Summer's End (5 page)

Gwen knew that while Hal was not the man she would have chosen to begin her life with, he could well be the man with whom she would choose to conclude it.

Amy adored being professional. She loved performing for a crowd without worrying about judges. She enjoyed the easy camaraderie among the dozen or so top skaters as they met up for tours, shows, or professional competitions. She liked getting dressed up and having her picture taken. She felt good about the charity work she did, passing out awards at the Special Olympics, opening blood banks, serving as honorary chairperson of countless benefits. She had yet to be caught in any major mistakes. She had not been arrested for drinking and driving—because she rarely did either—and none of her charities had ever been exposed as mismanaged frauds—because none of them were. Although it had been almost seven years since her Olympics, no other American female skater had challenged her place in the public's affections.

She lived in Denver. She, Tommy, and Henry continued to train with Oliver. They had built their own rink with saunas and whirlpools, a ballet studio, and—of course—a weight room. Their year followed a predictable pattern. Professional competitions began in October; most of December was turned over to the holiday shows. In January and February they either went overseas or
worked on television specials. Spring was reserved for the big multi-city tours. During the summer and early fall they created all the programs they would need for the next year. In between they taped commercials, squeezed in appearances in other people's television specials, attended banquets, made speeches, gave interviews, signed autographs, and did their charity work.

Henry and Tommy were both gay, as were her coach, her costume designer, and her choreographer. In fact, when Amy had been an amateur, she sometimes had felt that the only time she met men who weren't gay was when she went home and saw her father, brother, and brother-in-law.

But as a professional she met different people—promoters, sponsors, advertising executives, businessmen, sound engineers, and lighting technicians—and some of these men liked her in ways that Henry, Tommy, and Oliver did not.

Such men would come to her practices and wait for her at rink-side with her water and her skate bag. They would have decided where to go to dinner and would have figured out how to get there. They would make sure all the arrangements were right at the rink and at the hotel. They would take care of her. She liked that.

And they would want only one thing in return—to be a part of her success. The weak ones simply wanted their share of the attention. They always managed to position themselves so that no picture was taken of her without them in it. They would want to sit in on every interview with her. They would want the interviewer to speak to them too. They needed people to believe that they were as interesting as she was, as important as she was.

The strong ones didn't care about attention; they
wanted power. Amy was the staircase on which they would build their own careers. They would manage her, produce her shows, handle her investments. They would try to isolate her from her current coach, manager, financial adviser.

Both were bad for her career. “Amy, please,” her agent had said to her two years ago, “could you please go on this tour and not fall in love?”

“What do you mean, not fall in love?” she had laughed. “Failing in love isn't anything I can control, is it?”

“In your case, Amy, yes, yes, it is.”

And of course he was right. She hadn't been truly in love with any of these men; she had simply loved being in love. So she had quit.

But she missed it. It was fun to fall in love.

 

Hal and Gwen both knew that Hal was in Washington only for the spring. He was committed to spending the summer at his family's cabin in Minnesota—“it's one of the organizing principles of our family life, summer in Minnesota”—and in the fall he would be back in Iowa.

But they were not the sort of people who allowed circumstances to decide their fate. Gwen had moved every three years of her married life; she could move again. She liked change. And if they found themselves unsure by the time Hal had to leave, they could write, visit, call, e-mail each other until they were sure.

But privately, within their hearts, each was already sure. Hal had first thought of her as Athena, the cool, dispassionate goddess of wisdom. Now he knew she was Vestia, the protector of the hearth and home. Her own home was ordered, graceful, and filled with light. He
could see how a man, after months in the dark, tight spaces of a submarine, would be lured and then soothed by the quiet warmth of her world.

Hal had fallen in love with Eleanor because she seemed so unlike the nice Midwestern girls he had grown up with. Her strength of spirit, her will, her independence, her sexual permissiveness, seemed almost masculine to him, and he had been mesmerized. But he was wiser now and knew that such spirit, will, and independence could also come in a more conventionally feminine form. And the sexual permissiveness—which had riveted him at age twenty-two—attracted him less now. He knew that it came with drawbacks.

He had to return to Iowa for a weekend in late April. “Why don't you come with me?” he said to Gwen. “You can look around the place, meet Phoebe.”

Phoebe was his older daughter, the child of his who had been the closest to their mother. Gwen too had a daughter. Holly was her older child, and while Gwen did not love her daughter more than her son, she was closer to Holly.

And she had to wonder—if she had died before John and John was getting to know someone in the way that she was getting to know Hal, how would Holly have felt?

 

“You think
what?
” Phoebe stared at her husband.

“I think they are going to get married.” Giles Smith spoke mildly as always. He was a big, shaggy sort of man with a silky reddish-brown beard. He seemed soft and approachable, almost a teddy bear, but his eyes were alert and intelligent. Sometimes his gaze was steady; sometimes it was in motion, flicking from one person to the next,
taking in everything that was happening, understanding it all. “The senior recitals are the most public thing the music department does all year. Your father's going to have thought long and hard about bringing someone all the way from Washington for this particular weekend.”

Earlier in the day Phoebe had gotten a call from her father. When he had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington, D.C., for the spring semester, he had always said he would return to Iowa for the recitals of the senior music majors. Today he had called to say he would be bringing with him this Gwen person.

“But they've only known each other three months,” Phoebe protested. “They can't be thinking about getting married.”

“They aren't exactly kids. They have to know their own minds by now.”

Dad marrying again? Phoebe couldn't imagine it. Someone else living in the house with him, working in Mother's kitchen—it seemed impossible. Dad caring about someone, really loving her? Phoebe felt as if she didn't know him.

