The first week of August, the litany of Claire’s last moments began: last day at work, last volleyball game, last sunset picnic on the beach, last overnight with her high school girlfriends, last cheeseburger at the Friendly. Tonight was the last concert of the season at Interlochen, a tradition since Claire was a baby. Even Jo was going. They’d loaded her wheelchair into Monique’s van, then strapped her, muddled but cheerful, into the backseat, Claire and Dylan on either side of her.
It was a beautiful evening, cool and clear, still light as they joined the throngs of people winding along the various wooded paths, all of which led to the Kellogg Arena at the center of the grounds. There were stone and clapboard practice huts set back among the trees, the occasional earnest camper framed in a window bent over his instrument and the strains of music drifting into the evening air, mingling with the sound of people talking.
Charlie and Monique walked ahead a bit under the canopy of trees, chatting as they always did, about their time at the camp as teenagers. The rules were stricter then, they never failed to remember. Campers were always in their uniforms: girls in navy blue corduroy knickers, pale blue shirts and red knee socks; boys in navy blue pants and blue oxford shirts. Now they were dressed in infinite variations of navy blue and red – most only vaguely in uniform, sporting red knee socks with a blue mini-skirt or a blue “Interlochen” sweatshirt over a pair of jeans.
Dylan pushed Jo’s wheelchair and Claire walked alongside, chatting to her grandmother who gazed up at her, beatific, as if she could not imagine why this lovely young woman had decided to be so attentive to her.
“It’s sweet,” Diane said, as if reading her thoughts. “The two of them with Jo.” Then smiled. “Getting ready to come tonight, I was thinking about the time we went to visit her and they’d wheeled everybody into the lounge to hear the old guys playing big band music.”
“God,” Nora said. “The piano player on oxygen!”
“And all those old ladies bobbing to ‘A String of Pearls.’ Probably feeling twenty. All I could think was that it’ll be us in thirty years, only it’ll be, what? ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? It’s so bizarre, isn’t it? I think of my mom at the age we are now, and she was old.”
“We’re old,” Nora said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Not old like my mom was in her fifties,” Diane said. “We don’t have that awful helmet hair, do we? We’re not wearing knits. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m going to be a grandmother – speaking of which, Carah called today. Both she and Rose are coming. In September.”
Nora stopped short and gave her a hug. “They’re really, truly coming!”
Diane nodded, blinking back tears. “God. I’m so – emotional about it. I know I’m about to drive Mo crazy. I can’t wait, I’m scared to death. We’re fixing up Betty’s room for them,” she said. “Painting. Taking down those hideous drapes and getting blinds that let the light in. We’ve got a guy coming tomorrow to give us an estimate.”
“Wait,” Nora said. “You’re redecorating Betty’s room?”
“It was Mo’s idea,” Diane said. “You can’t get Betty out of Florida with a crowbar anymore, and Mo said, why should we keep that hideous early American furniture just because she picked it out forty years ago.
“Mo said that?”
Diane laughed. “She’s not saying she thinks we ought to get rid of it. Knowing Mo, she’ll make an annex to the Museum of Charlie, and put it there. But she’s been so great about the girls coming. She’s so happy for me. She totally surprises me sometimes, you know?”
“Mmm,” Nora had responded, thinking that she could not remember the last time Charlie had surprised her, or if he had ever surprised her at all. She tried as she had countless times in the past months to remember how it had felt to be happy with Charlie, before Claire’s school decision came between them. Days and days, each virtually the same. What a comfort they had seemed to her, unfolding – Claire at the center of them. Charlie kept a shoebox of her baby things out in the barn, along with the mementoes from his own childhood. Her pacifier, a teething ring, a tiny pair of moccasins. Her first bike was there, too: pink, with a flowered seat and glittery plastic streamers. All the images that came to mind when she concentrated on remembering Charlie in those happy times had Claire in them – the two of them often framed by a window or doorway. Charlie bending over to position the awkward baseball glove on her little hand, adjusting the brim of the “Michigan” baseball cap so she could see better, then throwing the softball again and again – from just steps away, so she would be sure to catch it. Charlie sitting beside her on the piano bench, leaning to run one finger across the notes on the score as she played to help her keep track of them and, years later, the two of them making music together – Claire on the cello, Charlie on his old violin.
Clear as anything, Nora saw them: Charlie giving Claire a hand-up so she could climb into his pickup and tag along on some errand with him, carrying her into Lake Michigan, showing her the right way to brush the dogs in the kennel. They’d built countless sand castles together, flown countless kites in the meadow. When she was not quite a year old, Nora remembered, Claire would raise her chubby arms when she saw him and he would walk her in a circle – through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and back through the kitchen again – until one day, to his great delight, she let go and toddled away from him.
The memories softened her toward him, made her resolve to be more patient, more understanding – though she could not imagine how she could avoid feeling like a cat with its back up in his presence. He was constantly underfoot; then disappeared when she needed him. He was quiet when she wanted to talk, talkative – about things that bored her to tears – when she wanted to be alone. He tried too hard to please her; he didn’t try at all.
