The Goodbye Summer (18 page)

Cornel put his fists on the floor. “Oh, hell, give me some of that spliff.”

Thea and Magill sat up in astonishment, which caused Finney to scuttle back in alarm and bark at them. “Really? You’re going to try it?”

Cornel pointed at Caddie. “If I go haywire, you’re responsible. You’re the one who has to calm me down, get me to the hospital if it comes to that.”

He looked so serious, she couldn’t laugh. “I will, I promise. Don’t worry.”

“I can do it,” he snapped when Magill started to light the half-smoked joint for him. “I know how to light a damn cigarette.”

“Not too much.”

“I know, I know.” He took a deep drag and went into a violent coughing fit.

Magill lost it. He laughed so hard, he fell over backward. Caddie poured Cornel a glass of iced tea, but he couldn’t stop coughing long enough to drink it. Thea patted his back. That didn’t help either, but he liked it.

“What the hell is that,” he said when he could talk, “dried horse manure?”

“You have to take tiny little puffs,” Thea told him, like an old hand. “Drink some tea and then try again.”

“But watch out for madness.” Magill definitely looked stoned, loose-jointed and slack-grinned. “I think it’s improving my balance. I’m gonna get Lieberman to prescribe it for vertigo. Sure you don’t want a little toke, Caddie?”

“Maybe later.”

“You okay?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Fine, I’m fine. I think I’ll just…” She gestured toward the stereo and got up.

Because of Christopher, everybody at Wake House had been treating her with extra kindness and consideration. It was awful. She didn’t care about Thea knowing, but she wished she hadn’t gone on and on about him to Magill. How stupid that had been, she saw in retrospect, how uncharacteristically self-confident. Arrogant, practically:
Look at me, I have a boyfriend.
She
hated
it that he felt sorry for her now. Not just him, they all did, but she minded Magill’s pity more than the others’.

She’d never had her heart broken before. She’d had two weeks to get over it, but nothing much had happened, she still felt buried alive. She’d wasted a lot of time on false hope, imagining different endings, imagining Christopher coming to his senses. Each time the phone rang her heart would stiffen and leap up, like Finney for a ball in the air, and each time it wasn’t Christopher she’d feel flooded in personal humiliation. When she heard the sound of a car slowing or stopping in front of the house, or in front of Mrs. Tourneau’s house, or across the street, the same wave of stupid hope would gush up and send her to the window, where the same shame and disappointment would swallow her back down.

At night she lay in bed and remembered dear, trivial things—like how pretty his hair was, how it always smelled like shampoo. The day he’d gotten so mad at her for not telling him sooner he had a poppy seed in his teeth. His habit of watching only two TV channels, the all-news one and Animal Planet. His plaid flannel bathrobe, how it looked tied around his waist in the morning. His beautiful smile, so sincere, so blindingly white.

She meant
nothing
to him. It must be true, but she still couldn’t
believe
it, because she’d had no warning, no bad memories to look back on and reinterpret as danger signs. In one phone call, he’d pulled the rug out from under her. She was still falling, hadn’t hit the bottom yet, so how could she recover? Today she couldn’t think at all, today was a wash as far as recovery went. She’d been in a fog since morning, some kind of protective haze making everything blurry and unreal, like the wrong glasses.

“Let’s play a game,” Thea suggested.

Cornel groaned. He was sitting up stiff as a plank with his arms around his knees, eyes wide, facial muscles tense. If anybody could will himself to stay straight, it was Cornel.

“You, too,” Thea said, leaning against his arm. He went even tighter for a second, then relaxed. “Everybody.” Thea was getting that croaky, hoarse, marijuana voice. “Name three things you want to do with your life before you get too old.”

“I’m already too old.
Ow.
” She’d poked him with her elbow.

“I’ll start. First, I want to dye my hair red. I do,” she insisted over the laughter, “I’ve wanted red hair all my life.”

“What was it before?” Caddie asked. Before it went a soft, shiny silver-gray.

“Oh, brown, just a sort of light brownish brown.”

“Your hair’s fine,” said Cornel. “Leave it be.”

“Nope, I’m dying it red. Not fire engine red,” she said, leaning over again and putting her face right in his face, so all he could do was grin. “A nice reddish-blonde, the old-lady version of red hair.”

“You go, girl,” said Magill.

“Caddie, you come with me when I get it done.”

“Okay.”

“What’s the second thing?” Cornel was liking the game better now.

