The Goodbye Summer (26 page)

“In a good way, nothing wrong with being conservative, especially for a woman. These days. That’s not the right word, anyway; I mean…cautious, maybe, not…not…well, anyway.” He gave up trying to think of the right word. “I was wondering if it wouldn’t solve everything if you—and I”—he spread his arms in a sort of all-embracing way—“got married.”

She giggled. He was so funny, he—

“I’m serious.” He stopped smiling hopefully; his face went stiff.

Dear God, he was. She burst out laughing.

“Oh. Okay, well.” He folded his arms and slid down in the seat.

“I’m sorry!” Was he offended? But it was so
funny.
She was amazed and delighted with the sweetness of it. “I’m just surprised—you took me by surprise—”

“Forget it, I know it sounds crazy. I agree. But in a way, it’s a stroke of genius.”

“It is?”

“Yes.” He hauled himself up, rewarming to it. “It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. You’re in kind of a bind—I’m free. I’m no prize, we agree on that, but that’s the
beauty
of it. Here I am, nothing if not available. Magill. It’s a good, solid name. We came from Cork, I think, I’m not positive, my father used to say that but he wasn’t exactly a genealogist.”

He put his hands together, growing earnest. “I’m not doing this very well. You’ve been worried about the baby, so I just wanted you to know. I could help you solve the problem, that’s all. Think of it as—” His face lit up: an inspiration. “Think of it as elements in an alloy. You’re titanium, you’re strong, but you’re much stronger if we add aluminum.”

“You’re aluminum?”

“Yeah. And niobium, I’m aluminum and niobium, Ti-6Al-7Nb—okay, that’s not the best analogy because it’s three elements, not two, but you get the point.”

“I get the point.” The car behind her blew its horn. It was so hot, she could feel sweat on the backs of her knees. Magill’s face shone with it. And his blue eyes were liquid with sincerity, gazing into hers. “Why,” she said eventually. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I can. Here I am—I’ve got no other plans.” He grinned winsomely. “Use me.”

“Don’t you have a future in mind for yourself?”

“Not that I can see. Not currently.”

“So it doesn’t matter what you want?”

“No.”

“Because you’re finished. You don’t deserve any happiness.”

Awareness dawned in his face, followed by alarm.

“You think your friend is dead because of you. So you’ll keep hurting and punishing yourself forever, by marrying
me,
for instance, since that’s only what you deserve.”

“Hey, wait. Let’s backtrack.”

“It’s like starving yourself.”

“No.”

“I appreciate the offer—I’m sure you meant it kindly.”

“I did. No, not
kindly.
”

“I’m no prize either,” she said, laughing. “Obviously.”

“I didn’t say it right.”

“You did, and I understand, truly. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. Thanks. Really. Thanks.”

She kept a frozen smile for as long as she could. She’d been feeling teary and blue off and on all day—hormones. A big, blubbery puddle of emotion was ready to overflow; the only thing keeping her steady was a weak little spark of anger. Umbrage. How pitiful did he think she was? She’d never known anybody as full of self-hate as Magill, and here he was asking her to be part of his penance. A charity case to help him carry on
his tradition of suffering. Caddie the hair shirt. She shouldn’t be mad, but she was.

“It’s moving. Thank God.” The hated brake lights of the car in front went off; traffic began to inch forward. She shifted into second, and finally a breeze began to circulate. Good: they needed a change of air in this car.

They drove the rest of the way in pained silence. By the time they got to Wake House, she wasn’t angry anymore, just anxious to get away. She parked in her usual spot but left the motor running. “Well, I guess we’re not getting married, but thanks again for the offer.” She said it in a final way so that he would get out of the car.

He looked miserable, which was a small consolation. “Aren’t you coming in?” he asked. “I thought you wanted to see Frances.”

“I’ll come back later. It’s so hot, I think I’ll go home.” That made no sense, Wake House had air-conditioning and her house didn’t, but Magill didn’t argue. She didn’t even think he heard.

