Ellie offered to put Alex and Claire to bed. “I know that you and Dad need to talk about the canoe trip.”
Phoebe thanked her. “But it’s just Alex and Claire we have to talk about. If you want to go, you certainly can.”
“I was hoping you would say that.” Ellie scooped up her brother and sister and danced off to the bunkhouse.
Giles waited until the kids were out of earshot. “Ellie’s getting a crush on Nick, isn’t she?”
Phoebe nodded. At home thirteen-year-old Ellie and her friends socialized with boys only in groups. If she had particular feelings for any one boy, Phoebe suspected, they were directed toward the son of one of the physics professors, an intellectually gifted kid who was shy enough that he might never date until college. Nick’s confident independence had clearly driven every other thought from Ellie’s mind. Flushed and breathless, she watched him whenever he wasn’t looking at her and nervously shifted her gaze away whenever he was.
Giles grimaced. “Actually, he’s not a bad kid, but he’s probably very unhappy. And she’s going to have a lot of competition from Maggie.”
“That’s for sure.” For Maggie’s fifteenth birthday, Joyce had taken her to the gynecologist for birth-control pills. “I want her to be able to make an informed decision about physical pleasures,” Joyce had said.
Phoebe thought that was crazy. Joyce wasn’t helping Maggie make an informed decision; she was encouraging her to make an impulsive one.
Phoebe rose from her place at the campfire and went around the circle to get Thomas from Gwen. Already half asleep, he was heavy and limp. Giles opened the door to the new cabin, and they went into their bedroom. Joyce and Ian were still outside. They could talk.
“So what about Alex and Claire?” Phoebe asked. She laid Thomas on the bed and began taking off his overalls. They were dirty; the knees were out-and-out filthy. “They’re dying to go too.”
“And we’d be monsters if we didn’t let them. The only question is which one of us goes with them and which one of us stays home with this little munchkin.” Giles tickled Thomas’s chin. He usually liked that, but tonight he was too sleepy. He lifted his chubby little fist as if to bat his father’s hand away, but even that was too much effort.
Phoebe looked up at Giles. Why was that a question? Yes, half of each day would be spent sitting in a canoe, but there would be portages across uneven, rocky paths; the campsites were often up steep banks. That sort of thing was difficult for him.
He went on. “I know you must have assumed that I would stay home—and of course I will if you want to go.”
“But you want to go too.” This did surprise her.
“Whatever Jack and Nick might have been planning originally, they’re going to have to take an easy trip now that the kids are going. And yes, I do want to go.”
Giles rarely spoke up like this. He certainly could have strong opinions, and sometimes he did impose them on everyone else, but he only ever thought about what was right for a whole group: he never worried about what he wanted for himself. Phoebe knew that because there had been so much he couldn’t do as a kid, he had learned not to have a lot of preferences so that he wouldn’t be disappointed.
“I know it isn’t fair of me,” he went on, “because the minute I say I want to go, it’s a done deal in your mind, you would never dream of going yourself, but that just shows you how much I do want to.”
He was right. If he wanted to go, there was no question whatsoever that he would go and she would stay home with Thomas.
She put Thomas in his crib. “Do you want to get away from the lake?” she asked.
They never talked about this, about the fact that Giles didn’t love the lake as much as she did.
“That’s part of it,” he admitted. “We haven’t had an easy time of it this year, but I also just want to go.” His voice lightened. “I think I have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Oh?” Phoebe looked over her shoulder with a smile. He was already the most grown-up person on the face of the earth.
“Yes, I want to be Jack.”
“What?” Phoebe stared at him. Thomas’s clothes fell to the floor. “You want to be what?”
“You heard me. And it’s a who, not a what…at least I think it is. I want to be Jack. He’s so good at all this guy stuff—the tools, the outdoors. I want to be like that.”
“Giles!” Phoebe had to laugh. “You want to be Jack?” She liked Jack, she did, and yes, he did have both large-motor and fine-motor skills, and his problem-solving skills were superb, but…
“Yes. I want to be him, but in my own life. I want to keep my family and my house and my job, but just be him.”
Phoebe started to undress. “I don’t suppose I need to point out that Jack doesn’t have a family, a house, or seemingly even a job, and that’s probably no accident. Can you imagine him doing your job?”
“Absolutely. He would keep a chain saw behind his desk, and the minute anyone started being a pain in the butt, he’d fire the thing up and start slicing the furniture. People would learn to behave.”
“If Jack had your job, he would probably use the chain saw on himself.”
“I have been known to lock up all sharp objects.”
Phoebe did love this man. She knew how their marriage must look to outsiders—oldest daughter marries crippled man so she can go on having someone to take care of. But Giles was, in so many ways, the least needy person she had ever met. She came around to his side of the bed, sat next to him, slipped her arm through his, and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I’m really glad you want to go.”
