Summer People (34 page)

Nathan cried, “No! They're coming!”

Eldwin trotted off the shore of broken shells, his heavy, flaccid body crashing into the water. Nathan waved his arms above him and shouted, “No! I can hold on! You're going to drown, you stupid motherfucker!” even though he knew his words were being stripped away by the wind. Across the small but rolling waves he could only occasionally see Eldwin's head. Nathan used his arms to propel himself forward as he continued screaming for Eldwin to turn back. The water was cold and his body trembled, but he started swimming harder toward shore.

 

S
unlight poured through the draperied hospital window and warmed the left side of Nathan's face. The first time he'd awakened, he had not known where he was, and for one irrational instant he feared he had somehow become Ellen. Now he breathed more easily. The ham and eggs the nurse brought in for breakfast allowed him to apply his new sensory awareness to eating. He sucked on the warm meatiness of the ham and with his tongue rolled the rubbery eggs around his mouth. Biting into his toast, Nathan stared out his window at the sunlit courtyard.

I am not dead,
he thought.

He was about to say this aloud when he glimpsed through the doorway a nurse slowly pushing a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair down the hall. The woman's dark head was titled at a palsied angle and drool hung pendulously from her lips.

Later in the day, the limp raucousness of the morning game shows echoed through the hallway into his room. A delivery woman brought in a vase of red tulips and handed Nathan a card.

Nathan slid the card beneath the vase and tilted the vase toward him to smell the tulips, pulling off one of the petals with his mouth before taking it out and laying it on the bedside table. While sitting beside Ellen one afternoon in the hospital, Glen had read her a Jack London story called “Love of Life.” In it, a starving man struggles through northern Canadian wilderness until a ship discovers his emaciated figure writhing on shore. Once on the ship, the man eats everything he can find and grows fat, but after a while he eats like normal again.

“You awake?” Eldwin asked.

Nathan opened his eyes and pushed himself up in the bed. Even though he knew he wasn't dying, it was still a relief to see Eldwin wearing jeans and a tan polo shirt instead of pastoral black. In his left hand, he carried a white plastic bag.

“How are you feeling?”

“Alive,” Nathan said.

Eldwin took a seat in the chair beside the bed. “You had me worried there for a little while.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for bringing me in.”

“How much do you remember?”

Nathan said, “I think I remember everything.” But he didn't, at least not at first. He remembered swimming toward Eldwin—the big man shouting encouragement to him as both of them fought the frigid waves.
He also remembered that they'd both stumbled, exhausted, out of the harbor and onto the jutting peninsula of Bill McAlister's property. Nathan had wanted to lie on the bed of warm sand and battered seashells, but Eldwin had hustled him up to a neighbor's home, shouting for help. Nathan had trembled so much he could barely walk. In the house, an old couple had dressed Nathan in…oh fuck…Nathan remembered now that his trembling hands were so useless that Eldwin and the old man had helped him out of his soaked clothes, unbuttoning his shorts and pulling them off with his underwear, then zipping him up into one of the old man's tracksuits. The wife was much heavier than the old man, so Eldwin had had to push himself into a tracksuit of patterned roses and lavender. The couple swaddled the two men in blankets and drove them to Brightonfield Hospital.

Eldwin said, “I was wondering if you were going to have a heart attack on our way over. You would look okay for a little while, and then you would suddenly look like you were about to shake out of your skin.”

Nathan recalled moments of the drive, the back of the old man's furry head, the woman's face knotted with worry, and it embarrassed him to remember that he had been sobbing against the window of the car.

“You probably saved my life.”

“I didn't. I don't think I even touched you until we got to shore.”

“Yeah, but—” Nathan stopped, not wanting to admit to what he'd been thinking while in the water. Instead, he said, “I might have had a heart attack on shore there if you hadn't taken me up to that house.”

Eldwin shook his head. “You would have made it.” He spoke with such frowning conviction that for an instant Nathan persuaded himself that this was true. Eldwin grabbed the white plastic bag from the floor and said, “I picked you up another sketch pad and some pens. I thought you might want to draw while you were here. I didn't know what kinds of pens you would want, so I just got you some of the different types.”

Nathan took the fistful of pens and laid the sketch pad in his lap, briefly flipping through the pages. “Thanks a lot,” he said, smiling down
at the sketch pad. He must have been weaker than he'd realized, because his voice broke when he added, “I'll pay you for them when I get back to the house.”

“They're a gift,” Eldwin said. Inspecting the sole of his shoe, he asked, “Have you told anybody what happened?”

Nathan rubbed his nose and shook his head. “No, I've just been sleeping for most of the day.”

“You might want to call Glen, and maybe your dad, and let them know you're okay, before they hear the story from someone else.”

“Who else knows?”

