Off Season (35 page)

“Kitty,” I said as levelly as I could manage, “are you saying that Cam married me because I reminded him of his dead sister?”

“Oh, shit, of course not, Lilly. You were so beautiful then that you stopped breath, and you were funny, and nice, and—I don’t know—absolutely unspoiled. Not naive, exactly, but kind of . . . untouched. Any man would have wanted to be the one that touched you. I’m just saying that we hoped he would finally stop beating up on himself for the drowning. Although I really think it’s a subconscious thing with him now.”

“Kitty,
he was only seven years old!
”

“Yes. Yes, he was. And my advice to you is that you sit him down and talk this thing out the minute he gets back. He had no right to keep it from you.”

I spent the rest of the weekend working furiously on the
Green Man,
hardly pausing except to get meals for the girls and eat myself. I worked so late into the nights that I fell into bed without time to think, too tired even to dream. When Cam’s behavior and my talk with Kitty did batter their way into my mind, I simply had to sit down with the weight of it and stare into space at nothing. When I thought of Cam I saw no face. When I thought of myself, I saw only a child so small and helpless that she was, to me, repugnant. Almost all couples, I thought at one point, have one or two secrets they keep from each other. But not the ones that defined life, skewed souls. Cam’s secret was almost literally who he was. I thought there must be something in me that kept him from trusting me with that pain.
He came home on the third day, earlier than I had thought he would. I had not heard from him, and I had not called him. For those three days I felt he would forever be a stranger to me, and I’d wondered drearily how one made a life with a stranger who had not been a stranger for the twenty years that went before.

He came into the kitchen just as I was boiling water for pasta. The girls were upriver at a friend’s birthday party, and I thought just pasta and butter would hold me nicely. I had just heard his quiet feet when I felt his arms go around me from behind and his lips fasten and linger on my sweaty neck. I froze for an instant, and then all my muscles, not knowing that there had been a quarrel, loosened, and I simply leaned back against him, feeling the sweet warmth of his body flow into mine like honey, like wine. I dropped my head and began to cry. He turned me around in his arms and pushed the hair off my face and looked at me, and then tears came into his blue eyes, too. He pulled me back against him.

“I’m so sorry. Just so, so sorry, Lilly. I don’t know what got into me and I can’t believe I let it spill all over you. I was afraid to call you because I thought you might have just—packed up the girls and left. And I didn’t answer the phone because I was so afraid I’d hear the same thing.”

“I didn’t call.” I hiccupped into the front of his shirt. “I didn’t know who would answer.”

He rocked me in silence for a while, and then said, “I promise never again to be such an asshole, to you or anyone else. But especially to you. I can’t bear the thought of you not being with me, Lil.”

“Me, either,” I said, hugging him hard. “But at some point we need to talk about it, Cam.”

“You’re right. At some point we will. Christ, I need a shower. Is there time for a drink before dinner?”

“Yes,” I said, reaching up into a cabinet to get out the martini pitcher. I heard him open the door to the bathroom, and then pause.

“I met somebody who knows you,” he called. “Or used to, anyway.”

“Who?” I asked, unscrewing the top of the vodka bottle.

“Her name is Roberta Singleton, but she said you’d know her as Peaches Davenport.”

By the time I could get my breath back I had spilled half the vodka. I stuck a forefinger into it and licked it absently. I decided then and there to drink a great deal of it.

“Well,” I said, in as bright and offhand a voice as I could manage. “Ol’ Peaches Davenport. Is she still so beautiful that people stop and stare at her on the street? Does she still pull the wings off flies?”

“She said you didn’t like her when you were kids. She also said it was with good reason. She said she had done a terrible thing that summer, something she never got over. But she also said what a magical place Edgewater was then, and how all the kids just ran wild on their bicycles and in their Beetle Cats and played outside under the stars, and swam in the bay—all the things she had never done before. You know her parents had died the year before in a car accident, and that she came to Edgewater with her grandfather and grandmother. I gather they raised her. It couldn’t have been much fun for her. I think she envied you; she said you were wild and pretty, like your mother, and leader of the pack. For the first time I got a real sense of what you kids and the summer must have been like.”

