Summer's End (29 page)

“But I don't care about my sister.” That wasn't true. “I only care about you.”

She was sounding like a child, a selfish child.
I'm the only one that matters
.

She wasn't like that. She was nice. That's what everyone said about Amy Legend, that she was nice. She wasn't a stuck-up star, she wasn't a prima donna, she was nice.

It was only when she was with her family that everything got so jumbled up.

She took a breath. The shadows were deepening along the shore of the lake. The water almost looked black.

It was odd to see the dock without Giles's boat. The boat was always there, either tied up at the dock or out on the water, but now it was spread out on the sand of the Rim's narrow beach, smashed to pieces.

Jack thought they ought to break up. She couldn't accept that. She wouldn't. Did that make her selfish? Did that make her a child?

But she would acknowledge that this was a difficult moment in her brother's and sister's lives, that perhaps this wasn't the best time for her and Jack to be doing the happy-young-lovers thing. The original plan had been to keep this a secret for the rest of the summer, and then the two of them would get to know each other better in the fall.

As far as she was concerned, that was still the plan. She took another breath. “I agree that we need to keep things light until summer is over. But I want to see you again in the fall.”

“Nothing will have changed by then. We will still be in the same family.”

But in the fall he would see how different her family was from his, how none of them ever knew what she was doing. He would see that this could work.

He had his hands in his pockets. “I hope you know,” he said slowly, “how much I hate this, how much I wish…”

She touched his cheek. “I know.”

She was letting him misunderstand. She would let him
think that she was agreeing with him. There was no point in arguing with him. He would never see how wrong he was until the summer was over.

“I'm going to go talk to my mother,” he said. “But I don't suppose you're ready to talk to your sister, are you?”

She wasn't. “I'll go to the log cabin for a while.”

“Holly's probably in there.”

“That's okay. It's my sister I'm mad at, not yours.”

Through the screen door she could see Holly sitting at the round table. As soon as the door began to creak open, Holly jumped up and came into the kitchen. “Amy, I'm so happy for you. I think the two of you will have such fun together. But you have to promise me that whenever he drives you nuts, you'll call me. He's been driving me nuts since he starting teething.”

Holly was trying, she was trying hard, but her voice was too bright. She had practiced this. She was not happy about Amy and Jack.

Amy had never thought about how Holly would react. She would have assumed that Holly would be happy for her, and clearly Holly felt that she was supposed to be happy, but she wasn't.

Why couldn't something go right? Why couldn't at least one person take this well?

“That's nice of you.” Amy decided to pretend to believe Holly's words. “But unfortunately nothing's going to come of it. The family situation is just too complicated.”

“Oh, Amy…” Now Holly's voice was sincere. She might not have been comfortable with Amy and Jack's relationship, but she did wish them well. “I'm so sorry. Are you terribly unhappy?”

“I'm not thrilled,” Amy acknowledged. “But it's okay.
It's not like we love each other or anything.”

She hadn't planned on saying that. She didn't know why she had.

But it was true, wasn't it? They were both a long way from talking about love. In fact, Jack thought they had broken up.

She went into the living room to sit at the table. Holly followed her. A legal-looking document was lying on the table, a pen on top of it. The document was densely typed and stapled across the top. Holly had been working.

“I really am sorry,” Holly said again. “I do think you would have been wonderful for him.”

“No, it's the other way around. He would have been wonderful for me.”

Going to be wonderful for me. Going to be. This might still happen
. She had to believe that.

Holly was speaking. “I sometimes think that Jack is lonely and doesn't know it.”

“Jack? Lonely?” That was a new thought.

“Anywhere he goes everybody likes him. I know that, but I've started to wonder if either of us knows how to recognize loneliness. People complain that their parents didn't allow them to get angry or be sexual. I'm wonder if Mother ever allowed us to miss Dad. She always distracted us, made everything such fun, that we never faced up to missing him.”

“I thought you liked it that you didn't mope around like some of the other families,” Amy said. Holly and Jack had both told her about what fun they had had when their father was out at sea.

“Yes, of course. But we may have gone too far, leaving us as adults who don't know whether or not we're lonely.”

“And you think this applies to you as well as him?”

“It has to, doesn't it?” Holly pushed her hair behind her ears. “Amy, I hate admitting this, but my first thought when I saw the two of you together was to feel betrayed.”

“Betrayed? How?” Amy was horrified. “Holly, I never—”

Holly held up her hand, stopping Amy. “I know you didn't mean to. It was all me. I guess I had been assuming that the two of us, you and me, that we would always have the same place in the family, the two career girls, the two maiden aunts.” Holly glanced out the window, but there was nothing to see. The Norways grew close to the cabin on this side, and their soft needles filled the other side of the windowpanes. “I've always thought Jack would marry and it would be Mother and me and Jack's wife and kids, and that seemed fine. But after Mother married your dad and both your brother and sister were married with children, everything changed. The family was different. Everyone would have a partner and children…except me, and that would have been hard except that you were in the same situation too.”

