Summerlong (26 page)

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 nobody 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 nobody 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 cluster 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 grass 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 shimmering 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, splashing. 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 space 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 slutty 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 sexy. 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 sex. 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 shifted. She looks at the sky. A meteor streaks across it, and then another. Two shooting stars with shimmering 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 shore, 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 shimmering 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 button
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 shivering 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 passed 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.