There were four of them in a space designed for three. Amy could tell that Jack didn’t like having to crowd his passengers like that, but she wasn’t uncomfortable. Neither he nor Holly seemed to mind being bumped and poked—being touched drove Henry nuts—so Amy wasn’t having to hold herself forward and stiffly upright as she would have if crowded between Henry and Tommy.
She was having a good time. She really liked these people. Of course, the boy Nick, fair-skinned, dark-haired, seemed a typical sullen teenager, but compared to the teenagers Amy knew, the determined little nearanorexics who viewed Amy as the once-idolized enemy, the person they wanted to dethrone…compared to them, Nick was just fine.
Holly was great, the ideal person for Amy to share a long car trip with. She had a cooler, more detached nature than Amy herself did, but like Amy, her clothes and shoes had the place in her life that other women reserved for husband and children. She was also dreading the inconveniences of the lake even more than Amy. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive without a hair dryer.”
“You have to tell your stylist,” Amy had laughed, “that you are going to Europe and don’t have room to pack an outlet adapter. That’s the only way to make them understand that you really won’t have a hair dryer.”
Physically Holly and her brother were attractive people. They both had rich, warm coloring—their eyes were a hazely topaz, they had freckles across their noses, and their hair was chestnut with coppery highlights…although Holly freely admitted that while Jack’s highlights were natural, streaked into his hair by the strong Kentucky sun, hers was a product of her hair salon. “I made him go in with me,” she said, “so that they could see exactly what I wanted.”
“Every woman should have a brother,” he remarked. “We’re so useful.”
He was driving easily, his left hand cocked at the top of the steering wheel, his right arm stretched along the back of the seat to give Amy and Holly more room. Holly played up her coloring; she was wearing a shirt of tobacco brown that looked marvelous on her. Jack’s waffle-knit, Henley-collared shirt was navy, and the best thing that Amy could think of to say about his choice of color was that it proved that he wasn’t vain. His hair was shaggy—Holly had already asked why he hadn’t had it cut—but Amy liked how soft and rumpled it looked.
He seemed like a familiar type to her. He was a guy, one of life’s practical types. She knew a number of such men. In her world they were road managers, sound engineers, and lighting technicians.
They were great. Outgoing, easy-tempered, and strong, they could always put a smile on your face; they could always get things done. They could open car doors when the keys were locked inside; they could get electricity back to an arena when the main circuit kept blowing; they could get the ice to refreeze when the rink was covered with huge puddles only hours before a show. They never gave up; they believed they could fix anything. They were wonderful people to have around.
But they were impossible to get to know. They hid behind all that practicality. They never asked themselves any of the hard questions; they were too busy trying to get the streets clear. They lived entirely in the moment; the past was over, the future had not yet happened. So as fun as they were to be around, they weren’t very interesting.
But they got things done. If anyone could persuade Dad and Ian to get light into the bunkhouse, it would be someone like that.
Amy had last seen her family at Christmas. It hadn’t been easy to arrange. The holidays were always busy for her. She was either riding a float in a parade, skating in a big holiday ice show, or both. The Christmas one month after her mother’s death had been no different. She was fulfilling commitments made long, long before her mother had gotten sick.
But the following year, this year, she had been determined to join her family for at least part of the holiday. Christmas Day would be out of the question, of course, but she carefully arranged her schedule on the twenty-sixth so that she could make the best possible connections from New York to Iowa.
Then the day after Thanksgiving Phoebe left a message to say that the family would be gathering at Ian’s house in California this year.
Amy called her right back. “California? Why?” They had always celebrated everything at home.
“We were all pretty miserable last year,” Phoebe answered. “So Ian suggested we do something dramatically different this year. Break the pattern. And Dad agreed.”
“When did we decide?”
“I don’t know. I guess we started talking about it in the summer, but we really didn’t decide for sure until yesterday.”
In the summer? Amy couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t they told her? If she had known this in the summer, she could have scheduled her holiday appearances for LA and been with them the whole time.
