Lake People (13 page)

“Reach into that glove box,” he told her, and quickly pointed his chin toward it. It was a motion he frequently made. To Alice it said that under Mike Shaw’s sharp instructions, life would be right. She did as she was told, feeling around for a way to open the box, but before she figured it out he reached over and opened it himself. There was a gun in there, she saw that, though she said nothing. Also a pouch of tobacco, and this he removed. In it were a few cigarettes he had already rolled. “Light this for me,” he said. She did, her first drag ever. The paper end ripped a little and a string of tobacco stuck to her wet lips. But she didn’t cough. Alice knew enough not to cough. She handed him the cigarette. He smoked, and after a few puffs held it out between the seats for her to take again. She pretended that she had taken a cigarette a thousand times before. Mike Shaw breathed loudly and let his head tip back against the seat.

When the trees gave way it was to the lake. Here, at the end of the dirt road, was also the store. Though all the lights of the place were off, he pulled the car into the small lot, cut the engine, and left his headlights on. These lights created a tunnel of barren ice, and at the very far end of the tunnel she could see the dark edge of Bear Island. He must have known, she would realize later. June, too. They must have known the store would be closed.

Mike Shaw reached down and pulled a lever, and in a rush his seat rolled back. With a loud breath he stretched his legs out, patted
his thighs. He smoked his cigarette lightly, not like he needed it but like it offered him some small pleasure.

“You know how hard it is yet?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re smart for your age,” he told her. “For any age I suppose.” The cold air that came into the car felt good, fresh. As did sitting there, talking with Mike Shaw, who had chosen her. When a truck drove by she tensed, but Mike did not. He only switched the lights off and unrolled his window all the way. It was teenagers in the truck, and they slowed down to throw beer cans out the window and hoot. To this Mike Shaw opened his car door, dropped his cigarette, and stepped on it. Then from the ground he picked up one of the crushed beer cans the boys had thrown and like a rock skipped it toward the lake. When he closed the door of the car again, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a flask, handed it to Alice. It was nearly full.

“When you get married,” he said. “Or maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’ll use that brain of yours and understand what’s right for a man and what isn’t.”

“I won’t marry,” she said. (She would, of course, more than once, the first in not too long a time. And it would be to a good-enough man, though not a man entirely unlike Mike Shaw. A man who, like Mike Shaw, had more than a decent amount of himself. A man who won races and women, a man who would wander. And she would wonder whether she should have chosen another, chosen a man with softer, much softer hands.)

“Don’t,” Mike Shaw said. Her teeth clenched and in the darkness her legs began to shake with cold. Soon her whole body shook. “It’s all work and doing this and doing that,” he said. “None of it is important. When I used to ski,” he said.

“You still can ski.”

“That’s what I like about you.” He put his hand on her head. A
father may have put his hand there like that. Not her father, but a father. “I used to feel so a part of it all,” he said.

Alice didn’t respond. Which, for Mike Shaw, turned out to be the right thing. In the silence his hand moved down from her head to her shoulder, then across her arm, onto her thigh. She took one long gulp from the flask. By the time his rough-bearded face breathed warm air against her cheek, the alcohol had opened and spread in her stomach. Though she could no longer see the island before her, she kept her vision fixed in that direction. The flicker of a light at its tip, for a moment she thought she saw that, though it may have been a trick of the eye. What happened happened quickly. In too quick a time to eat dinner, do math homework. But had it been a ski race, and had Alice followed behind another skier, crossing the finish line after him, with the time between the skiers the same as the time it took what happened to happen, the winner would have taken first place by a considerable amount. This she knew. Of course she had been a virgin. Mike Shaw started the car and they returned to that tall house in the road.

That night, her father did not say goodnight to Mike Shaw. He simply opened the truck door for his daughter and closed it once she’d climbed in. “Buckle up,” he told her, his voice weak and his breath a fog across the cold truck. As he drove he reached his hand in her direction, let it hover above her leg for one moment. Heat blew hard against their faces and sent the quick and sweet smell of him circling around. They never went to see Mike Shaw again.

But they did take the long way home. Her father drove slowly, and as they passed alongside the lake he unrolled the window. Alice imagined floating out that window, landing upon the frozen
water and being taken in as one of the lake people. At the pier he stopped and turned the truck off. Her coat was cinched tight and her arms hung awkwardly over her lap. She looked like a child just in from the snow.

“There,” her father said quietly, and pointed out to the island. The lake was illuminated, a radiant white, everything crisp and immovable. “Eleonora’s lantern. Do you see it?”

The wind picked up and howled like a loon. Alice looked out toward the tip of the island. Of course she saw nothing, but still she nodded in agreement. Yes, she was saying. Yes, I know that light is there.

THE FIRST TIME
she went to his place there was no staircase—and how would her life have turned out had that staircase never been built? Because funny is what he had been. So funny that she would be knocked right over.

He lived one hundred miles north of the lake, beyond the mountains, in a vast spread of land where even the tourists didn’t go. After she’d met him, it took Alice but one week to show back up in his driveway. There, on his land, at dusk, in the distance the mountains hung like a single stair across the skyline.

