Moonlight on Butternut Lake (32 page)

W
ell, I'll be damned,” Reid said, squinting at the far shore of the lake. He was leaning on his crutches at the living room window, watching a sunset that even by Butternut Lake standards was spectacular. But it wasn't the sun, an enormous orange globe hovering above the horizon, or the sky, awash in pinks and golds and reds, that had caught Reid's attention. It was a birch tree across the lake whose upper leaves were already splashed with gold. There was always one tree like this. One tree that began to turn before all the others. It was almost as if it had been put there, Reid thought, to remind the residents of the lake how truly short, and truly ephemeral, the rest of summer would be.

“Reid, if it's all right with you, I'll be leaving now,” Lonnie said, from the doorway to the living room.

“Oh, of course,” Reid said, turning to her.

She came over to the window then, and stood, for a moment, watching the sunset with him. “Did she, did she say what time she was getting here?” she asked.

“She said she'd be here about”—he glanced at his watch—“fifteen minutes ago. She probably ran into some traffic. I'm sure
she would have called if she was going to be much later than this,” he added.

“Of course,” Lonnie said. “But when you spoke to her, how did she sound?”

“She sounded tired, but otherwise all right.”

Lonnie nodded, relieved. “Well, she'll have plenty of rest once she gets back here, and plenty of good food, too. I've been cooking all day.”

Reid smiled. In Lonnie's opinion, there were very few problems in the world that couldn't be solved by a home-cooked meal.

“Well, I'll be heading home now,” she said. “Do you want me to turn the lights on in here before I go?” The living room was filling with a faint pink light, its corners retreating into shadows.

“No, it's fine,” Reid said. “And Lonnie?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For everything you've done this summer.”

“Oh, no need to thank me,” she said, pleased, but at the same time a little flustered, too.

“I'll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then she was gone, leaving Reid alone to watch the sun sink a little farther beneath the horizon and to think back over the last week. The morning after Brandon's death, he woke up alone. Mila, who'd spent most of the night crying in his arms, was already gone. He cursed himself for falling asleep, then got out of bed and dressed hurriedly. When he came into the kitchen, Lonnie was scrambling eggs at the stove, and Mila was sipping coffee at the kitchen table. And he knew, from the subdued atmosphere in the room, that Mila had already given Lonnie a rough outline of what had happened the night before.

Reid declined Lonnie's offer of breakfast, then sat down at the table with Mila. When he looked up again, Lonnie had disappeared. That was when Mila—pale and puffy eyed but otherwise calm—had told him that Allie had come over earlier and offered to drive her to Ely and then Duluth that morning. She needed to give a statement to the police in Ely, and, as Brandon's next of kin—he was, not surprisingly, estranged from his parents—she needed to identify his body at the Duluth coroner's office and then arrange to have a funeral home transport the body back to Minneapolis. Reid was shocked. It had never occurred to him she would feel any responsibility for Brandon now, but on this point she was adamant. She was equally adamant about renting a car in Duluth afterward and driving back down to the city that night. There, she would make arrangements for Brandon's burial, pack up their former apartment, and visit her friend, Ms. Thompson, in the hospital.

Reid had suggested he come with her to do all of this. They could take the van, he'd pointed out, and once they'd gotten to the city they could stay at his condominium. But Mila had politely refused his offer. This was something she needed to do alone, she explained. And Reid had known, from the set of her jaw, that it was useless to argue with her. Still, he'd been relieved when she'd promised to come back to the cabin as soon as possible. In a week, she hoped, or maybe less. So Reid had said good-bye to her and watched Allie's car pull out of the driveway, and then he'd gone back inside a cabin that, even with Lonnie's cheerful presence in it, felt utterly empty.

The next seven days of his life had crawled by. And the nights? The nights were longer than the days, each one of them its own separate eternity. Thanks to Mila and Dr. Immerman, he'd been sleeping again recently, but with Mila gone, his insomnia returned
with a vengeance. He tried everything to fill the sleepless hours. Reading, watching television, playing solitaire on his iPad. But nothing he did made the time go by any faster or made the cabin feel any less deserted. How had he ever lived alone all these years? he wondered. But that wasn't the real question. The real question was, how had he ever lived without Mila?

Missing someone was new to Reid. So, it turned out, was worrying about someone. But he worried about Mila. He worried about her all week. He worried about her being alone. He worried about her being lonely. He worried about whether she was eating enough, or sleeping enough. And he worried about something happening to her, worried about her becoming ill or, God forbid, getting in a car accident.

When he wasn't worrying about her, he was wishing he could be with her. Wishing he could help make her life at least a little easier right now. But as it was, at odd moments of the day or night, he'd imagine her alone in her old apartment, packing away the contents of an unhappy marriage into cardboard boxes, and he'd feel a rush of pity for her. Or he'd picture her meeting with a funeral director, and uncomplainingly choosing a coffin for a man who had very nearly ruined her life, and he'd feel a surge of anger at the unfairness of it all.

“Reid?” He started as Mila's voice called to him from the front door. He'd been so deep in thought, he hadn't heard her drive up to the cabin or let herself into the kitchen.

“I'm in the living room,” he called, turning on his crutches. He saw her silhouette in the doorway.

“Why are you in the dark?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, surprised to see that the last of the day's light had already drained from the room. The sun had set, leaving only a blush of pink on the horizon, and a pale moon was
etched above it. He started to come to her, but she was already coming to him, switching on lamps as she did so. He stopped and watched her. She was wearing a very pretty cotton print dress that he didn't recognize, and her hair was pulled up in a loose twist that managed to look both casual and elegant at the same time. As she came closer to him, he saw, too, that she looked thinner than she had when she'd left, and paler too, and that her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. For all that, though, she looked lovely to him. Lovelier than he ever remembered her looking before.

