The Goodbye Summer (35 page)

Except for her back, which was worse, and some mild cramps, which were new, Caddie was in a mood to find Cornel’s attitude cute. She got up to get more serve-yourself coffee, and when she came back, something about the back of his head, the still-boyish shape of it or maybe the vulnerable-looking tendons in the back of his skinny neck, made her put her cup down and wind her arms around his shoulders from behind for a sneak-attack of a hug. She put her lips on his piney-smelling, just-shaved cheek and kissed him.

He sputtered, he flushed, he wiped his cheek with his paper napkin. “Cut it out. What the hell’s that for?”

She grinned at Magill, who was snickering into his orange juice. “It’s to show I’m an equal-opportunity kisser.” If that wasn’t laying all her cards
on the table, she didn’t know what was. Cornel rattled his newspaper and harrumphed.

Magill put his chin on his hand and smiled at her. He’d just gotten out of the shower, she could tell by his slicked-back hair, shiny and straight, the neatest it would be all day. She imagined him in the shower. His lanky body. He had bruises on his shins and his elbows from getting dizzy and bumping into things. Last night she’d made a game of it, finding the bruises and making them all better.

After breakfast she called Ernest Holly, who said her car was ready. It didn’t take long to pack up and throw their suitcases into Mrs. Holly’s SUV. Caddie walked Finney one last time. He was a little off his feed, hadn’t eaten much of the dry kibble she’d brought along for him. She’d buy him a hamburger when they stopped for lunch.

It was a blustery, gray day, rain spitting sideways with enough force to hurt your skin. Bad luck; now they’d have to sit inside on the ferry, not stand out on deck and look at the bay, and strolling around Cape May would be a trial instead of fun. It was hard to care much, though. Hurrying back from the motel office after settling her bill, she spied Magill, hurrying toward her to settle his. He was watching his step and didn’t see her yet. When he did, his face went from preoccupation to gladness, and she skipped a heartbeat. He covered one eye with his hand, for better perspective. The wind tore at his jacket and slapped his pants around his legs like corduroy flags. They converged in the middle of the road and stood there, smiling stupidly until they heard a truck coming. Getting close. They brushed hands and parted, and as Caddie went on her way she felt lifted up and flung down at the same time by a luscious wave of lust.

She’d loved sleeping with him, maybe more than the sex. No. No, but
sleeping
with him, lying beside or across all those nooks and crooks and pointy corners of him, it should’ve been
un
comfortable, like sleeping with a fork or a pair of dice—but instead she’d felt like a lucky little boat, safe and snug in a calm, peaceful harbor. Home port. She’d woken often, to stretch her arms and legs into the four corners of the bed,
ahh,
and also to increase the surface area of her skin on his, and always she’d fallen back into sleep like a pebble slipping down, down into deep, clear water.

“No more scenic routes.” In the rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of Cornel unfurling his map over a dozing Finney on his lap. “We just go straight, Cornel, due east, no diversions, and when we—”

“We could go see Thea’s house.”

“Thea’s
house
?”

“You got to have that window open?” he complained to Magill. “Me and the dog are getting wet.”

“It won’t go up,” Caddie explained for the fifth or sixth time. “I’ll turn the heat on. Scootch over more to the left.”

Instead he sat forward, shoving the map over the seat. It crackled annoyingly in her ear, and she couldn’t look anyway, she was driving. “She used to live right here,” he showed Magill, tapping his finger on the spot. “How far is that from here?”

“I don’t know,” Caddie answered before Magill could, “but we’re already behind schedule by a whole day.” And she wasn’t feeling well. Were these cramps normal?

“So what? What have we got to do?”

“Well,
I
—”

“When are we ever getting back this way again? I’ll be dead before I ever do.”

“We’ll come back, Cornel, I promise.”

“The weather stinks. I don’t want to be on a ferry in this, anyway.”

She stopped herself from snapping back that she didn’t feel much like driving in it, either.

“We could go to Thea’s house
instead
of Cape May,” Cornel argued. “More personal. I could read my poem from the dock on that creek.”

