The Summer Cottage (22 page)

C
HAPTER
27

 

T
homas pulled open the paneled wood door to Anna’s office. Inside, he stepped on a plush Oriental rug, much like the one he just left in the other law office. He smiled. The successful lawyers he knew all had or hired decorators with impeccable taste. Maroon leather chairs sat next to each other in pairs in the expansive foyer. Two, four, six, eight of them—their color exactly matching the red in the rug. Two antique coffee tables held the finance and architecture magazines found in the spacious living rooms of people with money. Tall, lush plants fed by the sunlight streaming in through several skylights shot out of their colorful ceramic pots. Having second thoughts about seeing Anna, Thomas turned and walked back toward the door. He had been gone an hour, and surely Barb would be wondering where he was. Thomas was, had been for most of his life, acutely aware of time. Punctuality was an issue with him. It was a lesson he learned from his father, who was never late. Habitually late people, Thomas had relearned many times over the years, were always ready with excuses when they showed up ten or fifteen minutes after a mutually scheduled meeting time, but no matter what they said happened, they lost points with Thomas. His business partners valued Thomas’s time as highly as they valued their own. Barb had been waiting for his return long enough. Just as he reached the door, he heard Anna’s voice.

“I thought I heard someone out here,” said Anna, looking at Thomas’s back. “May I help you with something?” Thomas turned and faced her. The smile on her face faded, and her eyes narrowed. Two, maybe three long seconds passed before the smile returned. She walked to him, put her hands on his arms, and held him for a few moments at arm’s length. “Thomas Thompson,” she said.

“Hello, Anna,” he said, half in love with her as soon as he said her name. She had not changed, aside from a few gray hairs mixed in with their more numerous, darker companions, and crow’s feet around her bright eyes. She was trim and looked fit, and Thomas was wondering what it would be like to pick her up, as he had so many years ago outside Village Pizza.

“Thomas . . . I don’t know how many years it’s been,” she said, stepping back and looking into his eyes. “You look almost the same.”

Thomas laughed. “Thirty, Anna. I haven’t seen or talked to you in thirty years. And you, by the way, look exactly the same.” She smiled at him. “And you’ve been busy. Look at this place.”

“I love it here,” she said, looking around. “I’ve worked hard for it.”

“So, you obviously made it through college. You probably sailed through law school. You paid your debt to Hudson and Lambert, then practiced law with another reputable firm, I’m guessing, before striking out on your own. My God, Anna, I feel like I’ve been sleeping for thirty years.”

“You’ve been doing anything but sleeping, Thomas. Your company is doing quite well.”

“You’ve read about my company?”

“Everyone has,” said Anna, blushing. “You’ve changed the way people look at self-storage. Your places are clean, affordable, convenient, accessible, and secure. We all have something to store, at some point in our lives, and your places and your business philosophy have encouraged more of us to do so much more willingly than in the past.”

“You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”

Anna laughed. “I have, indeed, as has Amy. She’s a lawyer, too, but she’s also an artist. And she keeps her supplies and her finished pieces in one of your heated units close to her tiny studio.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. Anna looked into his eyes, wondering, searching. “Tell me about Amy.”

“She lives in Vermont with her husband and two children. She’s the only lawyer in a very small town, so she does everything from dog bites to divorce. Her husband’s a biology professor at the University of Vermont.”

Thomas thought for a moment. “She must be thirty-five or so, by now.”

“She is. She turns thirty-five in September.”

“Does she look the same?”

“She’s changed a little, Thomas. Last time you saw her, she was four,” said Anna. Thomas laughed. “And you,” she said, “you must have some children by now.”

“Very young ones,” Thomas said. “My daughter, Sally, is six, and Peter is four.”

“And your wife?”

“Barb. She’s just a few years older than Amy. Isn’t that kind of amazing?”

“You married someone my daughter’s age. Thomas, I’m feeling old.”

“Don’t feel old, Anna. I’m a late bloomer. I got so involved in business that I forgot about my personal life. By the time I made time, it had been so long, I was tempted to start at the high school.”

Anna laughed. “And to think you had just finished high school when you asked me to marry you.”

“Yes.” Thomas looked down at the carpet.

“Sometimes I’m sorry I said no,” Anna said, again searching his eyes when they returned to her face.

“No, you’re not, Anna. You never would have made it this far. You were right. I was impulsive.”

“I like impulsive people, Thomas.”

“So.” Thomas felt warm and slightly off balance. “What about you? You must have married along the way.”

“I did,” said Anna. “I married a lawyer I met at a convention in Chicago. I, too, was older. We had three years together and were thinking about having children when he died, just like that, of a heart attack. He was forty-five.”

