A
fter dinner Mena tells them she is going for a walk. The kitchen is hot and thick with the smell of eggplant and garlic. If she can get some fresh air before the headache starts, maybe it won’t start at all.
She slips on her flip-flops and leaves Finn and Sam at the table.They haven’t spoken to each other for hours, and she figures they might be forced to if she leaves them alone. She’s not sure what happened in the barn, but Finn’s been pissy all afternoon.
She decides to walk to the small grassy beach that also functions as the boat access area. She used to bring the kids here when they were really small. At home, they were allowed only at the edges of the ocean. Sam was worried about the riptide, the undertow. But the lake was the perfect place to learn how to swim. At the access area it’s shallow for about twenty feet before the drop-off where the bottom of the lake seems to simply fall out. There’s also a secret sandbar Franny and Finn discovered when they no longer needed her or their foam noodles anymore. She hadn’t known it was there until they both disappeared under the water’s surface only to emerge again about a hundred yards out, standing. Franny had waved gleefully back at her, delighted, jumping up and down on the water’s surface. She was ten, and her bathing suit was bright orange with a yellow bow.
The headache is just a tickle right now, like the telltale scratch at the back of the throat when you’re about to come down with a cold. They start like this, but sometimes she is able to will them away. She concentrates on the slap-slapping of her flip-flops on the dirt road leading away from the cabin.
When she hears the sounds of people at the beach, her heart sinks. She had hoped to have it to herself. Still, she’d rather be here than back in the cottage where the air is too thick to breathe.
She walks to the water’s edge and sees a couple with a baby. They have a dog too, a mutt that is jowly and gray. He is paddling in the deep part of the water, his fur slicked back, his face determined as he makes his way from the deep end back to the shore. The woman is sitting on one of the big boulders that make a sort of jetty into the lake. The man is standing in the water, the cuffs of his pants rolled up, holding the fingertips of the baby, lifting her and then lowering her, dipping her toes in and out of the water.They don’t notice Mena as she approaches.
The woman is tiny, pale with long black hair. The man is tall, dark-skinned, and his russet hands envelop the child’s. The woman watches him, and he croons to the little girl. “There you go, Zu-Zu, is it too cold?” The little girl squeals each time her feet touch the surface of the water. When they all turn around and see her, Mena feels like she’s interrupted something.
“Hi,” the woman says, smiling at her.
“Hi,” Mena says, and then, feeling like she has to explain her sudden appearance, she says, “I’m Mena Mason. We’ve just bought the Carson place.” She motions behind her, toward the cottage.
“Effie,”
the woman says, offering Mena her hand. “This is Devin.” She gestures to the man. “And Zu-Zu. It’s her first dip in the lake.”
“Like Zu-Zu in
It’s a Wonderful Life
?” she asks.
“I’m a sucker for Jimmy Stewart,” Effie says. “And it was on the entire time I was in labor. I swear, it’s the longest movie ever made.” The baby looks up at Mena, and her heart quickens. Her skin is the color of caramels, but her eyes are the same bright blue as Effie’s.
“Hi,” Zu-Zu says softly in the sweet, high voice of a toddler.
Mena wades into the water and crouches down so that she is at eye level with her. “Hi, Zu-Zu,” she says, her throat constricting. “Is this your first swim?” She looks up at Devin then. “She’s stunning.”
“Thanks,” he says.
“How old is she? About eighteen months?”
“You’re good!” Effie says.
“Are you here for the summer?” Mena asks.
“No, we live here year-round. The camp with the tree house over there.” She gestures down the road.
“Oh, I remember that place,” Mena says. “Are you Gussy McInnes’s granddaughter?”
Effie nods. “You’ve been to Gormlaith before?”
“It’s been about five years.We used to come here when our kids were little.”
“Oh, how nice. How old are they now?” she asks.
The pounding starts at the back of her head with one hard blow, like someone has hit her with a pipe.
“Seventeen,” she says. “My son, he’ll be seventeen in a few months. A Thanksgiving baby.”
“Wait a minute, are you
Samuel
Mason’s wife?”
Mena nods. This place is so small.
“We heard a rumor that he was coming,” she says. And then, apologizing, “I work at the library. He called about getting a library card.”
“Oh,” Mena says.
“You know, we would love to have him come speak some time,” she says. “I mean, if he does that sort of thing. There’s a book club that meets once a month. I’m sure they’d love to discuss one of his novels.”
“I’ll mention it to him,” Mena says, watching as the baby reaches into the water and picks up a flat gray stone, squealing with delight. She holds the stone out to her mother. “Mum—Mum.”
