Summerlong (27 page)

She shivers some more, wishes she could climb inside the stove and find heat. Now she needs to pee—for fuck’s sake—and she walks in the almost pitch darkness to the small bathroom, sits down on the freezing toilet and shivers some more and pisses. She doesn’t flush. Her underwear is already wet, and now feels cold as she pulls it back onto herself. Enough, she thinks, goes back and has the last of the wine, spinning now, a bit; a kind of throbbing heartburn beneath her breasts, she goes into his room. There had been a lot of peppers in the chili. Too many?

It is even darker in the bedroom. She can see vaguely the edge of the bed, but the curtains on the bedroom window are drawn and so what can she do? She cannot even imagine what she should do now. She goes back to the table, picks up the plate with the candle, and stands there in the kitchen for a moment. Breathing deeply, she inhales some of the candle’s heat, its vaguely buttery wax, and she goes back to the bedroom.

Inching closer to the bed, she sees his bare feet, his bare legs, and sees that they are intertwined with another pair of feet, another pair of legs. She doesn’t have to see their hips or their chests pressed
together or ABC’s wild hair next to Charlie’s sleeping face. She has seen enough to know she is a fool.

In Charlie’s cabin, ABC wakes from a dream of Philly, a dream of Philly coming from the lake, dressed not in white this time, but in black. She has a dream in which she watches Philly undress, in which Philly stands at the edge of the bed in candlelight and stares at her naked body next to Charlie’s. She, in a half-sleep state, almost feels as if she has seen her there, and when she finally wakes and sits up in bed, it sounds for all the world as if someone has slipped out the cabin door.

Philly.

This is the night.

“Philly?” ABC says in a whisper that seems to break her from her sleep.

This will be her last night on earth, and she is glad that she has spent it with Charlie and that he will remember her that way, making love with him in the dark of the cabin. She hopes his grief over her death may even make him avoid falling in love with Claire. Claire will go back to Don. ABC is also glad that she had, before this, told Don that she loved him, because in a way, she does. She loves all of these people for what they have led her to and now it is time to go to it.

Claire does not see him there on the dark beach, but Don sees her, hears her first, hears a strange whimper and the slap of the cabin’s screen door, sees her in the darkness, pulling on her boots and her jeans and a sweater over her head, dressing herself as she leaves Charlie’s cabin.

Now he watches her nearly trip down the steps, watches her stumble back behind the cabin and into the shadows, into which
he cannot see from the beach. He watches that darkness, hears, or thinks he hears, faintly, the smack of her Ugg boots on the crunchy gravel beneath her feet. He watches for a while longer, until he sees one of the lights come on in the lodge, sees her walking through the living room and sees her finally in the kitchen of the lodge, drinking a glass of water. And then the lights go off, and he wonders where she is sitting, there in the dark, drinking, staring off at the water, or is she looking out at the woods, the hill behind the cabin, at him?

Don bundles himself in his blanket and walks along the rocky path in the dark, the one along the Little Marais River, where he saw the bear. He is going back to face it. He wants to see it again, alone. He will charge at the cubs, and let the bear take him.

Claire sits in the darkness of the lodge drinking wine. She is still aroused from her planned but failed seduction of Charlie, and she wonders, really, why she had felt compelled to go to him. She had convinced herself, after the night of the heat wave party, up in the bedroom, up against the window, that she had gone over a precipice. That she could never right her old life—she had erased it. But there comes to her in that brisk northern air a feeling of smallness, of foolishness. Staring out at the big waters, the sky of meteors, the moon, the shimmering shadows of trees, the glimmer of each wave, she understands how insignificant her actions really are, how all of it, all of this seemingly urgently significant summer is small. Life is big. What she and Charlie do or don’t do matters to nobody but Don. He would think all of this is important, all of this is an irreversible course of events—the frailty of marriage, the foreclosed home, the regret—that he could never let go. She knows that this is what Don will be thinking. She knows he will believe that his life has shifted into some other life. And that perhaps he has wasted some of his life too.

But one can’t waste a life! One can only live it a day at a time. Claire knows that now.

She goes to the room where Don sleeps and finds the bed empty.

