Summer's End (13 page)

“I
hated
it.” He raked his fingers through his shaggy hair. “It was torture, the longest three days of my life. And it wasn't just routine adolescent hate-everything-associated-with-your-dad, although I certainly had enough of that. I honestly felt like I couldn't breathe down there. I was just starting to grow, and I was having trouble managing my body up here on God's green earth, and then they put me
in a narrow little metal tube on top of a nuclear reactor. When it was finally over, I don't think I went inside for a week. I was so glad to see the sunlight and the stars again.”

“Dad must have been disappointed,” Holly said.

“It did not exactly improve our relationship,” Jack acknowledged.

He had disappointed his father. Amy looked down at her hands. She knew all about that. Her parents had hardly known what to do with a child who didn't like to read, who couldn't organize her thoughts into tidy paragraphs, who refused to learn about primitive cultures because the clothes weren't pretty enough.

“You probably weren't delighted with yourself either,” Amy said.

“I sure wasn't,” he agreed. “It probably seemed like I was determined to piss him off at every possible moment, but I wasn't. It just worked out that way.” He pushed himself away from the railing. “All these folks who write about male-initiation rites—they never seem to talk about the kids who fail. What happens to us? Where do you go when you have failed not only your male parent but your entire culture?”

He was exaggerating, making this into a joke. But it wasn't a joke. Amy knew that. It still bothered him.

And she knew something else. Although Nick had crammed himself into the far corner of the platform, although he had his back turned and had not said a word, he was listening, listening hard.

 

They were heading back to the truck when Amy remembered milk. “Should we get some milk? I wonder if we should get some milk.”

“Beats me,” Jack said. “I didn't hear anything about it.”

“Me neither,” Holly added.

“It's just that there isn't much refrigerator space at the lake,” Amy explained, “so people always stop and buy milk on the way up.”

“I don't mind if we get some, but if Mother expected us to, she would have told me,” Holly said. She sounded very confident.

“I don't know…my sister always buys milk on the way.”

“We can do whatever you want,” Jack said. “But I can't imagine Mom leaving anything to chance. This has all been planned to the last carton of milk. And if she did expect us to bring some, we'll turn around and come back. I don't mind. In fact, I'm assuming I'll have to drive into town every time my sister needs to go to the bathroom.”

“That's the way to think,” Holly said approvingly.

But Amy shifted uneasily as they slid back into the truck.

You are twenty-six years old
, she reminded herself.
You have an Olympic gold medal. It doesn't matter whether or not you buy milk. This is not a female-initiation ritual, not like going down in someone's submarine
.

But it did matter. Mother's lips would tighten. “Oh, Amy, you should have known—”

But Mother wasn't going to be there.

Oh, well, Phoebe's lips could tighten with the best of them. Actually, Phoebe probably cared more about details than Mother had. Mother would have seen Amy's failure to buy milk as an inconvenience. Phoebe would see it as yet another sign that Amy was an idiot.

They drove on. Nick leaned his head against the car window and closed his eyes, but Amy didn't think he was
asleep. She wondered about him, who he was, why he was here.

Just as the prairies had given way to the mines, so now the mines gave way to the forest. The trees grew taller and closer together. The maples and box elders were gone now; this far north the winters were too cold. Except for the birches and the popples—which was the term people around here used for aspens—the trees were evergreen: spruces, balsams, jack pines, white pines, and Norways. The light was filtered, and the only wildflowers were in the ditches at the side of the road. The power line swooped into one final house and then stopped. Beyond that house there was no electricity, no phones. The road became a thin ribbon slicing through a wall of trees.

A State Forestry Service sign, brown with incised yellow letters, directed travelers to a public campground. Jack turned off the blacktop, and gravel spat out from underneath his tires. After another mile and another sign they turned again.

