Gwen was mad at her son. Amy found that interesting.
Obviously Ian had planned on doing something in the sauna, but he had been taking forever, and so Jack had finished it for him.
Amy could see why Gwen didn’t like that…on the other hand, she herself did. At Christmas last year, Ian had been always making everyone wait for him. He wasn’t a congenitally tardy person. If he was doing something alone or with one or two others, he was prompt and efficient, but if the whole clan was trying to get out the door at one time, Ian was always busy completing something important and everyone had to wait. It seemed like some kind of power move. She had been mildly irritated by it; Phoebe had probably been incensed.
So she was glad that someone had called Ian’s bluff.
It had been a nice day, probably the best time she had had at the lake since she had started skating. At family gatherings she usually drifted, uncertain of what she was supposed to be doing, how she was supposed to be helping. She never knew what she would be doing in the next twenty minutes.
She hated it. She was used to a day rigidly organized around ice time, flight time, curtain time, warm-up time, and every other kind of time. A structureless, scheduleless day probably should have been a relaxing change—she couldn’t help thinking that a sane, normal person would have found it so—but she couldn’t cope with it.
When she and Holly had come over to the main cabin for breakfast that morning, however, there was a big sheet of paper posted on the cabin wall. It listed the day’s schedule. Chores had been divided up; activities had been given a time. It was all very structured.
“Mother spent her whole adult life as a navy wife,” Holly explained. “She believes in order.”
“Don’t apologize to me.” Amy loved knowing what she was supposed to do. “There can’t be any group of people who are more addicted to routine than skaters. We can’t stand having any choices.” She was looking for her name on the duty roster. Sweeping the porches, clearing the lunch dishes, setting the table at dinner—these were all things she could do. She wasn’t going to have to ask a million questions.
She and Holly stuck together all day like two first-time summer campers. They swam, played cards with the kids, rode bikes out to one of the logging roads to see if the raspberries were ripe. Holly was her friend, her bunk mate, someone even more of an outsider than she, someone even more ignorant of the routines.
After lunch Giles launched his wooden fishing boat, the one he had restored so beautifully, and he took the kids for rides. Amy started to swim alongside the boat, and as her muscles warmed and eased, as she could feel the strength in her legs and across her back, she started to feel like herself again. The water was wonderfully soft. She could open her eyes and see the spray of diamond water drops flung out by her rising arm. She could hear the rhythmic splash and pull of Giles’s oars.
She didn’t get enough exercise when she was with her family. She was always too busy standing around waiting to unload the dishwasher.
She stuck her head out of the water. “Could you row across the lake?” she asked Giles. “I’d like to see if I can swim it.”
“Of course,” he answered. Giles was always happy to be in his boat.
The lake was about a half mile across, and she made the round trip easily. Then Jack came down to the dock and quietly beckoned to Gwen, Holly, Phoebe, and herself.
“The sauna’s ready. You four go first, before the kids get to the hot water.”
Amy had hardly known what he was talking about, but it turned out that the little building next to the log cabin which her family had always used as a woodshed had once been a sauna. Gwen had cleared it out; Jack had got it working.
It was deliciously warm, and the tank was full of hot water. The four of them lay on the benches until their skin was rosy and moist. Then they poured bucket after bucket of hot water on themselves. There was usually never hot water at the lake for anything but washing dishes, and the warmth, the cleanliness, was a luxury. Amy washed everyone’s hair, loving the way that she could feel each one of them relax under her fingers. Even her sister had eased.
“I didn’t think anything could make the lake better,” Phoebe sighed. “But this really does. I can’t believe that it’s been sitting here this whole time, and we’ve never used it.”
“I knew that Jack would run mad if he didn’t have some projects,” Gwen said. She was speaking mildly, but she was clearly pleased. “Although we may have to put our heads together to think up some more. It’s only been one day and he’s making too much progress.”