The first summer he had come up here had been difficult. There had been so little for him to do. Then the next summer he had asked if he could restore the old wood boat that had belonged to the previous owners of the log cabin. Restoring it had taken him years, and ever since the boat was his; it was the one thing up here he really cared about.
And now he wanted to go on the canoe trip. She was glad.
Staying here wouldn’t be so bad. Gwen, Dad, and Holly had already said that they weren’t going, and Amy probably wouldn’t either. So she wouldn’t be alone. It might be odd to be here with so few people, it wouldn’t seem like the lake, but she wouldn’t think about it.
Jack stayed to put out the fire while the rest of the family settled down for the night. The screen doors banged, people called to one another, and through the trees he could see the flashlights bobbing down the paths to biffies. In the moonlight he could see Amy in the large cleared patch through which the clothesline ran. The kids always flung their towels over the line in wrinkled wads that would never dry. So each night Amy checked the line, folding the dry towels and rehanging the ones that were still damp. Apparently she liked doing laundry. That seemed strange to him, but he liked watching her, a shadowy figure moving through the moonlight.
He had certainly made a mess of that conversation with her. Why had he tried to be subtle? He was the least subtle person on the planet. He should have just come out and said what he had to say. That was the only thing that worked for him.
If you were any other person and I had met you at any other time, I would have come calling at your door, but you’re Hal’s daughter and I’m Gwen’s son, so I’m not going to.
He sprinkled another juice can of water on the fire. He was putting it out correctly, using perfect Boy Scout procedure. Normally he just threw a couple of buckets of water on a fire and let the big logs soak, but tonight he didn’t have anything else to do, so he was doing it right, drizzling the water a little at a time. If you used too much water, it was hard to build a fire on the site the next morning.
Some footsteps rustled in the pine needles behind him. He looked up. It was Holly. She had an armful of neatly folded towels; Amy must have given them to her.
“You doing okay?” he asked. He hadn’t seen a lot of her.
“I am…although I would have died without the sauna. I don’t think I could have stood skinny-dipping in the lake every morning.”
“Is the lack of privacy getting to you?” he asked. She was used to being alone in the mornings and evenings, and she had grown to like it.
“Surprisingly not. The times when I would have been alone at home, I’m with Amy, and I love being with her.”
“She’s good company,” Jack said and dipped the juice can back into the water bucket. He was glad that the lake was working out for his sister.
“I saw you talking to Amy after the campfire.”
The juice can suddenly sank to the bottom of the bucket. He must have let go of it. That was stupid. Now he would have to roll up his sleeve and fish it out.
He unbuttoned his cuff. “I wanted to be sure that she felt welcome on this canoe trip.” The water in the bucket was cold. “Sometimes it seems like her family doesn’t think about including her in things.”
“You like her, don’t you?”
“Sure. I just said she was good company, didn’t I?”
He shouldn’t have sounded so defensive. He had probably given himself away completely. Oh, God, what would she say?
When they were kids, Holly sometimes turned herself into Junior Mom and lectured him with a persistence that their mother never had. He supposed that she would launch into something like that now. The fragility of a blended family, Jack…Phoebe and Ian aren’t happy with so many changes, Jack…so much other stress, Jack…
He was not in the mood to hear any of it. Not at all. He stood, picked up the bucket with a jerk, and dumped the water on the coals. The embers hissed, and grimy puddles formed among the gray ashes, exactly the kind of puddles the Boy Scouts didn’t like.
Well, forget the Boy Scouts. They might have taught him to use a compass and lash a table, but none of those merit badges were doing a thing to help him through this.
Holly spoke. “As much as I like it here, I’m starting to get concerned about things at work. I think I probably ought to go home to New York when you get back from this canoe trip.”
Jack blinked. Where had that come from? Not that it was a complete surprise; she had made it clear from the beginning that if she really hated the place, she would leave. But she didn’t seem to hate it. “Mom would be really disappointed.”
“She would understand.”
He picked up a stick and turned one of the logs over. He really shouldn’t have thrown so much water. “Is there anything I can do to make you stay?”
“Short of running phone lines, probably not…but I haven’t made up my mind. I’ll see how things are at the office when I go into town tomorrow.”
This was not about the office. Jack knew that. She hadn’t spoken to anyone there in a couple of days. And it probably wasn’t about having to pump dish water or not being able to blow-dry her hair.
Was it about him and Amy?
Holly wasn’t an idiot, and she was sleeping in the same cabin with Amy and him. If anyone had a sense of how he felt about Amy, it would be her. Her notions probably wouldn’t be far enough advanced for her to lecture him in the way he had imagined her doing. She probably just felt a vague unease, one she might not fully understand.