She pictures Don, suddenly, crying at the top of the ridge, where the waterfall begins. She feels as if she can almost hear it. And then, in her mind, she hears Don saying something he had said to her so many years ago, one night, their last spring in college, after they’d sneaked into one of the academic buildings and fucked in a book-lined alcove across from Gill Gulliver’s office—she hears Don saying, as he did that night, sweaty and crumpled on top of her
: If you ever love another man, I think I’d kill myself
.

Now, she knows that he knows. In her mind’s eye, she pictures Don hurling himself off the cliff and into the waterfall and she gets up from her chair, spilling some wine on Merrick’s sheepskin cushion, and she walks, in her boots, in the dark, toward the slick, rocky ledges that lead to the falls where Don Lowry has gone hoping to find that bear.

Just as ABC is going back up to the guesthouse, walking from Charlie’s cabin across the beach, a meteor streaks across the sky and she swears she sees it splashing into the lake. It’s so startlingly bright that she says, “Fuck. Fuck!”

She’s glad to finally see the meteor because she can take it as a sign. A confirmation of the dream she just had. Anybody would take it that way, she’s sure of it.

It is Philly. Philly has come for her and Philly is going to lead her out of this world. ABC enters the guesthouse as quietly as she can, but finds Ruth awake in a chair, staring out the window.

“Fireflies,” Ruth says, though ABC sees none of them.

“A meteor shower,” ABC says, and then covers Ruth with a
blanket and kisses her on the forehead. “Good night, Ruth,” she says. “You need your sleep.”

“You feel it too?” Ruth says.

“I feel what?”

“Tonight. It’s tonight,” Ruth says.

“Yes,” ABC says. “Good-bye. Get some sleep.”

They embrace for what feels like a long time and they feel the tears in their eyes are not enough, and they say something like this to each other. At the same time, they say, “These tears are only half of what you mean to me.”

ABC startles, jumps back. How had that happened?

“The spirit world,” Ruth says, “gives us the words we need to leave this world.”

ABC rolls a joint for Ruth, lights it for her, then gets her things and goes back outside to the porch of the guesthouse. A pleasant night, but turning colder. And so many stars, and meteors every few minutes in front of those stars, and the wind picking up enough so she feels that the lake will be rough in the early morning, which is what she wants.

She believes in the morning, once Ruth tells them what has happened, that everyone will understand. How easy it would be right now to go back to bed with Charlie—to crawl beside his naked body, to make love again in the dark cold air. Or to go and find Don, taking comfort in his warmth, feeling his desire, which was a desire, yes, for her flesh, but also for something more, something he seemed to want but that he and she could not name.

She is dressed in her layers. She has, per Ruth’s calculations, taken two sleeping pills and two Advil PMs. She begins to drink a beer. Stars spread out over the sky like scattered bits of glass and the glowing cloud of the Milky Way seems to hover just above the canoe.

It is time for ABC to go into the big water and find Philly.

In her pocket, she has a small baggie of Ruth’s heaviest painkillers, morphine, essentially, which she will take in the boat.
Twenty of the pills, just in case. She has the Xanax too, twenty of those. She has a six-pack of beer and a pint of bourbon that she puts into the canoe with the folded-up blankets, and she sips on these to keep her calm while she waits. It’s not the best way to go, Ruth has said, maybe, but as long as you can fall asleep on that water, by dawn you will be waking up in another realm. The lake will take you. By wind or by water, your soul will enter the lake.

The idea, of course, seems suddenly absurd; though rather than discouraging her, this realization strengthens her resolve. She has no other choice but to do this. She trusts Ruth. Ruth has grown up here, and if ABC looks back on the last year, did it not all seem like fate, like it was all meant to be: coming back to Grinnell, being hired to take care of Ruth, meeting Don, watching Don lose his home, having Ruth offer money to be taken to the lake, the fireflies abundant as ever that summer, and even the comfort she had taken from loving Charlie.