“Okay, you were right. It was a stupid idea. Sorry. I don’t know”—he made a twitchy motion around his head with both hands—“what I was thinking.”

“It’s okay. It’s sort of funny.”

They tried smiling at each other.

“I thought of a better analogy than titanium and aluminum. I guess you don’t want to hear it, though.”

“You know…I really…”

“Never mind.” He leaned over and started picking at the edges of an old peace decal on the dash. “But it’s not like you’re an illegal alien and marrying me would get you a green card. We already know each other. You’ve seen me at my worst, and you, you don’t even have a worst. I’d definitely be getting the sweet end of the deal.”

That made her smile. “Christopher called me,” she said for some reason. “He wanted to give me his address and tell me about his new job. Brag about it, actually.”

Magill mumbled something vulgar.

“I told him the baby wasn’t his.”

He sat up and stared at her.

She hadn’t been going to tell anybody this, not even Thea. “And he
believed
me—that’s the amazing thing. I told him I got mixed up counting the days. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“I thought—I thought he didn’t even
know.
”

“He knew. We just pretended he didn’t.”

Magill frowned, absorbing that. “Why tell him
anything,
then?”

“Well, in case he ever found out. I wanted to make sure—I just wanted him out of the picture. So all the decisions are mine.” If she could ever make them.

Magill looked at her in a funny, pleased way, as if he knew something she didn’t know.

“Oh, no—no, don’t think it’s because I want the baby for myself. That’s not it.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely. No. I’m giving it up for adoption.”

He recoiled. “You’re not.”

“Why not?” His dismay made her defensive. “I am. I’ve been working with an agency, all I have to do is fill out some more papers. I just have to sign. Well, what did you think? I can’t
keep
it.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? I’d be an unfit mother! For one thing. I’m poor, single, I don’t
want
a child—and anyway, Nana’s my child.”

“See, if you married me, you wouldn’t be poor or single, you’d—well, poor, okay, but not forever, not—”

“Magill, could we
please
drop this? I’m not marrying you,” she said with an angry laugh.

“Right.” He stuck his thumb in a hole in the knee of his jeans and pulled,
rip.
“Right.”

After a minute she added more gently, “But thanks anyway for, you know. Trying to save me.”

A wasp flew in and began to throw itself against the windshield with furious rasps. Magill froze. Caddie used her cupped palm and calmly guided it out the window.

He kept sitting there, baffled or something. This conversation was awful. She tried to telegraph a message into his left temple:
Open the door.
The car engine gave a sick, timely wheeze, and finally he reached for the handle.

Outside, he leaned down, storklike, to look at her through the frozen-open window. “Where I went wrong, Caddie, I was thinking of myself the way I used to be. You’d’ve entertained the possibility of me then.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I used to be the kind of guy you’d’ve considered.”

“Magill, wait.”

He gave her a sheepish salute. “Sorry I screwed up,” he said, and started down the sidewalk, stiff-arming the stone wall beside him to keep in a straight line. She called to him again, but he passed the steps to Wake House and kept going. The farther he went, a narrow blade of a man in flapping clothes, the less sure Caddie felt about which one of them had screwed up.

Caddie apologized to her grandmother five times on four different occasions before Nana finally gave in and forgave her for wrecking her lawn sculptures. The last time, Caddie said this was it, she’d run out of ways to say she was sorry, if Nana couldn’t excuse her for what she’d done they’d just have to live estranged for the rest of their lives. Since they weren’t even estranged
now,
that was a pretty idle threat. It was just that Nana couldn’t bring herself to say “I forgive you” in words.

Caddie’s ultimatum, or more likely her exasperation, finally worked. “Oh, hell. Give it up already,” Nana begrudged one evening after dinner. “You’re forgiven.”

“Well,
thank
you. About time.”

“But you were wrong, just so we’re clear on that. Terribly wrong.”

“Oh, boy, are we clear on that. But you forgave me, I heard you. No taking it back.”