But it was enough to make her think about leaving the lake.
Amy was her pal, her summer camp buddy, the person she spent most of her time with. They got up together, went on walks together, planned their day together. What if he suddenly started romancing Amy? Holly would want to give them privacy; she would linger outside the cabin every evening, get up early every morning. She would hold back, never wanting to make plans with Amy until she was sure that Amy had had a chance to make plans with him. She would feel as awkward, as out of place, as the third party in any courtship…and she would leave the lake.
This really stank. He had been all worried about Phoebe and Ian, thinking that they couldn’t handle any more family complications, but it turned out that Holly, his side of the family, couldn’t either.
If there had been any doubt in his mind about keeping Amy at arm’s length, now there was none. He didn’t want Holly to leave the lake. He wanted her to like it here. He wanted her to want to come back. He wanted this to be where Mom, she, and he saw each other.
Because he was starting to love the place.
At breakfast everyone was full of talk about the canoe trip. Quickly, firmly, Phoebe announced that she wasn’t going.
“Gwen and I discussed that last night,” her father said. “She suggested that Thomas stay here with the two of us. We will take care of him so that both you and Giles can go.”
Thomas stay here? That had never occurred to Phoebe, the little one staying home with the grandparents. A lot of families did make arrangements like that.
But hers hadn’t.
It wasn’t that Mother hadn’t loved the children, that she wasn’t a wonderful grandmother, but she wasn’t a playful person by nature. And any lapses in her grandparenting weren’t her fault. They were Joyce’s.
Maggie had been less than a year old when Ian married Joyce after the briefest of courtships. They had come back to Iowa when Phoebe herself was pregnant with Ellie.
Maggie had been a difficult, colicky baby, and even after she had grown out of the colic, she was sensitive and irritable. “She doesn’t like being so helpless,” Joyce had said—which had seemed absurd to Phoebe. How would a baby know whether she was helpless or not?
Joyce had allowed no one to do anything for Maggie. Phoebe supposed that such protectiveness and jealousy was natural of a single parent, but her message—I don’t want your help, I can do this—had set a pattern for Hal and Eleanor. They had not wanted to interfere; they had not wanted to offend by doing too much.
At least that’s what Phoebe had always told herself.
But this summer had been different. Thomas had become Gwen’s special pet. The two of them had developed their own little routines. They had a plastic bucket which they—to no purpose whatsoever—filled with pine cones every morning. They had a special stick with which they made elaborate designs in the sandy road. They dusted the cabin together. They sorted the clean silverware together. He was her little shadow.
And it had made life easier for Phoebe.
“I don’t know,” Phoebe said now, “about leaving him here. I’m just not sure.” She really wasn’t. “He’d probably do all right, but he’s never been away from us before, and there would be no way of reaching us if there’s a problem.” She heard herself sigh. It would have been fun to go with Giles and the older kids. “I don’t see how we can make it work.”
Her dad suddenly smiled. “Gwen is way ahead of you on this, sweetheart.”
“What do you mean?” Giles asked.
“I thought we might do a little trial run first,” Gwen answered, “and see how he does here without you. The two of you could go into town and spend the night there. It will just be for one night, and if Thomas is really miserable, at least Ellie and the other kids will be here for him. He won’t feel completely abandoned.”
Go into town…spend the night…what an odd idea.
“It is true,” Giles was speaking, “that Ellie being here would make all the difference to him.”
“And even if we find out that the canoe trip isn’t a good idea,” Gwen continued, “the two of you will at least have a night in town.”
“A night in town?” What were they talking about? Town was a place to be avoided. Whenever you went to town, you rushed through your errands, trying to get back to the lake as soon as possible.
“I don’t suppose it would be the most thrilling trip you’ve ever taken,” Gwen answered. “But you’ll have some time to yourselves.”
“Actually, it will be the most thrilling trip the two of us have had together in the last thirteen years,” Giles said. “It’s very generous of you, and we accept.”
Phoebe stared at him. They were accepting? Just like that? She had barely finished her first cup of coffee.
He went on. “My folks took Ellie a couple of times when she was a baby, but my dad’s health isn’t what it should be. So this is great.”
“Then why not go today?” Gwen suggested. “If you left in an hour or so, you could have lunch in town.”
“Leave right now?” Phoebe stared at her. “Today?”
“I know I’m going to sound like Jack”—Gwen smiled at the thought—“but what’s the point of waiting? It’s not like you can plan anything or make any reservations from here.”
Phoebe could feel the objections welling up in her. “But we don’t need groceries. Shouldn’t we wait until we need to go again?”