Effie accepts the stone and examines it in the light as if she were a gemologist. “It’s beautiful, sweetie. I love it. Can I keep it? Can I put it in my pocket?”
She nods. Effie turns to Mena, smiling. “And if you need anything, just let us know.” There doesn’t seem to be any pity in her voice, but Mena wonders how much they know. Because of Sam, because of his books, people seem to know more than they might otherwise. She pictures the book club ladies at the library clucking on and on about that poor, poor Mason family. She imagines awful casseroles starting to arrive at their doorstep.
“Maybe we can have you over for dinner one night,” Effie says. “We don’t have a lot of couple friends here at the lake.”
She tries to imagine herself and Sam having dinner with them. She struggles to picture the table, the food, the conversation. When did simple things like this, the normal interactions of life, become small miracles? How long has it been since she and Sam have had dinner with another couple? She can barely remember the last time they drank too much wine, the last time they laughed too loudly or stayed up too late. “Let’s do that,” she says. “Absolutely.”
“Great! How about Friday night?” Effie says. She has scooped Zu-Zu up now and is wrapping her in a towel, drying off her small bare feet.
“That sounds good. We’ll bring wine.”
Back at the cabin, the headache has retreated. She imagines her migraines like animals that reside in her skull. For tonight anyway, this one has curled up in the recesses. When she closes her eyes, she can almost hear the sound of it sleeping, breathing, waiting.
Finn is sitting outside, the portable phone in one hand, a cigarette in the other. As he sees her approach, he quickly snubs the cigarette out, nods at her, and goes back to his quiet conversation. Inside, the kitchen table has been cleared, the dishes washed. Sam. He’s always been good about this. Her girlfriends used to bitch and complain about how sloppy their husbands were, how they felt like they were always cleaning up after somebody: their kids, their spouses.That all the work they did was so quickly undone. But Sam was thoughtful about this. He mopped the floors, cleaned the grout. Did the laundry.
Suddenly, she is struck with the image of Sam sitting amid a pile of laundry in the living room of the bungalow in San Diego, not long after the babies were born. She remembers watching him for ten or fifteen minutes (he didn’t know she was there) as he folded the twins’ tiny onesies, their jammies, their impossibly small T-shirts (those soft white long-sleeve T-shirts with the straps that snapped to keep them enclosed). When he caught her watching him struggle to fold a pair of miniature blue jeans, he’d looked up at her as if he were just a helpless man, just a stupid know-nothing new daddy, and God, she’d remembered loving him so much it almost hurt.
“What are you reading?” she asks him.
“The new John Irving,” he says, holding the book up for her to see. “Good, but not my favorite.”
She smiles and sits down on the bed next to him.
“Finn talking to Misty?”
Sam nods. “Not sure. But he’s been on and off the phone for about an hour now.”
Mena touches Sam’s hand, scared that he might pull it away. He doesn’t though, and he leans over, kissing her slowly, precisely on the forehead. She closes her eyes when his lips make contact with her skin.
When he pulls away, she looks at him, wanting to ask him a thousand things, but instead she only says, “Are you tired?” Her heart is pounding.
This is their code, the way he used to find out from her whether or not there was the possibility of sex. It started after the kids were born, when she was so exhausted she could barely imagine the effort of taking off her clothes, let alone making any sort of semblance of love to him.
Are you tired?
Sam looks hard at her, his eyes apologetic, even before he says the words. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” she says, disappointment cold and sharp in her chest.
She turns away from him then to pull off her clothes, wonders if he is watching her as she bends over.Wonders if he even considers the contours of her body anymore. Wonders if he even thinks about her breasts, her hips, her thighs.
Then she thinks about Zu-Zu, about that strangely familiar ache she felt as she looked at her small hands. No. She couldn’t possibly want another baby. Not now. It’s too late for that. Her body is just confused, she thinks, wanting to fill a hole that can’t be filled. Like water seeking its own level. That’s all.
“I met a nice couple at the access area. Gussy McInnes’s granddaughter and her husband. They’ve invited us to dinner on Friday,” she says.
Sam has picked up his book again. He peers over the top of it at her as she climbs into bed. “Friday?”
“You have other plans?” she asks. She feels herself getting nasty. Angry. She hates this, but it happens every time he rejects her. “You don’t have to come, but I plan to go.” And then she rolls over, turning her back to him again. She squeezes her eyes shut, willing the migraine to stay huddled in its cavern, to not come out tonight.
I
n the morning, Finn decides to take a walk, asks his mother permission. He’s trying to be nice, considerate.
Obedient.
But still she looks at him in that awful way she has that tells him she doesn’t trust him at all anymore, and that she is disappointed, so very disappointed in every decision he has ever made.