“I’m sorry.”

“After that, I decided to stay away from marriage. Losing a husband as well as scaring off the father of my child is plenty.”

“Anna . . .”

“My friends call me the Black Widow.”

“Nice friends.”

“It’s okay,” said Anna, “really. I still go out on dates and enjoy the company of men my age. I just don’t want to commit to anyone.”

“That sounds familiar.” Thomas’s face got hot.

“Thomas, I’m sorry.” She put her hands back on his arms. “I’m still so sorry after all these years.”

“Don’t be, Anna. I’m absolutely fine. I’m great, in fact.” As soon as Thomas said he was great, he knew that he really was.

“Well, you
look
great, Thomas.”

Thomas checked his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “My family is back at the house, wondering where the hell I am.”

Impulsively, Anna wrapped her arms around him. He responded in kind, pulling her closer. “Thomas,” she said into his chest.

“It’s okay, Anna,” he said, releasing her, then bending down to kiss her quickly, just once, on her mouth. He took two steps backwards, looking at her, then turned and walked toward the door.

“Thomas?” she said. He turned again and looked at her. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For coming today. For acknowledging our past,” said Anna. “But mostly for being who you are. I learned a lot from you.”

“I learned a bit from you,” said Thomas, a slight smile on his face.

“I never forgot you.”

“And you can see by my visit today that I’d totally forgotten you.”

“Did I make a mistake?” she asked.

Thomas thought for a moment. “No. While I think that we might have made it work, it would have been difficult along the way. You have fulfilled your dream, Anna, which might not have happened from a dorm room at Princeton.” Thomas turned and opened the door. “Be well, Anna Santiago, and give my very best to Amy.”

Anna looked at the door for a minute after Thomas walked out and knew, without a doubt, that she had made a mistake—one that, unlike those of her clients, she could not rectify.

C
HAPTER
28

 

“Y
ou shouldn’t smoke, Eddie.”

“You’re right, Helen,” he said, as he lit a match and held it to the end of the Marlboro hanging out of his mouth. He inhaled deeply and the tobacco caught fire, glowing orange and sending up a stream of gray smoke.

“Don’t give it another thought, Helen. Eddie has a death wish.”

“Oh shut up, Thomas. You are such a fucking killjoy.”

“Language check,” said Helen.

“No, really,” said Thomas, who was so used to hearing Eddie swear that he didn’t hear it anymore, “I figure if you increase your intake to, say, two packs a day, you’ll check out by the time you’re forty.”

“What’s with you today?” asked Eddie. “Is this another stage in the great Santiago depression?”

“You leave her out of it.”

“I wish you’d leave her out of it.” Eddie took a deep drag of his cigarette. “You’ve been a pain in the ass for three weeks now. It’s getting old, Thomas. She’s just a girl.”

“No, she’s not, Eddie. She’s a beautiful woman who knows what she wants in life and is willing to work for it, unlike all the nitwits on the duck pond wall. What are their ambitions, other than finding a guy to buy the beer?”

“Your previous obsession, Catherine, is in college. I’d call that ambitious.”

“She was hardly an obsession. And she’s hardly ambitious,” said Thomas, “unless you count rich-husband hunting as a life goal.”

“Okay,” said Helen, who was accustomed to their bickering, “let’s talk about something else.”

“What time is it, Helen?” asked Eddie. He never wore a watch in the summer, telling everyone how free he felt without one. Thomas told Helen he suspected it was because Eddie didn’t want a tan line from the strap on his wrist.

Helen looked at her watch. “Almost four.”

“Let’s walk down to the bridge,” said Thomas.

The three lifted themselves off the sandy bank next to the train tracks. Helen ran down the hill ahead of her escorts, stopping when her feet hit the gravel that surrounded and supported the rails. She looked down the tracks to the signal tower. The lights had not changed. “Still green and yellow,” she called. “Nothing’s coming.”

She stepped up onto the closest rail and held her arms out for balance. Foot in front of foot, she moved slowly along the track, moving her arms up and down like a large bird preparing for flight. Six, seven, eight steps she took before she had to put her right foot down onto a wood tie. She stepped back up and again began her imaginary tightrope walk. She pictured the circus crowd below her, awestruck by her talent. With every breath she took, they took two. Faster and faster their hearts beat, while Helen moved ever so cautiously along the wire. Being a world-class performer, Helen never worked with a net. Below her, some one hundred feet, stood the enormous elephants dressed in their colorful, ethnic circus regalia. Even they watched as she moved closer and closer to the platform at the end of the wire. Just twenty feet away, Helen focused keenly on her destination. Perspiration dotted her forehead, threatening to drip down into her eyes, but she ignored it. Wiping her brow at this stage would be costly. A fan shouted up from the darkness,
Don’t look down, Helen!
But she did, and then she fell. “Rats!” she said, abandoning the rail for the stability of the wide ties.