“No, no, no.” Gwen took Phoebe by the arm and turned her around to face the path toward the new cabin. “Go get ready. You are not going to do one single errand. No groceries, no laundry, nothing at the hardware store. You are not to do a single practical thing.”
“Shouldn’t we at least call about the permits so Holly doesn’t have to go into town?”
“She would never forgive you.” Gwen was shooing them down the path. “She’s having telephone withdrawal and is dying to get on the phone and start throwing her weight around.”
Phoebe shook her head. This had happened so fast. As soon as she and Giles were back at the new cabin, she said, “I wonder what made her offer to do this.”
“Jack and Holly will say that she wants to have Thomas all to herself and that she’s wired a bomb to the ignition of the station wagon to be sure that we don’t return, but I think the truth is that she likes you and she wants to help you.”
Phoebe stopped. “Me? Help me?”
“She remembers what raising kids is like, and she wants to do something to make it easier for you. But you aren’t the easiest person to help, my love.”
“Is that why you accepted so quickly, because you thought I’d say no?”
“Let’s just say that I knew right away that I really wanted to do it.”
“And what precisely do you think we’re going to do in Hibbing?” Hibbing was a town of fifteen thousand people, smaller than even Iowa City.
“What are we going to do?” Giles asked. “We’re going to have sex.”
And that was precisely what they did. Yes, they went out to dinner, and yes, they went out to see the big mine and they visited the high school with the crystal chandeliers and marble staircases paid for by the mining company. But mostly they had sex.
There was nothing they were supposed to be doing. No meals to prepare, no phone trees to distribute. And not once did Phoebe worry about Thomas.
And as they got in the car to drive back to the lake, she scooted over and buckled herself into the middle seat belt so that she could sit right next to Giles. She couldn’t remember when she had last done that. Certainly not in the lifetime of this particular car.
“I haven’t been much fun for the past year or so, have I?” she said.
Giles checked the rearview mirror and then lifted his right arm to put it around her shoulders. “Phoebe, my love, having fun has never been your strong suit.”
“But it’s been worse since Mother died, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said simply. Giles never lied to her. “You’ve been grieving.”
Her Jewish friends told her that their religion gave them one year to mourn a death. After that a person was obliged to resume living to the fullest, to find life’s joys again. Phoebe had always thought that sensible and healthy.
But Mother had been dead for more than a year and a half. “I’m stuck,” she said. “I want to stop thinking about Mother so much, but I can’t.”
Giles nodded. He knew.
“Have you been worried about me?” she asked. She didn’t like people worrying about her.
“Yes,” he said again. “And I’ve been a little hurt,” he added honestly. “It sometimes has seemed that being your mother’s daughter was more important to you than being my wife or the children’s mother.”
Phoebe felt a prickling heat at the back of her neck. It spread to her face, down her arms to her hands. She was mortified. “Oh, Giles…”
His arm tightened around her shoulders. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. We just had a wonderful twenty-four hours. Let’s view this as a new start.”
They were close to the cabin now, past the spot on the trail where you could first see the lake over the wild grasses. Giles was driving slowly, obviously in no hurry to get back. As they crested a little hill, they saw a small group walking toward them. It was Ellie, the two little girls, and Amy. Claire and Emily started jumping up and down when they saw the car, shrieking for Giles to stop so they could ride home on the tailgate.
The lake was the only place where the kids were allowed to sit on the tailgate of the station wagon and dangle their feet. Giles stopped the car, got out, and lowered it for them. They dashed to the side of the road to get sticks so that they could make designs in the sand while the car was moving. Amy said she would ride in back with them; Ellie squeezed into the front seat next to Phoebe. Phoebe put her arm around her.
“Thomas did great,” she reported. “Gwen had Nick and Maggie and me eat over at the new cabin so he wouldn’t see me so much,” Ellie reported.
“I hope that was fun,” Phoebe said.
Ellie ducked her head, but Phoebe could see that she was blushing. “It really was.”
So Nick must not have openly favored one girl over the other.
Phoebe was grateful to him.
Giles was driving even more slowly now because of the open tailgate, but they were soon at the cabins. Holly and Gwen came out to greet them.
“Thomas just fell asleep,” Gwen reported.
“Then let’s not wake him,” Phoebe said. She’d love seeing him, but she wasn’t in any great hurry.
“What do we know about the canoe trip?” she asked Holly. “Did you get the permits?”
She had. For such a large group they needed two permits, but by leaving mid-week they were able to get them. “So you’re leaving on Wednesday,” Holly said.
Today was Sunday. “I guess we should start thinking about menus,” Phoebe said. There was a lot to be done, planning, shopping, packing. “We’ll probably need to go into town on—”
“You don’t have to worry about any of that,” Holly interrupted. “The outfitter is packing all the food and the equipment for you. You just have to show up.”
