Cameo Lake (8 page)

Eight

I
arrived
at the raft just as Ben did. The distance from the communal-beach was considerably longer than from our own shore front and my arms ached from the additional strokes. I hauled myself up by the ladder as Ben vaulted up without it. We landed nearly face to face on the redwood deck. My new insights into Ben made his sudden appearance on the raft a little startling. I hadn't yet adjusted to either of them, and a shyness woodened my speech until I realized that there was nothing different about Ben except my unwanted awareness of his two secrets.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Ben tossed me the tube of sunblock which I kept on the raft. “So, how's my dance partner?”

“Oh, a little pissed off, but I'm making a recovery.” Without meaning to, I launched into a diatribe against broken promises and how my work never seemed to come first. I loved my kids, but I needed my work. I needed to finish my novel.

Ben sat and nodded enough to keep the fires stoked until I got to my destination, Self-pityville.

I heaved a concluding sigh and smiled. “Sorry to go off on you like that. I'm sure it wasn't the answer you were expecting.”

Ben shook his head with a slight smile. “Actually, I'm relieved. I was beginning to think you were the Cleavers.”

Ben had me laughing at myself and it felt good. I thought of the East Side women and their nasty suggestion. I labeled it “shrewish remarks” and shoved it aside. They didn't know him at all. I recapped the tube of sunblock and handed it back to Ben.

“Hey, Mom!” Tim's red head crested the raft's edge. “What's so funny?” He pulled himself up the ladder and greeted Ben with a modified high five, a routine they had evidently perfected when I wasn't looking.

“Your mom was just telling me you kids are a couple of nuts.”

“Yep. Real nuts.” Tim tapped his head. “Coco Nuts.”

I thought I recognized another routine and wondered how often these two had met.

“Mom, can we have spaghetti tonight?” Lily dripped lake water all over my almost dry suit.

“Sure. Hey, you know you aren't supposed to swim right after eating.”

“We didn't eat. We came out to get you 'cause we made lunch.”

Instantly I was sorry for my crabbing about two such wonderful children.

“Ben, we made tuna, you want to eat too?” Tim faced Ben, his skinny legs turned out slightly at the knees like a yearling Thoroughbred, bony fists stuck in his waist, a posture more challenging rather than inviting.

“I can't today, Timmy boy. I have to go see someone.” Ben stood up, his posture an echo of my son's. “Maybe another day?”

“Just like Dad.”

“Tim.” My warning voice.

“It's okay, Cleo. Believe me, Tim, this isn't like your dad at all.” Ben seemed unoffended by Tim's charge.

“So, Ben, what about dinner?” My words preceded my thinking.

“Only if you're really having spaghetti.”

“Jar sauce.”

“Best kind.” Ben winked at Lily.

Before diving off the raft, Ben offered to bring a salad.

“Great, but nothing complicated,” I said, eyeing my children, who believed salad was simply lettuce with a tomato waved over the top.

“Done.” He went over the side with a slight splash and disappeared under the amber brown water, surfacing halfway to his shore.

Ben's coming to dinner changed the entire color of my day. Instead of doing any number of things I might have, I pulled out the meager cleaning supplies and began cleaning the cabin. If nothing else, the sour-smelling towels were banished and the chipped porcelain sink and toilet were clean. I dry-mopped, conquering for the moment the usual collection of detritus and spiderwebs, endemic to lakeside living.

On the way back from the Big G, I stopped at a farm market and bought a bouquet of summer flowers for the table. I resisted candles, but made sure the kerosene lamps were full. Rain was predicted, and the fragile nature of our electricity certainly warranted such precautions.

Tim and Lily were talked into real clothes, abandoning cut-offs and stained T's for one night in favor of clean T's and real shorts. I determined that they couldn't have overheard, or understood, the vile gossip on the beach. They were too comfortable with Ben. Or maybe they simply had their own opinion. I realized that I, too, had rejected the intent and hoped that Ben himself would eventually tell me the story, set the record straight.