Eddie and Thomas, well ahead of her now, sat on the edge of the little bridge that spanned the creek. Their feet dangling down over the water, they reached back for rocks from the track bedding behind them and dropped them, one at a time, into the water below. Helen ran down the middle of the tracks until she reached them. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to hit that can down there,” said Eddie. “See it?”

“Yeah,” said Helen, peering over the edge. “Let me try.”

The tide was on its way out, so the creek water rushed under the narrow railroad bridge like floodwater toward a storm drain. Helen grabbed a handful of rocks and then sat down beside Thomas. She closed her left eye for what she called laser focus and aimed the rock at the can. She let the rock drop, dead-on she thought, but the rock hit the water and was carried three feet from the can. She took another rock from the small pile next to her and then hesitated. “You hear something?”

“Lawnmower,” said Thomas.

Helen waited. The low rumbling sound increased. “You sure?” said Helen, looking down the tracks.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “We’ve been paranoid for five minutes about that stupid lawnmower.” Once he was reminded that he was in her presence, he did his best to curtail his bad language. It was a habit he knew he could correct, but
fucking
had become one of his favorite words. It was more descriptive than most people thought.

Helen concentrated again on the can in the water. She aimed, but missed, missed, missed, and missed. “This game stinks,” she announced, getting up.

“Well, it’s either the game or it’s you,” said Eddie, teasing her.

“Definitely the game,” said Thomas, standing. “Let’s walk back.”

Back at the sandy bank, they sat and waited. Thomas, who had filled his pockets with gravel along the way, threw the rocks, one by one, back down at the rails. His object, as always, was to hit the top of a rail. Most of the time he missed, even though he had been one of the best players, had the best arm, on his high school baseball team.

“Why can’t you hit those rails?” asked Eddie. “You never hit the damn rail.”

“It’s not easy,” said Thomas, throwing another rock.

“Yeah,” said Eddie, “so you’ve said, varsity athlete.”

“I’ve seen him play tons of times, Eddie. He is really good,” said Helen, defending her brother.

“Then hit the rail,” said Eddie to Thomas. He threw another rock and missed. “Give me one of those rocks.” Eddie threw it and missed. He threw another one and missed. Thomas threw another one and missed. Helen, wanting to join the game, held up her hand like a classroom teacher so the boys would hold their fire. Then she ran down the bank for a handful of gravel. Shallow pockets filled, she ran back up the bank and then again sat down between Thomas and Eddie. She emptied her shorts, laying the pile of rocks down beside her, just as she had done at the bridge. She picked up a rock, closed her eyes, and threw it in the direction of the tracks.
Ping!
“You,” said Eddie, lighting another cigarette, “are the luckiest girl on earth.”

It was Saturday afternoon. Thomas had driven the bakery run that morning and Eddie, who was a bank teller for the summer, didn’t work on Saturdays. They had talked about playing golf, but decided against it when Eddie pointed out how crowded the course would be. They were both tired and considering a nap on the beach when Helen happened upon them on the duck pond wall and suggested they all go to the tracks. Sitting in the baking sun near the tracks was not one of Thomas’s go-to pastimes, but he knew their mother forbade Helen to go without an escort. So when he had time, and after he told Helen he had better things to do than watch the trains go by, he usually took her. Helen got the feeling that, once there, he actually liked it. And if Eddie wasn’t working, he usually tagged along. She knew he liked going to the tracks because he’d told her if he stayed home, his mother would find half a dozen cottage projects to keep him busy. And he hated being busy, he told Helen, unless he was getting paid for it. Away from his mother’s to-do list, Eddie enjoyed sitting, sometimes lying, on the bank leading down to the tracks and smoking cigarettes with his eyes closed to the sun’s brightness. He often wore jeans and a white T-shirt in his effort to look like James Dean, which Helen, after Eddie explained who James Dean was, thought was almost as cool as Eddie did.