He was being disagreeable on purpose, because she and Magill had changed the balance last night. He felt excluded, and her lighthearted attempt to bring him back into the circle this morning hadn’t worked. Oh, her back hurt and she was sick of arguing.

“From here,” Magill said mildly, “it looks like about forty miles there,
forty miles back. Eighty miles. What do you say we take the ferry today, and see how we feel about seeing Thea’s house tomorrow? On the way back.”

“Fine,” said Cornel.

“Fine,” said Caddie. She smiled at Magill. The diplomat.

Cornel saw the smile. When she looked at him in the mirror, he was back to glaring. Now he thought they were conspiring against him.

Phooey. She had other things to worry about. “Pit stop. Sorry, guys.” She pulled the car into a gas station next to a pottery outlet. “I’ll be quick.” She trotted through the rain to the ladies’ room—locked; ran back around, got the key on a dirty wooden paddle from the attendant, ran back outside.

Grungy ladies’ room. No tampon machine, and she was spotting, she could tell. What next? She pulled down her slacks and checked her under-pants.

Blood.

She screamed. She slapped her hand over her mouth and made a sound in her throat,
urrrr.
Real blood, it was blood, like a period. She turned ice-cold.
A little spotting is normal,
the doctor said;
don’t even call me.
But this wasn’t spotting.

Or maybe it was. Spotting all at once instead of gradually. What about the cramps? Now that she knew about the blood, they were worse. This wasn’t right. She pulled off handfuls of the cheap toilet paper and made a pad.

Maybe it was the sex. Maybe this was what happened when you stirred things up by having intercourse. Then it
was
normal, because married people had sex when the wife was pregnant all the time.
Oh, please be normal.

She had her doctor’s telephone number. “Do you have a phone?” she asked the man in the gas station office, who was reading a car magazine. He pointed out the window, “Over there.”

On the side of the road. She waved to Magill and Cornel as she ran past the car, making a silly face, like
Look what I forgot to do,
or something. The glass door of the phone booth wouldn’t close; rain beat on the roof and blew inside. Did she have enough change? She put in money and dialed.

The answering service picked up. Of course: it was Sunday. The lady said she would give Dr. Anders Caddie’s message; did the doctor know her number? No, because she didn’t have one! “I’ll have to call back—I’m traveling. Can she give you a message, and then I’ll call you?” Well, no, because she probably wouldn’t get the same operator again. But she could try. It was all very complicated, and then the other operator came on to say she needed to deposit more money, and she didn’t have any. “I’ll call back,” Caddie yelled to the answering service lady before the line went dead.

“Who’d you call?” Cornel had to know as soon as she got back in the car.

She couldn’t say “my doctor.” Once she said it, she’d have to deal with it. It would be real.

“Brenda. I wanted to check on Nana. Who’s fine.”

They believed her.

“Where are we, Cornel, how much farther? When do we get to where we’re going?”

Ostentatious map-crackling. You’d think he’d have it memorized by now. “Well, we’re coming up on Georgetown in about five miles, and then it’s one, two, four, six, nine…fifteen miles to Lewes. Give or take.”

Twenty miles. She could do that.

More flat, dun-colored farm country, some of it under water as rain pooled in vast puddles, submerging the low trunks of trees in the copses. They drove by a house with a sign in the yard,
PALM READER–ASTROLOGIST.
In the middle of a stubby field, a white cow huddled in the rain all by itself. A million black dots in the next field turned out to be starlings pecking at the wet ground.
PUMPKINS
4
SALE.
She had to slow down for a dump truck going forty-five.

“Mmm.” It came out involuntarily.

Magill looked at her. “What?”

“Funny feeling.” Immediately she felt a little better. Half of what ails us, Nana used to say, comes from keeping it a secret.

“Funny how?”

“Like a cramp. Like…grinding.”

“Have you had it before?”

She shook her head. “A little bleeding, too. It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.” She could feel him staring at her, but she didn’t look over. But she was glad he knew.