The table set, the spaghetti water on simmer, the brownies for dessert were cooling, and I stood, freshly showered, at the cramped three-drawer chest stuffed with my clothes. It seemed as though I'd brought nothing but shorts, T's, and jeans, one baggy sweatshirt, and my favorite cardigan, worn out at the elbows. I hadn't brought so much as a sundress, never planning on anything more dressy than the movies. Too late to do anything about it, I chose the jeans and the plain mint-green T-shirt, tucked in, adding one of Sean's flannel shirts I'd co-opted to tie around my waist like a teenager. It cooled
down these rainy nights, and eventually I'd need it. I could only see my face in the tiny bedroom mirror. For someone who was supposed to be working, I certainly had a nice tan.

I held my lipstick up to my lips and then stopped. What on earth was I doing? I recapped the tube and dropped it in my dresser drawer. This wasn't a date, for God's sake.

For the first time I allowed myself to feel a nudge of guilty pleasure. I knew that it was nothing more than a neighborly dinner, but I also knew that in Sean's view, this was borderline. It certainly would be if the shoe were on the other foot. Then I thought that maybe there was some little part of me which would enjoy a little innocent revenge. Not for the old hurt, necessarily; I had long ago chosen the revenge of forgiveness for that.

I picked up the lipstick again. If Sean can go to the zoo at midday with what's-her-name, well, this casual invitation was equally innocuous. Besides, it wasn't my invitation, it was the kids' doing. No harm done. A knock at the screen door startled me and I never did put the lipstick on.

In the cabin's kitchen, Ben Turner seemed much taller, and the space suddenly much narrower. He kept moving out of my way as I went from fridge to stove, missing the beat once and making me bump up against him. We were fully dressed, yet the bump of hips somehow seemed more intimate than sitting half-naked, side by side on the raft. In slight embarrassment, I sent him to the living-room side of the little island counter to finish dressing the salad—lettuce, tomato and cucumbers. Little dishes of feta cheese, black olives, and croutons were arrayed beside the bowl.

Once the conversational staples of weather and high prices were used up, we moved easily into books and movies. We played a hilarious game of Mousetrap with the kids before I sent them off to bed. I half-expected Ben to leave then but he patiently waited, clearing away the worst of the kitchen mess while I argued the kids into bed.

“Hey, you're company, you don't have to do that.” I took the dishrag from him.

“I wanted to.” Ben darted past me and opened the screen door. Reaching down, he came back up with a bottle of white wine in a bucket of mostly melted ice. “Can we open this?”

I wondered for a second if I had deliberately forgotten to buy wine for the meal. If I had, it hadn't been conscious.

Ben opened the pinot grigio with a flourish, pouring two equal glasses and setting the bottle back into the bucket. Raising his glass to me, he said, “To a lovely evening, with gratitude.”

I held my own glass in front of me to disguise my pleasure. I know I flushed like a schoolgirl spoken to by the football captain. I refused to let myself analyze the moment, to allow it to take on any other meaning beyond two neighbors well fed on a July evening. “We should have had this with dinner.”

“Wrong color for spaghetti. Besides, it tastes better looking out over the lake.”

“So, tell me, Ben, how long have you lived out on the lake?”

“All my life, in one way or another. My parents owned it, my mother's parents before that.” He poured a second glass of wine into both our glasses.

“I spent my boyhood summers here. We lived in New Jersey, so the mountains of New Hampshire were our idea of heaven. About a dozen years ago I'd had some setbacks and needed to . . .” He seemed to be struggling to find the right euphemism for his action. “I needed a retreat, and Cameo Lake was what came to mind. I used the last of my money to buy the place from my parents and winterize it. I felt as though I was building a nest to get away from the world and supporting my parents at the same time. I've been here almost year-round ever since.”

“You and your wife lived here?”

“Yeah. Even though we kept an apartment in New York, this was home.” Ben rocked gently in the glider beside my stationary chair. He hummed a little, a light, moth-like flutter of sound. I recognized a bar or two from the piano music I would hear every evening from across the lake.

“That's your concerto?”