Tommy had had his family in LA a couple of Christmases ago, and they had all had a great time. He had gotten tickets for the Rose Bowl parade and had set up a “back-door” tour of Disneyland so that his nieces and nephews could get on the best rides without ever waiting in line. The local promoter had provided suites for everyone, and the kids had used room service and had gone swimming in the hotel pools, and the women had had facials and massages. It had been a Christmas they would remember forever.
Phoebe had said the Legend family needed something dramatically different. How about Christmas in a luxury hotel, arranged by Amy? That would have been different.
But it was too late now. She was committed to being in New York.
So she had to reroute herself, and then she almost missed the plane. Pestered by a talkative seat mate—someone traveling on a frequent-flyer upgrade who was thrilled, so thrilled, to be sitting next to Amy Legend—that Amy could not sleep during the flight. She was exhausted by the time she got to Ian’s.
As was the rest of the family. Ian and Joyce’s house wasn’t big enough, and everyone felt the lack of privacy. Joyce had planned extraordinarily elaborate meals, and every other plan had to be subordinate to their preparation. Ian and Joyce were very environmentally conscious—and Amy knew that was right—but feeding thirteen people three meals a day and never using a single paper plate or cup? Amy felt as if she and Phoebe and Joyce were chained to the kitchen, and she hated kitchen work.
Let’s go to a restaurant, Amy wanted to shriek. Call for pizza, Chinese, anything. I’ll pay for it.
But this was clearly Joyce’s show. Her sister-in-law was determined to be as in charge of this holiday as Mother had been of all holidays past. So Amy said nothing about pizza, nothing about Disneyland. She just loaded and unloaded the dishwasher over and over.
And at the lake there wouldn’t even be a dishwasher.
Suddenly Amy wanted to warn Holly and Jack—these two nice people she was squeezed between—about her family. She wanted to caution them about what the lake meant to Ian and Phoebe, how odd her brother and sister were about so many things. Please be careful. Let them have their own way.
But why should Holly and Jack have to accommodate Ian and Phoebe? Why couldn’t Ian and Phoebe be generous, why couldn’t they compromise?
Because they couldn’t.
Nick was listening to his CD player so loudly that Amy could hear a tuneless rasp coming from the headphones. Holly and Jack were now talking to each other about the financing of a business deal he had just done. They had carefully explained it to her so that she would not be excluded from the conversation, but once she started thinking about Phoebe and Ian, it was hard to concentrate on anything else.
For the early part of the drive they had been on the interstate; the terrain had been open, the Minnesota prairie falling away from either side of the graded highway. For the first half hour there had been billboards for an outlet mall, then ones for casinos on Indian reservations. After they passed the reservations, they left the interstate, and then there was nothing to advertise. The fields were dry, and slender-trunked trees lined the streambeds.
The afternoon shadows lengthened, and they entered mining country. The road curved around huge mounds of earth excavated from open-pit iron mines. This was the Mesabi Iron Range. Ore from under this earth had been mined and made into the steel that had won two world wars.
“I’m going to stop at Nashwaulk,” Jack said. “My sense is that that is the last place to get gas.”
“That sounds right,” Amy said.
Nashwaulk was a very little town, perched close to the edge of a mine. It was T-shaped; the county road ran along the edge of the mine, and Main Street ran perpendicular to it, meeting the county road and dead-ending at the mine. The town had an odd air to it. As small as it was, the houses were built close to the street on cramped lots. Even the churches crowded toward the curbs. No one wanted to waste on building lots land that might have ore beneath it.
The filling station was at the intersection of the county road and Main Street. Jack pulled up to the pumps, and Holly and Amy got out to go to the bathroom. This wasn’t only the last gas station; it was the last flush toilet, the last running hot water.
When they came out, Jack was going inside to pay for the gas. “Do either of you want a soda?” he called over his shoulder.
They shook their heads. “Is Nick in the bathroom?” Holly asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Holly made a face. “Where can he have gone?”
There was a bar across from the filling station. In fact, there were several bars along Main Street, almost more bars than stores. Holly sighed. “I think we’re about to have to turn ourselves into Carrie Nation.”
“There’s an observation platform over there,” Amy said, “where you can look at the mine. Maybe he’s there.”
At the end of Main Street was a small wooden tower outside the high fence that surrounded the mine. There was someone up on the platform. It was Nick. Amy and Holly went over to it. “This is sort of cool,” he said as they were climbing the steps. “What is it?”
