Summer's End (16 page)

Amy felt that “rescuer” was too strong a word. She was involved in enough mental health organizations to know that the true rescuers fell in love with people who were transitioning from manageable drug addictions to ones that were completely out of control. It didn't sound
as if Jack were rescuing these women; he was giving them a helping hand. There was a big difference. Maybe the mental health professionals would say that he was avoiding intimacy, but what woman starting her own business had the time for a lot of emotional intensity?

Of course, Amy had to pretend that she didn't know about any of this. “Holly said you just sold a business. Do you know what you're doing next?”

“I think it would be fun to learn to fly helicopters.”

“Helicopters?” Amy herself found helicopters noisy and uncomfortable, but the men flying them always seemed to love them. “Do you have a reason? Or does it just sound like fun?”

“It just sounds like fun. But if my past history is any guide, I will figure out some way to turn it into a business, and I'll have it for about five years and then I will get restless and sell it to someone.”

Apparently he had done that twice already. Amy was used to her father, who had only had one profession, and to figure skaters, most of whom would need a second profession but could rarely find one. “Does that seem okay to you?”

“It seems like what will happen, so it had better be okay.”

That was probably a good attitude. “You don't have any control over it?” she asked.

“Apparently not.”

They walked on for a minute or so. Then he spoke. “Why did your brother cut his hair?”

“Ian?” Amy blinked. That seemed like an odd question. Ian had always worn his hair long, pulled back into a ponytail, but sometime between Mother's funeral and
when she had seen him the following Christmas, he had cut it. “I have no idea. Maybe he did it out of sympathy for me. Maybe he knows how much I want to have long hair, and so he cut his to share in my misery.”

This was, of course, unlikely in the extreme. Ian could not have given her hair one moment's thought in his entire life. If you asked him to shut his eyes, he probably couldn't have said what color it was.

“Why can't you have your hair long?” Jack asked. “Because of your skating?”

“No. I could pin it back or spray it. It's that I would look really horrible in long hair.”

“You would?” He looked down at her, squinting a bit, as if trying to picture her with long hair. “I find that hard to believe…but I don't know one thing about it.”

Amy had to agree with him there; anyone who had his coloring and wore navy did not know one thing about it. She hoped that all the ladies in transition understood that.

The trail did not make a complete circle around the lake. The far third of the shoreline was marshy and reedy, with no solid ground for building a road. So before they reached the trail's dead end, Amy turned away from the lake onto an old logging road. Heavy flatbed trucks had worn two sandy ruts through the forest, but now that the trucks were gone, wild grasses grew between the ruts. The road ran at an angle away from the shoreline, and after a bit they turned down an even more overgrown trail.

The last time Amy had come on this walk, it had been simple. One old logging road ran away from the lake; then another road cut back toward the lake. But the logging roads were now crossed by snowmobile trails and all-terrain vehicle routes. She stopped for a moment.

Jack noticed. “Are we lost?”

“I don't know. I thought I knew this road, but that was because there was only one.”

“We came out from the trail at about a thirty-degree angle, then we took a pretty sharp turn—maybe eighty degrees or so—and now we're heading back toward the lake again. My guess is it's about a hundred yards away—but I don't know that for sure.”

She was impressed. “You have a good sense of direction.”

He nodded. “But I don't have my dad's sense of distance. He would be right about the yardage.”

“Well, I don't care about the distance so long as we're going the right way.” Then she saw a No Trespassing sign. “Oh, good, we are in the right place.”

“Because we're trespassing?” he asked as she went past the sign. “That's how we know we're in the right place? I thought I was the only one who said things like that.”

Amy rolled her eyes, but didn't answer…because she wasn't trespassing.

A moment later they rounded a bend and came to a chained gate with another No Trespassing sign. But the gate was not attached to a fence. It was designed to keep cars out, not people. In fact, there was a distinct footpath leading around the gate.

A short lane opened onto a clearing at the edge of the lake, the one stretch of firm ground between a little swamp at the end of the trail and the marshy land around the inlet stream that brought water into the lake. The clearing was almost meadow-like, flat and open and sunny, full of wildflowers—lavender-blue asters, lemon-scented evening primroses, the fuzzy pink dome-shaped
clusters of the Joe Pye weed. Their blossoms were little dots of color in the pale green grasses. Raspberry bushes spilled from the edges of the woods, growing over a pile of brush.

The site was low, and there was a sandy beach at the lake's edge, the only beach on the lake beside the one at the campground.

Amy and Jack crossed through the meadow and flowers. The property was at the longer end of the oval lake, so the length of the lake stretched out before them. Normally at this time of day the sun would be nearing the treeline and long streaks of light would glitter off the water, but of course this evening was cloudy.

Jack was looking around. Amy sat down on the lone big boulder that rose out of the sand.

“What is this place?” he asked. “It's a great spot. Why hasn't anyone built on it? The access stinks, but that could be fixed. Who owns it?”

She started to shrug, but then she spoke, her words coming out in a rush. “Can you keep a secret?” She was standing now. She didn't remember getting up off the boulder. “I do. I own it. It's mine.”

He had been looking out across at the lake, but at her words his head jerked toward her. “You what?
You
own it?”

“Yes.” These grasses and flowers, the raspberries, the soft beach, they were hers. “The last time I was here, it was three years ago, the property was on the market, and apparently some resort developers were looking at it to be some sort of fly-in hunting and fishing retreat. So there would have been little planes landing on the lake all the time. They would have brought in electricity, and that would have changed so much. My family would have
hated it. So I was in town one day, and I just picked up the phone and told the people who take care of my money to buy it.”

Pam and David—her financial advisers—had said it wasn't a good investment, but she hadn't cared. The summer people had been dreading the resort, and the locals hadn't wanted it either because the potential purchasers were terrible employers, and here all by herself she, little Amy the Afterthought, had fixed everything with a single phone call.