The clouds thickened and lowered as they ate dinner. Amy lingered at the table with her dad and Gwen, Gwen being eager to ask all the questions everyone always asked Amy, how she had gotten started, what her life was like, what her daily routine was, what was she going to do when she wasn’t able to skate, and the final, completely unanswerable one—what it was like to be famous. She usually answered those questions the same way each time, but now she found herself concentrating on her father’s role in her career, how he had steered her onto the right path early in her career, how much of her music he was still finding. He even passed some along to Tommy and Henry. It was an enormous help. All three of them did their own choreography now. They didn’t like being dependent on other people’s creativity—many skaters just waited for their choreographers and coaches to have good ideas—but finding new music was extraordinarily time-consuming, and Hal’s help was invaluable. He had grown to understand what a skater needed in a piece of music as well as any of the professional choreographers.
He waved a hand, dismissing his role. “I’ve learned a lot. But tell us, how long are you going to be able to stay? That was never clear in any of the messages.”
“I don’t know,” Amy answered. Yesterday she couldn’t have imagined being here for more than forty-eight hours, but clearly she was going to be able to make it for longer than that. “I’ve still got the four days left over from the television special.” That committed her. Now she had to stay for at least four days. “At some point we need to start thinking about our fall programs and what we’re going to do this spring.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Gwen asked.
“Henry Carroll, Tommy Sargent, and our coach Oliver Young. We’re planning a tour next spring, primarily the three of us. We’re really going to try to keep the ticket prices down.” That was particularly important to Tommy. The ticket prices for the big spring tours always seemed way too high. The venues usually sold out, but some of the people who cared the most couldn’t go. “But keeping the ticket prices down is our only idea so far.”
“It’s a good one,” her father said.
“Yes, but it’s hard to skate too.”
He laughed. “I can’t disagree with that.”
She liked seeing him laugh. He hadn’t laughed last Christmas. “So I don’t know. Mostly it’s ideas I need, and I don’t have to be in Denver to come up with ideas.”
“Stay as long as you like,” Gwen said, “but in the meantime would you help me bring all the towels in? It looks like it’s going to rain tonight.”
Taking towels off the line—this too was something Amy could do, and she happily followed Gwen outside.
The towels were still damp. “When it was just your father and I,” Gwen said, “I hung them up in front of the fire for the night, but there’s too many now. What did your mother do?”
“I don’t know,” Amy admitted. “But whatever it was, it wasn’t very effective.” In fact, whenever Amy smelled mildew, it reminded her of towels at the lake. She thought for a moment. Laundry was her hobby, her sole domestic skill. She couldn’t cook, she couldn’t tell one cleaning product from the next, but every time she moved it was to get better laundry facilities. She owned five different shapes of tailors’ hams, and her ironing board was German with a vacuum-producing motor that pulled the steam through the garment. She should be able to figure out what to do with damp towels even if there were almost twenty of them. “What about if we hung them in the sauna? Wouldn’t they dry in there?”
“That’s a good idea. We can add another log on the fire, and they’ll be perfect in the morning.”
As they were carrying the baskets over to the sauna, they met Phoebe coming toward the main cabin.
“We thought we would hang these in the sauna,” Gwen explained. “So they can dry overnight.”
“That should work,” Phoebe said. “It’s a good idea.”
A good idea? Phoebe had just said that she had had a good idea.
This is laundry, Amy reminded herself. Just laundry. Surely you are not such an idiot as to be pleased that your sister likes your idea about laundry.
Of course, Phoebe didn’t know that it was Amy’s idea. She probably thought it was Gwen’s.
The three of them draped the towels over the benches, and while Phoebe built up the fire, Amy carried the empty baskets back to the main cabin. She set them in their place—she had watched Gwen pick them up—and then went back outside, letting the screen door shut behind her.
She started back down the path. Then she heard a noise from the far side of the bunkhouse. She went around and looked.
It was Jack. He was halfway up on a small ladder, caulking a window. He was working quickly, his grip on the caulking gun sure and strong. He jumped down from the ladder and bent over, tilting his head to do the underside of the window.
Amy watched him work. He was so busy with all his tasks. It almost seemed as if he were a handyman paid to work while the rest of them vacationed.