It was the first time he had initiated conversation. “It’s an iron ore mine.” Amy reached the top of the platform. “Well, no, I guess it’s now a lake.”
The last time she had climbed this tower had been in her childhood. The mine had been closed for only a year or so then, and you could see down into the pit, into the glowing orange-red earth. It had been a man-made canyon, with roads gradually spiraling down the walls to the floor of the mine.
But over the years it had filled with water, dark, still water that looked icy and deep. All you could see of the mine was a steep rust-colored bank topped by a cyclone fence designed to keep people out. The water was not used for boating, swimming, or fishing. It was just there.
Holly started asking questions about mining, most of which Amy couldn’t answer. “My dad will know.”
Jack joined them on the platform, and the platform suddenly seemed smaller. He took one look at the water and shuddered. “This gives me the creeps.”
“It does?” Amy was surprised. “Why? It’s so peaceful.”
“I guess that’s it. It sort of looks like a thousand people drowned there, and that’s why it’s kept so peaceful, because it’s a graveyard.”
“It’s not,” she said. “At least not that I know of. It filled gradually. Long after the mine closed.”
“I know.” He shrugged. “I guess I just don’t like deep water.”
Amy looked at him. Was she wrong about him, thinking he was like the sound engineers and the lighting technicians? Those men would have never admitted even to themselves that they didn’t like deep water.
The business deal that Jack and Holly had been talking about, the one that had kept him from getting his hair cut, had been his. The kind of men she had been thinking of also didn’t start their own businesses. They became head supervisor in someone else’s.
“Why don’t you like deep water?” she asked. “You can swim, can’t you?”
“Yes, but how is swimming going to help you if you’re stuck in a submarine?”
Amy didn’t understand. Puzzled, questioning, she glanced at Holly.
“Our father was a submariner,” Holly explained. “He was under water deeper than this for long periods of time. Jack doesn’t think it would be his cup of tea.”
“Jack doesn’t think anything,” Jack answered. “Jack knows.”
“You’ve never been down in a submarine,” Holly said.
“I have too,” he protested. “When I was thirteen. The male-dependents cruise.” He turned to Amy and Nick, explaining. “We were in South Carolina and Dad had his own boat, so he set up a three-day male-dependent cruise—the guys on the boat could take their sons or nephews out. Some of the younger ones took their own fathers. And Dad took me.”
“I had forgotten about that,” Holly said, obviously now remembering.
“That’s because you didn’t have to go,” Jack told her. “If you’d gone you would have remembered.”
“I remember how mad I was,” she answered. “I couldn’t believe that you got to go and I didn’t. I was the older; I felt that I should have gone.”
“They should have let you. You probably would have liked it fine, and right now you’d be in dress whites with a couple of stars on your shoulder.”
“I could never be in the navy,” Holly said. “I look horrible in blue. I’d have to be in the army. I can wear olive.”
Those sounded like good reasons to Amy. After all, she had chosen her career because it was one of the very few that allow a person to wear marabou. “I take it that you didn’t like the submarine,” she said to Jack. Her body was still facing the water, her elbows propped up on the top rail of the tower’s protective fence, but she had turned her head so she could look at him.
“I hated it.” He raked his fingers through his shaggy hair. “It was torture, the longest three days of my life. And it wasn’t just routine adolescent hate-everything-associated-with-your-dad, although I certainly had enough of that. I honestly felt like I couldn’t breathe down there. I was just starting to grow, and I was having trouble managing my body up here on God’s green earth, and then they put me in a narrow little metal tube on top of a nuclear reactor. When it was finally over, I don’t think I went inside for a week. I was so glad to see the sunlight and the stars again.”
“Dad must have been disappointed,” Holly said.
“It did not exactly improve our relationship,” Jack acknowledged.
He had disappointed his father. Amy looked down at her hands. She knew all about that. Her parents had hardly known what to do with a child who didn’t like to read, who couldn’t organize her thoughts into tidy paragraphs, who refused to learn about primitive cultures because the clothes weren’t pretty enough.
“You probably weren’t delighted with yourself either,” Amy said.
