Moonlight on Butternut Lake (12 page)

At the word
together
Mila's eyes widened slightly. More surprise, Reid saw. But she recovered herself quickly. “All right,” she said. “I'll get us some burgers.” And then she was gone, leaving Reid to mull over the curious turn the day's events had taken. And he had to admit, he was almost as surprised by them as Mila was.

But she was back before he knew it, carrying their lunches in a bulging and slightly greasy paper bag and looking as if she was determined to make the best of their impromptu picnic. And Reid, feeling oddly contented, gave her directions to the town
beach, realizing as she pulled into the parking lot there a few minutes later that it was even prettier than he remembered it being. Set at one end of a sheltered bay, and fringed by great northern pines, the beach was a quarter-mile-long crescent of yellow sand that gave way to the blue waters of Butternut Lake. There was only a scattering of people there today, mainly parents with young children who had grouped their beach chairs, brightly colored umbrellas, and striped beach towels near the lifeguard's stand and the small, roped-off swimming area in front of it. Mila, though, seemed unnerved even by this small crowd, and Reid noticed that she was careful to park as far away from the other cars in the lot as possible, and that when she got out of the van and came around to slide his door open, there was a worry line creasing her otherwise smooth forehead. Once she'd gotten their lunches out and locked up the van, though, she seemed to relax. A little.

“There's a paved walkway over there that leads to some picnic tables,” Reid said as he wheeled himself in its direction, and Mila fell in beside him. He remembered, now, the last time he'd been to this beach. It was a warm day in late spring, and Allie and Walker had brought him here, thinking that the fresh air and sunshine might do him some good. They hadn't. He'd wanted to leave as soon as they'd gotten here. It was only a few days after they'd moved him into the cabin from the rehabilitation center, and he was already resentful of their unflagging cheerfulness and already ashamed, too, of his resentment of it.

And the truth was, he wasn't in much better shape today than he had been that day, because by the time he got to the first picnic table, which stood in the shade of a nearby aspen tree, he was already winded. “Is this okay?” he asked, positioning his wheelchair at one end of the table.

“It's fine,” Mila said, setting the drinks and the bag on the table and sitting down on one of its benches. She unpacked their lunches then and slid his Coke and his paper-wrapped hamburger and french fries over to him. He waited for her to start her lunch, but she didn't eat it right away. Instead, she took a tentative sip of her soda, and then she did that thing he'd seen her do at Pearl's the first time he'd met her. She made herself smaller somehow, dipping her chin down toward her chest and drawing her shoulders closer together. It was a tiny movement. A subtle movement. He didn't even know why he noticed it, really. Most people wouldn't have. But while it had annoyed him the first time he'd seen her do it, now it interested him. The way she closed herself up like that. Closed herself
off
. Maybe it interested him, he thought, because closing yourself off was something he knew about firsthand.

Thinking about that, he unwrapped his hamburger and took a bite and then, surprised, took another bite. It tasted like . . . it tasted like real food, he marveled. Since the accident food had seemed somehow unappealing to him. Eating was just another thing he did because other people expected him to do it. But he hadn't taken any real pleasure in it. This was different, though, he thought, and, suddenly famished, he took another bite of his hamburger.

Mila, watching him, unwrapped her own burger and took a small bite. “
Oh my God,
” she said softly when she'd swallowed it, “this is
so
good. Is everything at Pearl's this good?”

“Pretty much,” he said.

“Do you think there are people in Butternut who eat one of these every day?” she asked, taking another bite.

“Oh, definitely,” he said. “But they probably won't be with us much longer,” he added. And she smiled, an almost smile, at
him. It wasn't much, but he'd take it, he decided. It was the first tiny crack in the wall of her distrust for him that he'd seen since they'd left the cabin that morning.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, and then Reid noticed that Mila looked tense again. Her eyes flicked briefly in the direction of the parking lot, and Reid followed them and saw a car pulling in. He watched it park and looked as two parents and a passel of kids spilled out of it, all of them armed with coolers and sand toys and inflatable rafts. He glanced back at Mila, thinking that she couldn't possibly feel threatened by this family. And she didn't look as if she did, but still, there was something about the car's arrival that sent her guard back up, and she didn't go back to eating her lunch, but left it, instead, unfinished in front of her.

“Are you done?” she asked him a little while later, glancing at what remained of his own half-eaten lunch.

“No, not yet,” he said. “I just can't get enough of these fries,” he added, biting into one. Truth be told, after weeks of undereating, he was already full, but he wasn't ready to leave yet. Mila said nothing, but she looked at him a little strangely, probably remembering all the uneaten meals he'd sent back to the kitchen.

“You don't mind if we stay here a little longer, do you?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” she said.

But when Reid came to the end of his lunch, he continued to dawdle. He didn't want to leave yet. Not until . . . not until he'd found out something about her. Because damned if he wasn't curious about Mila Jones. And then he thought of something his brother had said to him.
If there's something you want to know about her, Reid, why don't you just ask her?

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “A question?”

“Uh-huh.”

She frowned slightly. “I guess that would depend on what the question was,” she said finally.

“Okay. That's fair. The question is, ‘what is it that you do all day?' I mean, when you're in your room?”

She hesitated. “You know, I could ask you the same question,” she said.

I try not to think,
Reid almost said.
At least during the day. During the night, I try not to think and I also try not to sleep
. But instead he said, “Well, right now, I'm the one asking the question.”

She seemed to consider it, then shrugged and said, “I study.”

“You study?” That had never occurred to him before. “What do you study?”

She paused, played with a cold french fry, and then sighed. “I'm studying for the nursing school entrance exam. I have some practice books that I brought with me. So I do the sample problems in them.”

“But . . . all day? I mean, most of the day? That's a lot of sample problems.”