He finished the underside of the window. He ran his fingers lightly over the seam and then began rubbing his thumb over his fingertips. He must have gotten some of the caulk on his hands and was trying to bead it up.
He saw her. “This stuff is supposed to be quick-dry,” he said, “but I’d feel better if the rain held off until after midnight.”
“The towels are in,” she said lightly. “So we laundresses are prepared.”
“Good for you. Now tell me, have you taken a look at that limb?” He was speaking again, now pointing at a tree overhead. “Don’t you think it ought to come down?”
Amy looked up. She saw a mass of green leaves. She supposed that the leaves were attached to a branch, and if they had been silk leaves, she probably could have figured out how to iron them if that proved to be necessary, but since they were real, she didn’t have one thing to say about them. “If you think it needs to come down, then take it down.”
“I shouldn’t do it without talking to your dad.”
“Then talk to him. He was inside a couple of minutes ago.”
Jack shook his head. “Not anymore. He’s doing something with your brother. And they’ll probably want to do it themselves; they must have their own way of working.”
“That they do,” she agreed.
He closed up his ladder and picked it up. “So what are you up to?”
“Nothing.” She stopped herself. She was not going to be that way. She was going to make her own plans. Even if they were little and pointless, they would at least be her own. “I’m going to go on a walk. If anyone asks where I am, will you tell them I’ve gone down to the Rim?” She had been meaning to do this ever since she had arrived yesterday.
“The Rim? Where’s that?”
“At the other end of the lake. Would you like to come?”
He paused for a second. “Sure. Why not? Let me put this ladder away. It will only take a second. Shall we try to find Holly?”
“That’s a good idea.” Amy watched as he picked up the ladder, levered it across one shoulder, and started carrying it to the garage. Then she changed her mind about finding Holly. “Actually, I’m not so sure that it is a good idea. While we’re looking for her, we’ll run into everyone else, and they’ll want to come, and people will need to get sweaters and the kids will have to use the biffy and someone else will think of one other quick little thing that they have to do first, and someone else will think of another, and it will be dark before everyone gets ready, and then we won’t be able to go.”
He came out of the garage, brushing his hands. “I like my sister, but not that much.”
He scooped up a wool shirt that had been lying on the steps to the bunkhouse, and they started down the driveway. He threw a last glance at the tree hanging over the bunkhouse.
His shirt was plaid, browns and camels with a touch of gold.
They started walking up the drive. “That’s a nice shirt. It must look good on you,” she said.
He had hooked the shirt on his finger and slung it over his shoulder. At her words he twisted his head to look at the shirt as if he remembered nothing about it.
“The colors,” Amy continued. “They must look good on you.”
He shook his head. She could have been speaking Greek for all he understood. “If you say so. Holly gave it to me.”
At the end of the driveway they turned right, heading away from the campground and the turn-off from the main road. He was walking easily, his shoulders back, the kind of effortless posture that came from good abs and traps.
Amy was used to male figure skaters. They were leanly built, often quite short men. And her father and brother, although tall, also had trim, sleek builds. But Jack was crafted on generous, solid lines with broad shoulders, big hands, and a strong chest.
Holly had told her all about him last night, about his different business ventures, his different romances. In terms of romance, Holly had called him a “rescuer.” His relationships were with women who were making important transitions in their lives, returning to school or starting a business. Jack gave them a lot of practical support, from cleaning their gutters to advising them when a client wasn’t worth the effort. Once the woman emerged from her transition, Holly said, she and Jack amicably lost interest in one another.
Amy felt that “rescuer” was too strong a word. She was involved in enough mental health organizations to know that the true rescuers fell in love with people who were transitioning from manageable drug addictions to ones that were completely out of control. It didn’t sound as if Jack were rescuing these women; he was giving them a helping hand. There was a big difference. Maybe the mental health professionals would say that he was avoiding intimacy, but what woman starting her own business had the time for a lot of emotional intensity?
Of course, Amy had to pretend that she didn’t know about any of this. “Holly said you just sold a business. Do you know what you’re doing next?”