“Mmmm.” Ben nodded in time with the rocking. “I still haven't found the flute motif. It's still all just the surrounding themes. I'm doing it backwards.”

Ben began to sing the theme on “ta,” and the lovely flying rhythms were colored in for me. His voice was very sweet, and moved easily from bass to tenor, where the imagined cellos and violins would take the theme from one another. His right hand described the pattern in a conductor's graceful arc. He kept singing until the notes, repeated and repeated in ascending thirds, made the skin prickle on my neck and I wasn't surprised to feel a deep emotion which might have been grief or loneliness or joy.

Suddenly I reached out for his arm, a visceral need to touch overriding our limited acquaintance. “Ben, stop.” I realized we were both weeping. I knew that he cried for the woman he'd lost but I didn't know why I was crying, except that his music seemed profoundly sad.

Though his eyes glistened in the light from the kitchen window, Ben made no move to wipe them dry. He gulped the last of the wine in his glass.

“I wish I could write words as beautifully as you write music.”

Ben waved a dismissive hand. “The fact is, I'll never finish it. No one will ever hear it, and it really doesn't matter. She'll never play it.”

“But someone will.”

He did move to wipe his eyes then and set his glass down on the floor beside the glider. “Thanks for dinner, Cleo. I owe you.” Ben left quickly, and I was left with the strange sense of having almost pierced his veneer.

Nine

E
arly-morning rumbles turned into downpours by eleven. The garbage was rank in the bin and the kids were squabbling over who was responsible for the milk I had asked to be wiped up.

“Just wipe the damn milk and stop bickering!”

It was the second day of rain in a row and the cabin was growing smaller with each passing hour. I left Lily and Tim still fighting about fairness and stood on the porch, staring hard at the liquid sky. With the kids effectively sentenced to house arrest by the rain, I had gotten nothing of merit done on my manuscript. I stood and stared out over the gray sky, gray water, gray world, and felt a familiar twinge of resentment bloom in my stomach. Sean should have come back for the kids. He had promised me my solitude to finish my work. Why was his work always more important than mine? My midlist-sized income had provided breathing space when the business took a downturn. We had money set aside for both kids' educations; we weren't rich, but we were comfortable enough to afford a nice vacation in the winter. Didn't that count for anything?

Sometimes I felt as though I was married to an Old World patriarch. Despite the trappings and opinions of a modern man, Sean could be amazingly retro in his attitude toward our roles in the marriage. The children were my bailiwick, he was the breadwinner. Not
to say he didn't take a part in their upbringing, but, like his father before him, it had devolved into that of disciplinarian and entertainer. Of course he did more car-pooling and soccer-coaching than his father had; of course he helped monitor homework, that was the way of the new man. But when push came to shove, the kids' welfare was my responsibility. And one I had shouldered with delight. Except for this week. I felt as though I'd been dealt a bait and switch, and it was hard to keep the resentment hidden from the kids.

“Mom! She hit me!”

I was ten paces down the soggy path before the screen door slammed. I wasn't really dressed for running, but I did have my old New Balance joggers on and sweatpants, so I didn't look too unusual, except that I was running in a downpour. Everyone knows dedicated runners are a little nuts. I splashed through puddles and slipped a little on the wet pine needles. I slicked back my wet hair with my fingers and kept running. The rain sizzled against the still lake surface, the only sound except my breathing. The little beach was empty, canoes tipped over, spines up. Someone's aluminum and web beach chair was a bright mark against the dull scene. I ran and forced my thoughts away from my crabby children, pulling my characters up and into my adrenaline-fired imagination. I slowed a little to give myself a fighting chance at having enough breath, that I might be able to think about my scene and not about how hungry for air I was. The rain seemed lighter in the woods, and warmer. I went past my usual halfway mark and kept going, jogging now so that I could imagine the world I was creating and forget the real one. Except that thoughts of Ben kept surfacing, little thoughts, little echoes of conversation— my curiosity about his wife and her death. That he grieved and that he loved her I thought was obvious, understandable. That he might have been responsible for her death was sad, and, at the same time, tantalizing.