“The outfitter?” Phoebe knew that outfitters provided such services, but it would have never occurred to her to use them. “Isn’t that expensive?”
“Hideously so,” Holly answered cheerfully. “But we put it all on Amy’s credit card.”
Amy’s card? Why Amy’s card?
Because Amy had more money than everyone else. Phoebe kept forgetting that.
“So what I am supposed to do with myself,” Phoebe asked, and she was only half joking, “if I don’t get to spend the next day and a half packing Tang and dried skim milk into Ziplock bags?”
“You could have fun,” Gwen suggested.
Phoebe let herself make a face. “My husband just told me I’m no good at that.”
“Then you need to start practicing.”
Nick believed that when you fucked up, you ought to admit it to yourself. Lie to the rest of the world, but be straight with yourself—it was a point of honor with him. Stare in the bathroom mirror and admit that you had screwed up.
There weren’t any bathroom mirrors up here—there being no bathrooms—but he could admit it anyway. He had loused up this canoe trip something fierce, so much so that he was almost considering apologizing—and that certainly was not a part of his code.
He had not wanted to go out in the wilderness alone with Jack. Right away he understood that this was a mission of mercy. Let poor fatherless Nick grieve. That bugged him. He could handle his shit himself. And a canoe trip? What a mismatch that would be—Jack could start fires, Jack could split wood, Jack could have probably melted down the canoe and built a B—52 bomber out of it. And what could good old Nick do? Nothing, zippo.
So like the jackass idiot that he was, he had suggested that everyone should come…just to protect himself from feeling like an ignoramus. Now the trip had become this huge, expensive production, and of course he was still feeling like an ignoramus.
They were renting four canoes—three seventeen-foot canoes and one fifteen-footer. There had been a lot of discussion about who should be in which canoes. There would, he was sure, be a lot of discussion about everything; these people didn’t do anything without a lot of discussion. This subject simply happened to be the first.
Maggie wanted to be in a canoe with him. It took him two seconds to figure that one out. She was being smart about it, never saying that she wanted to be with him; she simply objected to every other arrangement. But the idea was stupid. Neither he nor she knew a thing about canoes. They had to be split up.
Ultimately Nick ended up with Jack, but they were going to have the two little boys riding in the middle of their canoe. Ellie’s parents had the two little girls and a knapsack full of Barbie dolls in the middle of theirs. Maggie would be in the last of the larger canoes with her parents, while Ellie and the ice skater had the smaller one to themselves.
Canoes—Nick learned—had a front and a back, a bow and a stern. And there was a real power ladder about who sat where. The person in the stern was the boss. He—or she—got to steer the boat. Nick would be hard pressed to say that any canoe stroke was interesting, but the person in the front had only two strokes, forward and reverse—“straightaway” and “backwater” was the lingo—while the person in the back led a life of fun-filled drama with an arsenal of at least four or five strokes.
So it was cool to sit in back. It was less cool to sit in front. It was totally uncool to sit in the middle, because you didn’t have a real seat and just had to squirm your way around the big trail packs. So the dads—Giles, Ian, and Jack—were all in back.
Ellie had automatically gone to sit in the front of her canoe. After all, she was a kid riding with an adult, and adults always kept the cool jobs for themselves.
“What on earth are you doing?” the skater called out instantly. She went over to the smaller canoe…and Nick had to admit that it was something to watch her move. It was like that with coaches who had once been really good wrestlers. You could tell just from the way they walked, and her walk was even better than theirs. Her torso hardly moved. From her collarbone through her rib cage down to her pelvis, her body remained in a clean, straight line. “You aren’t expecting me to steer this thing, are you?”
Ellie turned and looked at her. “Don’t you want to? It’s more fun to be in the stern.”
“Not for me it wouldn’t be. I’ve never sterned in my life. Actually, I ought to be with Claire and Emily playing Barbies. I’m probably very good at Barbies.”
Nick had never paid a minute’s attention to ice skating, but he did know that Amy had a gold medal from the Olympics. Maybe that’s why she could stand there and admit that she couldn’t stern a canoe without looking like a doofus because she knew she was really great at something else.
He’d have to remember that.
“And,” she continued, waving Ellie out of the canoe, “to be in the stern you have to be power-mad, and I am terrified of power and responsibility.”
“I’m not power-mad,” Ellie protested, laughing.
“I know it doesn’t seem like it,” Amy returned, “but you’re an oldest sister. You have to be power-mad. Now get into the back of this stupid boat or we’ll both drown.”
This arrangement left Ellie in the stern, and Maggie not even in the bow like Nick, but in the middle, between her parents. Maggie was clearly not thrilled with the arrangement.