“I think it would be fun to learn to fly helicopters.”
“Helicopters?” Amy herself found helicopters noisy and uncomfortable, but the men flying them always seemed to love them. “Do you have a reason? Or does it just sound like fun?”
“It just sounds like fun. But if my past history is any guide, I will figure out some way to turn it into a business, and I’ll have it for about five years and then I will get restless and sell it to someone.”
Apparently he had done that twice already. Amy was used to her father, who had only had one profession, and to figure skaters, most of whom would need a second profession but could rarely find one. “Does that seem okay to you?”
“It seems like what will happen, so it had better be okay.”
That was probably a good attitude. “You don’t have any control over it?” she asked.
“Apparently not.”
They walked on for a minute or so. Then he spoke. “Why did your brother cut his hair?”
“Ian?” Amy blinked. That seemed like an odd question. Ian had always worn his hair long, pulled back into a ponytail, but sometime between Mother’s funeral and when she had seen him the following Christmas, he had cut it. “I have no idea. Maybe he did it out of sympathy for me. Maybe he knows how much I want to have long hair, and so he cut his to share in my misery.”
This was, of course, unlikely in the extreme. Ian could not have given her hair one moment’s thought in his entire life. If you asked him to shut his eyes, he probably couldn’t have said what color it was.
“Why can’t you have your hair long?” Jack asked. “Because of your skating?”
“No. I could pin it back or spray it. It’s that I would look really horrible in long hair.”
“You would?” He looked down at her, squinting a bit, as if trying to picture her with long hair. “I find that hard to believe…but I don’t know one thing about it.”
Amy had to agree with him there; anyone who had his coloring and wore navy did not know one thing about it. She hoped that all the ladies in transition understood that.
The trail did not make a complete circle around the lake. The far third of the shoreline was marshy and reedy, with no solid ground for building a road. So before they reached the trail’s dead end, Amy turned away from the lake onto an old logging road. Heavy flatbed trucks had worn two sandy ruts through the forest, but now that the trucks were gone, wild grasses grew between the ruts. The road ran at an angle away from the shoreline, and after a bit they turned down an even more overgrown trail.
The last time Amy had come on this walk, it had been simple. One old logging road ran away from the lake; then another road cut back toward the lake. But the logging roads were now crossed by snowmobile trails and all-terrain vehicle routes. She stopped for a moment.
Jack noticed. “Are we lost?”
“I don’t know. I thought I knew this road, but that was because there was only one.”
“We came out from the trail at about a thirty-degree angle, then we took a pretty sharp turn—maybe eighty degrees or so—and now we’re heading back toward the lake again. My guess is it’s about a hundred yards away—but I don’t know that for sure.”
She was impressed. “You have a good sense of direction.”
He nodded. “But I don’t have my dad’s sense of distance. He would be right about the yardage.”
“Well, I don’t care about the distance so long as we’re going the right way.” Then she saw a No Trespassing sign. “Oh, good, we are in the right place.”
“Because we’re trespassing?” he asked as she went past the sign. “That’s how we know we’re in the right place? I thought I was the only one who said things like that.”
Amy rolled her eyes, but didn’t answer…because she wasn’t trespassing.
A moment later they rounded a bend and came to a chained gate with another No Trespassing sign. But the gate was not attached to a fence. It was designed to keep cars out, not people. In fact, there was a distinct footpath leading around the gate.
A short lane opened onto a clearing at the edge of the lake, the one stretch of firm ground between a little swamp at the end of the trail and the marshy land around the inlet stream that brought water into the lake. The clearing was almost meadow-like, flat and open and sunny, full of wildflowers—lavender-blue asters, lemon-scented evening primroses, the fuzzy pink dome-shaped clusters of the Joe Pye weed. Their blossoms were little dots of color in the pale green grasses. Raspberry bushes spilled from the edges of the woods, growing over a pile of brush.
The site was low, and there was a sandy beach at the lake’s edge, the only beach on the lake beside the one at the campground.
