Amy rolled to her side and tucked her hand under her cheek. She could hear the wind in the trees. The heavy pine boughs were rustling thick and soft; the slender branches of birches flicked against one another with light clicks. The morning light filtered through the gray-green tent walls.
Last night had been wonderful. It had been so…so simple, so natural, unstudied, and honest. She didn’t like it when a man tried to create an atmosphere with soft music and low lights. That always made her feel uncomfortable; music and lighting were things you worried about when you were performing. But with Jack she hadn’t felt that she was performing. It had been more like the canoeing, something the two of them had done together, using their bodies because that’s the kind of people they were. Maybe that wasn’t the most romantic comparison, making love and paddling a canoe, but she had had a really good time paddling that canoe.
Jack started to stir. She leaned forward to kiss him.
He lurched back, turning his head, holding up his hand. “My breath will be awful.”
She laughed. What a perfect thing for him to say. People had morning mouth—not a pretty thought but the truth. And Jack viewed it that way, as a simple physical fact. More romantic types tried to pretend it away…which didn’t work.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Oh, yes, you do.” He sat up, rummaged among his clothes, and triumphantly pulled out a toothbrush.
They began to dress. Jack found it difficult to maneuver in the tight space, and she made sure to get in his way so that he was always bumping against her with his elbow or hip. “You have to be doing this on purpose,” he said at last. “I’m no model of grace, but I’m not this clumsy.”
They scrambled out of the tent, Jack going up to the ranger cabin to return the lantern and see if the ranger could spare some hot water again while Amy went to the water’s edge to get the food pack. The plates and cups were still on the top of the canoe. They were slick with rainwater, and Amy had to brush the pine needles off them with the side of her hand.
Jack returned from the ranger cabin with coffee. Their menu was the same as it had been last night, tuna fish sandwiches and dried fruit. The ranger had offered to give them a hot breakfast. “But he’s a talker,” Jack said. “We would be there forever.”
“This is fine.” Amy sat down on a rock to eat her breakfast. It would have been more fine, she decided an instant later, if the rock had been dry, but it hadn’t.
Jack squatted down, resting one knee against one of the logs. The knee of his jeans would be damp and dirty, but better to have a damp knee than the wet tush that she had.
He picked up his sandwich. “Do you really think we can keep this from everyone? I think it’s important that we do.”
“I don’t see why it would be a problem.”
“Everything would be different if there wasn’t this family stuff. I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy.”
“I know that.”
She had answered instantly, and he looked up, a little suspiciously. “You do? How?”
“My great insight into people, and the fact that I’m sharing a room with your sister. Don’t you think I know everything there is to know about your love life?”
He groaned. “So I suppose you’ve heard this whole Jack-as-rescuer thing?”
She smiled. Of course she had. Holly said that Jack had never been in a true partnership. The women had needed him; he had probably not needed them.
“Well, it’s not like Holly says.” He was determined to defend himself. “It’s just that I’m not so great in the expressing-my-true-feelings department, so I do better with women I can do stuff for. You put a new radiator in someone’s car, and she gets the message that you like her. You don’t have to rattle on quite as much.”
“I think you express yourself very well.”
“Then you’re the only one.” He drained the last of his coffee. “So this will all work the best if you give me a list of chores. Like your gutters…do you need your gutters cleaned? I like cleaning gutters.”
He wasn’t talking like someone who was planning on a secret relationship. “I don’t have gutters. I live in a high-rise, and the building has a maintenance staff.”
He grimaced. “A maintenance staff? No woman who already has a relationship with a maintenance staff would have any reason to have a relationship with me.”
“I think I can find something to do with you.” Amy folded the Saran Wrap her sandwich had been in and stood up. “But we’ve got plenty of time to sort this out, because we can’t really do anything until the summer’s over.”
“I guess that’s true,” he agreed.
They packed up quickly, and as Jack was pushing the canoe out into the water, she turned in her seat. “Let’s see how fast we can go.”
It was an absurd idea. There was no need for speed, and yesterday had been grueling.
“Sounds good to me,” he said.
As quickly as they had traveled yesterday, they had at least been prudent. They hadn’t known what difficulties lay ahead; they’d had to stop and check maps. But this morning they knew the route, and there was nothing stopping them.
The wind was at their back, and they flew through the water, carried on by the air currents and their own strength. They made a game of it, plotting where to beach on each portage to save themselves a few steps, a few seconds. Even though the sun was still low in the sky, their shirts were damp with sweat. It was utterly pointless; it was completely exhilarating.