Thea got to her feet with a slow, wobbly grace. “Play ragtime!” Laughing, she went to the piano, plopped down at the bench, and banged out, over the music already playing on the stereo, the two introductory bass chords and the first two right-hand measures of “Maple Leaf Rag.”

“Wooo, my fingers aren’t working. This afternoon I had them going together, top and bottom.” Her laughter erupted again. She bent over and touched her forehead to the hands she still held on the keys “Oh, my goodness, it’s kicked in. Whose hands are these?”

“She plays it pretty good,” Cornel told Caddie, “on that piano at the house. She practices all the time.”

“
All
the time,” Magill confirmed.

Thea stuck her tongue out at him. “It sounds better there than here because that piano’s out of tune. Honky-tonk.
That’s
my problem, Caddie’s piano’s too good.” She swayed on the bench, chuckling with merriment, infecting the others with her silliness. “Caddie, you play something now. Come on.”

“Yeah, play something,” Magill said.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Okay, that’s two. What’s the third thing?”

“Oh, I have lots of things.” Thea ambled back over. “Well, the main one is, I want to go to Cape May in October.”

“What for?”

“The birds,” Cornel guessed. “The fall migration.”

“Yes.”
Thea’s surprise and pleasure made him color. “Have you been?”

He shook his head sorrowfully, as if he hated to let her down. “I like birds, though.”

“Oh, so did Will. They were his favorite hobby, practically a passion. He’d ask me every year to go with him to see the fall migration on the flyway, the East Coast flyway, but something always came up and I’d put it off.” She smiled sadly. “So we never went.”

“Not your fault,” Cornel said gruffly. “Not something to feel guilty about, Pete’s sake.” His frown didn’t look natural; his eyes had a hazy, unfocused swimminess he was trying to correct by scowling. Thea put her hand on top of his absently. That cleared his vision.

“It’s not guilt. It’s more like…” She paused for a long time. “A correction.” She gave the word a stoned vehemence, then shook her head. “I do
not
want to get maudlin.” No, no, they all agreed, leaning toward her. “But when he was dying, he told me it was one of his regrets, that I’d
never gone with him to see it. It meant something to him.” She laughed, dashing a tear out of her eye. “This is not right! I’m not sad, I feel
happy
tonight. And it’s not the end of the world that I never went with Will to see the birds at Cape May, even
he
didn’t think that. I just use it, I’ve made it a thing, a marker, a…oh, I can’t think of words.”

Magill reached over and squeezed her foot inside her white flat.

“It
stands
for all the things I wish I’d done that I didn’t, that’s all. Anyway, I’m going. That’s my third thing, I’m going to see the birds at Cape May next October. Okay, I’m finished.
Henry.
You go.”

Thea was the only one who called Magill by his first name. He was still on his back with his hairpin knees bent, gazing up at the ceiling. He’d taken off his shoes and socks. Finney lay curled up in the crook of his arm, and they wore similar drowsy, comfortable, satisfied expressions. “I forget the question.”

Caddie reminded him. “Things you want to do before you die.”

“Before you get too old,” Cornel corrected.

“Get too old,” she said quickly.

Magill’s amused grin faded slowly. “Get my life back,” he said in a monotone. “That’s what I’d like to do.”

Nobody spoke; the Ike and Tina Turner song on the stereo sounded too loud all of a sudden, too crass and unconcerned.

Cornel cleared his throat harshly. “Well, if you want it, you can have it. All you gotta do is take it.” He didn’t feel as unsympathetic as he sounded, Caddie knew that. But he looked mean to her just for a second, like someone who couldn’t fit much compassion inside himself anymore because getting old had made him smaller.

Magill speared a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt without disturbing the dog, shook one out, and lit it. Finney hated smoke; he scrambled up and jumped on the couch, blinking his eyes and looking put out.

“How did it happen?” Thea asked. “The accident.”

Caddie turned to her in alarm. Why would she ask him that now? His hand holding the cigarette stopped halfway to his lips. He stared at Thea
through the smoke, first in disbelief, then something else. Caddie thought it looked like panic. “Does anybody need anything?” she asked. “More beer? I could make popcorn.”

“How did it happen?” Thea repeated, softer, not taking her eyes from Magill’s. She nodded, sending him a message. “Tell us if you want to. It’s as good a time as any.”

He kept looking at her, wouldn’t drop his gaze. It was as if they were hanging on to each other while she guided him across a cliff edge, urging him to look at
her,
not
down.
If only Cornel would say something cynical or dismissive or snotty right now, it might head off what Caddie could see coming. Nothing had changed, she still didn’t want to hear this story. Maybe she was a coward, but how could it be anything but hurtful? Cornel sat hunched over his beer bottle, absorbed in scraping the label off with his thumbnail. No help.