Any cottage to-do list grows faster than it shrinks, so Thomas, especially as the only son, was under the same pressure as Eddie. Even though John Thompson liked to putter around the place, he was busy at his practice five days out of seven. During the week, Claire was insistent that Thomas help when she wanted a screen replaced, a window painted, or any other number of what she called hardware-store jobs done. While she often made Charlotte run into town for a few items at the grocery store, Claire solicited general cottage errands and help from Thomas, who wouldn’t, each time she made a request, give her a ten-minute argument about child labor. In reality, Charlotte labored very little. She worked only when she needed the money, which wasn’t often since she managed to talk one of the besotted boys on the beach into paying for everything she desired. Still, John Thompson insisted Charlotte do something other than lie on the beach all summer, so she worked as a waitress two or three nights a week and once in a while during the day. Charlotte told her sisters that she had made it quite clear to the owner of the restaurant that her social life came first. For a reason known only to him, the guy hired her anyway and told her he’d call her when he needed the help. All the other waitresses had six or seven shifts per week, while she had just three, Charlotte boasted. Pammy told Helen that Charlotte must have flirted with the owner. She would flirt with anyone, even old men like their dad, to get what she wanted. The only thing that Charlotte and Pammy agreed upon that summer—at all, actually—was that going to the train tracks was for numbskulls.

Antsy, Thomas walked back down the tracks to check the signal tower lights. “Red and green!” he called.

“Really?” said Helen, running down to him.

“What’s that mean again?” shouted Eddie from the bank.

“I think one’s coming,” said Helen.

“Now we’re in business,” said Thomas. He took some pennies out of his back pocket and gave a few to Helen. They bent down and laid them on the tracks so the train would flatten them. Helen had a bunch of squished coins back at the house in a box on her bureau. Thomas kept one in his pants pocket, mixed in with his other change, for good luck. Helen laid her pennies in a straight line, about two inches apart. Thomas lined his up in pairs. When Helen was done, she looked down the track, one way and then the other. She looked up at the signal tower where the lights still shone green and red. Thomas was laying more pennies on the other tracks, in case the train was traveling west to east instead of east to west.

“Hurry, Thomas,” said Helen, scrambling up the bank.

“There’s plenty of time,” said Thomas, looking up from his task. “I don’t hear anything yet.” Just as he spoke, he did hear something: a low rumble. He ignored it, telling himself he had several minutes. The signal lights changed well in advance of the train’s actual arrival. To be sure, Thomas looked down the tracks and saw nothing. To double-check, he bent down and put his ear to the track.

“I hear something, Thomas!” Helen shouted from the bank. “Leave the rest of the pennies for another time.”

“I’ve got time,” said Thomas, even though his gut told him otherwise.

“Don’t fuck around!” Eddie shouted. “The train’s coming!”

Thomas looked down the tracks again and saw it. About a mile away, it moved along the track quietly and quickly, pulled by its powerful, indestructible-looking engine. The distinctive pinging sound that reverberated from the tracks as the train approached bounced into the air. Helen and Eddie screamed at Thomas to move, but he wasn’t listening. He wondered if Anna would be screaming if she were on the bank. He could see her, sitting at her desk at Hudson and Lambert. She was smiling, talking to someone. She was dressed in the light green linen suit he loved, and her dark hair hung softly around her face, falling on her shoulders. He wanted to touch her. He reached out his hands, but he couldn’t move.

Something hit him in the chest and he flew backward, up off the track and down to the ground. The train, twenty feet from him, sped past. Something touched his hand, and Thomas rolled away from it. Bewildered, he looked behind him and saw his friend, lying flat on his stomach next to him. Thomas realized he hadn’t been hit by the train; he had been shoved out of its path by Eddie, who was lying next to him, saturated with sweat and covered in sandy dirt. “Are you okay?” Thomas asked him, pushing himself up to a sitting position.

“I think so,” said Eddie, not moving. His chin was bleeding.

Thomas stood and then reached out a hand to his friend. Eddie took it, and Thomas pulled him up off the ground. Eddie brushed the dirt from his white shirt, but they both could tell its chances of remaining white after the first and second washing, with bleach even, were close to nothing. Helen ran across the tracks to Thomas. She had tears in her eyes. She jumped up onto his waist and threw her arms around his neck. “Thomas, you scared me,” she said. “What were you doing?”

“I don’t know,” said Thomas, hugging her. “I’m sorry.” Thomas looked at Eddie. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m quite sure you just saved my life.”

“Eddie, you’re bleeding,” said Helen.

Eddie touched his chin with the back of his hand and then, for a moment, studied the blood on his skin. He looked at Helen. “Just a scratch, I think.”

“Let’s go home,” said Helen.

While Helen often shared her adventures at the track at the dinner table, what happened that day became an instant secret. When Claire asked them upon their return about their excursion to the end of the street, Helen and Thomas locked eyes, briefly, before Helen said, “Nothing much.” Helen didn’t understand what had happened, what had made her sensible, cautious older brother behave in such an erratic manner, but she never asked him. She did wonder, however, if it had something to do, because everything that summer had something to do, with the woman who broke his heart.