Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (38 page)

I took her hand. We stood there like that for a moment, then she looked down, at her father’s hand holding hers, and shook it off. She turned around and walked back up the path, toward
the restrooms, where Caroline and Lisa were just coming out. When she saw her mother, Julia quickened her pace. The last bit she ran. Then she threw herself into Caroline’s arms.

That evening we stopped for the night in Williams, a town along old Route 66. We ate outside, on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. Caroline and I drank margaritas. While we were having appetizers, a cowboy came out onto the patio with a guitar. A few yards from our table he put down a soapbox and climbed onto it. I looked at Julia as the cowboy started in on his first song. Her enchilada was still lying untouched on her plate. She had taken out her earbuds and was looking at the cowboy. In her eyes I saw the same look as the one with which she had viewed the Grand Canyon that afternoon.

The hotel was close to the railroad tracks. I lay awake in the dark and listened to the freight trains that passed every half hour. You could hear them coming from a distance, first the whistle: a wailing sound like the call of an owl, or of an animal lost in the night. The trains were endlessly long. I tried to count the cars, but with every train that passed I forgot to keep counting halfway through. I thought about the Grand Canyon and the singing cowboy. About Julia’s fit of weeping and the look in her eyes, back at the Mexican restaurant.

“Marc?” I felt Caroline’s hand on the back of my neck. “What is it?”

“Are you still awake? You should try to get some sleep.”

Caroline’s hand had reached my face by then; her fingers touched my cheeks. “Marc, what’s wrong?”

I had to clear my throat to make my voice sound normal. “Oh, nothing. I was just lying here listening to the trains. Hear that? Here comes another one …”

Caroline moved up against my back. She placed one arm
under my head and put the other around my chest. “You don’t have to be sad. I mean, of course you can be sad. I’m sad, too. But have you seen that she doesn’t have her iPod in all the time anymore? She’s starting to look around again. Just this evening, in the restaurant. There really is something changing, Marc.”

I don’t believe it for a minute
, I felt like saying. But I didn’t. I lay there for a while, completely quiet, and counted the boxcars. “I think I can probably go back to sleep now,” I said.

In Las Vegas we spent most of the time in the deck chairs beside one of the many pools at the Hotel Tropicana. Caroline and I drank even more margaritas. During happy hour we sometimes ordered as many as four in a row. We threw a few dollar coins into the one-armed bandits. In the evening we strolled the neon-lit streets, past the casinos. We looked at the fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel, as they performed a water ballet to music. By that time the margaritas had worn off; I listened to the pounding in my head and didn’t dare look over at my older daughter. Caroline held Julia’s hand. Lisa cried “Oooh” and “Aaah” at every new flourish of water, and took photos. I bought us all ice cream and Coke at a sidewalk stand, but even the Coke couldn’t make my tongue any less dry.

“Maybe we should do something different,” Caroline said later, in bed. The girls had a room of their own beside ours. I was staring at a poker tournament on TV.

“Oh yeah?” I said. I raised the little can of Budweiser I’d taken from the minibar and emptied it in one swig.

“Something restful,” Caroline said. “Maybe it was a bad idea, taking this trip. Maybe there are just too many new impressions for her, all at the same time.”

I suddenly felt my eyes sting. “Oh, damn it,” I said.

“Marc! Is that the only way you can deal with it, to sit
around knocking them back all day? This is about our daughter. About
her
sorrow. Not about ours.”

“What?” I said, much louder than I’d planned. I wiped the tears from my face. “Listen, who’s knocking them back around here? You haven’t quite been avoiding those margaritas yourself. Even though you can’t hold your liquor at all. Not at all! You should see yourself. And hear yourself! That fake, cheerful tone of yours. Lisa winked at me this afternoon, when you were sitting there in your deck chair giggling again, when you knocked over that whole fucking bowl of popcorn. I mean, Julia doesn’t say anything, but do you think it’s fun for her to have to see her mother sloshed all day long?”