Magill shut his eyes. Caddie felt as if she were on an edge, too, waiting for him to decide. She could see it going either way, but it seemed more likely that he would say something funny or mocking now, then roll to his feet and stroll out to the kitchen for another beer. She could see his Adam’s apple rise and fall when he swallowed. He put his hands on his upraised thighs, gripping the ropy muscles. “I took her up for a tandem dive from fourteen hundred feet. It was her birthday,” he said, and Caddie closed her eyes, too.

“A tandem jump is the safest dive there is. Nothing can go wrong. You’re harnessed together, back to front. I’ve done hundreds, thousands. I was a jumpmaster, I
taught
it.”

Thea, kneeling beside him, put her hand on his shoulder. Just that, but Caddie saw how it steadied him, kept him from veering off into something dark, some form of self-recrimination it would be hard for him to come back from.

“It was a perfect day. June the fourth. Blue sky, white clouds. Holly was okay on the ground, nothing but excited, acting like a kid. But as soon as we took off she got scared. Waiting for your turn to jump is always the hardest, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it. There were nineteen of us packed like sardines on the twin-engine, and we were second to last. Last was a guy named Mark Kohler, a level-eight student, two jumps away from his A license. He laughed at Holly when she cried.”

She cried.
Oh, God,
Caddie thought. Holly cried. She kept her eyes closed tight, because then it was like hearing confession. Magill was the penitent and they were the priests.

“She was so scared.” His voice went down low, became rough. “She was laughing and crying, yelling, trying to psych herself up. She kept saying, ‘What have I done?’ I told her, ‘Relax, relax, you’re gonna love it, relax so you can
feel
it,’ trying to get her loose, trying to
wake her up
so she wouldn’t miss the whole thing with her eyes shut. I told her—I told her nothing bad would happen. I swore it. Then we jumped.

“Free fall was perfect. We dropped two miles in less than a minute, and she never stopped screaming. But she liked it, she really loved it, she gave the thumbs-up, she…tried to kiss me, but her cheeks were flapping in the rush of the air, she couldn’t make…” He made a guttural sound Caddie couldn’t bear to hear, a laugh that came so close to a sob, he couldn’t talk at all for a minute.

“You can’t hear anything but wind during free fall, but once you open your canopy everything goes dead quiet. It’s like hang gliding, just you and the blue air and the incredible earth coming up slow. It’s not like flying—it is flying. So beautiful you forget to breathe. You’re excited, your heart’s pounding, but it’s like being in a trance, too. I like it better than the dive. Free fall’s just a way to get to that place. That peace.”

He stopped again, and Caddie thought,
Finish it. Please, I just can’t stand this.

“Mark, the guy, the AFF student who jumped behind us—his girlfriend was filming his dive from the ground. He did—he did a hard turn to impress her. Make it look good. Dramatic. He forgot us, forgot where we were, he didn’t see us, we were a hundred feet from the drop zone and he didn’t see us. His turn made him fall too fast. He fell into our chute. He’s wrapped up like a mummy, trailing yards of red and white nylon, and the three of us—three of us hanging from his student chute because our main’s collapsed. I…I…I cut away. We weren’t going to make it. I cut away the tandem chute and pulled the reserve, but there wasn’t room. Wasn’t time. You should never, you should never cut your main that close. But we were coming in so fast. I did it. Holly hit first and she died. Under me. She died. I don’t remember anything. Mark Kohler broke his ankle.”

The music had stopped. Caddie wanted it back because the silence was horrible. Cornel was making a little cup in the carpet with his thumb, hollowing it out with pinch-faced diligence. He looked shocked and miserable, and he was as helpless, as useless as she was. They both inhaled with hope when Thea shuffled over on her knees, closer to Magill’s limp body. But then Caddie was afraid she was going to embrace him, wrap him up in her arms like a baby—he wouldn’t like that, he’d hate it. She heard herself blurt out, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Just as she feared, his lips went flat. “I don’t feel absolved.” He still had his eyes closed. Two tears had rolled into his hair on either side when he’d said, “She died.” The tracks still glistened, untouched.

Thea didn’t embrace him. She bent to him and put a kiss in the center of his forehead. He opened his eyes. She said something very soft—Caddie couldn’t hear it.