“Wouldn’t it be fun”—Amy spoke over her shoulder—“to come up here sometimes and really push ourselves to see how far we could go?”
“With your strength and my lack of sense, we’d probably be at the Arctic Circle in a week’s time.”
That was what she needed, not a repairman but a playmate, a buddy. She would love to try new things physically. She’d always wanted to roller-blade, mountain bike, cross-country ski, horseback ride, but she never had. She wanted to go to a state fair, ride the roller coaster, and have someone win her a big stuffed animal. She wanted to have fun.
They could have their own camp, the two of them, Camp-Amy-and-Jack. It would be a traveling camp. They would meet for weekends in Montana, New York City, Maine, wherever there was something to do, and they would have fun.
It didn’t have to be hard. As soon as the summer was over and the family was all scattered around again, they could pick some dates. Amy’s assistant Gretchen would make the travel arrangements. It would hideously expensive, but very easy.
She knew that this would work. She always felt doubts first as a tightening in her throat. It has harder to swallow, harder to exhale when she felt a doubt. When she doubted herself on the ice, it seemed that she never quite got all the air out of her lungs. The old air would settle in her stomach and her legs, weighing her down.
Confidence she felt in her arms, a prickling, flashing, bubbling certainty, making her arms curving and graceful. Beauty flowed from that confidence, and she would know that however she moved her arms, however she held her fingers, the line would be beautiful.
Time and again she would find a piece of music and no one else thought it would work, and she wouldn’t know how it would work, and for days, weeks, everyone would keep questioning her, joking with her, urging her to give up, and then suddenly it would work, and everyone else would be grimacing, apologizing, acknowledging that she had been right. “It was my arms,” she would say. “I knew it in my arms.”
Most people dreaded summer’s end. Amy could hardly wait.
Other canoes, other parties, were entering the water. The ones going upstream were struggling against the wind. Across the surface of the larger lakes, waves broke and foamed against the silvery canoes. The shore curved away from the lakes in arching shells, the deep green of the trees reflecting a fringe on the blue-brown water.
One more portage and they would be in sight of the island campsite. It was not even nine o’clock. They had been gone for only eighteen hours.
The four little kids crowded down the rocks to meet them, shrieking and jabbering. It wasn’t until Ellie reached the shore that Amy and Jack could piece together the story. The plane had come at five this morning. It had found the campsite easily. They hadn’t even had to paddle out to the center of the lake and flap orange ponchos to identify their location. The kids had been looking forward to that.
“Nick got off okay?” Jack asked.
Ellie nodded.
By now the adults had joined them. “I’m wildly impressed,” Giles said immediately. “You just left twenty minutes ago, didn’t you?”
“You got to the ranger station last night?” Phoebe marveled. “We couldn’t believe it when the pilot said that was when the message came in.”
“But you didn’t really get all the way there on your own, did you?” Joyce asked. “That’s what I said. You must have found someone with a motor or a cell phone.” Motors were not allowed in canoe country, and cell phones didn’t work. Joyce knew that. Amy couldn’t imagine what she was thinking.
“No, we made it there ourselves,” she said quietly.
Ellie and the kids were unloading the canoe, obviously planning on carrying up the packs. The two boys were already fighting over who was to carry what. Amy and Jack followed Phoebe and Giles to the longer but less steep path up the rocks.
Phoebe and Giles confirmed that everything had gone well. The butterfly bandages had held, although the wound had oozed throughout the night. They’d had to send Nick off alone; otherwise there would not have been enough adults to bring all four canoes back.
“He’ll be all right,” Jack said.
Everyone agreed. Nick was a survivor.
“If he went alone,” Amy put in, “then where’s Maggie?” She had not seen the other girl.
Phoebe and Giles exchanged glances. Then Phoebe spoke carefully. “She’s in her tent. She is in a bit of a snit.”
When wasn’t Maggie in a bit of a snit? “What happened?” Amy asked.
“We haven’t pieced it all together”—Phoebe was speaking softly—“but Ellie says that she thinks something happened between Maggie and Nick. He went off for a walk yesterday afternoon, and the little kids said that Maggie followed him.”
“And?” Jack asked.
“That we’re not sure of, but they are a pair of teenagers. Then a half hour later he was out collecting wood with Ellie—”
“Which he clearly volunteered to do,” Giles put in. “I was planning on going with her.”
“So no doubt,” Phoebe continued, “Maggie viewed that as a kind of rejection.”