Amy and Jack crossed through the meadow and flowers. The property was at the longer end of the oval lake, so the length of the lake stretched out before them. Normally at this time of day the sun would be nearing the treeline and long streaks of light would glitter off the water, but of course this evening was cloudy.
Jack was looking around. Amy sat down on the lone big boulder that rose out of the sand.
“What is this place?” he asked. “It’s a great spot. Why hasn’t anyone built on it? The access stinks, but that could be fixed. Who owns it?”
She started to shrug, but then she spoke, her words coming out in a rush. “Can you keep a secret?” She was standing now. She didn’t remember getting up off the boulder. “I do. I own it. It’s mine.”
He had been looking out across at the lake, but at her words his head jerked toward her. “You what? You own it?”
“Yes.” These grasses and flowers, the raspberries, the soft beach, they were hers. “The last time I was here, it was three years ago, the property was on the market, and apparently some resort developers were looking at it to be some sort of fly-in hunting and fishing retreat. So there would have been little planes landing on the lake all the time. They would have brought in electricity, and that would have changed so much. My family would have hated it. So I was in town one day, and I just picked up the phone and told the people who take care of my money to buy it.”
Pam and David—her financial advisers—had said it wasn’t a good investment, but she hadn’t cared. The summer people had been dreading the resort, and the locals hadn’t wanted it either because the potential purchasers were terrible employers, and here all by herself she, little Amy the Afterthought, had fixed everything with a single phone call.
Jack was shaking his head. “I guess I’ve opened businesses with about that much thought…but how big is it? Those No Trespassing signs were a good ways back.”
“It’s a hundred acres.”
“A hun—” He whistled. “That’s a lot of land. But why the secret? Why aren’t you telling people?”
“I had to keep my name out of it during negotiations. Otherwise the price would have gone through the roof. And then…I don’t know. I guess I wasn’t sure how my family would react. My mother always talked about how far the place was from the other cabins, how inconvenient it would be to have a cabin there.”
“Inconvenient? You have no plumbing up here, no electricity, you’ve got to drive twenty miles to make a phone call, and another half mile seems inconvenient?”
“Well, when you put it that way, I guess it does seem a little odd, but my mother’s opinions were always so settled that it was hard to even think about disagreeing with her. And I supposed I was also a little embarrassed about doing it. I didn’t want it to look like I was flashing my money around.”
“Okay.” It didn’t sound like he completely understood. “I take it you don’t have any plans for the place?”
“No. None.”
But as she spoke she realized that she probably had had, if not plans, at least a hope that someday, somehow, she would feel enough a part of her family to want a cabin up here. There’d be the main cabin, the new cabin, the log cabin, and Amy’s cabin. Amy’s cabin—she liked the sound of that. A place where Amy would decide what they all would eat, a place where Amy would decide where they all would sit.
Of course, a good rainfall would wash out the road to Amy’s place. So much for that fantasy.
Jack had moved over to the edge of the clearing and then stepped into the woods. She could hear twigs cracking and leaves rustling as he moved around.
He called out. “Is the swamp at the end of the trail yours?”
“I think so.”
He reappeared. “If you built a little footbridge across the swamp—laying down a few dock sections would work fine; it would be at most two hours’ work—then people could get from the trail to the beach in two seconds.”
Amy had never thought of that. “The kids would love being able to walk down here.”
“But you’d have to tell everyone that the place is yours.”
There was a leaf caught in his thick hair. He must have tangled with a branch while crashing through the swamp. Amy wanted to reach up and brush it out.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
But she knew she wouldn’t.
Gwen sat down on the steps to the main cabin. It was the first moment she had been alone all day. The sky was dark and low. At home she would have turned on the Weather Channel to find out when the storm would be coming, but there was no Weather Channel up here, no TV.
She could hear voices. The younger kids were playing in the road with Giles and Phoebe. Maggie and Ellie were in the new cabin playing cards with Joyce. Nick was by himself in the bunkhouse. Holly had gone to the log cabin to do some work. Hal and Ian were looking at the bank, checking for erosion. Everyone was accounted for. Except Jack, but she wasn’t worried about him. He could take care of himself.