This was the trail that led to the lake. It was a narrow, sandy lane, winding and only wide enough for one car. The original growth had been logged, but it had been so long ago that the popples, jack pines, and birches were nearly full-grown. Moss, wintergreen, and silvery blueberry plants grew in the sandy soil along the edge of the trail.

“This is really nice back in here,” Jack said.

“It is,” Amy agreed. She always forgot that about the lake—how beautiful it was.

It was familiar, even after all this time. The open spot where above the wild grasses she could see the lake for the first time. The little rise in the trail. The names on the
signs in the front of each cabin. Familiar names: Henson, Pinianski, Nutting, some locals, some summer people.

Amy had hated coming up here. She really had. They had come for the whole summer in those days, and she had to go for two and a half months without skating. None of the other girls she trained with could believe that her family made her do this. The lake had come to symbolize that—having a family who didn't understand.

But none of those girls, girls whose families had understood skating, whose families had treasured their daughters' efforts and had nearly bankrupted themselves…none of those girls were still skating competitively.

And she was.

During her break last summer she had volunteered to participate in a medical study of female athletes. In so many of the athletes, their rigorous training schedule had delayed the onset of menstruation for years and years, often resulting in bone-density levels of post-menopausal women.

But Amy's menstrual cycle and her bone density were those of a normal twenty-six-year-old. And she had never had a serious injury. Yes, she was careful about warm-ups, but there was a resiliency about her bones, muscles, and ligaments that not all skaters had.

The examiners were fascinated. When had she started skating? How much had she trained as a child? What had her schedule been? Her diet? They asked about her family history, her mother's bone-density levels, her sister's.

She answered their questions as well as she could and then added, “Until I was in senior competition, my parents didn't let me skate in the summer. I took two to three months off every year.”

There was a sudden quiet in the room. This was important.

The trail flattened as it came to the longer side of the oval lake, and there now was her family's sign—T
HE
L
EGENDS
, H
AL AND
E
LEANOR
, P
HOEBE AND
I
AN AND
A
MY
.

The sign had been made before she had been born, so the “and Amy” was squeezed into the corner, ruining the symmetry of the spacing.

Twenty-six years, and no one had made a new sign.

Surely a new sign would be made now, one that included Gwen, Holly, and Jack.

The strip of land between the trail and lake was densely wooded, and none of the cabins could be seen from the road. The only breaks in the wall of trees were the narrow driveways, Of course, they weren't driveways in the suburban sense, graded and paved. These were sand-covered lanes twisting between the trees.

Jack swung wide and turned into Amy's family's drive. A big Norway was rooted right in the middle. He eased the truck around it, and then they could see the cabin.

“It's lovely.” Holly was astonished. “I had no idea. It's like something out of a children's book.”

This was the “main” cabin. Sided with logs of honey-colored pine, it was small with a sharply sloping roof of green and brown shingles. More birches, their white bark peeling in papery layers, filled the spaces between the road and the lake while tall pines shaded the cabin itself. The cabin sat to the right of the drive while to the left was the bunkhouse and the path leading to the other two cabins.

Amy peered through the windshield. The screen door of the cabin opened, and out came her father, followed a moment later by a fair-haired woman. The woman was carrying Phoebe's son Thomas on her hip.

Jack reached across Amy, touched his sister's arm, and pointed at their mother and the little boy. “We can go home now. She's happy.”

Holly and Amy had to wait while Nick got himself organized. Jack got out of the truck and crossed the pine-needle-covered sand. An instant later he was at his mother's side, his hand on her shoulder, and he was speaking to her softly and quickly. She was nodding, as if to say, yes, yes, she already knew.

She came toward the truck with a smile. “Nick,” Amy heard her say, “what fun that you're joining us.”

Nick didn't resist her one-armed hug—she was still holding Thomas—although he did not return it. “They didn't give you a chance to say no, did they?”

“They didn't need to. They knew that I wouldn't.”

By now Amy was out of the truck, and her father's arms were closing around her. “How wonderful of you to come, sweetheart.”