So they set off. The first lake was long and narrow. They launched at its tip, and there was a small cluster of cabins near the launch site, but after fifteen minutes of paddling there was nothing on the banks except trees. No power lines, no road, just water and trees—that was all there was between here and Canada.
At the end of the first lake, they had to portage—unload everything and carry the canoes and packs on a trail around some rocks and swirling currents. Jack asked him if he thought he could carry one of the canoes. “Giles is strong,” Jack said, “but his footing isn’t sure enough. So will you try?”
“You’ll have to show me how,” Nick answered.
It was fairly straightforward. The canoes had padded shoulder pads attached to the center crosspiece—“thwart” Jack called it—so you carried the canoe overhead like a gigantic hat, its weight resting on your shoulders. It wasn’t horribly heavy, maybe sixty pounds or so, but it was mostly awkward. If you looked down, you could see your feet, but if you looked straight ahead, all you saw was the inside of the canoe.
Then they loaded up again, and Nick wasn’t surprised to see that this time Maggie was in the bow of her canoe, and her mom was sitting on the packs in the middle.
They ate lunch at the next portage, paddled a couple more hours, then started looking for a place to camp. It was still pretty early, just the middle of the afternoon, but the kids were clearly getting restless.
He hadn’t known what to expect. The maps noted “established campsites,” but these sites made the bunkhouse at the lake look like the Ritz. The one they chose was on an island. It had a couple of nearly flat tent sites and a fire circle, but no tables or shelters of any sort.
“Where do we pee?” the skater asked cheerfully. “In the woods?”
“There should be some sort of latrine away from the water.” Ellie’s mom gestured toward the center of the island. “It’s probably down that path.”
The kids all dashed down the path and then returned to report that there was a box with a hole in it, and you were supposed to sit on the hole, but if instead you looked down the hole, there was—
Ellie’s mom stopped them. “We get the idea.”
Apparently that’s all there was to the latrine, just a box over a pit. There wasn’t even a little house around it. The woods were starting to sound pretty good to Nick.
“It’s times like this”—Jack was suddenly at his elbow, speaking softly—“that you’re glad to be a man.”
That was for sure.
Nick had finally, finally figured out something about Jack—he had the hots for the skater. Nick wasn’t entirely sure how he knew; it wasn’t like Jack was flirting with her, putting the moves on her, or even looking at her too much, but Nick knew anyway. He spent too much of his life observing grown-ups, trying to predict their behavior so he could keep one step ahead of them, to be wrong about something like this.
And while it should have been cool to finally have some information on Jack, Nick found that it wasn’t giving him any power…because Jack wasn’t doing anything. Nick supposed that that was admirable. Weird perhaps, but admirable.
Clearly not something his own father had done.
Nope, his dear old dad, his pops, hadn’t resisted a thing. Nick wasn’t accusing the guy of rape; Val would have been a willing participant. She might talk a good game, but in the end she did whatever she wanted to do.
He knew nothing about his father. “He was just a boy,” that’s all Val and Barb would ever say. “He was just a boy.” She wouldn’t even give him a name. It really pissed him off. How the hell were you supposed to grow into a man when your father had been “just a boy”?
The guy might be a rat, Nick was well aware of that possibility. But he might be a decent enough sort who’d never been told that Val had changed her mind about giving the baby up for adoption. Maybe he’d be somebody like Giles or Hal or—
Nick stopped himself. He wasn’t going to turn this into an Afterschool Special, a made-for-TV movie with ninety minutes of heartwarming complications followed by a bittersweet happy ending. Dads were not the solution to much these days. As far as he could tell, his friends were getting next to nothing from their dads or stepfathers. The men did three things—they drove to work, they worked, and they got mad. They would come to soccer games or wrestling matches and yell. They would yell at their sons, they would yell at the coaches, they would yell at the refs. He and Brian had always said they were better off not having dads at all.
Brian…what’s it like? What’s being dead like?
Suddenly he wanted to be alone. He went over to Giles. He didn’t mind asking permission from Giles. “Is it okay if I take off for a bit? We’re on an island. I can’t get lost.”
“Go ahead. Just keep your eye out for firewood.”
The island was a rock-studded mound poking up from the lake, and Nick started to climb toward the center. The only path was the one to the latrine, but it was easy enough to move without one. Some of the tree limbs were low; he ducked under them. The sheets of rock were covered with silvery, gray-green lichen, and where there was no rock, tree roots arched out of the sandy soil. Pine cones crunched under his feet.
He could tell when he reached the high point of the island, but he couldn’t see anything, just the thick, furrowed bark of the trees. He didn’t know their names—they were evergreens, but they were loose and light, not dense and packed like Christmas trees. One of the branches was low, and testing it with his hands, he swung himself up and started to climb.