And now, understanding how things are meant to be, she has given herself over to the idea that life will be better elsewhere. She worries that she won’t be able to find Philly right away. She worries she’ll have to journey through the spirit realm alone. At least Philly is out there, somewhere, she thinks. She can search for her if she needs to search for her. Love is worth it. Love is worth all things. To live a life without love is foolish. If Philly could not come back to the world, ABC would never love again.

If one could choose a last evening on earth, she would choose this very one. A meteor in the sky above her seems to confirm her resolve to push herself out into the frigid waters, to get lost there and pass out and eventually fall out and drown. Or maybe she will just have to throw herself into the deep. She will take the painkillers first if that is the case. It will not be a pleasant way to go. She understands all of that. But it is a way to go.

The doubts begin to grow, pushing back the whole idea of it, but then she notices that Ruth has come onto the beach, and suddenly over the lake, in the cold wind, there’s an ecological impossibility:
hundreds and hundreds of fireflies come hatching up out of the waves, floating and blinking up to the moon and the stars and all of that meaningless, feckless heaven.

Don Lowry has seen a meteor brighter than any he has ever seen before, brighter than any of the previous August meteors he has seen in his life. He feels as if he has changed somehow, and as he finds a place among the rocks near the waterfall, he nestles in and waits for the bear. Why he wants to see it again, he cannot say, he can only say that he has not felt so alive in years and if he can see the bear, if only he could see the bear once more—he waits in the dark there, watching the stars. Does he really want to die? Is that it? The thought stays with him for a moment—it is possible, it is possible that he wants to die. He is struck by the oddness of the thought and he shivers with cold and huddles against the rocks and pulls the watch cap lower, so it covers his ears. This dulls the rushing of the waterfall, the sound, perhaps, of oblivion, which is why it is a sound that calls to Don Lowry right then, and calls to all of us, at some time, in our twisted lives, in a dark wood. Oblivion, Don thinks. If you say it’s never called to you, you’re lying.

But even with the rush of the falls, and the watch cap over his ears, he can hear the snapping twigs and the breathing of something not human. The air smells of dead fish and a heavy musk, which comes and goes with the breezes off the distant lake.

ABC drags the canoe to the water’s edge. It is not heavy but its metal is cold and her hands sting. She wrenches her back somewhat, but she’s already taken two of the painkillers and if she has hurt herself at all, in any significant way, she will probably never know.

She has dragged the canoe near the shore, near the fire pit where Don Lowry likes to sit. He is not out there staring at the fire,
which she takes to be a good sign. Of course, he would try and stop her if he knew what she was doing. The fire is all set for lighting—Don has already made the wood stack he needs to light a fire, has stuffed paper and birch bark and scraps of driftwood beneath it, but must have fallen asleep before he’d gone through with it. She takes a lighter from her pocket and lights the kindling. It seems the thing to do. It seems there should be flames. Earth, wind, fire, water.

A signal she will leave behind, a way to summon Philly perhaps, though she can feel Philly as soon as she lights the fire. Philly is already here.

She begins to think of Philly, and she calls to her softly, a singing whisper:
Phillllllly!

ABC stands alongside the canoe and looks out toward the water. She has no life jacket. If she had one, she might decide to wear it and change her mind. She wonders if she will die of hypothermia while swimming or if she will simply drown. They will probably find the boat before they find her. She doesn’t want any of the Lowry children to find her so she tells herself that such a thing is unlikely. Didn’t she hear once that Superior never gives up its dead? Where did she hear that? She may never be found.

It is hard to picture her earthly body gone, and she wonders how it will work. Will she be dressed in white too, like Philly? Where had Philly found the white clothes, since ABC remembers very clearly that when Philly died, when she’d been thrown from her bike by that recklessly careening delivery truck, she was wearing cargo pants and a blue tank top that said
VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS
.

It is a bear, of course, Don knows that much, though he cannot be sure if it is the same bear. He doesn’t know what to do. Move, or stay still, as if asleep.

The air fills with the scent of musk, of dead fish. He might die
here, near the river, and his body, by morning, would float into Superior, would it not? He wonders. His stomach sinks and he tries to swallow hard to keep himself from shaking. The bear is on the bank above him, maybe ten feet away. He can see the bear snuffling the ground, coming toward him.