“So is she still the lady of the manor?” I said sarcastically, pouring vodka over ice.

“Not so’s you’d know it,” he said, his voice muffled in the towel. “Her grandparents are dead, and they left her the old Maine house—she was up looking it over, to see if she wanted to sell it, when she saw my car at Edgewater and came over to meet me—and I think she got a little money from them, but her husband died of prostate cancer five years ago, and she’s got a young teenage girl with cystic fibrosis, in a special school near Monmouth, and a younger girl at home. They live in New Jersey; her husband taught theology at Princeton. She’s not bad looking, but she’s thin and frail. She works in some government job to keep her girls in school.”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, having no idea whether I was or not. It was a sad story, but with Peaches you could never really know the truth. My heart was pounding as if trying to leap out of my chest. I did not want to remember any more of that summer.

I took the drinks out on the patio that faced the twilit river and sat down at a little wicker table. In a moment he joined me, comb tracks still in his damp hair and a fresh blue oxford-cloth shirt rolled up his tanned arms. He smelled of the lemon-sage bubble bath I used.
He lifted his glass and tapped mine with it. I gulped mine down.

“So is she going to keep the house?” I said.

“Don’t know. I went over and looked at it with her, and she cooked supper for me, and we talked for a long time. She has fond memories of the house, she says, but she could get a good price for it if she put it on the market. I looked it all over. Just needs cosmetic work. I get the feeling that she’ll sell. I don’t feel that she thinks there’s anything there for her now.”

“There never was,” I said mulishly, not looking at him. I could not bear the idea of Peaches Davenport playing the poor wounded victim of cold fate with Cam. Peaches wasn’t a victim; Peaches
made
victims.

He drained his drink too, and made us both another. Then he looked at me across the flickering candle I had lit, both for light and to ward off the shoals of strafing mosquitoes boiling in up out of the river.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Jon?” he said.

I felt a surge of fury so profound it took my breath. I felt as if someone had taken the deepest and most intimate part of me and ripped it out and held it up to the light. God damn Peaches Davenport. Was one death not enough for Jon?

“Why didn’t you tell me about Carrie?” I said coldly.

He sighed. It was a deep, defeated sigh.

“I knew Kitty would get around to it,” he said heavily.

“Why not you, Cam?” I was near tears. “Why couldn’t you have told me in the very beginning? Why carry that awful thing around with you all these years, when I thought we knew everything there was to know about each other?”

He didn’t speak for a long time. When he did, his voice was thin and small, like a child’s.

“I thought you would hate me for letting my sister die.”

“How could I hate you? I
love
you! Did you honestly think I would blame you for that? My God, Cam, you were only seven years old! How could
anybody
blame you? Why did your mother leave you alone with your sister at that age, anyway? Didn’t anybody ever think to blame her?”

“I don’t know,” he said dully. “Nobody ever talked to me about it again. I was plopped into Episcopal before I could get my breath, and when I came home I stayed with Granny in her wing. She was furious with my mother and father, but she didn’t talk to me about Carrie either. They had consulted some psychologist or something, and he said the best thing would be for us simply not to discuss it again. So my sister drowned twice. Once in the river and once on our frozen tongues.”

“How did you feel about all that?”

“You know how I felt? At first I felt as if I wasn’t fit to live on God’s earth anymore. And then I began to be angry at my sister, and after a while I came to absolutely hate her. If it weren’t for her I wouldn’t be a walking dung heap. And then, finally, I just forgot her. If you think it has escaped me that I hover over everybody I love, that I live in terror when I am away from you, it hasn’t. I hoped it would never come to the point that it smothered you, but of course, it had to. My God, when you refused to go with me to Edgewater I was so angry at you I could have wrung your neck.”

“What got you over that?”

“Well, Peaches did. She could tell I was upset, and somehow over dinner I just told her everything. She’s easy to talk to. So she told me about Jon, about everything, about her part in it, and how awful she’s felt ever since, and suddenly I had the answers to some things I’ve always wondered about you.”