It had been ages since he had climbed a tree. In fact, he didn’t know if he ever had. They’d never had a good one at any of the places they had lived.
He eased himself up to the last of the thick limbs. It didn’t make any sense to go higher; the branches wouldn’t support him. His view was framed and filtered by other trees. Some of their needles were blue-green and soft-looking while others were paler and twisted. He could see the lake, and from here it almost looked black, but the water was so pure that they were just dipping their cups straight into the lake to drink. It was unbelievable that anything was that clean anymore. It must be amazing up here in the autumn with the birches firing up golden and the flocks of birds and geese flying in V’s overhead.
And suddenly it seemed so wrong, overwhelmingly wrong, that he was here and Brian was dead.
Brian used to wonder if he should wait. There were such advances being made; maybe someday they’d find the drug that would work for him, the drug that would keep each day from being a torment.
It was impossible to imagine that kind of suffering, and one thing that Brian had liked about Nick was that Nick never pretended that he understood. “You never say that you know how I feel,” Brian used to say. “That means a lot.”
So how could Nick say what was right, what was wrong? How could he know what thoughts Brian had had? How could he judge? But it was really something up here. Brian should have seen it.
A heavy rustling broke into his thoughts. Someone else was climbing the island. He heard twigs snap, pebbles scatter.
“Nick? Nick?”
He peered down through the pine boughs. It was Maggie. She was keeping her voice down. “Nick?”
“I’m up here.”
She tilted her head back. “In the tree?”
“Yes.”
“Oh…” She was a little disconcerted. “Could you come down?”
He didn’t answer. Instead of climbing down, he inched along the limb, and just as it started to bend, he dropped, landing neatly like a gymnast. He was standing closer to her than he expected.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she said.
“You found me.”
“I hear a friend of yours committed suicide.” There was a little thrill in her voice.
Oh, great. He hadn’t wanted Ellie and her to know. He had asked Aunt Gwen not to tell them.
And Aunt Gwen wouldn’t have. “How did you find that out? Eavesdrop city?”
“My mother told me. She doesn’t believe in keeping things from me. How did he do it?”
How did he do it? Nick kicked a pine cone. What kind of question was that? Did she really want an answer? Little globlets of brain tissue on the living room couch?
“Believe it or not, I don’t know.” He sat down on a flat plate of rock. “He was in a psychiatric hospital, and they aren’t releasing any details. I suppose I’ll find out sooner or later.”
“Why did he do it?”
Maggie sat down next to him. Her thigh was right up against his leg. He could feel its warmth. He expected her to move away, but she didn’t. And in a moment the contact lengthened as she moved her leg even closer.
He knew what it meant.
Did you figure on that, Brian? That your frying yourself would make me sexy? Brian would like that. He would laugh.
Nick had first done a girl at fourteen. He had read all these old books—Phillip Roth, Catcher in the Rye, all about the terminal sexual frustration of the young male. Well, it wasn’t like that anymore, ladies and gentlemen of middle America. Girls were aggressive. They started things, and they intended you to finish.
Admittedly he didn’t hang out with the most well adjusted of young ladies, and usually a whole lot else was going on besides a girl’s passion for his pasty white body. There was a bigger scheme; she was trying to get back at her mom, her stepdad, or sometimes even her regular boyfriend.
There was nothing, not anything, that Nick hated more than being a pawn in someone else’s scheme. That wasn’t for him. It was better just to jerk off.
But of course he had his reputation to think about. He couldn’t have people thinking he was saving himself for marriage. So he had developed another way. He scared the daylights out of the girl. That way everyone saved face. She got to be the one to say no, and he got to pretend to be frustrated.
So Nick let Maggie move closer still, and he answered her questions, about how Brian had been depressed, seriously, chronically, clinically depressed, that some of the drugs would help a little for a while, but then he would be worse.
“When did you talk to him last?” She was fascinated; it didn’t occur to her to offer sympathy. “Did his parents feel like it was all their fault?”
Nick could see where her thoughts were going—standard teen stuff, kill yourself so everyone will feel bad afterward. But it hadn’t been like that. Brian had hated what this would do to his mother. The thought had probably kept him alive for another year.
Maggie was sitting really close to him now, and rather than answer he put his hand on her leg. She leaned forward and kissed him. She knew what she was doing, and all of a sudden that was seeming like a fine idea. She wanted it, and he certainly did too, and it would be easy enough to—
But you couldn’t survive in the jungle giving in to temptation. You had to hold fierce to your resolve. Nick made up his own rules, and the only difference between him and the other kids who were also out in the jungle alone was that he stuck to his.