“Do you think they had sex?” Amy asked. Both Maggie and Nick did have an alert animal presence to them, an awareness of their bodies, their sexuality.
Phoebe shrugged. “Who knows? She was probably willing.”
Jack was shaking his head. “If there is one person on earth Nick has any respect for, it is my mother. He might have had a sense of how disruptive this could be, how tough it would make things for her.”
“And that’s why he didn’t have sex with a willing girl…out of respect for his aunt?” Giles didn’t sound convinced.
Jack grimaced. “It does sound a little lame, doesn’t it?”
They were now at the worst part of the climb, and Giles waved for Amy and Jack to go on. A moment later Amy spoke to Jack softly. “When you were talking about things being disruptive for your mother, it wasn’t Nick you were talking about, was it?”
“I was supposed to be this great role model for him, and so far all I’ve seemed to manage to teach him was how to seduce family members.”
Amy would have slipped her arm through his if she could have, but Giles and Phoebe were behind them on the path. “First of all, if you check the timing, whatever did or didn’t happen, Nick and Maggie went first, and second, it’s not clear that Nick was doing the seducing…or you either, for that matter.”
Jack rolled his eyes. He was not convinced.
Amy longed for something to say that would persuade him of what she knew, that Camp-Amy-and-Jack wasn’t going to hurt anyone, that it was a perfect way for them to be together.
With Amy and Jack back safely, the others decided to leave the tents pitched and take a day trip to a little waterfall. Phoebe urged Amy and Jack to stay at the campsite and rest. “You’ve paddled so hard. Take it easy for the rest of the day.”
That sounded wonderful. Amy hadn’t expected to be alone with him until after the summer’s end.
But of course, the minute Maggie heard that the two of them were staying behind, she announced that she wasn’t going either. That left too many people for two canoes, but not enough for three, so Joyce said she would stay back too.
And rather than spend the day with the two of them, Amy and Jack quickly chose to go on the day trip.
The obvious arrangement for the return trip home the next day would have been to move Maggie out of the middle of her parents’ canoe and have her take Nick’s place in Jack’s. But the obvious thing was never done when Maggie was involved. Complicated negotiations started, and Amy was not going to get involved. This was not regression, this was not a return of Amy the Afterthought, this was just smart. She went and sat on a rock. A minute later Ellie came to sit by her.
“You’re keeping out of this too?” Amy asked.
Ellie nodded.
Ellie didn’t have Maggie’s sexual presence; she simply did not.
Amy reached over and ruffled the girl’s hair. “Does it drive you nuts that Maggie gets her way all the time?”
Ellie looked up, startled. She hadn’t expected to hear that from Amy. “Yeah, I guess. It just doesn’t seem fair that she should be so smart and so great-looking.”
“Maggie has a very dramatic look, and that’s in fashion right now. In the fifties people would have thought that she was ugly.”
“They would have?” Ellie looked hopeful for a moment, but only a moment. “That doesn’t change anything now.”
“That’s true,” Amy had to agree. “But her being gorgeous and smart does not change the fact that Nick could have bled to death if you hadn’t acted so quickly.”
“I just blew the whistle.”
“You had a whistle; you knew the distress signal.” Amy herself had not known what the three blasts meant. Phoebe had explained it to her when they were in the canoe searching for the source of the sound.
Ellie shrugged. “That’s Girl Scouts; they’re always teaching us stuff like that.”
“But you applied it.”
This is me. I am being myself.
When new girls joined the big spring tour, some of them were painfully young, fifteen, sixteen, and while they could skate exquisitely, they had no idea how to be a professional, how to get along with the others, how to remain focused. Increasingly each year Amy found herself reaching out to any who would listen to her, dropping a hint here, a suggestion there, reassuring some, questioning others.
She went on. “I’m sure I’m scheduled to visit a hospital or a health-care facility sometime this fall.” She had no idea if that was true, but as soon as she got back to Denver, she would make it so. “Would you like to come?”
“Me?” Ellie asked. “Why me?”
“If it’s a group of other adolescents, you could talk about how something as little as carrying a whistle and not panicking can save someone’s life.” Or you could just come and see what I do.
“I’d love to,” Ellie said. “If Mom and Dad will let me miss school.”
“I’m sure they will.” Giles, at least, would say yes.
Suddenly a whoop broke from the cluster of decision makers, and the two little boys were tearing down to the waterfront, shrieking.
“I get to go first,” one shouted.