She wanted to
do
something, but she couldn’t move; she felt stuck, not able to unwind her arms from around her legs and stand up.
It wasn’t your fault
—what a ridiculous thing to say. What would it feel like to believe you had stolen someone’s life? Someone you loved, who trusted you. Who was innocent.

Magill sat up, and after that she could move, she wasn’t frozen anymore. He was holding the sides of his face and smiling so painfully, a taut spreading of his lips. But he was coming around. What had Thea said to him? Was it good that he’d told them the story? Did he feel lighter now, as if fresh air had blown away some of his sadness and shame? Or did that happen only in books?

Cornel did something brilliant then. Not on purpose, she didn’t think, but it saved the day. “Is it me,” he said crankily, “or could anybody else eat a horse?”

“Let me make something,” Caddie offered. “I could at least open a can of soup, I have chicken noodle, bean with bacon—or toasted cheese sandwiches, how would you like that? Or, I know, bacon and eggs.”

“Mmm,” they said, nodding appreciatively but not looking up from the leftovers they were devouring. Thea and Cornel had fallen on a plastic container of beef stew like refugees; they hadn’t even heated it. Magill was standing over the sink scooping in cold rice as if it were haute cuisine. The kitchen was filled with the sounds of chewing and swallowing, satisfied humming, forks scraping, lips smacking. Caddie found that funny but also faintly nauseating. She boiled water for tea—nobody wanted any but her; they were sticking with beer—and nibbled on a carrot stick. She didn’t even want that, but she wanted attention on herself even less.

“So that kid yesterday,” Magill said with his mouth full, “that was your grandson, Cornel?”

He grunted yes.

“I didn’t even know you had one. Where does he live?”

“Richmond.”

Caddie hadn’t known, either. Cornel was widowed and now childless, but yesterday a sweet-faced, tired-looking blonde woman and an eleven-year-old boy had appeared on the front porch at Wake House, looking for him. The boy was Zack, the woman was Donna; she was the widow of Cornel’s son, who had been killed in an automobile accident in 1999. That surprised Caddie, too; Cornel spoke of his son so infrequently, she’d assumed he’d been dead for years and years.

“What’s his name?” Magill asked. He’d been on his way to physical therapy and had seen Cornel’s family only as he was leaving.

“Zachary.” He snorted. “What a name. There’s no Zacharys in the family, I can tell you that, ours or hers. Coulda been worse, though, coulda been
Jason.
Coulda been
Alex.
”

“All lovely names,” Thea said mildly. “What is the matter with you?”

“Get this, if it was a girl they were gonna name it
Courtney.
Hah!”

Thea just rolled her eyes. “Donna’s a darling. We had the nicest talk.”

“She’s all right.”

“She said they have a nice house down there. Pretty little house in the suburbs.”

Cornel shrugged, scraping stew gravy from the bottom of the bowl.

“She said she’d love it if you’d move down there. Be closer to them.”

“Yeah.” He shoved his chair back and stood. “I’m still hungry. Mind if I just…” He opened the refrigerator and bent inside. “Tell you what she really wants. Wants me to
move in.
Can’t you picture that?”

Magill had moved aside so that Caddie could put dirty dishes in the sink. He looked tired, she thought, but not worse, not drained or unhappy or regretful. Thank God. She wanted to stay near him, or say something to make him smile, send affection to him without embarrassing him. She leaned back against the counter and hooked her hand over his shoulder. As if she just needed a place to put it and his shoulder was the closest perch.

“I certainly can picture it,” Thea exclaimed. “Why wouldn’t you? What a perfectly lovely idea.”

“Perfectly lovely idea,” Cornel mimicked, backing out of the refrigerator with a container of cottage cheese and a jar of olives. “We eat these?”

Caddie thought about Zack, a weedy, wispy boy in baggy clothes, pale hands clutching a computer game he’d rarely looked up from except for quick, shy glances at his mother. He’d spoken only once in Caddie’s hearing. Donna had been telling Cornel about how Zack was having a little trouble in school this year, in fact he’d gotten a D in English and would be taking remedial reading in summer school. He was a whiz at math, though, she’d added quickly, reaching over to ruffle his crew cut—which had made him pull away. But then he’d darted a sideways look at Cornel and asked hopefully, “How ’bout my dad? Mom didn’t know—did my dad do good in math?”

Cornel had lowered his bushy brows and glared at him for an unnaturally long time. Caddie had been afraid he wasn’t going to answer at all, but then he’d snapped out, “
Well,
did he do
well
in math. I don’t remember, it’s too long ago. Quit playing fool games on that machine, that’s all you need to do. Read a damn book for a change.”