“You're here,” he said, and he reached for her as best he could on his crutches.

“I'm here,” she agreed, with a tired smile, and as he drew her into his arms and kissed her there was a shyness about her that disarmed him slightly. Still, he was savoring the nearness of her, when he asked, “How was it?”

“It's . . . it's over,” she said, and there was something about the way she said it that told him she didn't want to talk about it anymore now. “I'm sorry I'm late,” she added, “but I decided to make a last-minute stop.”

“Where?” he asked, brushing a strand of hair off her face.

“Well, on the drive up I realized I was still, technically, your home health aide. So I stopped in at the boatyard and told your brother that I was resigning.”

He smiled. “How'd he take it?”

“Pretty well,” she said, stepping closer and nuzzling his neck with her lips. “He took it pretty well. What about you, Reid? How've you been?” she asked.

“Um, okay,” Reid said, and her lips on his neck felt so good that he wondered, momentarily, if the dress she was wearing had buttons on it or a zipper. But there was something he needed to
do now, before . . . well, before he answered the button/zipper question.

“I've actually been thinking, a lot,” he said, and Mila, sensing his change of direction, stopped kissing his neck and took a step back from him.

“What have you been thinking about?”

“About you. About
us,
actually. About our future, and about where we go from here.”

The corners of her mouth lifted in amusement. “You've never been one for small talk, have you, Reid?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. Is that a problem?”

“Not even a little bit of one,” she said, her eyes gentle.

“Good. Because, as I said, I've been thinking, and while I don't really know how to say this the right way, the
romantic
way, I mean, I'm going to say it anyway. I want you in my life, Mila. I
need
you in my life. And I think you need me in your life, too. Or at least I hope you do.” He stopped, unsure of how to continue.

“Go on,” she said encouragingly.

“So . . . I want you to come back to Minneapolis with me,” he said. “God knows, I've loved being here with you this summer. In this cabin. On this lake. It was like being in our own little world. And part of me wants us to stay here like this, forever, but part of me knows we can't. I mean, for starters, my brother and his family need their house back. There isn't even enough room for Wyatt's Legos in the cabin they're staying in, let alone enough room for the four of them. But there's something else, too. We need to start the rest of our lives. And we can't do it here. Not all of it. I need to get back to work, and for the first time in a long time, I actually
want
to get back to work. And not just
work
work, either, as in work for my company. But other work, too. You know, physical therapy, and the other kind of therapy, if I
still need it. And you're going to be applying to nursing school, aren't you?”

She nodded but didn't say anything. He pressed on. “Anyway, what I thought was, if we're both moving back to Minneapolis, why don't we do it together. Live together, I mean. I have a condominium there, as you know. It's not much to look at, really. The building it's in is nice. It has a gym in it, and a pool. But the condo itself . . .” He shrugged. “It's a little . . . impersonal, I guess. There's not much in it. Just some furniture that I rent. I never took the time to decorate it. I didn't see the point, to be honest. But we can decorate it now, if you like. Buy some house plants, or pillows for the couch or whatever it is people do . . .” He trailed off. Interior design was well outside his area of expertise. “Then again,” he said, “if you really hate my condo, and you might, we can buy something else. A house even, if you think that would make you happy. Something we could both call home.” He stopped.
Home.
Until recently, home was not a concept he had ever associated with himself.

He waited now for Mila to say something about the two of them living together, or buying a house together, but when she did say something, it wasn't about either of those things.

“You rent your furniture?” she asked, perplexed.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “It just seemed simpler somehow. But we don't have to
keep
renting it. We could buy it. Not that same furniture, of course, because it's all kind of beige and corporate looking. But we could buy different furniture. I'm getting off track, though.” He fought back an unfamiliar nervousness over what he was going to say next. “And, uh, another thing. If you don't want us to live together—
just
live together—if you want us to do
more
than that, we could get married. It's not something I ever thought I'd do. Not before I met you, anyway. But if it's
important to you, Mila, we'll do it. We'll do it right away, if you want us to.”

And then, realizing how his words must have sounded to her, he stopped abruptly. Had he actually just proposed to her by saying, among other things,
It's not something I thought I'd ever do?
Christ, what was wrong with him? He'd had a week to work on that.
A week.
And that was the best he could do? He studied her expression now, looking for some clue as to how she felt about what he'd said, and he saw her face had colored slightly, probably with embarrassment, though maybe with disappointment.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, quickly. “That wasn't a great proposal. I'm sorry. I guess I should have planned it better. You know, done something with rose petals. Made a trail out of them, or scattered them around somewhere, or whatever it is people do with them.”

Mila laughed, surprising him. “I don't know what people do with rose petals, Reid. But I don't need them. I need
you,
” she said, stepping closer to him. “I love you.” Reid leaned down and kissed her then, a long, lingering kiss on the lips, and he felt the rest of what he needed to say to her slipping away. But he couldn't let it, he decided. It was too important.

“Mila, one more thing, all right?” he said, pulling away from her. “I know how much you want to be a nurse. And I want you to know that if that's your dream, it's my dream, too. If there's anything I can do—
anything
—to help you realize it, I'll do it. The admissions process, the studying, anything I can help you with, I will. I won't make you go it alone. I mean, obviously, to a point, you'll have to, but I'll still be there with you, from beginning to end. Every step of the way.”

He stopped. There, he'd said it. All of it. Everything he'd been thinking about all week. It was out of his hands. Still, when he tried now to read her expression, he couldn't. She was doing
something with her hair, he saw, loosening it from the knot it was in and then shaking it out so that it came tumbling down to her shoulders. It had gotten longer this summer, and lighter, too, and it's red and gold highlights shone in the lamplight.