“I sure wasn’t,” he agreed. “It probably seemed like I was determined to piss him off at every possible moment, but I wasn’t. It just worked out that way.” He pushed himself away from the railing. “All these folks who write about male-initiation rites—they never seem to talk about the kids who fail. What happens to us? Where do you go when you have failed not only your male parent but your entire culture?”
He was exaggerating, making this into a joke. But it wasn’t a joke. Amy knew that. It still bothered him.
And she knew something else. Although Nick had crammed himself into the far corner of the platform, although he had his back turned and had not said a word, he was listening, listening hard.
They were heading back to the truck when Amy remembered milk. “Should we get some milk? I wonder if we should get some milk.”
“Beats me,” Jack said. “I didn’t hear anything about it.”
“Me neither,” Holly added.
“It’s just that there isn’t much refrigerator space at the lake,” Amy explained, “so people always stop and buy milk on the way up.”
“I don’t mind if we get some, but if Mother expected us to, she would have told me,” Holly said. She sounded very confident.
“I don’t know…my sister always buys milk on the way.”
“We can do whatever you want,” Jack said. “But I can’t imagine Mom leaving anything to chance. This has all been planned to the last carton of milk. And if she did expect us to bring some, we’ll turn around and come back. I don’t mind. In fact, I’m assuming I’ll have to drive into town every time my sister needs to go to the bathroom.”
“That’s the way to think,” Holly said approvingly.
But Amy shifted uneasily as they slid back into the truck.
You are twenty-six years old, she reminded herself. You have an Olympic gold medal. It doesn’t matter whether or not you buy milk. This is not a female-initiation ritual, not like going down in someone’s submarine.
But it did matter. Mother’s lips would tighten. “Oh, Amy, you should have known—”
But Mother wasn’t going to be there.
Oh, well, Phoebe’s lips could tighten with the best of them. Actually, Phoebe probably cared more about details than Mother had. Mother would have seen Amy’s failure to buy milk as an inconvenience. Phoebe would see it as yet another sign that Amy was an idiot.
They drove on. Nick leaned his head against the car window and closed his eyes, but Amy didn’t think he was asleep. She wondered about him, who he was, why he was here.
Just as the prairies had given way to the mines, so now the mines gave way to the forest. The trees grew taller and closer together. The maples and box elders were gone now; this far north the winters were too cold. Except for the birches and the popples—which was the term people around here used for aspens—the trees were evergreen: spruces, balsams, jack pines, white pines, and Norways. The light was filtered, and the only wildflowers were in the ditches at the side of the road. The power line swooped into one final house and then stopped. Beyond that house there was no electricity, no phones. The road became a thin ribbon slicing through a wall of trees.
A State Forestry Service sign, brown with incised yellow letters, directed travelers to a public campground. Jack turned off the blacktop, and gravel spat out from underneath his tires. After another mile and another sign they turned again.
This was the trail that led to the lake. It was a narrow, sandy lane, winding and only wide enough for one car. The original growth had been logged, but it had been so long ago that the popples, jack pines, and birches were nearly full-grown. Moss, wintergreen, and silvery blueberry plants grew in the sandy soil along the edge of the trail.
“This is really nice back in here,” Jack said.
“It is,” Amy agreed. She always forgot that about the lake—how beautiful it was.
It was familiar, even after all this time. The open spot where above the wild grasses she could see the lake for the first time. The little rise in the trail. The names on the signs in the front of each cabin. Familiar names: Henson, Pinianski, Nutting, some locals, some summer people.
Amy had hated coming up here. She really had. They had come for the whole summer in those days, and she had to go for two and a half months without skating. None of the other girls she trained with could believe that her family made her do this. The lake had come to symbolize that—having a family who didn’t understand.
But none of those girls, girls whose families had understood skating, whose families had treasured their daughters’ efforts and had nearly bankrupted themselves…none of those girls were still skating competitively.
And she was.
During her break last summer she had volunteered to participate in a medical study of female athletes. In so many of the athletes, their rigorous training schedule had delayed the onset of menstruation for years and years, often resulting in bone-density levels of post-menopausal women.