Poor Zack recoiled, looking stunned, as if the family cat had suddenly scratched him. Donna said in a bright tone, “Oh, I bet he was, Daddy was good at everything,” and Cornel started to squirm in his rocking chair. Caddie saw him bare his teeth in a clumsy try at a smile, an apology, but too late, Zack had already ducked his head and gone back to his game. She’d been searching for a resemblance, a feature grandfather and grandson had in common, and finally she saw it. They had the same knack for shutting people out behind ferocious scowls.

“Why wouldn’t you go live with them if they
want
you to?” Thea asked, plucking an olive out of the jar. “What would hold you back? I can’t even imagine.” She leaned toward Cornel, both elbows on the cluttered kitchen table, resting her chin in her hands. When she turned her full attention on him like that, it always discombobulated him.

“Because. Then I’d be dependent. What do you mean, why can’t you imagine? Who’d want to be a burden to their own relations? Me, I’d rather be dead.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous. Sometimes we help the ones we love, sometimes we need their help. It’s a cycle. What could be more natural? Didn’t you love taking care of your family? But you’d rather
die
now than let them take care of you. It’s a kind of arrogance, isn’t it?”

He blinked in shock, then rallied. “Hell, no. Taking care of an old fart is nobody’s idea of a good time, old age makes sure of that.”

“Oh, age is just a number. What if a year had fourteen months instead of twelve? Then I’d be…” She turned to Caddie and Magill. “How old would I be?”

“Old age.” Cornel curled his lips as if they were swear words. “It’s a lot more than a number. It’s losing body part after body part. Everything goes, it’s one damn kick in the teeth after another. One—”

“Fifty-nine,” Magill said. “Multiply your age by twelve-fourteenths, which is six-sevenths, six times sixty-nine—”

“Old age,” Thea said, “isn’t any different from any other age. It’s still
you.
I feel like I’m the same age I’ve always been!”

“Really?” Caddie said.

“It’s still a surprise when I hear somebody call me old. And when I look in the mirror—” She made a humorous expression of horror. “But I’m always young in my dreams. Isn’t that odd? In dreams I’m my old self, my
real
self.”

Cornel was staring at his clawed hands. “Getting old is for the birds. Time sneaks up on you like a…like a mugger. Look at these. I used to have a man’s hands. Now I got hair growing outta my ears, I’m cold all the time—”

“But underneath—”

“Can’t eat this, can’t eat—”

“But underneath, you’re still a boy, aren’t you? Don’t you feel that? Cornel Montgomery. Did they used to call you Cornie?”

He smiled in spite of himself.

“I love being alive,” Thea declared. “I love it more, not less, the older I get. I’m still a girl under all these wrinkles. I’m still burning bright, and everything’s still a mystery—I never want to leave, I’m just getting started!”

Everything was still a mystery to Thea,
too
? Caddie didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or demoralized.

“That’s because you
feel
good,” Cornel said. “You’re in your
young
old age. Wait’ll you get to your
old
old age, wait’ll everything starts to go. All it takes is one little stroke, one little fall and you break your hip, bingo, into the nursing home. Diabetes, you go deaf, you can’t drive anymore, quadruple bypass. Prostate, cataracts, knee replacement. Hiatal hernia. Joints hurt, can’t sleep, can’t pee. Canes, walkers, ugly shoes—”

“But—”

“We’re invisible,” he kept on. “I’m an
old man,
that’s all I am. Nobody looks at me, I might as well be smoke. Young people think we’re fools, they laugh in our faces.”

“That’s not true.”

“Donna’s the one who’s a fool. Me in Richmond, what a joke. I
would
rather die than drag down my kin. One of these days I’ll be wearing diapers—and she’s not even
blood
kin.”

“Zack is,” Thea argued. “Did you ever think you might be able to help
him
? Maybe that’s why she wants you down there, because her son needs a man, a
father.
”

“What’s a boy that age want with an old man? Hell’s bells, I don’t know a GameBoy from a
Playboy.
”

“Why are you so ashamed of being old? It’s life, Cornel, it’s nature! You could help them, they could help you. What’s undignified about that?”

“I don’t want to be dependent. Period, the end. Wake House, that’s the last stop before the nursing home. I
hope
I die there. Those are the lucky ones, the ones that don’t wake up in the morning. Bernie told me the same stupid story about his lumbago
three times
yesterday.”

“
Dependent
—you make it such a dirty word! If I had any family at all, if I had
anybody
and they wanted to take care of me, do you think I’d say no?”