I was drenched, water dripped from the ends of my hair and off the tip of my nose. My white T-shirt clung to my body as if I'd been entered into one of those tasteless contests, the pink of my skin showing through. With each step I felt the squash of saturated sneaker sole.

Three faces watched me as I walked the last fifty yards. Three expressions of varying disbelief that a woman of my intellect and sense would go running in weather like this. Lily looked embarrassed, Tim puzzled, and Ben looked amused. Self-consciously I folded my arms across my chest.

“I came to take the kids to the movies. They've got a Star Wars matinee at the mall.”

“They've seen it, Ben. But thanks.”

Tim and Lily clamored a duet of protest. “But Mom, but Mom! We love
The Phantom Menace
! We've only seen it once!”

“Are you sure?” This to Ben.

“Absolutely. It's self-serving, if you must know. I want to see it, and . . . well, it's more fun with the right people. Besides,” and he pointed to my closed laptop, “you can use the time alone.”

“God bless you, Ben Turner.”

“God bless us every one. Now, scoot, you two. Find your shoes.”

“You're a natural.”

Ben didn't reply to this, looking away a little, and I might have felt as if I'd blundered but he was smiling.

It was decided that I would join them after the movie and we'd eat at the food court. I got there a little past the agreed-upon six o'clock. Ben was sitting on a bench outside of the games arcade, one arm casually flung across the back of the faux park bench, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. I saw him before he saw me and I experienced the strangest sense of excitement, as if I hadn't seen him in a long time and we had much to catch up on. A sensation I could only attribute to seeing him outside of our normal habitat. I spoke before I reached him. “Ben, sorry I'm late.”

He stood up as I approached and waved off my concern and pointed toward the game room. “I hope you don't mind that they ended up in there, but it was the only mutually agreeable place.”

“You've done this before, haven't you?”

“I have nieces and nephews, so I'm not a total novice.” Ben had
plucked the kids away from their games with great ease. If I'd done that they'd have protested for another round. “I have two siblings and they've both provided me with terrific surrogates.” Ben chatted about his family, more expansive about them than he had been about anything. Usually circumspect, he seemed to take great pleasure in the subject of his multiple nieces and nephews, and it was nice to hear his stories.

Her name slipped in then, as he was telling a story. Talia.

“Talia was your wife?”

He neither nodded nor shook his head, only made a little shrugging gesture as if reluctant to place her in the past tense. “Talia Brightman.” He scratched at the back of his neck where the hair was a little long and wavy like a child's. “She was good with the kids. They liked her.”

“How long were you married?” The kids had run back to the arcade for one last game, their McDonald's meals half-eaten. We were alone and the din of the food court made it seem as though we had complete privacy.

“Almost five years.” Not looking at me, he added, “The accident was a year ago tonight.”

I pushed aside the trays cluttering up the rectangular table we shared and placed a hand on his arm. “I'm sorry, Ben, I had no idea.”

“It's all right. It's okay, Cleo. I had to spend this night somewhere, and this is far better than alone.”

“Is that why you suggested the movie?”

“No. Well, maybe. Partly.” Ben carefully organized the trash, keeping his eyes away from mine as if he thought I expected him to describe the accident. He stood up and walked to the trash containers. Suddenly the kids were back and he brushed his hand over Tim's buzz-cut hair. He did look at me, and then, “Cleo, I will tell you about it sometime. I just can't right now.” We walked away from the food court, a child on either side of Ben. He could have meant right now in the mall, or right now in front of the children, but I knew intuitively that he meant he wasn't ready to speak of the accident to anyone just yet.

Regaining his playfulness, Ben grasped Lily and Tim's hands. “How about I buy us some ice cream?” Swinging arms like Dorothy's companions on the way to Oz, they got ahead of me.

It was later than I planned when we left the mall. I had missed my scheduled call to Sean and the phone at home rang unanswered. When the answering machine kicked in, I automatically assumed he was out with a client, or at his mother's. It really wasn't very late, maybe eight-thirty. I figured I'd just wait and call him in the morning and left that message behind with a quick apology for being late with my call.