Summer's End (22 page)

At the end of the first lake, they had to portage—unload everything and carry the canoes and packs on a trail around some rocks and swirling currents. Jack asked him if he thought he could carry one of the canoes. “Giles is strong,” Jack said, “but his footing isn't sure enough. So will you try?”

“You'll have to show me how,” Nick answered.

It was fairly straightforward. The canoes had padded shoulder pads attached to the center crosspiece—“thwart” Jack called it—so you carried the canoe overhead like a gigantic hat, its weight resting on your shoulders. It wasn't horribly heavy, maybe sixty pounds or so, but it was mostly awkward. If you looked down, you could see your feet, but if you looked straight ahead, all you saw was the inside of the canoe.

Then they loaded up again, and Nick wasn't surprised to see that this time Maggie was in the bow of her canoe, and her mom was sitting on the packs in the middle.

They ate lunch at the next portage, paddled a couple more hours, then started looking for a place to camp. It was still pretty early, just the middle of the afternoon, but the kids were clearly getting restless.

He hadn't known what to expect. The maps noted “established campsites,” but these sites made the bunkhouse at the lake look like the Ritz. The one they chose was on an island. It had a couple of nearly flat tent sites and a fire circle, but no tables or shelters of any sort.

“Where do we pee?” the skater asked cheerfully. “In the woods?”

“There should be some sort of latrine away from the water.” Ellie's mom gestured toward the center of the island. “It's probably down that path.”

The kids all dashed down the path and then returned to report that there was a box with a hole in it, and you were supposed to sit on the hole, but if instead you looked down the hole, there was—

Ellie's mom stopped them. “We get the idea.”

Apparently that's all there was to the latrine, just a box over a pit. There wasn't even a little house around it. The woods were starting to sound pretty good to Nick.

“It's times like this”—Jack was suddenly at his elbow, speaking softly—“that you're glad to be a man.”

That was for sure.

Nick had finally,
finally
figured out something about Jack—he had the hots for the skater. Nick wasn't entirely sure how he knew; it wasn't like Jack was flirting with her, putting the moves on her, or even looking at her too much, but Nick knew anyway. He spent too much of his life observing grown-ups, trying to predict their behavior so he could keep one step ahead of them, to be wrong about something like this.

And while it should have been cool to finally have some information on Jack, Nick found that it wasn't giving him any power…because Jack wasn't doing anything. Nick supposed that that was admirable. Weird perhaps, but admirable.

Clearly not something his own father had done.

Nope, his dear old dad, his pops, hadn't resisted a thing. Nick wasn't accusing the guy of rape; Val would have been a willing participant. She might talk a good game, but in the end she did whatever she wanted to do.

He knew nothing about his father. “He was just a boy,” that's all Val and Barb would ever say. “He was just a boy.” She wouldn't even give him a name. It really pissed him off. How the hell were you supposed to grow into a man when your father had been “just a boy”?

The guy might be a rat, Nick was well aware of that possibility. But he might be a decent enough sort who'd never been told that Val had changed her mind about giving the baby up for adoption. Maybe he'd be somebody like Giles or Hal or—

Nick stopped himself. He wasn't going to turn this into an Afterschool Special, a made-for-TV movie with
ninety minutes of heartwarming complications followed by a bittersweet happy ending. Dads were not the solution to much these days. As far as he could tell, his friends were getting next to nothing from their dads or stepfathers. The men did three things—they drove to work, they worked, and they got mad. They would come to soccer games or wrestling matches and yell. They would yell at their sons, they would yell at the coaches, they would yell at the refs. He and Brian had always said they were better off not having dads at all.

Brian…what's it like? What's being dead like?

Suddenly he wanted to be alone. He went over to Giles. He didn't mind asking permission from Giles. “Is it okay if I take off for a bit? We're on an island. I can't get lost.”

“Go ahead. Just keep your eye out for firewood.”