She shrugged noncommittally.

“How many test prep books did you bring with you?”

“A few.”

“Haven't you done all the problems in them by now?”

She smiled faintly. “That's more than one question.”

“I know. But there's something else I'm curious about,” he said, not giving her time to object. “Why don't you ever go down to the dock?”

“I'm not here on a vacation,” she pointed out. “It's bad enough that I'm already getting paid for time that I don't spend working, but getting paid for time that I spend relaxing . . . that doesn't seem right to me.”

Reid nodded, slowly, thinking she had an admirable work ethic, but that it still didn't explain everything. “Okay, that's fair. But you don't even go down to the dock on your days off,” he said. “You're not getting paid then.”

She hesitated again, and he could see her weighing whether or not to tell him something. Finally, she said, “I don't know how to swim.”

“You don't know how to swim at all?” Reid asked, shocked.

She shook her head.

“Didn't you . . . didn't you want to learn? When you were a kid, I mean.”

“Of course I wanted to learn. When I was growing up, I used to walk by this pool sometimes, in the summer, and it looked . . . it looked like fun,” she said, a little wistfully. “I used to . . .” But she caught herself here, and stopped, and looked as if she was sorry she'd said as much as she already had.

“But, I mean, couldn't you have taken swimming lessons then?” Reid asked. “Or gone to a day camp where they taught you how to swim?”

She shook her head. “No. I couldn't have taken lessons. Or gone to camp, either.”

“Why not?”

“Because those things cost money,” she said simply. “And we didn't have any.”

“Oh,” Reid said, not knowing what else to say. He forgot sometimes that not everyone's childhood was as blessedly middle class as his own had been, though after his father left and kept “forgetting” to send the child support checks, money had been a little tighter. Still, there'd always been enough for swimming lessons and day camps and stuff like that. Though now, when he thought about it, he couldn't really remember when he'd first learned
how to swim. It seemed to him, in a way, that he'd always known how to swim. That he'd been
born
knowing. And that was a good thing too, because he and Walker had grown up on a lake. Lake Minnetonka. One of his favorite childhood memories, in fact, was of him and his brother as little kids, swimming in the still cold lake on an early summer evening as their mother waited on the dock, towels in her arms, begging them to get out of the water. “Your lips are blue,” she'd called out to them. “You'll freeze to death.” But she'd been laughing, too. She'd still been young then, and pretty. It was before their father had left them, and before the bitterness had started eating away at her, like some terrible disease. He liked remembering her the way she'd been on the dock that day.
God, she'd loved the water,
he thought now. And she was an excellent swimmer, too. In fact, it had probably been her, and not some camp counselor, who'd taught him and his brother how to swim.

“Couldn't your mom have taught you how to swim?” he asked Mila.

She considered this. “Maybe. She knows how to swim. But she didn't have time to teach me. She was always either working, or sleeping.”

“What about your dad?”

She looked uncomfortable, and he knew she didn't really want to continue this conversation, but she said, after a long moment, “My dad wasn't in the picture.”

“Not . . . not at all?”

“No. I don't even know who he was,” she said, concentrating on an imaginary design she was tracing on the picnic table's top.

He shook his head slightly. That was rough, not even knowing who your father was. Having him just bail out on you like that, probably before you were even born. His father, of course, hadn't
stuck around for the long haul, either. But he'd been there for a while. Long enough to do the whole Boy Scouts thing. Long enough to go to some of their Little League games. Long enough to make it hurt, like hell, when he left them and stopped doing those things. And then, eventually, stopped seeing them or even calling them altogether. Maybe it would have been easier, he decided now, to never have known him at all.

“Now I have a question,” Mila said, breaking into his thoughts.

“For me?”

She nodded. “I think that's only fair, don't you?”

“I guess,” he said noncommittally. “If it's not too personal.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean like asking me about my relationship with my father?” she said. And Reid frowned because, now that he thought about it, that
had
been pretty personal.

“Okay, shoot,” he said.

He saw her take a deep breath, as if she was gathering her courage. “When you dream at night,” she asked, “what is it that you dream about?”

Reid was instantly on edge. He hadn't been prepared for that question. “I don't . . . I don't remember my dreams,” he lied, looking away.

“You don't remember
any
of them?” she asked gently.

He shook his head. And that was another lie. But what was the point, really, in trying to explain his dreams to her? She would never understand them.
He
would never have understood them, either, before the accident.

“When I hear you sometimes,” Mila said, carefully, “you're calling for help.”

Reid looked at her warily. Why was she bringing this up? he wondered. But a moment later, she seemed to think better of it
too. “Never mind,” she said, her tone still gentle. “It's none of my business. And you know what, Reid? You're right. Some questions
are
too personal to ask,” and she smiled at him, a smile that seemed as much an apology as a smile.

Reid nodded, wordlessly, as a breeze shook the nearby aspen tree and sent little dappling shadows over the picnic table and the two of them.

“Are you done with those?” she asked, indicating the few now cold french fries that he'd left uneaten. He nodded disinterestedly, his appetite gone. He watched as Mila gathered the remnants of their lunches and threw them in a nearby garbage can. He knew he should have offered to do it, but all of a sudden he was exhausted and anxious to get back to the cabin. Now, though, it was Mila who seemed to want to stay.

“The lake looks so pretty,” she said, gesturing in its direction. “Do you mind if I take a closer look?”

He shrugged indifferently, but then he wheeled after her, at a distance, as she walked down the paved trail until it ended, in a turnout, right in front of the water. And even Reid had to admit that the view from there was stunning, especially the view of the opposite shore of the lake, where the deep blue of the water contrasted dramatically with the pale gray of craggy rocks and the dark green of towering pine trees.