“Ah,” I said. “And they would be?”

“About how you virtually disappeared into your father’s house after your mother died, and about burying yourself in swimming and never dating, about being so naive and vulnerable for your age. I saw that you had been fighting the pain the only way you knew how, just like I had.”

“I believe you said some
things
you’d wondered about.”

He dropped his head. “Lil, I always felt when we met, and that—that absolute bonfire sprang up between us, and you came to love me so easily and naturally, especially after the way your father had raised you, that it was like you’d—oh, it was like something you’d done before. You just knew how to love me without stumbling and stuttering. I loved it, of course. But I wondered. And when Peaches said that she’d never seen two people of any age so much in love as you and Jon were—”

“Damn Peaches!” I shouted, beginning to cry. “I was eleven years old, Cam! Jon was twelve! We didn’t even know each other more than a few weeks! What the fuck is it that you thought Jon and I did?”

“Nothing, really,” he whispered, tears on his face catching the flickering candlelight. “I knew you, I know you, I know you haven’t loved anybody but me. I dishonored you even to have it cross my mind. I just wish I’d known. Maybe I could have saved you some of that pain.”

“Cam, did you marry me to save me because you couldn’t save your sister?”

“Jesus, no! I married you because I couldn’t wait to be with you for the rest of the days I have on earth, and because you were so beautiful you stopped my heart, and because you were smart and funny and almost a princess locked up in a tower—”

“That’s what I mean! You just wanted to save me.”

“Bullshit,” he said at last, beginning to grin a little. “It was just easier to get you away from your daddy than from twenty-five other guys buzzing around you. It just meant that I could fuck you a lot sooner. But if you’d rather have done it any other way . . .”

“No,” I said, still crying but smiling, and stood up and held out my hand. “Let’s go do it the same old way. And Peaches Davenport is
not
invited.”

“I should hope not,” he said, taking my hand. “God help me.”

I dreamed that night, a dream that frightened me more than any I had ever had, and even today I cannot speak of it. I dreamed that Cam and I were at some sort of county fair—maybe the yearly Labor Day Blue Hill Fair, which we both loved—and there was a booth that said,
KISS YOUR GIRL AND WIN A PRIZE
. The midway was thronged with people, but Cam took me into his arms anyway, and kissed me so powerfully and long that I felt myself start to sag against him, and returned the kiss hungrily.

A bell jangled, and from behind the stage on the booth Peaches Davenport’s head appeared, painted on metal or plastic or something, one-dimensional and terrible, somehow, beyond imagining.

“Kiss her again and you’ll get two prizes,” she intoned tinnily, the great, stretched smile not moving.

Cam kissed me again, this time so deeply and intimately that I felt the familiar heat start up in the pit of my stomach, and moaned, and thought,
We can’t do this here in front of all these people!
and tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let me go.

The bell clanged again, and Peaches’ insane painted face popped up again and shrilled, “One more time and you get the grand prize!”

The kiss this time was different; it began almost tentatively, a soft searching for my mouth, and then becoming deeper and deeper and scaldingly sweet, and I lost my breath and felt the fire explode in my stomach and could only stand there, held up by his arms, gasping for breath and throbbing with completion, too ashamed to raise my eyes. He took his hand and lifted my chin and then I did look at him. It was Jon.

“You win it all!” screeched Peaches. “You win everything!”

I came awake gagging for breath and trembling and running sweat all over. I hadn’t ever read much Jung, but I knew without a doubt that this dream meant something enormous to me, and I would see it if I examined it. I would rather have cut my own throat than do so. The nearly full moon, the Egg Moon, I think, rose very late that year and it flooded me with its silver light just as dawn cracked the world and its pink yolk showed through. I scrambled as far away from Cam in the big bed as I could. I was afraid the violent trembling would wake him.

It did. He rolled over and put his arms around me from behind and said, “You all right? You’re shaking like a leaf. Come let me hug you till it stops.”

“I’m okay.” I quaked. “It was just a dream.”

“Some dream,” Cam said. “You’d better tell me about it or you’ll carry it around with you forever, and that’s no good.”