It was Claire so near leaving, she reminded herself. That’s why she felt so restless, why Charlie was driving her crazy. It was being so sad about Jo. But it wasn’t only that. It was also the Philadelphia woman, who’d been arrested for crimes committed in the seventies and whose case was regular fodder on the evening news, always accompanied by clips of her stalwart husband, her bewildered teenage daughters. It was the news about Iraq.
It was like Vietnam, as Diane had said. Lies upon lies. Just this week, one of Bush’s former advisors had spoken out against the impending war. There was scant evidence tying Saddam Hussein to terrorist organizations, he said. Even less evidence tying him to 9/11. And as for the alleged meeting between one of the terrorists and an Iraqi official in Prague, Vaclav Havel himself had “quietly” called the White House, debunking the story.
Yet “proof” of the meeting had been the lead story on last night’s news.
Neither of them said a word about it. Charlie just stood, switched off the television and put Yo-Yo Ma’s Goldberg Variations on the stereo.
“Do we have to listen that again?” Nora asked.
He turned to her, confused, the empty CD case still in his hand. “Is there something you’d rather listen to?”
The Rolling Stones, she felt like saying. “Yeah, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaciton.” But they didn’t even have a Rolling Stones CD in their collection. They never listened to anything but classical music. Though, lately, she’d been listening to the oldies station in the car.
“Oh, forget it,” she said. “The Bach is fine.”
But once Charlie had settled into his easy chair, eyes closed, to enjoy it fully, she’d gone outside and walked toward the forest until there was no sound but the rustling trees, the chirp and whirr of insects. Then just stood there for a long time, seething at the sight of him framed in the living room window.
Glancing at him now, still chatting companionably with Mo, Nora wondered whether she and Charlie would be so at odds with each other if Claire had decided to go to Oberlin, as she had originally planned? If she hadn’t been shocked into remembering her own young self, would the two of them have gone on living more or less as they always had once Claire left, growing older and older until, like Jo, they became doddering, frail ghosts of themselves?
Stop, she told herself. Lately, her mind felt like a grocery cart with a bad wheel, always veering off in some direction she did not want it to go. She focused her attention on the activity outside the arena: teenagers lounging on the benches that circled clusters of big trees, laughing and talking, their instrument cases at their feet. Some held hands, leaning into each other as close to kissing as you could get without actually doing it. A group of tuba players clustered near the information center, fooling around, the comic bellow of the instruments mingling with the “whoosh” of an espresso machine nearby and the crunching sound of blenders making smoothies with fruit and ice.
Inside the open-air arena, it was cool and dim. The last rays of the sun fell first on Green Lake and set it glittering, then slanted across the arena like a wand, illuminating whole rows of seats and the moths fluttering in the red rafters high above. Nora chatted with Diane, who raised an amused eyebrow at Mo and Charlie, who were reminiscing about concerts they’d heard as campers, sitting out on the lawn because they couldn’t afford to buy tickets then. Claire and Dylan had disappeared among the young people clustered down front, near the stage. Jo sat beside her, on the aisle, quietly lost.
She perked up, though, when the music began, lifting both hands as if to capture the notes in them, and Nora saw a glimmer of the old Jo in the simple pleasure on her face and in the way she watched a young father who stood nearby, swaying to the music, an infant bound to his chest in a corduroy snuggly. Was she remembering how they used to bring Claire here when she was just a little girl, wondering what had become of her?
She wondered it herself sometimes, remembered Claire at two, three, four, and how it had felt, then, to be all Claire wanted, the center of her life. How she had known Claire absolutely – her needs and moods. Claire had belonged to her in a way Nora had not fully appreciated until she started kindergarten, her own life that Nora could never fully know.
It was natural, of course. There was your life with your parents, and . . . your life. Her relationship with her parents had been unusually distant and strained. But even Jo hadn’t been privy to everything about Charlie’s life once he left childhood.
A glimpse now and then was probably the best you could hope for, a little window opening. In fact, just that morning, cleaning the kitchen countertops, she had noticed Claire’s portable CD player on the countertop and picked it up, thinking she’d set it on one of the piles in the hallway to make sure Claire wouldn’t forget it. But on a whim, she put the earphones on and pushed PLAY.
To her surprise, she heard Janis Joplin. “Piece of My Heart.” Then “Somebody to Love,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” It was the mix Dylan had made for her, Nora realized. “He’s kind of a sixties freak,” Claire had said when she told her about it. “Like you couldn’t figure that out. Duh. His name?”
Perhaps Nora shouldn’t have, but she sat down and kept listening – “Revolution,” “Light My Fire” – until Bob Dylan’s gravelly voice singing “Like a Rolling Stone” undid her, the plaintive harmonica that seduced the truth and laid it bare. Listening to that song when she was young, she had heard it as a taunt directed at those in the older generation who thought they knew everything, who refused change. “Never trust a person over thirty,” they said then, only half-joking. Bob Dylan was all about that, wasn’t he? At the base of all his mysterious metaphors, wasn’t he really just saying, “Get out of the way, old man. It’s our world now.”
But listening this afternoon, in her own kitchen, what she heard was the terrible loneliness in his words. The sense that everything you believed in and expected life to be could just dissolve – and where would you be then?
She had felt utterly untethered for a moment – and felt it again, now, as night chased the last of the light away and stars punctured the clear, black sky.