby window blazed like a searchlight, illuminating almost half the front yard. A shadow moved across the ceiling, but Nathan ducked along the side of the porch, then sprinted across the back lawn.

An Early Departure ~ Ralph's Girlfriend ~ Leah's Party Plans ~ Nathan's Fury ~ Beer, Badminton, and Dancing

I
n a dream he had that night, Nathan was on Ellen's porch when he noticed Leah. She was in her black bikini on the beach, waving for him to join her.

“I'll be there soon!” Nathan called.

Leah yelled something back to him—something reassuring, Nathan could tell—but he couldn't hear her over the creaking coming from somewhere inside the house. He wandered back through the French doors, climbed the stairs, and opened the door to Ellen's room. He found her leaping on the bed, her khaki dress billowing up to midthigh.

Nathan raised his hands and shouted, “Ellen, my God! Be careful! Stop bouncing!”

But through the loose wisps of hair, she only stared at him, her brow knitted in a familiar expression of embarrassed confusion, as if she didn't know how she'd started, or how to stop. Nathan begged her to come down. Then her lips parted into a toothy, knowing smile. She pushed off
hard from the bed, leaping high, like an airborne dervish, twirling headfirst toward the bureau, so that Nathan awoke with a start.

A seagull had perched on the gutter above the room's nearest window, its talons scraping against the aluminum rim. Nathan clapped his hands and yelled so that it flew away, and then—aware that he might have awakened someone—he listened for sounds of movement in the house. The red numbers on his alarm clock read 9:26 a.m., later than he and Ellen usually awoke. But he heard no talking or footsteps. He dressed and peered through his door at the empty hallway, then walked quietly downstairs. Returning from his walk last evening, he had discovered Ellen's Volkswagen in the driveway and an additional bedroom door closed, so his hope that Glen would stay in a hotel had already crumbled when he saw the note on the kitchen table.

By his own admission, Nathan was not a tidy person. The one time his father had visited Nathan's room in the shared house, a year or so ago, when they were still trying to meet every Wednesday for lunch, his father couldn't help curling his lip at what surrounded him: empty glasses and half-eaten dinners, opened art books and comics, clean and unclean clothes, all of which looked as if it had been tied up into a bag—along with his bedding—and then struck like a piñata until its contents had exploded across the room. Still, even Nathan's tolerance for this kind of disorder did not allow him to feel at ease in the driver's seat of Ralph's truck. Two gnarled and blackened banana peels lay directly in front of him on the dash, and when Nathan reached with two fingers to throw them out, he
found they were fixed to the dashboard, along with a few coins and a half-empty pack of cigarettes, by a paste of sun-hardened cola. Crammed-in cigarette butts overflowed from the ashtray, spilling out onto a pile of empty cans, newspapers, mail, and fast-food bags that covered the passenger-side floor. A deodorizing cardboard Christmas tree hung from the rearview mirror, but the truck still reeked so badly of cigarettes and decaying food that Nathan rode with all the windows open, his face pinched and frowning until he pulled into the hospital.

Ralph and Glen sat on either side of Ellen's bed, although only Glen was awake. Ralph sat on the far side with a
National Geographic
on his chest, his arms folded across it like a beloved manuscript. A bouquet of red and white tulips stood on Ellen's nightstand, and Glen sat with his elbows on his knees, his glasses halfway down his nose as he read aloud from
The Collected Jack London.

“Hey, Nathan,” Glen said, removing his glasses and shaking Nathan's hand. He reached over and laid a hand on his mother's forearm. “Momma's doing much better today. Aren't you, Momma?”

Ellen smiled faintly. Tributaries of broken blood vessels still fed into the dark lake of bruised skin around her left eye and along her cheekbone. Opening her mouth, she pulled a white piece of pulp from inside her lip and held it up for them to see.

“I'll take that from you, Momma,” Glen whispered, as he took a tissue from a nearby box. He took the pulp from between her fingers and dropped it into the trash. Patting her hand he said, “You're doing much better today than you were yesterday. You even ate some applesauce this morning.”

Ellen raised her hand from the bed and circled her index finger once in the air, a feeble gesture of celebration. Glen and Nathan both laughed so loudly that Ralph opened his eyes to squint at them, shifted position in the chair, and went back to sleep.

“Oh, Momma, you're going to be fine,” Glen said and smiled.

Ellen nodded blankly and stared up at the muted baseball game on the television bolted into the wall above them. As they watched the game, Nathan apologized for not getting there sooner. But Glen shook his head,
saying he had just wanted to get there early to talk with Dr. Sahni and a couple of private medical plane companies about when they might be able to take his mother home. “Dr. Sahni says she's stabilized now. They'd like to run some more tests and keep her under supervision for another week, but a lot of that can be done in Cleveland. I've been trying to find out when a private plane would be available with one of these companies. Right now I've got one that says they can do it a little over a week from now and another that says they can do it tomorrow.”

“Whoa,” Nathan said.

Glen frowned as he glanced back at his mother. “Well, we don't want to do anything reckless. But I'm going to talk with Dr. Sahni again this afternoon, and we'll discuss whether or not it's possible. So we'll see. I know my mother would like to be home.” He glanced down at Ellen and said, “You're a tough old girl, aren't you?”

Ellen nodded and then rested her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes.

For lunch they purchased hamburgers from the cafeteria and took them back to the room. They found a tennis match on television—for Ellen's benefit—and for a little while, Ralph regaled them with stories about his quest for the photograph that would capture the quintessence of the inner city. “I wandered into this crack house one time, and this big dude—I mean, a
big
dude, way too fat to be a hard-core junkie, so he must have just been a dealer—shouted that he'd give me thirty seconds to get out or he was going to burn me. Slang for a gun is a ‘burner,' so I'm not sure if he was talking about shooting me or actually burning me. But, anyway, I hit the road.”