And then suddenly Amy hadn't been in the same situation. She had been with Jack. “I don't know what to say.”

“Nothing. I know myself. I like living alone. I don't want to get married. I don't want to have children, but you can't let my choices influence yours. I was surprised, that's all. I'll get used to it.”

“But there's nothing to get used to,” Amy said softly. “It happened once. It won't happen again.”

“Do you believe that I'm sorry?” Holly said. “That I am really not as selfish as I sound?”

“I do.” She trusted the sincerity in Holly's voice. “You know I do.”

It was her own voice she was worried about.
It hap
pened once. It won't happen again
. That must have sounded sincere too.

What was happening? Maybe Jack was right. Maybe the summer ending wouldn't make any difference.

 

Gwen was using paper plates for dinner. Eleanor had never done that. Paper plates were fine for lunch, but dinner was served on dishes. That had been Eleanor's rule.

Well, Eleanor wasn't here anymore, and this evening Gwen was using paper plates. She needed to talk to Hal, and that was more important than setting the table.

She found him still on the lakeside porch of the main cabin, standing, one foot on the railing, staring out through the trees, toward the lake. She went up and slipped her hand in his arm. He was still thinking about Ian's wife leaving, about Phoebe's husband wanting to find a place of his own. He didn't know about the latest problem, about Amy and Jack.

She wasn't sure how much to tell him. She had often concealed Jack's misdeeds from his father; John overreacted to everything Jack did. But Hal was so different. He observed, he watched, he waited, he thought.

Suddenly she felt as if she hardly knew him.

This summer was supposed to be their chance to learn each other's ways before they went back to Iowa and faced his world, his friends. But they had never had that chance. Since the moment Phoebe and Giles's station wagon turned into the drive, there had been nothing but everyone else's problems. She had, in effect, been standing on all the electric cords, keeping others from tripping. She had devoted all her patience, energy, and intuition to everyone except the one who mattered the most—Hal.

She loved Hal—she was sure of that, she did not for one instant question their marriage, question whether or not they had done the right thing—but she still didn't know him, not like she had known John, whom she had known better than he knew himself.

When would her generation ever get its turn?

“We were worried about the wrong couple, Hal.” She decided to be direct. “It wasn't Nick and Maggie who had sex on the canoe trip. It was Amy and Jack.”

Hal turned his head to look at her.

“When they went to that ranger station to get help, they shared a tent. He says that they both recognize that it was a mistake, that there's too much going on with the rest of the family. He feels awful about it. He really does. It's not like him to—”

Hal laid a hand over her lips. “You don't have to defend Jack to me. I'm not saying anything because I'm so surprised. That's all. I don't know what I think, but I'm not angry at Jack.”

Gwen felt her shoulders ease. She had been more worried about that than she realized. “I was surprised too. I suspected that he was attracted to her, but I truly believed that he wouldn't let anything happen.”

“Do they really think it was a mistake, or are they being noble, giving it up for the rest of us?”

“I don't know.” That hadn't occurred to her…although it was the sort of thing Jack would do. “That would be sad, wouldn't it?”

“Yes.”

“So what do we do?”

“You know my answer to that. Nothing. We have to trust them to do the right thing.”

“But what is the right thing?”

“How can we know that?”

Her first husband would have never said that. He would have believed that he did know what was right.

And his first wife probably would have too.

Thomas's little plastic pail of pine cones sat at the edge of the steps. It was still full from yesterday. When Gwen had first come to the lake, she had known nothing about pine cones. Now she knew that the light egg-shaped ones were from the Norways, the rosy brown ones were from the tamarack trees, the narrow, closed, curving ones from the jack pines. The beautiful white pine with its soft blue-green needles dropped the ugliest of the cones, narrow yellow-brown cylinders.

Hal put his arm around her. “When I met you, I was so giddy, so happy, that I didn't think enough of how this would impact the kids.”

“But they aren't kids anymore,” she said.

“Sometimes they act like it.”

She nodded slowly. They did. “Why do we always have to worry about them? Why can't they worry about us?” Even Holly, as considerate and attentive as she was, tended to think that Gwen could survive anything.

“Because we don't want them to. We still want to be Mom and Dad able to fix everything.”

He was right. Holly thought Gwen could survive anything because that's what Gwen wanted her to think.

Why couldn't they all go back to being babies? Why couldn't they go back to having problems their parents could solve?

Everyone was subdued for the next few days. Ian's children, Emily and Scott, clung to him, and so Claire and Alex were quieter too, spending more time with their father in the new cabin. Gwen planned fewer activities, and Nick initiated more, taking the kids on walks, teaching them to throw horseshoes.