“I’m not going to fucking run, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he says, unable to keep up the farce.
She shakes her head and blushes then, and it makes him feel a little bit sorry for what he’s said, but mostly just sorry for her.
He lets the screen door slam behind him as he stomps out of the cottage. It is overcast out, on the verge of rain. He doesn’t even know where he thought he might walk to. The only road, besides the one back to Quimby, just makes a circle around the lake. So instead, he goes straight to the barn and picks up the basketball his father left behind yesterday.
He had finally gotten a hold of Misty on her cell phone last night. She was at Fashion Valley Mall with a bunch of people, including Sadie Silverman, who has always hated him. He could hear her in the background,
Mist, come on. Let’s go.
“Listen, Finn, now’s not a good time. I’m at the mall; I can barely hear you. These guys are being so obnoxious.”
“Who?” he asked, feeling bilious. Suspicious.
“The same old same olds.You know.”
“Justin?”
“What? I can’t hear you,” and then muffled, “Christ, cut it out!” Laughter.
“I need to give you my number here,” he said.
“Huh?”
“The number at the cottage, at the lake. My cell doesn’t work here.You got a pen?”
He heard her rifling, pictured the big floppy backpack she carries to school, his name etched in ballpoint pen on the small pocket next to the Maroon 5 pin.
“I don’t have one, Finny. Can you call me back later?”
“Fine,” he had said.
But when he tried her later, he kept getting her voice mail. He left three messages, each one progressively more agitated. Finally he just called and hung up. Called and hung up. He could almost hear Sadie’s grating nasal voice, “What is he, some sort of sicko stalker or something?” But he wasn’t a fucking stalker. He was Misty’s fucking boyfriend. At least he used to be.
He dribbles the ball and then chucks it as hard as he can. It rattles against the backboard and comes crashing down again, rolling toward the door. Outside it is starting to rain. He can hear it on the roof of the barn. So much for the fucking walk.
“You’re not very good at that.”
He turns toward the door, startled. There’s a girl standing in the doorway of the barn. Her hair is wet, plastered to her head, and she is holding his basketball.
“Give it,” he says.
She clutches the ball to her chest. “I’ll give it to you if you tell me why you’re so pissed off,” she says.
“Who says I’m pissed off?”
“Well, my mom says that most people throw tantrums for two reasons. Sometimes they’re really pissed off, but most of the time it’s just for attention. Since you thought you were alone out here, I’m betting on the first one.”
The girl is smiling, examining the basketball now. She looks younger than him. Maybe fifteen or so. She’s short and skinny, knobby knees. She’s wearing a wife beater, plaid boxer shorts, and black low-top Converse, no socks.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Finn,” he says.
She walks over to where he’s standing and hands him his ball back. “I’m Alice.”
He takes the ball, dribbles it, sort of half-assed, and is suddenly self-conscious.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name?” she hollers after him.
“What?”
“The girl who just dumped you? What’s her name?”
He stops dribbling and makes an easy shot from the foul line his father painted with fluorescent orange paint on the wooden floor. He catches the ball on its descent and tucks it under his arm.
“You smoke weed?” he asks.
They walk together in the rain through the woods behind the house. He remembers playing in these woods with Franny. Franny had created an entire imaginary world for them there. It’s where they could disappear for hours on end every summer. Their parents never even came looking for them. They built forts and hunted for treasures in the place where people dumped their old appliances. But today when they get to the spot, there’s not much there but a rusted-out car he’s pretty sure was there the last time he came and an old washing machine.
He sits down on a stump and pulls the Baggie and rolling papers out of his pocket. Alice stands next to him, shielding him from the rain that has lessened to a weak drizzle now. He lights the joint, takes a puff, and offers it to her, holding the sweet smoke in his lungs as long as he can bear. He loves the smell of the rain and the pot smoke.
“Where do you live?” he asks her.
“Not far from here.We’re locals. Me and my mom.”
From the way she says this, he knows better than to ask where her dad is.
“My dad’s an asshole. He’s in jail.”
“TMI,” Finn says.
“Huh?” she asks, taking a puff on the joint, coughing.
“Too much information. ”
God, where is this chick from?
“Sorry. My mom says I’m an open book,” she says. She coughs again, covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry.”
“This your first time?” Finn says.
“Open. Book.”
She nods, hands him back the joint, and pops a piece of bubble gum in her mouth.
After a while, they start to get cold. It’s raining harder now, and Finn is hungry. “My mom’s probably making dinner.You want to come over?”
“Nah,” she says. “Maybe next time.”
“Okay.” Finn shrugs, and Alice takes off, running through the rain ahead of him, turning around to wave at him as she runs down the road.