She, Giles, and their four children lived in Iowa City, which was about twenty miles away from the smaller town of Lipton, where Phoebe had grown up and where her father still lived. Both Phoebe and Giles were lawyers. Giles was general counsel for the University of Iowa, a job that he loved. It was tough and exciting, combining public relations, damage control, and the law, and he was shrewd enough to exploit the misleading mildness of his appearance and manner.

Phoebe herself was in legal aid, working part-time, running a legal-services clinic staffed by law students from the university. She didn't love her work as Giles did his;
the law probably wasn't her calling in life, but she certainly did believe that what she did was important. It was work that needed to be done.

Doing the right thing mattered to Phoebe. She was conscientious and orderly, both at work and at home. She typed the carpool schedules and did up the soccer phone tree. She negotiated between the group of parents who wanted an elaborate graduation ceremony for the kindergartners and those who wanted to serve cupcakes and juice and be done with it. She talked sense into the people who thought that the fifth-grade Valentine's party should include boy-girl dancing. She silently, tactfully got year-books into the hands of kids whose parents couldn't afford them. Everyone who knew her admired her, but in truth, she was too busy to have close friends.

Of course, with her mother only twenty miles away, she hadn't needed close friends.

“But Mother's only been dead for a year. What can Dad be thinking of?”

“It's almost been a year and a half,” Giles said gently. “She died in November.”

Phoebe knew when her mother had died. She knew it to the minute.

 

She had been pregnant with Thomas, her fourth child, when her mother died.

That's what she kept thinking about during those days at her mother's bedside. Things like this weren't supposed to happen when you were pregnant. You were supposed to be worrying about your baby, not about your mother.

It had started with a sore throat. Phoebe had seen her on Sunday, and Eleanor had mentioned feeling raspy. But
Eleanor was stalwart about illness, she made little of her discomfort, and Phoebe forgot about it. Tuesday morning she called her parents about something else, and she could tell that her father was concerned.

She had him put her mother back on the line. “Are you turning into the sort of old lady whose daughter has to take her to the doctor?” Phoebe did not think of her mother as old.

“I hate doctors,” Eleanor groused. “They make you wait forever.”

Eleanor was not a complainer. She really must not feel well. “I think you ought to go, Mother. I can come over this afternoon if you want.” Phoebe wasn't joking anymore.

“Don't be silly. The weather looks horrible. There's supposed to be ice tomorrow. There's no point in you driving twenty miles through an ice storm just so you can wait forever too.”

“But that's tomorrow. You should go today.”

“I shall. I shall.”

Eleanor went to the doctor. He gave her an antibiotic. She should have felt better in twenty-four hours. She didn't.

The ice storm came as predicted. A thin layer of cold air had settled near the ground, but the clouds were warmer. So when the rain fell late Wednesday, it froze as it landed, glazing everything with a glittering icy sheath.

Thursday morning Eleanor was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. “We can monitor the antibiotics better here,” the doctor said.

Phoebe went to see her mother immediately. She drove a big Ford station wagon, and its weight and good tires kept her on the road, but other cars were sliding into ditches, getting stuck at the bottoms of hills. Sharp rays of
sunlight glittered off the ice-encased power lines and the twisted points of the barbed-wire fences. The piles of unraked leaves had frozen into stiff mats, and tree limbs hung dangerously low, burdened by the weight of the ice.

Phoebe ached for the green woods of Minnesota, where the needles from the tamarack trees rustled underfoot all summer long.

Her mother did not get better.

On Friday she and Giles decided that the whole family should spend the weekend in Lipton. It would be safer, more convenient. “I'm sure Mother will be out of the hospital by Monday, Tuesday at the latest,” she said.

Phoebe was making a deal with God.
If we skip all our weekend activities, if Ellie misses the movie with her friends, if Alex doesn't go to tae kwan do, and if Claire misses tumbling, and Giles and I don't go to the Reynolds lecture Sunday afternoon, then Mother will be well on Monday
.

That wasn't the kind of God Phoebe believed in, but she didn't know what else to do to make her mother well.

And the deal wasn't working. Saturday morning a nurse who had known her since childhood took her aside, putting her hand on her arm. “I think you should call Ian and Amy. Have them come.”

Have them come? That was a crazy idea. Ian lived in California. Amy was God knew where. Phoebe looked down at the nurse's hand. Her nails were trimmed and polished clear. Her watch was practical, with big numbers and a long second hand that moved in little ticks. Phoebe watched it hop past the twelve toward the one.

“Phoebe? Really, you should call.”

Phoebe kept looking at the watch. “Dr. Morgan said as soon as they find the right antibiotic then everything will—”

“And that's true. If they find the right drug, she'll be out of the hospital early next week, but Phoebe, call them anyway, tell them to come.”

No, I can't. If they come, it means Mother is dying. If they don't come, it means she is not
.

“Do it, Phoebe. Don't make your father have to decide to call them.”

Phoebe took a breath. She could deal with that. Her mother wasn't dying, she was just helping her father. She was the oldest, she had always been the helpful one. She walked down to the pay phone.

She would call Ian first. She knew how to manage him. She never told him what to do. She would tell him what was happening, and he would do the right thing. He always did as long as someone else didn't tell him to do it. That's when he got difficult. He already knew that Mother was in the hospital. He wouldn't press her with too many questions.

Amy would be a different matter. Phoebe had no idea where she was. She supposedly lived in Denver, but she was never there. She was always off skating in shows, taping commercials, or making personal appearances. A long time ago she had given the family an emergency number to use if they ever needed to reach her. Phoebe didn't know if the number was good anymore. Or even if she had it with her.

But she did. It was there in her little address book under Amy's name. Phoebe dialed. An answering service picked up immediately. Yes, they took messages for Miss Legend.

Miss Legend?
Phoebe had never heard anyone call Amy that. “This is her sister. I need to get a message to her. Our mother is ill. She should come home.”