Nana had already put on her nightgown. She was tucked in bed with her sketchbook on her knees and a handful of pastels, making a chalky mess on the bedspread. “Caddie, what’s the essence of oldness?”

“Pardon?”

“Oh, never mind, how would you know. What’s up with you these days, anyway? You look funny.”

She gave a nervous laugh. “I do?” She wasn’t showing yet, her clothes fit fine, but she was nine weeks pregnant and she still hadn’t told Nana. Here was a perfect opening—she could tell her right now.

“You look wired or something. You getting enough sleep?”

How
shrewd.
She was wired and tired at the same time, but imagine Nana noticing. Caddie cleared her throat, but the two words that would have explained everything didn’t come out. “I’m fine. What’s that you’re working on, something new?”

“Nope, something old.” She cackled. She looked witchy with her grizzled gray hair loose on the pillow. “Old as the hills, old as time. You coming to my program?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.”

“You can bring that dog man.”

“No, I told you. I don’t see him anymore.”

“Damn, I forgot.” She squinted up, forehead furrowing with sympathy. She reached for her glasses on the bedside table.

Caddie didn’t want to be seen better. “Gotta go.” She leaned over and gave her grandmother a quick kiss. “Night, sleep well. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Nana wasn’t the only one turning in early. Soft snores came to Caddie clearly as she passed Mrs. Brill’s door. Doré was singing in the shower, and Maxine was watching television. The canned laughter sounded harsh and personally derisive, but Caddie told herself she was just in a mood. She was always in a mood lately, and not always a bad one. Sometimes she felt euphoric, for no reason at all. Hormones, she’d read in a book. Her face was breaking out, too; this morning she’d woken up with a pimple on her chin. Lovely.

A corridor off the main second-floor hall led to a private staircase, one of two entrances to Thea’s tower room; the other was on the third floor. Seventy years ago her room was the Wakes’ master bedroom suite, the finest in the house. Thea always rode the elevator, but Caddie took the private stairs. Heat lightning through the window on the landing lit the way, illuminating the ancient striped wallpaper in flashes. The door at the top of the stairs stood half open, probably for a breeze—it was a stifling hot night, and by the time the air-conditioning got to the third floor it wasn’t what you’d call robust.

The sitting room was empty, but a light shone from the bedroom. Caddie knocked on the wall. “Thea?” she called, soft-voiced. “It’s me.”

“Come in!”

Thea sat under a tasseled floor lamp in her big Morris chair with a book in her lap, her legs stretched out on a leather ottoman. She’d banished Wake House’s sturdy but plain furnishings to the basement and decorated the tower suite with all her own things, a comfortable couch covered in rich scarlet velvet, an old rocking chair, enormous pillows scattered on the floor, everything soft and warm and always smelling of flowers. Caddie loved Thea’s rooms. They were like the fantasy dorm digs of the coolest, most sophisticated coed you’d ever known.

“Aren’t you hot?” She plopped down on the edge of the great four-poster bed. “This room is boiling. Oh, you’ve got your window open, no wonder.” And Thea was still fully dressed in gauzy pants and an orchid silk shirt, the tails tied in a knot around her waist. She didn’t look hot, though.

She wriggled her bare feet on the ottoman. “Don’t move, that’s the secret. And I’m getting the sweetest little breeze. Much better than air-conditioning.”

“What are you reading?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”

“Oooh. Something racy?”

“Definitely not.” She brushed at rust-colored specks on her lap. “This book’s so old, the cover’s disintegrating.”

“What is it?”

“
Freckles,
by Gene Stratton Porter. Who was a woman, not a man. I read this book first when I was about ten.” She made a face. “So it’s finally happened, I’ve regressed to childhood.”

“Nana only likes Jane Austen these days, she won’t read anyone else.”

“See? The slow infantilization of the mind. Very sad. But I don’t care, I’m rereading all the old books I used to love, and it’s making me happy.”