But Amy’s menstrual cycle and her bone density were those of a normal twenty-six-year-old. And she had never had a serious injury. Yes, she was careful about warm-ups, but there was a resiliency about her bones, muscles, and ligaments that not all skaters had.
The examiners were fascinated. When had she started skating? How much had she trained as a child? What had her schedule been? Her diet? They asked about her family history, her mother’s bone-density levels, her sister’s.
She answered their questions as well as she could and then added, “Until I was in senior competition, my parents didn’t let me skate in the summer. I took two to three months off every year.”
There was a sudden quiet in the room. This was important.
The trail flattened as it came to the longer side of the oval lake, and there now was her family’s sign—THE LEGENDS, HAL AND ELEANOR, PHOEBE AND IAN AND AMY.
The sign had been made before she had been born, so the “and Amy” was squeezed into the corner, ruining the symmetry of the spacing.
Twenty-six years, and no one had made a new sign.
Surely a new sign would be made now, one that included Gwen, Holly, and Jack.
The strip of land between the trail and lake was densely wooded, and none of the cabins could be seen from the road. The only breaks in the wall of trees were the narrow driveways, Of course, they weren’t driveways in the suburban sense, graded and paved. These were sand-covered lanes twisting between the trees.
Jack swung wide and turned into Amy’s family’s drive. A big Norway was rooted right in the middle. He eased the truck around it, and then they could see the cabin.
“It’s lovely.” Holly was astonished. “I had no idea. It’s like something out of a children’s book.”
This was the “main” cabin. Sided with logs of honey-colored pine, it was small with a sharply sloping roof of green and brown shingles. More birches, their white bark peeling in papery layers, filled the spaces between the road and the lake while tall pines shaded the cabin itself. The cabin sat to the right of the drive while to the left was the bunkhouse and the path leading to the other two cabins.
Amy peered through the windshield. The screen door of the cabin opened, and out came her father, followed a moment later by a fair-haired woman. The woman was carrying Phoebe’s son Thomas on her hip.
Jack reached across Amy, touched his sister’s arm, and pointed at their mother and the little boy. “We can go home now. She’s happy.”
Holly and Amy had to wait while Nick got himself organized. Jack got out of the truck and crossed the pine-needle-covered sand. An instant later he was at his mother’s side, his hand on her shoulder, and he was speaking to her softly and quickly. She was nodding, as if to say, yes, yes, she already knew.
She came toward the truck with a smile. “Nick,” Amy heard her say, “what fun that you’re joining us.”
Nick didn’t resist her one-armed hug—she was still holding Thomas—although he did not return it. “They didn’t give you a chance to say no, did they?”
“They didn’t need to. They knew that I wouldn’t.”
By now Amy was out of the truck, and her father’s arms were closing around her. “How wonderful of you to come, sweetheart.”
He felt good. He had been thin and pale at Christmas, and for the first time Amy had thought about him growing old, but he had regained the lost weight and there was strength in his arms again. “How’s your ankle? Are you going to be okay? You’ve never been injured before, have you?”
How the messages had gotten garbled. “It wasn’t me. I’m fine. It was someone else.”
“That’s good. How long can you stay?”
“I’m not quite sure. It depends on a lot of things.”
“Fine.” Then he turned her around and introduced her to Gwen.
Her father’s new wife was very pretty—that was the only word for it; even at her age, she was pretty. Her hair was light. She had her children’s high cheekbones, but not their warm coloring or their strong jaws. She was wearing khaki slacks and a white turtleneck. She looked crisp and trim. Mother had insisted on everyone wearing dark colors at the lake so that they didn’t have to go into town and do laundry so often. But Gwen obviously didn’t mind doing laundry.
Gwen said that she had been dying to meet Amy, and Amy said the same about her…and then, although she wanted to kick herself for saying it, she couldn’t help it, she had to say it—“We didn’t bring milk. I hope that was all right.”
“Goodness, yes. It would have been a disaster if you had. There’s not an inch of refrigerator space. We’re absolutely set for at least the next twenty minutes.”
“So where is everyone?” Holly asked. “I thought there were going to be whole hordes of people.”
“Mom has murdered them all,” Jack said, “so she can keep the baby.”