So it was fear-time, scare the girl. He pulled Maggie against him tight and hard. She was a good-sized girl, but he was strong. He rolled over with her and used his knee to open her legs. The rock must have been cold and hard against her back. He thrust his tongue into her mouth and ground against her, letting her have it for a minute or two, kind of mean and angry-like. Only he wasn’t just angry-like. He was angry. Brian was no sideshow. He hadn’t suffered for this girl’s amusement.
It should have been over by now. She should be protesting, she should be scared. No, Nick, no, please stop. And he would instantly turn himself into a poster child for the date-rape laws. “You said you wanted to stop,” he would say when the girl started looking hurt and rejected.
But Maggie wasn’t reading the right script. Nick could feel her flattening her back, pulling her legs up, giving him a better angle at her crotch. She was squirming. She liked this. It turned her on.
That made him sick. He sat up, straddling her, one leg on either side of her thighs. “So is this a turn-on for you, guys whose friends commit suicide? Is that who you do?”
She looked stunned, horrified. She drew a breath, about to speak, but he didn’t want to hear. He scrambled up and plunged down the hill. He was running, and pine needles were snapping against his face. He almost lost his footing as the pine cones rolled across the rocks. At the bottom of the hill he stopped and wiped a hand across his face.
Shit. That had not gone according to plan. He had really pissed her off.
What a major mess lay ahead. When you had a fight with a girl at school, maybe she and her friends would be cold and prickly for a while, but who cared? Up here all the adults were going to get involved, and it was going to be hell on Aunt Gwen.
Even Val and Barb couldn’t have caused this kind of trouble.
He was down by the water now, and there was nothing to do but circle the island shoreline until he reached the campsite. He climbed over an outcropping of rocks and almost landed on Ellie, who was stowing two life jackets in a canoe. She was wearing a bright yellow Iowa Hawkeyes sweatshirt, khaki shorts, and heavy hiking boots with thick socks rising out of the top. A navy fanny pack bunched the sweatshirt in stiff folds at her waist. As fashion looks went, it was imperfect, but if he had owned hiking boots or a fanny pack, he would probably be wearing them too.
She looked up. “Oh, hi. We don’t have much wood here. I was about to paddle over to the shore. There are a couple of brush heaps.”
Giles had asked him to keep his eye out for firewood. He hadn’t. “Who’s going with you?” He pointed at the second life jacket.
“My mom. She’ll be here in a second.”
But it was her dad who appeared at the top of the rocks. He had heard her. “No, sweetheart, you’re getting dear old dad instead. At least you will when he gets down these rocks.”
Going up and down the rocks was hard for Giles. “I can go with her,” Nick heard himself say.
“That would be great by me,” Giles said. “You don’t mind, do you, Ellie?”
Ellie was suddenly busy, checking stuff in her fanny pack, not looking up. “It’s fine,” she mumbled.
She headed toward the bow of the canoe. “No way,” Nick called out. “I’m still a major league amateur. You have to do the hard stuff.”
She brushed her hair off her face. “Okay…if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
It wasn’t far to the mainland. Ellie didn’t say anything, and that was fine with him. She steered them in parallel to the shore, and at the first brush heap they were able to break off dry wood while still in the canoe.
But the second wasn’t so conveniently located. “I’ll get out,” she said.
She was closer to the more solid ground. It made sense for her to get out, but all of a sudden Nick shivered. There was something wrong with this brush heap.
He never had thoughts like that—instincts, he guessed they were called—but he couldn’t get rid of this one. There was something wrong. He couldn’t let her go.
“No, Ellie, I’ll do it.”
He tried not to move too quickly, he tried to be careful, but he didn’t want to dawdle. Otherwise she’d argue with him, and he didn’t know what he could say without sounding like some sort of macho jerk.
He hadn’t paid any attention when the canoes were first being loaded, but once they were out on the water, he could see that his and Jack’s canoe rode lowest in the water; Jack had taken the heaviest packs himself. That’s what guys like Jack did, take the heaviest packs, climb the risky paths first.
Nick’s first step, the one that took him out of the canoe, was fine. And his second one was okay too. So he tested his third step. The tangle of branches and brush seemed solid, but just as he was lifting his back foot, he heard the wood crack, and it wasn’t just a single crack but a whole series of little firecrackers. Everything was still cracking and popping as the wood gave way. He slipped and then there was a pain, a slicing pain, followed by warmth, warmth and liquid and pain.
“Nick, Nick…what happened?”
“I don’t know.” He was feeling strange. Weak. Woozy.
Ellie was fumbling with her fanny pack. She pulled out something shiny and raised it to her mouth. Three shrill blasts spat out across the water. It must have been a whistle.
She was blurring. He felt like she was getting farther away, although he knew she was coming closer. The pain in his leg was fierce. Was this what it was like, Brian? Is this what it felt like?