Summerlong (24 page)

“But the kids seem good. They seem okay,” Claire says.

“I think they are. I think we’ve handled things well enough. I wonder how they’ll make sense of this summer, years from now.”

“In therapy?”

“Right. Well, of course. They’ll need that. We should set some money aside now. I think parents should have to pay for college, and, after that, therapy.”

She smiles at him and it makes her eyes tear up and his too.

“I suppose it depends on how things end,” Don says.

“What things?”

“The summer. Us. Me. You.”

“I hope it’ll end as well as it can end.”

“If we end it.”

“Don,” Claire says. “Doesn’t it feel like we already have? That’s why I didn’t want to confuse the issue, with this trip.”

“A last hurrah.”

“Your words, not mine.”

“We shouldn’t take it,” Claire says, when Don tells her just how much money Ruth has given him and tells her about the house.

“I mean,” Don says, “it won’t fix everything. But it will help.”

“It feels wrong,” Claire says. “Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“It buys us a year, up here, to fix things.”

Claire looks over to the guesthouse, where ABC is taking an afghan to Ruth. Claire watches ABC moving in the wind, a thin wraparound skirt and white linen blouse, the wind blowing
her clothing tight against her body, so different from Claire’s own. Claire is lean, muscled, and slender and ABC is all hips and breasts and ass. Ruth appears to have dozed off. Claire doesn’t like how the trip has become linked to their floundering financial situation, the mountain of debt. Ruth is there to help them, not vice versa, and it should be vice versa. They should be doing this out of kindness, not need.

Claire also wants to say this but doesn’t:
I don’t want to fix anything, Don. I’m done.

Claire wants to say something like this, but when she looks at Don, she sees that he is gazing in the opposite direction, at Charlie, who has stood up now and is walking along the beach away from the compound, holding a bottle of beer. He peels off his shirt and finds himself a sunny rock at the far end of their beach where he stretches out. It is not warm for Iowa, not compared to the July they have just been through, but the sun is high and it is warm for northern Minnesota. Very warm for this part of the world. The lake is the warmest it’s been in history, sometimes getting into the sixties off the shore, though easily plummeting back into the forties overnight. It is a moody lake. Don keeps his eyes on Charlie. Claire watches Don’s clenching jaw work a piece of gum. She touches Don’s shoulder.

“I think I’ll brew some coffee,” Claire says. She stands.

“Okay. I’d like some too. Can I come with you?”

“Of course,” she says.

“What were you thinking about?” Don asks.

Why do couples ask each other such a question? Don used to ask this of Claire often. This was back when they were young, and newly together, and Don seemed convinced that she was always thinking about something sad, about leaving him. But she is not sure he has asked it once since the children were born. It is odd to hear it after it had been a forgotten part of their conversational repertoire.

Claire surveys the scene. She shrugs. On the deck of the guesthouse,
Ruth sleeps in the sun and ABC now walks barefoot over the rocks (how effortlessly she does that, Claire thinks, my feet always kill me when I do that) and she is heading toward Charlie. ABC stops and waves at the children, who are now splashing about in the shallow creek that almost leads to the lake but today, in that dry month, the creek stops about ten feet short of it. When it rains, the lake’s swell will wash up over that ten feet and the creek will rush into the lake and the lake into it.

The children wave back to ABC, who is now walking in the surf and holding her flowing skirt up high, exposing the meat of her thighs. Claire sees Don watching ABC as ABC walks toward Charlie, who stands and walks toward ABC. The surf is significant and loud and when Charlie and ABC come together and sit down next to each other at the water’s edge, one can’t tell if they are speaking or if they are simply staring at the water.

Claire notices that Don is staring at the two young guests as intently as she has been.

“They’re beautiful,” she says. “That’s what I am thinking.”

“Yes,” Don says. “Not so much younger than we are, not really, but . . . So. Much. Younger.”

ABC stretches into the wind as if she is trying to embrace the horizon. She reaches up as high as she can, steps up on her tiptoes, stretches toward the sun. She wags her hands in the air, as if beckoning something out of the cold deep.

“Have you slept with Charlie?” Don asks.