Gwen swatted him on the arm. “Maggie and Joyce are out in the canoe, and Giles is asleep. The others went to launch the boat. We’re baby-sitting this little man here.” She poked Thomas in his tummy. He giggled at her.
“So where do we put our stuff?” Jack asked. “Amy said something about a bunkhouse. Is that it?” He pointed at the aging building.
“That’s the bunkhouse, and Nick will be sleeping there with the other kids, but the three of you are in the log cabin.”
“We’re in the log cabin?” Amy was surprised. “Then where is everyone else sleeping?”
“All four adults are in the new cabin,” Gwen said firmly and went around to the back of the truck. “Now, I know these are Holly’s bags”—clearly there was to be no further discussion about who was sleeping where—“so either Jack’s taste has improved a lot or these beautiful leather ones are yours, Amy.”
“They are.” Amy wondered how her brother and sister were reacting to this decisiveness. Badly, she assumed.
This has to be so much harder on them than it is on me. I’m not going to mind changes. They will.
The log cabin, the one where Amy, Jack, and Holly would be sleeping, was the oldest building on the lake, the only one built pioneer-style from notched and stacked logs. It was designed for harsh Minnesota winters; the walls were thick, the window openings small. As a result, the cabin, while a snug fantasy after nightfall, was dark, even gloomy, during the day.
Amy followed Holly and Gwen inside. Each paused for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. The first room was a small, square kitchen furnished with an enamel-topped table, a gas stove, and a squat little refrigerator. There was an old-fashioned pump mounted next to the sink, and two big teakettles set on the gas stove.
Beyond the kitchen was the main room, which was warmed by a wood-burning stove fashioned from an old oil barrel. Two more teakettles sat on the barrel stove. That’s how you got hot water up here; you pumped it and then heated it. A small bedroom with a pair of twin beds was nestled next to the kitchen, and along the lake side of the cabin was a narrow enclosed porch with a set of bunk beds.
Holly and Amy were to take the bedroom, Gwen said, leaving Jack to sleep on the porch. He went back to the main cabin to get the rest of the luggage, and Gwen showed Holly and Amy where the coffee and tea were and explained how to light the stove. She told them what to do if they thought the pilot light on the refrigerator was out. She showed them how to prime the pump in case the prime gave out.
Holly was paying close attention. “I think I’ve got it,” she said, then looked at Amy. “But you understand it, don’t you?”
Amy winced. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.” And she had not been paying attention. She was the little sister up here. She didn’t have to understand how things were done. Everyone else understood, and if they needed her to do anything, they told her.
Tommy said that she acted this way out of choice, that she didn’t have to be the little sister for ever and all time. Everything would change, he said, if she started exerting herself more, and he was probably right, but it didn’t seem worth the effort, not when she was around so little, and not when Phoebe and Ian were Phoebe and Ian. “I just know to sleep with some windows open so a propane leak won’t kill us.”
“We can do that,” Holly said.
Jack brought the rest of the luggage in, carrying hers and Holly’s into the bedroom. Holly lifted her suitcase onto one bed; her mother was standing ready to help unpack. Jack was at the door of the little room. “So how’s it going, Mom?” he asked.
“Wonderful,” Gwen answered. “As you can see, it is a beautiful place.”
That was no answer. Amy suddenly realized that she was the outsider here, that Gwen couldn’t speak honestly in front of her, that the most helpful thing she could do, the only thing she could do, was get out and give the three of them a chance to be alone.
“If you all will excuse me,” she said, “I want to go see the lake.”
“Do you need some company?” Jack drew back, out of the doorway, letting her pass.
He was being polite. He wanted to stay and talk to his mother. “No, no. I think the lady in the fuchsia blouse has given up on me by now.”
“Good thing. Since you probably wouldn’t want to hide out in the bathroom here.”
“That’s for sure.” She smiled and went outside. A little set of steps led down to the lake in front of this cabin, but the only dock was at the main cabin. She went in that direction. As she grew closer, she could hear children’s high-pitched voices, and a moment later the four little kids, Alex and Claire, Scott and Emily, came scrambling up the bank. They greeted her exuberantly, carelessly, and dashed off.
A moment later her sister came into view. Phoebe was carrying what looked like nearly a dozen life jackets, the old orange kapok Mae West type. She had thrust her arms through the neck openings and so at times had to turn sideways to maneuver between the trees.