“I wanted to see the mountains,” she said, which in a way was true, but the real truth was of course that she had wanted to see
him. He opened his arms and took her in and the motion was certainly one filled with mocking but still there she was in his arms. They stayed up through the night, telling each other stories and lying back on his bed, keeping the time from passing by keeping their eyes open to each other. When the sun burrowed into the room they looked at nearly all they could look at of each other. Later, he took her to the thrift store, bought her some silly, cheap clothing, said, “Look at that, now you don’t even have to go back home.”

Later still he said to her, “See, I got room.”

“Some man thinks you’re a good lay so you just move in with him?” her father asked her when she phoned.

“Yes,” Alice said. She did not go home.

He had a great plume of blond hair and he was tall and so funny. From his bedroom—from his bed, even—she could see the mountains. After they made love he would stand there in the second-story window and pee right out of it. And then one time he pointed to a ledge miles away, up the mountain, and he said, “There, let’s do it there.” The birch trees were aglow and they drove and hiked and made love in that spot he had pointed to, on the hard rock ledge, and certainly she and Josh understood each other in some ancient way.

That first time she’d met Josh, Alice had watched him, eavesdropping. He’d been talking to a friend. That they were talking of some old girlfriend of Josh’s was clear. Their subject was not. “Bad news woman,” Josh had said, and then, “She’s had like five of them.” Miscarriages, Alice had thought suddenly. The word had dropped into her mind like an early leaf turned and fallen. Just as quickly it blew away. When, years later, she recalled that moment, she would have to remind herself that she hadn’t really heard the conversation anyway.

“You don’t love me,” Alice said one morning at breakfast.

“Ah, baby, no.”

“I love you,” she said. She had said it to him before. And in her lifetime she would love again, in a deep, deep way, but never again would it be like this. Here her heart had been wide open. Do what you will, she might have said.

Josh filled his fork with eggs and hash browns and like an airplane he pushed it toward her mouth. Zoom, zoom, open up. She did, and laughed. He paid the check and waited for her in the truck.

They made love in that truck. On the mountain, in the truck, upside down, in the kitchen, in the bathtub.

On that drive home she thought he was angry. She believed this would be it, she had ruined it. It had happened before. “I don’t want a girlfriend,” he would say. “Stay here, be my pal. You’re my bud. Stay, live with me.” That and, “I want to die a lonely old man. I don’t want a girlfriend.” Okay, she would say, every time. How could she say that? It only took a few days, anyway, before he wanted her in his bed again. Each time she agreed. So now, on that drive home, she thought it would be that way. She stayed quiet. She squinted into the thick woods, let her vision shift just enough for a stone wall to appear, a lake, a rising hill of maple like those of Kettleborough. In these moments when he left her she had learned to do that.

But on this day she was wrong. They stopped at the only stoplight in town and something hit her and she turned to find him pelting her with little packets of cream. Back at the restaurant, just for this, he had filled his coat pockets. One of his jokes. For a time in the renovations of the house—it was a daily chore, and still undone—the bathtub had been in the middle of the room. It had a showerhead, and a curtain that enclosed the entire tub,
and Alice had been in there when suddenly a banana flew over the top. Another. And then a potato, a loaf of bread. She had laughed and laughed and the food had not stopped and she had even laughed when the frozen chicken hit her in the head.

Now he pulled into the courthouse and turned the truck off and came around and opened her door and lifted her out, carried her to the steps. It was deep fall, the leaves a fire raging through the valley.

“Whoops,” he said, and dropped her on purpose. Ha, ha. He made a show of picking her back up, and at the top of the steps he dipped her and kissed her and said, “Aw, how romantic,” and they were married.

Among the things that Paul sent his daughter when he heard the news were rubber boots, a rain jacket, and a good rain hat that tied beneath the chin. “Now that you’re a farmer,” he had written. Was it mocking? Alice liked to believe it was not, though she knew that her father was upset and would not ever come visit. In the years since Alice had gone to college, Paul had become angry and stubborn. But it was true—Alice and Josh had planned to farm—chickens, they spoke of, and gardens, and even perhaps a goat. But what did they know? Winter had come but no snow, only so much rain that the ditch along the side of the road had transformed to a dirty river. In it were carried brittle leaves and sticks and once in a while a beer can, an empty bag of chips that a driver had let float out the window.

Josh worked most days, construction here and there, but Alice couldn’t find a job. She took to passing her time sitting close to the woodstove—for there were still great gaps between the logs that formed the walls of the house, which meant that the wind came streaking through like an army of ghosts. Alice read and
cut the crosswords from the paper. They had built a staircase by now, together, during one of their good spells, and she learned to keep a packed suitcase at the base of it, for even now that they were married Josh’s periods of breaking up with her still had not ended. She believed the suitcase helped to put Josh at ease about their marriage.

Her father might not approve, but those gifts he had sent were sensible. Each day Alice put them on, the boots and coat and hat, and went out into the cold, wet world. It was her one grace of the day. Up the road she walked. She dreamed of leaving, of going to Boston and getting a job, taking up an apartment in the city. Though in truth what propelled this dream was the vision of Josh chasing her there. Alice, he would call. How he would tell her he loved her.