“No,” Claire says, instinctively. She had not meant to lie, but that is the reflex, buried within her. “Have you? Slept with ABC?”

“I’ve come close,” Don says. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve come close too,” Claire says.

“When?”

“The heat wave party. That hot night.”

“Me too. That was the night.”

“Really?” Claire says.

“Yes. Must have been the heat.”

“Did we get married too young?” Claire asks.

“I don’t know. I think about that.”

“It’s only natural,” Claire says. “You wonder.”

“You have been the love of my life,” Don says. “You are the love of my life.”

Claire shifts, pulls her knees up to her chest, making herself smaller, more compact. “It’s a long life,” Claire says. “Maybe you should have more.”

“More what?” Don says.

“More life,” Claire says. “More love. More joy than I can give you.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” Don says.

“It isn’t,” Claire says.

“No,” Don says. “It is.”

“Maybe it’s just nearing forty—I feel like fifteen years of my life went by without, without, I don’t know, without me doing anything.”

“We had kids,” Don says.

She nods. “Right. And I love them so much.”

“But you don’t want to be with me anymore? Is that it?”

“Don, you take all my energy. I guess that’s it. You take all my energy. Living with you exhausts me. I don’t like being around you some days. All of the day. I didn’t like the way you changed when things got hard. I think that’s it. You’re only able to do easy. That’s why you hid the foreclosure notices from me. How could I have been so dumb?”

Don says nothing, and Claire, who’s been trying to sound comforting, realizes she may have come off as cruel.

“But you have been the love of my life too,” she says. “No matter where we go from here.”

“No matter what happens,” Don says.

“You’re funny, Don Lowry,” Claire says. “You always have been.”

“So, is this it?” Don says.

Claire knows then that she will go to Charlie’s cabin one of these nights, and she will sleep with him again. It is the only way
to move ahead in her life, she thinks. It is a portal out of this life and into a new one. And, she tells herself, it is the only way Don will understand that they have reached the end of something. One time with Charlie, drunk, and after a long, steamy party, might be forgivable, a mistake. But if she does it now, here, in the cool and limpid light of Lake Superior, it will not be a mistake.

She stares out at the water. Sometimes, a trick of clouds and the light will make you believe you see a ship on the horizon, or one of the Apostle Islands off the coast of Wisconsin. But other times the sky above Superior is perfectly clear, a blank white slate. This has become one of those afternoons. How fitting, she thinks. Blank slates.

“You came more than close,” Don says. “Didn’t you?”

She turns to him, wraps herself in her own arms, suddenly chilled.

“Don,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

And now Don knows that one night soon, he will find himself alone in the world, a new person, and he will go off and look for a new life, and the world, and everybody he loves in the world, will be free to move forward, away from his ugliness, the Shadow of him, and they will be free, all of his pretty chickens, to move into the next phase of their lives, which will be beautiful or, as he looks at his kids playing, destined for beauty. He will work harder than ever. If he has to leave town to find work, he will do it. He will send them money. He will work shit jobs. He will allow them, and their mother, to move into a happier life without him. He will do it without bitterness. It will be his purpose. Every day as he ties on an apron at some Home Depot outside Waterloo or loads trucks in a warehouse off the Mississippi in Moline, he will think of his children, the reasons he is doing the work, and he will be okay with it. He’ll work happily, intently, his goals as noble as goals can get.

On weekends, he’ll drive to Grinnell, or wherever they are then living with their mother. He’ll arrive bearing gifts and he will not allow his misery, any sadness he feels, to infect them. If he lives alone, he can keep all of that, he can keep the Shadow to himself. He will show up smiling and the children will take comfort from his newfound stoicism, his warm optimism. He will change what he has felt powerless to change. He wonders though, why not change now, right at this moment? Can’t he just wake up tomorrow and understand that life, in fact, is fundamentally wonderful? That he is fundamentally wonderful? That he is not his father? That Claire is fundamentally wonderful? The kids, their lives, Iowa. Being alive should be enough. He wants to say this aloud.

Why couldn’t he just say that to Claire and reverse the course of everything?

“I want you to be free of me,” Don says. “I want you and the kids to have a different life. A happy one.”

The kids shriek in the cold water and sprint back onto the shore, howling.