The island was a rock-studded mound poking up from the lake, and Nick started to climb toward the center. The only path was the one to the latrine, but it was easy enough to move without one. Some of the tree limbs were low; he ducked under them. The sheets of rock were covered with silvery, gray-green lichen, and where there was no rock, tree roots arched out of the sandy soil. Pine cones crunched under his feet.

He could tell when he reached the high point of the island, but he couldn't see anything, just the thick, furrowed bark of the trees. He didn't know their names—they were evergreens, but they were loose and light, not dense and packed like Christmas trees. One of the branches was low, and testing it with his hands, he swung himself up and started to climb.

It had been ages since he had climbed a tree. In fact,
he didn't know if he ever had. They'd never had a good one at any of the places they had lived.

He eased himself up to the last of the thick limbs. It didn't make any sense to go higher; the branches wouldn't support him. His view was framed and filtered by other trees. Some of their needles were blue-green and soft-looking while others were paler and twisted. He could see the lake, and from here it almost looked black, but the water was so pure that they were just dipping their cups straight into the lake to drink. It was unbelievable that anything was that clean anymore. It must be amazing up here in the autumn with the birches firing up golden and the flocks of birds and geese flying in V's overhead.

And suddenly it seemed so wrong, overwhelmingly wrong, that he was here and Brian was dead.

Brian used to wonder if he should wait. There were such advances being made; maybe someday they'd find the drug that would work for him, the drug that would keep each day from being a torment.

It was impossible to imagine that kind of suffering, and one thing that Brian had liked about Nick was that Nick never pretended that he understood. “You never say that you know how I feel,” Brian used to say. “That means a lot.”

So how could Nick say what was right, what was wrong? How could he know what thoughts Brian had had? How could he judge? But it was really something up here. Brian should have seen it.

A heavy rustling broke into his thoughts. Someone else was climbing the island. He heard twigs snap, pebbles scatter.

“Nick? Nick?”

He peered down through the pine boughs. It was Maggie. She was keeping her voice down. “Nick?”

“I'm up here.”

She tilted her head back. “In the tree?”

“Yes.”

“Oh…” She was a little disconcerted. “Could you come down?”

He didn't answer. Instead of climbing down, he inched along the limb, and just as it started to bend, he dropped, landing neatly like a gymnast. He was standing closer to her than he expected.

“I've been looking for you,” she said.

“You found me.”

“I hear a friend of yours committed suicide.” There was a little thrill in her voice.

Oh, great. He hadn't wanted Ellie and her to know. He had asked Aunt Gwen not to tell them.

And Aunt Gwen wouldn't have. “How did you find that out? Eavesdrop city?”

“My mother told me. She doesn't believe in keeping things from me. How did he do it?”

How did he do it? Nick kicked a pine cone. What kind of question was that? Did she really want an answer? Little globlets of brain tissue on the living room couch?

“Believe it or not, I don't know.” He sat down on a flat plate of rock. “He was in a psychiatric hospital, and they aren't releasing any details. I suppose I'll find out sooner or later.”

“Why did he do it?”

Maggie sat down next to him. Her thigh was right up against his leg. He could feel its warmth. He expected her to move away, but she didn't. And in a moment the contact lengthened as she moved her leg even closer.

He knew what it meant.

Did you figure on that, Brian? That your frying yourself would make me sexy?
Brian would like that. He would laugh.

Nick had first done a girl at fourteen. He had read all these old books—Phillip Roth,
Catcher in the Rye
, all about the terminal sexual frustration of the young male. Well, it wasn't like that anymore, ladies and gentlemen of middle America. Girls were aggressive. They started things, and they intended you to finish.

Admittedly he didn't hang out with the most well adjusted of young ladies, and usually a whole lot else was going on besides a girl's passion for his pasty white body. There was a bigger scheme; she was trying to get back at her mom, her stepdad, or sometimes even her regular boyfriend.

There was nothing, not anything, that Nick hated more than being a pawn in someone else's scheme. That wasn't for him. It was better just to jerk off.