She sometimes thought that he should have been born a hundred and fifty years ago. He could have gone west, and once he had learned the road, he could have become a wagon master, paid to guide the covered wagons full of settlers across the Rockies to Oregon. He would have never settled himself, never found a little plot of land and tried to raise cows or grow corn, but he would lead others to their new homes.
An instinct, a mother’s instinct, turned her eyes toward the road, and there he was, her wagon-master son, at the end of the driveway, talking to Amy. Oh, yes, Amy. She had forgotten to keep track of Amy. She must have been out in the road with Giles, Phoebe, and the younger children.
Jack was wearing the wool shirt Holly had given him, the one he looked so good in.
He was still talking to Amy.
He had his hands in his pockets. Amy’s were linked at the back of her neck, her forearms together. They were still talking.
“Amy! Aunt Amy!” It was one of the little kids, calling her. Amy dropped her arms and gestured to the kids that she was coming. She turned back to Jack, no doubt smiling a little farewell.
He, still keeping his hands in his pockets, moved his elbow and lightly nudged her arm with his.
It was the lightest of touches, but Gwen felt her shoulders drawing together, her neck starting to stiffen.
Why hadn’t this occurred to her? Jack and Amy. Both unattached, neither with enough to do. She watched her son come down the driveway. He was built like her own father, tall, broad-shouldered, but he had John’s warm coloring. Both the children did. She raised her voice. “What have you been up to?”
“Caulked that window and then went on a walk with Amy.”
So there had been more than a chat at the end of the driveway.
Gwen moved over on the stoop, making room for him. He sat back, bracing himself on elbows. She leaned back a bit so that she was touching him, her back against his arm. They were quiet for a moment; then he spoke:
“Mom, how bad would Amy look in long hair?”
Gwen forced herself not to react, not to sit up, pulling herself away from his arm. She tried to answer. “I don’t know…it’s hard to imagine her looking anything but wonderful, but her features are very delicate. I suppose she could be overwhelmed by a lot of hair. And her jaw and throat are so perfect, you wouldn’t notice them as much if she had longer hair.” What on earth was happening that Jack was thinking about how Amy wore her hair? “Why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “We were just talking. I was wondering why Ian had cut his hair, and then she said something about wishing her hair was long, but that she wouldn’t look right in long hair. I don’t get it. If she wants her hair long, she should let it grow. Surely she’s earned the right to have what she wants.”
Gwen had to agree with him on that. “Well, it was nice of you to go on a walk with her. It doesn’t seem that she’s as comfortable up here as the rest of her family.”
“She’s not,” he agreed.
“But I think she’s really enjoying having you and Holly here. She’s closer in age to the two of you. It’s as if she finally has a brother and sister who can play with her.”
Jack was still leaning back on his elbows. “She and Holly certainly have gotten chummy.”
“And that’s nice for both of them.”
Gwen knew that he was getting her message. Amy needs a brother too. And you’re a good brother, Jack. You’re wonderful to Holly. You’re the only person who can get her to stop working. Her life is so much better because you are her brother.
That’s what Amy needs too. Don’t fall in love with her. Be her brother.
Was she asking her son to set aside his own happiness? She hoped not, she desperately hoped not. But everything was so complicated this summer, so difficult. Phoebe, Ian, and Joyce were having such trouble adjusting to Gwen’s being here. Phoebe was a mass of unresolved grief; Ian seemed unreachable, unknowable; Joyce swaddled herself in critical bitterness. The cord that was holding Hal’s family together was thin and fraying.
And if by summer’s end the cord broke, Gwen knew that everyone would blame not the worn sections of the cord itself, but the new knot at its end, the knot that had tied her family to theirs.
So not now, Jack. The necklace can’t take any more weight.
I’m trying, Mom. I suggested that we take Holly on the walk with us. I knew we needed to take Holly with us. And I didn’t ask her to tell me that secret. I would have stopped her if she had given me a chance.
I’m not going to give in to this. I’m not.