Amy hurried to meet her. “Let me help you. What can I do?”
“Actually I’m okay. They aren’t heavy, and I’ve got them all balanced.”
“Where are you taking them?” Amy stepped out of her way.
“We’ve been keeping these under the bow of the boat for ages,” Phoebe said over her shoulder. “I can’t imagine we’ll ever use them again. So I thought we should store them in the garage.”
If no one was going to use them, why store them at all? Why not throw them out?
But Amy didn’t say anything. She was not going to interfere.
“Dad and Gwen were delighted you could come,” Phoebe said. “How long are you staying?”
“I don’t really know. It depends on a lot of things.” Amy quickened her step so she could open the side door to the garage.
This big, free-standing garage was between the road and the new cabin. In the male-dominated culture of the Iron Range, garages were occasionally bigger than a family’s house, and this was certainly true here. The garage, built by a man who had been an electrician in the mines, was bigger and perhaps even better built than the new cabin itself.
To get through the garage door, Phoebe had to turn sideward again. The late afternoon light fell full on her face. She looked pale, and her eyes were tired and tense.
That wasn’t right. Phoebe wasn’t supposed to look like this at the lake. Phoebe was supposed to be happy at the lake.
Phoebe’s life in Iowa City was busy and fragmented. Whenever Amy spoke to her, it seemed as if a million things were happening at once; she was always planning Girl Scout trips, baking cupcakes, planning class parties as well as working, worrying about the law students, the legal aid cases. She worked hard at the lake, of course she did, she was Phoebe, but up here she only did one thing at a time. She was soothed, made peaceful again.
Not this year.
Let me take those life jackets…let me massage your shoulders. Amy longed to do something for her sister. I brought a cashmere robe, please take it, it’s so soft, it will warm you, comfort you…
Phoebe never did anything nice for herself. She never bought herself scented bath oil or thick feather-edged writing paper. She never took time for herself. When did she make herself a cup of tea and sit in the sun on a spring afternoon? When did she ever buy flowers just for herself?
Amy followed her to the garage. There was a loft across one end of the building. Phoebe dropped the life jackets there.
Then it was Phoebe who got the ladder—Amy didn’t know where it was—and it was Phoebe who climbed up the ladder, balancing precariously while Amy handed the life jackets to her.
“I’m glad that’s over,” Phoebe said, brushing off her hands after she had put the ladder away. “I’m not crazy about heights.”
Then why not have me do it? Amy wanted to ask. Heights don’t bother me at all. Why not me?
And for a horrible, overpowering, swamping moment Amy wondered why she was here. What was the use? What was the point?
Whoop-di-do. Two whole laundry baskets shoved underneath the lower bunk for his stuff. Was this ever first-class treatment. The two little dudes he was bunking with—Nick couldn’t imagine ever being able to keep their names straight—got only one basket apiece. But Aunt Gwen had given him two.
Thanks, Brian. Thanks a heap. Look where you got me.
Nick was lying on his bunk, staring up at the underside of the mattress above him. Aunt Gwen had said that cock-tails would start at five-thirty. Oh, does that mean there will be a cocktail for Cousin Nick? He hadn’t even bothered to ask.
It was five forty-five. He could hear voices outside the bunkhouse. This place was some kind of trip, all right. The full-scale isolation might be cool if there weren’t so goddamn many people all living on top of each other. He levered himself upright, swung his feet around, and stood up. There was no point in putting this off any longer.
The driveway ended in a little clearing in front of the cabin. A couple of rough-hewn boards had been laid across some sawhorses, and Gramps—Aunt Gwen’s new husband—was tending bar. Aunt Gwen herself was passing around crackers and cheese. The kids were playing some kind of game, the two teenage girls were sitting together on a picnic bench, and the other adults were all standing around being too polite. That always signaled the start of something weird—when grown-ups were being too polite.
He looked over at the two girls. They were not exactly read-each-other’s-diaries-forever friends. He had picked up on that right away. The tall, dark one—Maggie was her name—did not want to have one thing to do with the other one, the mousy one, Ellie.