After suggesting that Ralph be more careful, Glen said, “Allison has taken some absolutely breathtaking photographs when we've been on our trips.” For decades, Glen's willingness to occasionally guide tourists through important archaeological sites in Wyoming allowed he and his wife admission to other, eco-educational trips offered by the same company, and the trips were part of the reason Glen did not travel to Brightonfield Cove very often. Glancing sideways to make sure that his mother
was still asleep, he said, “Summers are short in Wyoming, so I've got a limited time for doing field research, and the free time I have—if it's a choice between watching tennis at the Alnombak or going with Allison on a kayaking expedition in Alaska, I'll almost always go to Alaska.”

By late afternoon, Ellen was occasionally replying to questions. Her answers were limited to shaking or nodding her head, or slurring a monosyllable, but the fact that she was responding at all buoyed everyone's spirits considerably. Nathan and Ralph stayed until dinnertime, when Glen thanked them for coming and let them know he could “hold the fort” by himself. Nathan protested half-heartedly, but by the time he was finished, Ralph was already waiting for him in the hall.

 

O
ut at the truck, Ralph opened the passenger-side door to try and clear out a space for Nathan. He threw armfuls of clothes, cans, newspapers, paper bags, and audio cassettes from the seat and floor into the already garbage-filled truck cab. Then he stood back and wiped his brow. Most of the trash was off the seat, except for a Ziploc bag and some pennies, and on the floor all that remained were a few empty cans and scraps of paper.

“That work for you?” Ralph asked.

“That's gorgeous,” Nathan said, already cranking down the window.

During the drive home, Ralph lit a cigarette from the pack on the dash and sighed, “Fuck. Hit me if I fall asleep.”

“You still pretty wiped from the drive?”

“Yeah, I would've been rested up. But I heard Glen banging around in his room this morning and woke up about ready to eat my sack off, I was so hungry. I went down to the kitchen to try and find something to snack on, and he found me down there. Guess what time we got to the hospital?”

“I don't know—eight o'clock.”

Ralph frowned at Nathan. “You're pissing on my parade, man—we got there around nine o'clock.”

“That's still early.”

“Hell yeah it is, man, and the doctor didn't even show up for like another hour. So I was trying to stay awake, but I'm dragging ass.” Ralph blew a stream of smoke out his window.

“You really think Glen might put her on a plane tomorrow?”

“I don't think so. I think she's going to be fine, but it seems kind of quick to be jetting her home.”

“I think so, too,” Nathan said, staring out at the blur of passing trees.

Ralph asked, “So does this suck for you or are you glad to be going home?”

“Well, it sucks to see Ellen injured. It scared the living shit out of me when it happened. But it also sucks because there was this girl I was seeing, and I don't know what's going to happen now.”

“You were seeing a girl up here?”

Nathan told him a little about Leah, and Ralph nodded with a knowing, Cheshire grin. “So that's what you were doing last night? A little boinky-boinky on the beach?”

Nathan shook his head. “I actually didn't meet up with her last night. I think she thought I was still at the hospital, so I ended up just taking a walk.”

“You gonna see her tonight?”

“Yeah, probably. Maybe.”

Ralph leaned over and pulled his wallet from his back pocket, opening it to show a photograph of himself and a young woman. “That's my girlfriend, Shannon.”

“She's cute,” Nathan said, holding the wallet. The girl in the photograph was not cute, not really, although the pale fleshiness of her face made her appear very young. In the photo, she stood beside him on a beachside balcony, wearing cutoff jean shorts and an oversize gray Case Western sweatshirt. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back tightly, and the toothy overbite of her smile reminded Nathan of the braying of a reined-in horse. Ralph said they had been dating for almost two years. She was majoring in art history, but she also knew a lot about photography, and it was great to be with someone who didn't have all kinds of emotional baggage, who could
offer him intelligent criticism and suggestions about his work. Ralph winked, and said, “Plus, if she's drunk, she sometimes lets me give it to her up the pooper.”

At the house, a glass-dish casserole sat on one of the chairs beside the front door. Nathan picked it up to read the note attached to its aluminum-foil cover.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Ralph said.

“Do you know Kendra?”

“She's my cousin.”

Ralph went upstairs and Nathan carried the casserole to the refrigerator. After pouring himself a drink, he sat down at the kitchen table, then picked up the phone.

Ralph's voice trumpeted from the receiver, so Nathan set the phone down and pulled an old
Sierra
magazine across the table. An article about wildlife preservation quoted a letter the writer Sherwood Anderson had once written to a friend. In it he asked, “Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of the bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost…Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies…. I can remember old fellows in my
home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet….”

Nathan looked up from the page to stare out at the sea. He wasn't anywhere near big empty plains, but he was near a big empty ocean, away from Sophie, away from his father, away from all the shackles of home. In the days before he'd left for Brightonfield Cove, Nathan had begun to hope that being away from everything would give him time to clear his head. He had allowed himself to envision a quiet summer of drawing and watching ships pass and just recuperating from the last few years of his life. But this was not how things had turned out. He still wanted the shrillness taken out of him, but his dreams of quiet were now tangled in a vision of a future with Leah. He thought about how romantic it would be for them to take a road trip to a place where they could stand on the big empty plains, letting the mystery whisper in the grass around them. He was biting his thumbnail and holding a fistful of hair in one hand when Ralph traipsed into the kitchen.

“Are you through with the phone?” Nathan asked.

Ralph opened the refrigerator to pull out the casserole. “Yeah, but I'm supposed to be getting a call back in about fifteen minutes.”