Phoebe apologized to Amy almost immediately. She was mortified, unable to forgive herself for speaking as she had.

Are you always this hard on yourself?
Amy wondered as she listened. And she knew the answer instantly. Yes, Phoebe was. Phoebe had never learned to forgive herself.

Phoebe spent her life determined to make no mistakes. That's why she worked so hard, that's why she never relaxed or daydreamed; she might make a mistake. And because she never made mistakes, she had never learned to forgive herself for them.

Amy had won the Olympics because she had gone on after a mistake. Phoebe had never had to do this.

How can I teach you this? How can I show you the one thing that know?

But Phoebe was locked into her own unhappiness, her
grief at leaving the lake, her guilt at being the first one to do so. Amy couldn't help her. There was nothing she could say.

It was past time for her to go back to Denver. She had been here for weeks. Henry and Tommy were already at work, putting together new programs for the fall professional season and for their tour in the spring. They wouldn't be happy with her, but she didn't care. Holly wasn't leaving until the end of the week. Amy would stay as long as she did.

Jack offered to drive them to Minneapolis, but they refused. They would take the little commuter flight out of Ribbing. “Then I'll take you there,” he said.

“I'll do it,” Phoebe volunteered. “We'll have a mound of laundry to do.”

“No,” Jack said, “I'll take them.”

His voice was low, quieter than usual. Phoebe understood. She nodded her head. Yes, Jack could take them to the airport. The laundry could wait for another day.

With Holly and Amy leaving there was to be yet another change in sleeping arrangements. Jack was moving into the bunkhouse with Nick; Ian and his children were moving to the log cabin. So while Amy was saying good-bye, there was another parade of children dashing along the path between the cabins, dropping T-shirts and shoes behind them.

Amy hugged her dad and Gwen, Phoebe, Giles, and Nick; she even hugged Nick.

“So when do I see you again?” she said to him. She really did like the boy. His pale skin had gotten more color in the weeks he had been here, and his close haircut had grown softer, making his narrow forehead, once bulldoggish, seem strong, not belligerent.

“Uncle Hal has been making noises about my coming to college at the place he teaches, so maybe in two years you'll be seeing me all the time.”

Amy didn't want to tell him that she was almost never in Iowa. “I have a competition in Boston in November. Can I send you tickets? Will you have dinner with me afterward?”

“Is it on a school night? I'm not allowed out after bedtime on a school night.”

“And that stops you?” she asked.

He grinned.

She hugged everyone again and got into Jack's truck. This time there were only the three of them, and she could sit without touching him.

The Ribbing airport was small, little more than one room. There was no gift shop or newsstand, just vending machines and an electric coffee maker. The coffee was paid for on the honor system, and a white foam cup served as the cash register. Amy and Holly checked their bags, got their boarding passes, and sat down to wait.

“I heard you making plans to see Nick,” Jack said.

Amy nodded.

“It's good of you.”

“I like him.”

They looked at each other. She was going to see Nick; all her New York dates were already on Holly's calendar, but she and he were making no plans to see each other. Amy heard herself sigh.

But there was nothing to say.

The seats of the airport's molded plastic chairs had no armrests; the legs were pairs of chrome tubes that slanted down in long, narrow triangles. A chrome bar ran beneath the seats joining one chair to the next. They were
the most ordinary sort of chairs, the kind you see everywhere.

How could she have nothing to say to him? She had never been able to be so straight with anyone before. They had been able to talk about fame, fears, bad breath, everything. She didn't think of herself as a witty person, but with him she had been funny.

Now there was nothing to say.

Holly stood up. “I think I'll go to the ladies' room.”

Amy understood. Holly was trying to give Jack and her some time alone, a moment for a private farewell.

But what would be the point? “I'll go with you,” Amy said.

The ladies' room had only two stalls, and the women ahead of them had small children. They had to wait, and by the time they were finished, the plane was ready. People were already starting to pass through the security check in front of the airport's single gate.

Amy couldn't speak. There had to be air in her lungs; she could feel the rising swell in her chest, but she couldn't exhale, she couldn't breathe.

There was nothing to say.

She had wanted a relationship with him that didn't involve her family. Lots of women had that. They just took their husbands home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and stored them in the corner of the living room to watch football. The husband was polite to the family, and the family was polite back. That was all.

She didn't like herself when she was with her family. She didn't like how passive she was. That's why she wanted to keep her relationship with him separate from her family, so she could be her real self when she was with him.

But that wasn't possible. He didn't want to separate from his family, and his family was her family.

She and Holly moved to the security check. Holly put her purse on the conveyor belt. Jack hugged her. “I'll call you whenever I can,” he said.

Holly nodded. She knew that.

Amy laid her purse down for the X-ray inspection. Holly was walking through the metal detector. Amy looked at Jack. He had his hands in his pockets.

There was nothing to say.