“Me? Me sloshed? Marc, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Julia is old enough by now. She knows damn well that her mother sometimes acts a little giddy when she’s had a few. Why else would she always walk beside me and hold my hand? With you it’s different. You undergo a personality change when you’ve been drinking. She’s really scared of you then.”

I felt the air disappear from my lungs, as though my chest had suddenly imploded. “If she’s scared of me, then it’s because of you!” I climbed off the bed and hurled the empty beer can at the wall. “Because you can’t come up with anything except to play the nice mother. The nice mother who’s oh so understanding of her little girl who’s been raped. You know as well as I do that before last summer she could hardly stand you, you with your constant harping about what time she had to be home. That she always thought I was a lot nicer than you. Jesus Christ, that kind of behavior makes me puke. Sometimes, deep down inside, I think you’re happy to finally be able to play mother hen to your poor, miserable raped daughter. But she’s not a little girl anymore, Caroline, you’re not doing her a
favor by mothering her. All you’re doing is pushing her down deeper into her own mire!”

Someone pounded on the wall. We both covered our mouths with our hands and looked at each other in horror.

“Quiet over there!” we heard Lisa shout. “We can’t sleep!”

During the last week we rented an apartment in Goleta, a seaside suburb of Santa Barbara. We ate crab at the pier. Lisa photographed the huge seagulls that swooped down brazenly onto the wooden tables and made off with the leftovers. We sauntered down the shopping streets. Julia bought herself a blouse. Then she bought a pair of Nikes. Sometimes I would wait outside after she had grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her into yet another boutique.

But every once in a while she laughed, too. More and more often. Real laughter now. At the apartment she spent a long time in front of the mirror, then came to show us her new purchases. “Yeah, does it really look good on me?” she asked. “Isn’t it a little too tight around the shoulders?”

Lisa took pictures of Julia posing on the balcony in one of her new outfits. She raised her leg and rested her heel against one of the low iron railings. She put on her new sunglasses, then slid them up onto her hair like a barrette. Lisa squatted down, the camera glued to her left eye. “Now look into the sun,” she said. “And now look back at me … Right, like that … that look … Just keep looking like that.”

On one of our last days there we went out for Mexican one last time, at a restaurant with a patio dotted with palms and cacti, not far from the beach.

“A margarita?” I asked Caroline.

“I guess one couldn’t hurt,” my wife replied, winking at me.

Later there was a parade down the main street of town. Our daughters elbowed their way through the crowd to get a better look, while we stayed back a bit, on the sidewalk—without losing sight of them for a moment.

“You’re right, it was a bad idea,” I said.

My wife tilted her head to one side and laid it against my shoulder. I felt the warmth of her hair against my cheek.

“It sure was,” she said.

One Sunday, a few weeks after we got home, I looked at the photos Lisa had taken in America. I had transferred the entire contents of the camera to the hard drive of my laptop. Then I clicked through them, from back to front. The most recent photos first, and then further and further back to the start of our trip.

Let me say right now that it was no accident, my going through them in that order. There was something I feared—I didn’t quite dare to admit it to myself—but what I feared were the photos from the beginning of the vacation. Or rather, the photos taken around the time Julia had wept at the Grand Canyon.

I clicked a little more quickly past the pictures of the illuminated casinos on the Strip in Las Vegas. There was one of the singing cowboy on the patio of the Mexican restaurant in Williams. There were pictures of Caroline and me drinking our
margaritas through straws and waving cheerfully at the photographer. In the next picture, Julia stared straight into the lens. On the plate in front of her lay her enchilada, untouched. I forced myself to look my older daughter straight in the eye. I saw what I was afraid to see. But I also saw something else. Before what happened at the summer house, Julia had had a different look in her eye. Uninhibited.
Undamaged
, I corrected myself right away. That was how I viewed the damaged look in my daughter’s eyes, while I tried to think about nothing. I knew I would be lost as soon as I thought about anything.