He felt good. He had been thin and pale at Christmas, and for the first time Amy had thought about him growing old, but he had regained the lost weight and there was strength in his arms again. “How's your ankle? Are you going to be okay? You've never been injured before, have you?”

How the messages had gotten garbled. “It wasn't me. I'm fine. It was someone else.”

“That's good. How long can you stay?”

“I'm not quite sure. It depends on a lot of things.”

“Fine.” Then he turned her around and introduced her to Gwen.

Her father's new wife was very pretty—that was the only word for it; even at her age, she was pretty. Her hair was light. She had her children's high cheekbones, but
not their warm coloring or their strong jaws. She was wearing khaki slacks and a white turtleneck. She looked crisp and trim. Mother had insisted on everyone wearing dark colors at the lake so that they didn't have to go into town and do laundry so often. But Gwen obviously didn't mind doing laundry.

Gwen said that she had been dying to meet Amy, and Amy said the same about her…and then, although she wanted to kick herself for saying it, she couldn't help it, she had to say it—“We didn't bring milk. I hope that was all right.”

“Goodness, yes. It would have been a disaster if you had. There's not an inch of refrigerator space. We're absolutely set for at least the next twenty minutes.”

“So where is everyone?” Holly asked. “I thought there were going to be whole hordes of people.”

“Mom has murdered them all,” Jack said, “so she can keep the baby.”

Gwen swatted him on the arm. “Maggie and Joyce are out in the canoe, and Giles is asleep. The others went to launch the boat. We're baby-sitting this little man here.” She poked Thomas in his tummy. He giggled at her.

“So where do we put our stuff?” Jack asked. “Amy said something about a bunkhouse. Is that it?” He pointed at the aging building.

“That's the bunkhouse, and Nick will be sleeping there with the other kids, but the three of you are in the log cabin.”

“We're in the log cabin?” Amy was surprised. “Then where is everyone else sleeping?”

“All four adults are in the new cabin,” Gwen said firmly and went around to the back of the truck. “Now, I know these are Holly's bags”—clearly there was to be no
further discussion about who was sleeping where—“so either Jack's taste has improved a lot or these beautiful leather ones are yours, Amy.”

“They are.” Amy wondered how her brother and sister were reacting to this decisiveness. Badly, she assumed.

This has to be so much harder on them than it is on me. I'm not going to mind changes. They will
.

The log cabin, the one where Amy, Jack, and Holly would be sleeping, was the oldest building on the lake, the only one built pioneer-style from notched and stacked logs. It was designed for harsh Minnesota winters; the walls were thick, the window openings small. As a result, the cabin, while a snug fantasy after nightfall, was dark, even gloomy, during the day.

Amy followed Holly and Gwen inside. Each paused for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. The first room was a small, square kitchen furnished with an enamel-topped table, a gas stove, and a squat little refrigerator. There was an old-fashioned pump mounted next to the sink, and two big teakettles set on the gas stove.

Beyond the kitchen was the main room, which was warmed by a wood-burning stove fashioned from an old oil barrel. Two more teakettles sat on the barrel stove. That's how you got hot water up here; you pumped it and then heated it. A small bedroom with a pair of twin beds was nestled next to the kitchen, and along the lake side of the cabin was a narrow enclosed porch with a set of bunk beds.

Holly and Amy were to take the bedroom, Gwen said, leaving Jack to sleep on the porch. He went back to the main cabin to get the rest of the luggage, and Gwen showed Holly and Amy where the coffee and tea were and explained how to light the stove. She told them what to
do if they thought the pilot light on the refrigerator was out. She showed them how to prime the pump in case the prime gave out.

Holly was paying close attention. “I think I've got it,” she said, then looked at Amy. “But you understand it, don't you?”

Amy winced. “No, I'm afraid I don't.” And she had not been paying attention. She was the little sister up here. She didn't have to understand how things were done. Everyone else understood, and if they needed her to do anything, they told her.