“Nana says she likes knowing how they end.”

“Well, there’s that. Freckles finds out he’s not a penniless orphan after all, he’s the son of a nobleman, and everyone lives happily ever after. Oh,
it’s a lovely book.” She marked her place with a nail file and put the book down. “How are you? You look a little fagged out.”

“I guess I am.”

“Anything wrong?”

“No. I don’t know. I’m just all…I don’t know.”

Thea waited, but when Caddie couldn’t do any better than that, she pulled her feet off the ottoman and stood. “If you feel like talking, I know a terrific place. But it’s a secret, you can’t tell anybody about it.”

“Is it cool?”

“Cool
er.
”

“Lead on.”

Down the hall past the men’s bedrooms, past Bea and Edgie’s room, past the staircase and around the corner, along a dark, unused corridor to a door Caddie had never seen before. It wasn’t locked and it led to two short, narrow flights of stairs covered in black rubber or linoleum, lit by one dusty bulb Thea flicked on at the bottom. “Are these servants’ stairs?” Caddie asked, whispering for some reason.

Thea paused, holding on to the railing to catch her breath. “No, just attic steps. That’s where we’re going.”

“Oh.” She followed after dutifully, thinking,
How could it be cooler in the attic?

At the top of the stairs, they stopped again. “Whew,” Thea said, patting her chest. “I need more exercise. Look at this place, Caddie. Wouldn’t it be fun to explore? You could get an American history lesson right here in the attic.”

“Or an allergy,” Caddie said nasally, right before she sneezed twice. She could only make out shapes under the rafters in the semidark, trunks and wardrobes, cast-off furniture, things covered up under sheets. Everything smelled of dry wood. “Wow, it’s huge. Is this where we’re, um…”

“No, silly.” She laughed and took Caddie’s hand, leading her confidently along a twisty path through piles and clumps of this and that. Pale light shone around the edges of an enormous old cabinet or armoire against the raw, slanted, uninsulated wall. Not flush against it: Thea dropped Caddie’s hand and slipped around the back of the heavy piece of furniture.
A click; a shrill creak. More light. Caddie peered around the corner and saw a long, open casement window. “What in the world?” She squeezed through behind Thea, and a moment later she was looking out over a low stone balustrade at a sky of rushing clouds and a cityscape of roofs, black treetops, and winking lights. “Where are we?” she cried, delighted. “I didn’t even know this was
here.
”

“Isn’t it fabulous?”

“There’s the alley, so we’re on the north side, but where?”

“We’re between two sloping roofs, all but hidden. That’s really the only place you can see us from.” She pointed to a faraway house in the next block. “I told you it was a secret.”

“How did you ever find it?”

“Exploring.”

“This window wasn’t even locked? There could be others—”

“There’s one directly opposite, I’ll show you when we go back, but it won’t open.
Why
you’d build two invisible little balconies off the attic, I can’t imagine, but I’m grateful. Sit, Caddie, these stones are nice and cool at night.”

There was room for them to sit on opposite sides of the tiny porch with their backs against facing walls and their legs stretched out side by side, but not for much else. “Are we sure this is safe?” Caddie knocked on one of the balusters, half joking, half not.

“Oh, this house will be here a long time after we’re gone. Me, anyway.”

“Nana says she knew the Wakes. Knew
of
them, she means. I guess they were the big deals around here. Did you know them?”

“I was pretty young when the bubble burst and they wandered away. The Wake diaspora.”

How sad to lose everything, even your home. Sad for anybody, but worse if you were famous and the whole town got to watch. Caddie heaved a deep sigh.

“What’s going on with you? You look heavy. Hearted,” Thea clarified when Caddie looked down at her flat stomach, “heavyhearted. What have you been thinking about lately?”

“Nothing, really, my head’s empty. But I’m kind of on this ride, this emotional…up and down. I’ve just about settled on a couple. The Benedicts. They’re perfect,” she said gloomily. “The wife is a veterinarian and the husband’s a social worker. There’s
nothing
wrong with them.”