But of course he had his reputation to think about. He couldn't have people thinking he was saving himself for marriage. So he had developed another way. He scared the daylights out of the girl. That way everyone saved face. She got to be the one to say no, and he got to pretend to be frustrated.

So Nick let Maggie move closer still, and he answered her questions, about how Brian had been depressed, seriously, chronically, clinically depressed, that some of the drugs would help a little for a while, but then he would be worse.

“When did you talk to him last?” She was fascinated; it didn't occur to her to offer sympathy. “Did his parents feel like it was all their fault?”

Nick could see where her thoughts were going—standard teen stuff, kill yourself so everyone will feel bad afterward. But it hadn't been like that. Brian had hated what this would do to his mother. The thought had probably kept him alive for another year.

Maggie was sitting really close to him now, and rather than answer he put his hand on her leg. She leaned forward and kissed him. She knew what she was doing, and all of a sudden that was seeming like a fine idea. She wanted it, and he certainly did too, and it would be easy enough to—

But you couldn't survive in the jungle giving in to temptation. You had to hold fierce to your resolve. Nick made up his own rules, and the only difference between him and the other kids who were also out in the jungle alone was that he stuck to his.

So it was fear-time, scare the girl. He pulled Maggie against him tight and hard. She was a good-sized girl, but he was strong. He rolled over with her and used his knee to open her legs. The rock must have been cold and hard against her back. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and ground against her, letting her have it for a minute or two, kind of mean and angry-like. Only he wasn't just angry-like. He was angry. Brian was no sideshow. He hadn't suffered for this girl's amusement.

It should have been over by now. She should be protesting, she should be scared.
No, Nick, no, please stop
. And he would instantly turn himself into a poster child for the date-rape laws. “You said you wanted to stop,” he would say when the girl started looking hurt and rejected.

But Maggie wasn't reading the right script. Nick could feel her flattening her back, pulling her legs up, giving
him a better angle at her crotch. She was squirming. She liked this. It turned her on.

That made him sick. He sat up, straddling her, one leg on either side of her thighs. “So is this a turn-on for you, guys whose friends commit suicide? Is that who you do?”

She looked stunned, horrified. She drew a breath, about to speak, but he didn't want to hear. He scrambled up and plunged down the hill. He was running, and pine needles were snapping against his face. He almost lost his footing as the pine cones rolled across the rocks. At the bottom of the hill he stopped and wiped a hand across his face.

Shit. That had not gone according to plan. He had really pissed her off.

What a major mess lay ahead. When you had a fight with a girl at school, maybe she and her friends would be cold and prickly for a while, but who cared? Up here all the adults were going to get involved, and it was going to be hell on Aunt Gwen.

Even Val and Barb couldn't have caused this kind of trouble.

He was down by the water now, and there was nothing to do but circle the island shoreline until he reached the campsite. He climbed over an outcropping of rocks and almost landed on Ellie, who was stowing two life jackets in a canoe. She was wearing a bright yellow Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, khaki shorts, and heavy hiking boots with thick socks rising out of the top. A navy fanny pack bunched the sweatshirt in stiff folds at her waist. As fashion looks went, it was imperfect, but if he had owned hiking boots or a fanny pack, he would probably be wearing them too.

She looked up. “Oh, hi. We don't have much wood here. I was about to paddle over to the shore. There are a couple of brush heaps.”

Giles had asked him to keep his eye out for firewood. He hadn't. “Who's going with you?” He pointed at the second life jacket.

“My mom. She'll be here in a second.”

But it was her dad who appeared at the top of the rocks. He had heard her. “No, sweetheart, you're getting dear old dad instead. At least you will when he gets down these rocks.”

Going up and down the rocks was hard for Giles. “I can go with her,” Nick heard himself say.

“That would be great by me,” Giles said. “You don't mind, do you, Ellie?”

Ellie was suddenly busy, checking stuff in her fanny pack, not looking up. “It's fine,” she mumbled.