Maggie was a looker. She wasn’t pretty-pretty like the icky-sweet cheerleaders at school. She was super pale with big soft lips and dark eyes. Her eyebrows grew low and close to her eyes. She was wearing a man’s black shirt. She was tall, but the shirt was big on her, drooping down over her shoulders. Nick wondered if she was self-conscious about her boobs, which—based on his insufficient eyeing of them—looked quite majestic.
He had less of an impression of Ellie. She seemed pretty boring, even a little pathetic, but Nick supposed that was what happened to you when your folks gave you a name that worked best on a cow.
He watched the two of them from the corner of his eye. Ellie was turned toward Maggie, trying to talk to her. Maggie was looking straight ahead, obviously ignoring her.
“So what will it be, Nick?” Gramps asked. “We’re making the little kids drink powdered lemonade. Otherwise we’d be surrounded by half-drunk cans of pop. But you and Maggie and Ellie can certainly have pop.”
Pop. That’s what people around here called soda. God, it was a stupid word. Pop, pop. No wonder people thought Midwesterners were stupid; they ran around saying “pop” all the time. It didn’t exactly scream sophistication.
Unlike the words “bourbon, gin, and vodka.” Those items were also on the table. Gramps could have shown himself quite the sophisticate by uttering those words in Nick’s direction, but clearly that was not meant to be. He was a member of the pop brigade. He took a Sprite and sauntered over to where the two girls were sitting. Maggie instantly moved over, crowding Ellie, making room for him. Clearly he was to sit by her.
Not cool. A mistake, a misstep, too obvious by half. Sorry, sweetheart, but Cousin Nicky wasn’t here to make things easy.
He sat down next to Ellie.
Joyce couldn’t believe the junk that Gwen had set out for the kids—potato chips and cheese curls. The cheese was Brie, soft, full of fat—there was more fat in that wedge of cheese than her family ate in a week. Gwen had cut apple slices, but they were accompanied by one of those preprepared caramel-chocolate dips. The little girls, Emily and Claire, were using the apple slices as spoons. They would scoop up a wad of the dip, lick it off the apple slice, then stick the apple back into the dip dish. Joyce’s own kids, Emily and Scott, would be wild before the evening’s end. But it wouldn’t be her fault. They weren’t used to that much sugar.
At least that boy Nick was here so Maggie wouldn’t get stuck with Ellie all the time.
“Ellie’s such a dork,” Maggie had said on the airplane. She and Joyce were sharing an aisle and a window seat while Ian was in the row behind them with Scott and Emily. “I just can’t stand her.”
Joyce agreed…and she would have said so except that there was a chance Ian would overhear. “You know that Phoebe and Giles wish that the two of you were better friends.”
“Oh, come on. She’s a baby. She’s dumb.”
“You’re exaggerating, Mags. She’s not stupid.”
But she’s not like you.
It was a source of nearly immeasurable satisfaction to Joyce that her child was so very, very smart. Maggie might not have any Legend blood in her, but she had the kind of abilities that the Legends so valued.
From the earliest days of her marriage to Ian, Joyce had known that she was in competition with Phoebe. Who was the first Legend grandchild? Ellie, the first child born to any of their children? Or Maggie, older than Ellie, brought in the family before Ellie’s birth but not officially adopted by Ian until well after?
Phoebe had named her daughter Eleanor after her mother. Why had she done that? Joyce knew. Phoebe had been drawing a line in the sand; she had been trying to make sure that everyone knew that her daughter was the one who counted.
But then Maggie started to read at three and a half. She was labeled gifted and talented during her first semester in kindergarten. And Ellie? All anyone could say about Ellie was how sweet she was, how nice, how helpful. Ellie was clearly one of life’s Miss Congenialities, someone people sort of liked, but never respected or feared.
Joyce looked across the clearing at her daughter. All three teenagers were sitting together. Ellie was in the middle, but both Nick and Maggie were leaning forward, talking to each other, ignoring her.
And in addition to being smart, Maggie had her father’s striking looks.
How many people had said “I told you so” when Matt—Maggie’s father—had let his heroin problems get the best of him? Joyce would like to be able to gather all those people up in a room now and make them look at Maggie, listen to Maggie. That would show them.