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips hard against my eyelids. For thirty seconds, maybe longer. Then I opened my eyes again. I looked again. And now I saw something different. It was impossible
not
to see it.

Julia had always been a pretty girl. An uninhibited, pretty girl, that’s right, a girl some grown-up men turned their heads to watch when she walked by. But on the patio of that Mexican restaurant she looked anything but uninhibited. It wasn’t even a sad look that I saw in my daughter’s eyes. It was a grave look. Julia was fourteen now. She no longer looked into the camera as a girl, but as a young woman. A young woman with eyes that had seen things. That
knew
things. It made her even prettier. She had changed from a normal, pretty girl into a dazzling beauty.

I clicked further back in time. I saw dry, empty landscapes with cacti. Gas stations and Burger Kings. Endless freight trains. There was a photograph of Caroline, Julia, and me sitting at a wooden picnic table at the viewpoint on the Grand Canyon. It must have been taken just before Julia’s crying jag.
I can’t even see how beautiful it is anymore
—that’s what she’d said. But in her face I already saw the first signs of the change
that had become definitive by the time of the patio in Williams. Even further back, posing in front of the presidential profiles at Mount Rushmore, she had looked at the camera almost searchingly. Really searchingly, as though she were looking for something. Maybe she was looking for herself, it occurred to me now.

The photo series ended with the skyscrapers of Chicago, the view of Lake Michigan from the Sears Tower. At least I thought it did. But there was more. After a photo of a departures screen at Schiphol, zoomed in on our destination (KL 0611–Chicago–11.35–C14), there was suddenly a picture of a flower. Some kind of flower, not one I knew the name of myself, taken from very close up. At the bottom of the screen I saw that this was photograph number sixty-nine. Sixty-eight more to go before the first … I clicked again: a picture of a butterfly on a white wall, and then a portrait of a cow. It was a brown cow, with a thick copper ring through its nose.

I knew it even before I clicked further back. I could tell by the way I was breathing. It was a camera with a memory large enough for more than a thousand pictures. Lisa had taken at least three hundred in America. Plus another sixty-nine during our vacation before that. At the summer house. And apparently not a single photograph in the entire year between the two summer vacations.

A few photos back in time I saw my own face at a breakfast table. The breakfast table at the little hotel in the mountains. My half-open, bloodshot eye on the morning that I had operated on myself in front of the mirror. I hesitated for a moment about clicking further back. These were the pictures I had never wanted to see. Or, to put it more accurately, the pictures whose
existence I had denied
. I had never wanted to look
at them: at normal vacation pictures that would never be normal again because you knew what had happened afterward.
Carefree
vacation pictures in which everything, as they say, is peachy-keen. Your own thirteen-year-old daughter on a green inflatable crocodile in a pool. Your
laughing
daughter—back then, still.

But now everything was different, because of what I’d seen in the pictures taken in America. Now I wanted to see with my own eyes whether it was true: whether one year ago Julia had still been a girl, but now wasn’t anymore. So I kept clicking back. I saw Julia sharing a deck chair with Alex, each of them with one white earbud. I saw Ralph chopping the fish into pieces. Ralph and Alex and Thomas at the Ping-Pong table. Julia and Alex up to their waists in the sea at one of the remote beaches, Julia waving at the camera, Alex with his arm around her. Caroline lying on her stomach, asleep on a beach blanket, Judith posing with a tray full of glasses and a pitcher of red lemonade. I saw myself as well, down on my knees, digging a trench in the sand; I wasn’t even looking at the photographer, that’s how absorbed I was in my work. Then came the pictures of the hosing-down at the pool: the afternoon of the Miss Wet T-shirt contest. I spent a bit more time looking at a picture of Julia on the diving board. She had adopted the pose of the consummate fashion model, looking into the lens with eyes closed to slits while the water from the garden hose spattered against her stomach.
Consummate
was indeed the right word for it. Professional. But it was a make-believe professionalism. One year ago she only did a very good imitation of the models in magazines. Now, one year later, she “did” nothing at all. Nothing extra.