Lightning flickered, closer, revealing the surprise outline of clouds. Electricity prickled in the air, and the dull rumble of thunder was almost constant. Storm coming.

“Oh God, oh God. I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve had an abortion.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because. Eventually she’s going to find out I gave her up.”

“She?”

“He, she. I think it’s a girl—that’s what we always have.”

“So…” Thea spoke slowly, as if feeling her way, “it would be better for this baby not to be born than to find out she was adopted.”

“No, not find out she’s adopted, find out I gave her away. I’m not saying this makes sense.”

“Oh, good.” Thea leaned her head back against the wall. “When exactly is she due?”

“Late March.”

“Right before spring.”

“Yeah.” A drop of rain fell on her wrist. “It’ll be nice weather, she can go outside and lie on a blanket in the shade.” Caddie folded her arms over her eyes. “I’m trying not to think about it, the details. If I make her a real person, if I put
myself
in the picture—but sometimes I can’t help it. Which do you think is worse,” she asked, lowering her arms, “losing your mother because she died—or because she left, she didn’t, you know, want you, didn’t care very much about you. Which is worse, do you think?”

“Which one of us had it harder, you’re asking?”

“
No.
Okay, yes. Your mother, at least you always knew she loved you. But Thea, which felt worse to you, her dying or your father—going out west?”

“That’s an excellent question, but what difference does it make? It was a lifetime ago.”

“I know, but how did you get over it?”

“I never did. But I stopped letting it follow me around like a lost dog.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “By facing the alternative. And also by looking around and seeing how
short
life is, Caddie,” she said intensely.

“Facing the alternative. You mean turning into somebody like me.”

Thea smiled in the dark. “Plenty worse things than turning into someone like you.”

“But that’s what you meant.”

“No, what I meant was, being afraid takes too much energy and it’s hardly ever worth it. I’ll take pain over fear of pain any day. My worst mistake, and I’ve made more than you think, was marrying Carl, and I did it to try to correct the past. Which you cannot do. What a waste of time, two people’s short, precious
time.
”

Caddie said, “I thought I fell in love with Christopher because he was so normal, and he could make
me
normal. And invisible—that’s always been a goal of mine. But…maybe the real reason I fell in love with him is because I knew I couldn’t have him. Maybe what I really want
—wanted,
” she corrected hopefully, “was nobody. Peace and quiet. Just me and Nana, because then I’d be safe. Nobody could ever leave me. Thea…”

“Hm?”

“How did you get to be so brave?”

She laughed, dropping her head to ruffle her hair with her hands. “One of the things I love about you, Caddie, is your…what would you call it…cluelessness.”

“Oh, thank—”

“Over how nice you are. And how much stronger you are than you think.”

“You say that, but I don’t feel strong.”

“You just haven’t had enough practice. You need to start asking for what you want. And sometimes
not
asking.”

“But there
are
things about ourselves we
can’t
change,” she argued, “don’t you feel that? Sometimes, yes, I want to keep the baby, but I know I
shouldn’t. It’s like—I’m a child and there’s something I want very badly, but I know my parents can’t afford it, but I want it anyway. So then I’m ashamed.”

“Because you’d like to keep your own baby?
Ashamed?
”

It was so hard to explain. “Listen. Once, I was inside my mother, the same way this baby is inside me.”

“Yes?”

“I
tell
myself that, but I can’t make it real. On any level. If my mother could leave me, if my father could leave me—” She held out her hands. “Who are we, Thea, if we’re not the people who made us?”

Thea took hold of Caddie’s shoe. “Well, now, you do whatever you have to do, for whatever convoluted reasons you’ve got for doing it, but listen to me. First of all, being ‘normal’ is a false goal, a child’s goal. So is being ‘invisible.’ ”

“I know.” She hid her face against her bent knees. It was starting to rain; she felt the heavy drops thud on her back like little slaps.