Jack was shaking his head. “I guess I've opened businesses with about that much thought…but how big is it? Those No Trespassing signs were a good ways back.”

“It's a hundred acres.”

“A hun—” He whistled. “That's a lot of land. But why the secret? Why aren't you telling people?”

“I had to keep my name out of it during negotiations. Otherwise the price would have gone through the roof. And then…I don't know. I guess I wasn't sure how my family would react. My mother always talked about how far the place was from the other cabins, how inconvenient it would be to have a cabin there.”

“Inconvenient? You have no plumbing up here, no electricity, you've got to drive twenty miles to make a phone call, and another half mile seems
inconvenient?
”

“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it does seem a little odd, but my mother's opinions were always so settled that it was hard to even think about disagreeing with her. And I supposed I was also a little embarrassed about doing it. I didn't want it to look like I was flashing my money around.”

“Okay.” It didn't sound like he completely understood. “I take it you don't have any plans for the place?”

“No. None.”

But as she spoke she realized that she probably had had, if not plans, at least a hope that someday, somehow, she would feel enough a part of her family to want a cabin up here. There'd be the main cabin, the new cabin, the log cabin, and Amy's cabin. Amy's cabin—she liked the sound of that. A place where Amy would decide what they all would eat, a place where Amy would decide where they all would sit.

Of course, a good rainfall would wash out the road to Amy's place. So much for that fantasy.

Jack had moved over to the edge of the clearing and then stepped into the woods. She could hear twigs cracking and leaves rustling as he moved around.

He called out. “Is the swamp at the end of the trail yours?”

“I think so.”

He reappeared. “If you built a little footbridge across the swamp—laying down a few dock sections would work fine; it would be at most two hours' work—then people could get from the trail to the beach in two seconds.”

Amy had never thought of that. “The kids would love being able to walk down here.”

“But you'd have to tell everyone that the place is yours.”

There was a leaf caught in his thick hair. He must have tangled with a branch while crashing through the swamp. Amy wanted to reach up and brush it out.

“I'll think about it,” she said.

But she knew she wouldn't.

 

Gwen sat down on the steps to the main cabin. It was the first moment she had been alone all day. The sky was dark and low. At home she would have turned on the Weather Channel to find out when the storm would be coming, but there was no Weather Channel up here, no TV.

She could hear voices. The younger kids were playing in the road with Giles and Phoebe. Maggie and Ellie were in the new cabin playing cards with Joyce. Nick was by himself in the bunkhouse. Holly had gone to the log cabin to do some work. Hal and Ian were looking at the bank, checking for erosion. Everyone was accounted for. Except Jack, but she wasn't worried about him. He could take care of himself.

She sometimes thought that he should have been born a hundred and fifty years ago. He could have gone west, and once he had learned the road, he could have become a wagon master, paid to guide the covered wagons full of settlers across the Rockies to Oregon. He would have never settled himself, never found a little plot of land and tried to raise cows or grow corn, but he would lead others to their new homes.

An instinct, a mother's instinct, turned her eyes toward the road, and there he was, her wagon-master son, at the end of the driveway, talking to Amy. Oh, yes, Amy. She had forgotten to keep track of Amy. She must have been out in the road with Giles, Phoebe, and the younger children.

Jack was wearing the wool shirt Holly had given him, the one he looked so good in.

He was still talking to Amy.

He had his hands in his pockets. Amy's were linked at the back of her neck, her forearms together. They were still talking.

“Amy! Aunt Amy!” It was one of the little kids, calling her. Amy dropped her arms and gestured to the kids that she was coming. She turned back to Jack, no doubt smiling a little farewell.

He, still keeping his hands in his pockets, moved his elbow and lightly nudged her arm with his.

It was the lightest of touches, but Gwen felt her shoulders drawing together, her neck starting to stiffen.

Why hadn't this occurred to her? Jack and Amy. Both unattached, neither with enough to do. She watched her son come down the driveway. He was built like her own father, tall, broad-shouldered, but he had John's warm coloring. Both the children did. She raised her voice. “What have you been up to?”

“Caulked that window and then went on a walk with Amy.”

So there had been more than a chat at the end of the driveway.

Gwen moved over on the stoop, making room for him. He sat back, bracing himself on elbows. She leaned back a bit so that she was touching him, her back against his arm. They were quiet for a moment; then he spoke:

“Mom, how bad would Amy look in long hair?”

Gwen forced herself not to react, not to sit up, pulling herself away from his arm. She tried to answer. “I don't know…it's hard to imagine her looking anything but wonderful, but her features are very delicate. I suppose she could be overwhelmed by a lot of hair. And her jaw and throat are so perfect, you wouldn't notice them as much if she had longer hair.” What on earth was happening that Jack was thinking about how Amy wore her hair? “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “We were just talking. I was wondering why Ian had cut his hair, and then she said something about wishing her hair was long, but that she wouldn't look right in long hair. I don't get it. If she wants her hair long, she should let it grow. Surely she's earned the right to have what she wants.”

Gwen had to agree with him on that. “Well, it was nice of you to go on a walk with her. It doesn't seem that she's as comfortable up here as the rest of her family.”

“She's not,” he agreed.

“But I think she's really enjoying having you and Holly here. She's closer in age to the two of you. It's as if she finally has a brother and sister who can play with her.”

Jack was still leaning back on his elbows. “She and Holly certainly have gotten chummy.”

“And that's nice for both of them.”

Gwen knew that he was getting her message.
Amy needs a brother too. And you're a good brother, Jack. You're wonderful to Holly. You're the only person who can get her to stop working. Her life is so much better because you are her brother
.