“Well, the Vogels, the couple who drove us here. Also, Mrs. Trentman. She was the woman who saw you out there and ran and told me. They might have told other people.”

“Does Leah know?”

Eldwin nodded. “Yeah, she knows.”

For a moment, they sat in silence. Then Nathan said, “Were they trying to get you to stay here, too?”

“Yeah, I was fine, though. I wasn't in the water as long as you were, and I've got a protective layer of blubber you don't have.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and then shook his head, murmuring, “Hospital,” before putting them back. Nathan worried aloud about the loss of the
Little Red Hen,
but Eldwin told him he thought Glen would just be glad to hear he was okay. When the conversation turned to insurance—Nathan's father had long ago begged him to pay eighty bucks a month for basic health insurance that would help cover some of the expenses he was incurring—Eldwin said, “Probably better to stay one more night like they want.” He asked the nurse what time Nathan would be released, and then returned to tell him he'd be back tomorrow morning to take him back to the Cove.

“Don't knock up any candy stripers,” Eldwin warned.

Nathan had only a vague idea of what a candy striper was, but a smile remained on his face a few moments after Eldwin had left. He was grateful for Eldwin's gift—for the sentiment, of course, but also because the pens
and paper seemed once again like a ragged lifeline being thrown to him. He wasn't sure that it was possible to escape entirely from his sadness, but at least he could try to pull himself through with his drawing.
Follow your bliss!
he'd often heard from well-meaning people, or read on bumper stickers, but the most common interpretation of this advice—that everyone has a passion he or she should pursue—always made Nathan uncomfortable. His parents, and even people he had met in Brightonfield Cove, seemed to have lots of activities that brought them pleasure, and even joy, and Nathan disliked seeing good, otherwise life-loving people grappling with the gloomy uncertainty of what their bliss was, or how to go about finding it. Nathan thought he understood the wisdom the bumper stickers were attempting to impart, but even for him, for whom drawing was beginning to seem as much a part of who he was as his face, bliss seemed too light and carefree a word to describe the exhausted elation he felt—every once in a great while—when staring at something he'd just created.

It seemed more appropriate to think of bliss with regard to romance, but his front-row seat this summer for the romantic flailings of Carl Buchanan, Ellen, and Mr. McAlister, had allowed Nathan to witness how endlessly elusive such bliss could be. His memories of Ellen, friendless at home, aching for Bill's arrival, and of his own similarly focused attempts to win (and hold on to) Sophie and Leah, reminded Nathan that when he returned home to Cleveland he would have no one really to talk with.

He wasn't sure if Eldwin regarded him as a friend or as just a companionable kayak partner / charity case, but Nathan wished he knew more people like him. The man was suffering under the burden of a depressive wife, an unhealthy desire for booze, and any number of parishioners wanting his help to sort through their anguish. Yet, wittingly or not, he had found the means to buoy Nathan in ways the younger man could not help but acknowledge. Already Nathan was considering more seriously Glen's offer to live with Ellen. He saw it as an opportunity to make up for his occasional ineptitude as a caregiver, to complete the graphic novel about his mother (and maybe start one about this summer), and to free up some expenses so he could enroll in classes at the university. He felt like he
had been long oppressed by a preoccupation with happiness—
Was he happy? Was he really following his bliss?
—and felt emboldened by the prospect of learning more about Aristotle, and thinking in terms of virtue and bravery.

When the nurse brought a turkey sandwich and tomato soup, Nathan ate with the TV on as he stared out the window. In the courtyard a stone bench sat amidst a colorful garden. Nathan did not know the names of many of the plants, but the spear-length stalks with red, conical blossoms looked familiar. Maybe they could grow in the Midwest. The modest circle of earth was beautifully landscaped and might give his father ideas for his garden. In a little while, Nathan would call him and let him know what had happened. Then maybe he would draw the garden and, when he returned to Cleveland, give his father the illustration. It had been a long time since Nathan had done something like that for him. He mulled the idea over as he finished eating his turkey sandwich. Then he wiped his mouth, cleared the table, and began to sort through his new pens.

I am grateful for the invaluable wisdom of my editor, Lee Boudreaux, as well as for the encouragement and support of JB, Katie Bollmer, Evan Carroll, Martin Edlund, Inga Fairclough, Atieno Fisher, Mya Frazier, Jeff Groh, Steven and Marisa Groh, Jake Halpern, David Hayes, Holly Herr, Kate Isenberg, Rob Jefferson, Amelie Arbour Lasalle, my sharp-eyed agent PJ Mark, Benjamin Soskis, Donna Spivey, Kellie Van Swearingen, Harvey Tharp, and most especially, George and Donita Groh.

Jacket Design by Allison Saltzman

Jacket Photograph © Image Source/Veer