“You know what I remembered last night?” Cornel spoke up.

“What?”

“Lying all alone in my lonely bed?”

Magill folded an arm over the back of the seat and rested his chin on it. “What did you remember last night, Cornel, lying alone in your lonely bed?”

“I remembered the time I saw Thea when she was a little girl.”

Caddie forgot her cramps and turned around to look at him.

“It had to be ’38, because that’s the year my daddy got my brother and me jobs toting bags part-time at the train station. We weren’t real redcaps, it was just Saturdays and after school, helping out the colored fellows who were the real redcaps; we had to give them half our tips, and plus they always got the good customers, we only got the leftovers.”

“You saw Thea?” Caddie reminded him. “How old was she?”

“Little. Five, six, four. It had to be her because it was the rest of the whole Wake family on their way to upstate New York, Chautauqua, I guess, for a vacation. Here they all come on a Saturday morning, dressed like pictures you’d see of that girl who married the king of England, forget her name—”

“I know who you mean,” Caddie said.

“Wallis Simpson,” Magill said.

“Right, her, fashionable and fast-walking, the whole kit and caboodle, old-man Wake leading the parade. Thick-chested fellow with a gold watch chain. Had on a white suit, I remember. A white suit. I never saw anything like that before. Aunts, cousins, servants, there’s so many of them, even I get to haul some of their bags. I’m sure this little girl was Thea because she’d’ve been the right age for 1938. I was twelve.”

His voice trailed off. In the rearview mirror, Caddie saw him stroke Finney’s head softly, absently. “I wished I’da remembered that before. I could’ve told her, we could’ve talked about it. Can’t you see how she’d’ve looked, how it’d’ve made her laugh?”

“Yes,” Caddie said. “I can, Cornel. She’d have loved that story.”

A fresh cramp seized her. They were coming into a town. “Is this Georgetown? Where do I go? Cornel, where do I go?” She slowed through a green light; the car behind honked. “Right or straight? Why aren’t there any
signs
?”

“Right,” Magill said when Cornel went mute.

“But it doesn’t say!”

“Go ahead, I think this is it.”

Finally a sign, Route 9 Bypass. “Is this right? What happened to the ferry signs?” Were they lost? They were driving through the middle of the town, this was no bypass.

“There,” Magill said, pointing. “ ‘Lewes Ferry.’ We’re okay.”

Whew. More flat, straight highway. “How much farther, do you think?”

“Not far, about twelve miles.”

But she was bleeding, she could feel it. And the pains were worse.

“Pull over,” Magill said.

“No, I have to get somewhere. This isn’t right.”

“What’s wrong?” Cornel asked, sticking his head between them.

“Caddie’s not feeling well.”

“I don’t feel too good myself. That coffee gave me indigestion.”

“Pull over, Caddie. You shouldn’t be driving.”

“You need someone to drive? I can drive,” Cornel said. “I just can’t see.”

The pain passed. “No, I’m okay to drive, but I need to stop somewhere. I’m afraid I need a doctor.”

Cornel finally got it. “Keep going. There’s a big blue
H
on Lewes—” he showed Magill the map—“just keep going straight, there’s a hospital right in the town.”

But she couldn’t keep going. The pain wasn’t excruciating, but the fear was, because it was impossible now for her to believe this was normal. “Look, I just have to—” She slowed the car and jerked it to the shoulder, stopping half on, half off the grass verge. “And once again, we are in the middle of nowhere,” she tried in a light tone. She put the brake on, the car in park, and let it idle. She put her head on the steering wheel.

Magill’s hand felt cool on the back of her neck. “You’re pale as a ghost.”

“I’m in trouble. Oh, God. This is wrong.”

“I’ll flag a car down,” Cornel said.

Magill was getting out on his side. Instead of flagging down a car, he pulled open Caddie’s door. “Come on,” he said, and started to help her out. She put her feet on the ground. They saw the blood at the same time, a blotch of bright red like a wound, staining her groin and the inner thighs of her tan slacks. She started to cry.