“The kids are happy,” Claire says. “They love you. And I love you. And I, I really have—until very recently—been happy.”

“This life though,” Don Lowry says. “I feel like it’s killing you.”

She doesn’t say anything to that.

Just beyond where the two children are playing, ABC and Charlie sit side by side, throwing rocks into the water. She begins to cry and Charlie puts his arm around her, the waves swell even higher, a wind blows from the woods behind them, and a cloud passes in front of the sun, turning the warm yellow light momentarily to a metallic, golden hue.

“Are you okay?” Charlie says.

“I have deliberately been trying to avoid anything beautiful,” ABC says. “Ever since Philly died, I’ve been afraid to experience beauty without her.”

“Why?” Charlie says. “I don’t get that.”

ABC lets out a snotty laugh and buries her face in the wrist cuffs of her wool sweater. “Because you’re a monster!” she says, the words choked out in a kind of sobbing guffaw.

“Probably,” he says.

“Do you think you will end up with Claire?” ABC says. “Eventually.”

“You mean, like, forever? Or tonight?”

“Don’t do it, Charlie. Leave them alone.”

“I didn’t do it,” Charlie says. “She did it. She doesn’t love him anymore.”

This life, the one at the lake: it is not killing Claire. She begins to think of what has come to be known in proper terms as the Merrick option, and she is considering it. A year at Superior—how would it feel in the winter? She was certain a lake like this would never freeze, but maybe it would—maybe you’d look out and see a vast expanse of ice, a bridge you could walk across out into nothing. This is what she likes about being so far north—you feel like you could, if you wanted to, get out into nothing. Enter a state of it, escape.

How strange it was to see them, this foursome, Don and Claire and Charlie and ABC, plus the ancient Ruth and two happy children, sharing the same space that week. The space was vast, of course, and this helped. And around the space, around their lodgings and their private beach, only woods and sky and water. It was possible that the clean air and open vistas had transformed all of them, had brought them out from their grief and burdens. They were all like the children that first week, free to roam the beach and the woods that separated the compound from the distant highway, free to sit for hours and stare at the waves, and the changing color of the water, gray, green, blue. They gathered rocks, hunted for agates, watched the eagle, which Charlie had named Lyle Canon, patrol
the shoreline, and on still days they heard the haunted call of the loon. Once, at night, a yearning wolf echoed his howls off the stoic cliffs. The gulls gathered away from them, on a massive stand of charcoal-colored rocks at the far end of the beach, and they walked out to the rocks and studied the intricacies of the orange lichen.

The clouds above them changed often, coming in low and swollen in the morning, dissipating into the blue by noon, then returning at sunset, gray and thin, a flattened fog separating them from the moon and stars as Don Lowry built the evening’s fire. At night, Ruth would join them until she got too cold, at which point ABC would retreat with Ruth to the guesthouse for sleep. Charlie, who had lied and told everyone he had decided to write a novel, would leave the lodge soon after that. He spent much of his evenings in and near his cabin, reading, drinking coffee or beer, and pretending to write a novel on a stack of yellow legal pads he’d bought at the co-op down the road in Finland. And while his stated intention had been to write a novel, a plan he blurted out over coffee the first morning there, each night he wrote letters to old friends, letters that said almost nothing of substance, but made him feel as if, when he returned from his time on the lake, he would be part of a wider world again. Each morning, he’d drive into Finland, buy envelopes and stamps at the post office, and send the letters out into the world. Some of the addresses he had scrawled into the back pages of his Moleskine journal, some he guessed at, relying on memory. In one instance, he sent a letter to an old professor at Oberlin simply by writing down his name, the words
Oberlin College,
and the city, state, and zip. Some letters would reach their intended recipients and others would not. That was certain. Also certain: He would leave Grinnell. He would leave his mother with what she wanted, a tidy, organized archive of his father’s insignificant work, a most unimpressive intellectual legacy. He would attempt no interpretation or insight. The work, what his father had spent decades on, was, when one was forced to be realistic, largely meaningless. He had done very little that
would last. Charlie would burn all the letters. They meant nothing. He would burn the typed and retyped drafts of
Gatsby
himself and be done with it.