“No, me, me, me, me,” the other one shrieked.
“What do you think that’s all about?” Amy asked Ellie.
“It sounds like someone told them they could take turns in the bow,” Ellie answered, “but it makes no sense. They’re too small, they aren’t strong enough. I can’t imagine whose idea it was.”
Amy could. The two little boys had been in the middle of Jack’s canoe. “I’m willing to bet that Jack got fed up with all the discussion and just said he’d go with Alex and Scott.”
“Would he really do something that stupid?” Ellie asked.
“Yes.”
Jack broke free from the others and came over to the two of them. His expression was rueful, and he was shaking his head as if he knew that he had made a mistake. “I figure that two eight-year-olds makes one sixteen-year-old, and we won’t miss Nick and his wrestling muscles one bit.”
Ellie giggled. “But they’re only seven.”
“Seven, eight…what’s the difference?” Jack waved his hand. “We’re all men.”
“Why don’t you take the smaller canoe?” Ellie offered. “Aunt Amy and I will do fine in the bigger one.”
“Oh, no. We need no concessions made for us. We are men. We will do great.”
They didn’t. Jack’s stroke was so much stronger than the boys’ that it was nearly impossible for him to steer the canoe. They trailed way behind the others.
At the first portage the rest of the group had to wait nearly ten minutes for the “all-men” canoe. Ian was, Amy noticed, very subdued. He must have known that this would not be happening if Joyce or Maggie had been more accommodating.
When they at last arrived, Jack came straight up to Ellie.
“You’re clearly the only person around here with any sense. Thank you, and yes, we accept your offer of the smaller canoe, and I don’t care if you and Aunt Amy are miserable because this is all your dad’s fault.”
“Dad’s fault?” Ellie was giggling again. “How do you figure that?”
“Yes,” Giles put in, “how do you figure that?”
“Because you just stood there”—Jack glanced over his shoulder to be sure that neither Ian’s family nor the two boys could hear—“and let me make an idiot of myself and you didn’t say one word to save me.”
“I guess it is my fault,” Giles agreed. “For that I will take one of your packs.”
“Deal.”
Amy and Ellie took a couple more packs, and with the smaller canoe and only one pack, Jack and his crew managed to keep up.
They reached Ely in the middle of the afternoon. Nick had left messages both with the outfitter and the hospital. They were not to call his mother and grandmother. He had gotten a judge to approve his treatment. He was all stitched up and had spent the night at the home of one of the nurses. Apparently Giles had given him a credit card if he needed to get a motel room, but Nick had managed to get himself a free billet.
“Don’t thank me,” the nurse said. “He was a godsend. He played cards all afternoon with my kids. I took a nap. I haven’t taken a nap since my husband walked out.”
“That does it,” Giles sighed. “Nick, you are now a danger to the entire human race. You have learned what grown women truly want—some sleep. This is knowledge so powerful that a lad of your years ought not to have it. Use it wisely, my boy.”
“Yes, sir.” Nick grinned.
The nurse gave them all the necessary information about changing the dressings, when to have the stitches removed, and such. Nick was a very lucky young man, she reported. No tendons had been cut, no muscle damaged. He was sore but able to walk.
Maggie had not gotten out of the car.
Although Thomas had been quite happy during his parents’ absence, the instant he saw their station wagon turn into the drive, he burst into tears and punished his mother by refusing to look at her for a full five minutes.
“You little pill,” Phoebe said to him. “I love you anyway.”
Amy hugged her father, Gwen, and Holly.
“How on earth can you be out in the wilderness for three days,” Holly demanded, “and still look so good?”
“Just wait—” Just wait until we’re alone and then I’ll tell you everything—that’s what Amy intended to say.
She wanted to tell Holly what had happened with Jack. They had talked late into the night about their equally empty love lives, and Amy would love it this fall if she got a giddy, gushing phone call from Holly reporting that Holly had Found Someone. Amy would want to know everything about him, how Holly had met him, what he was like. She and Holly were friends; they were sisters.
But how could she tell Holly about Jack? It was supposed to be a secret from the family, and Holly was family.
Maybe this was going to be more complicated than she had thought it would be.
“I guess”—she revised her answer to Holly’s question about her looks—“it was all the exercise.”
The little kids were all talking at once, telling Gwen, Hal, and Holly about the plane that had come to get Nick. Phoebe, Giles, and Ellie were clustered around the wailing Thomas. Maggie was leaning against the garage sulking.
At dinner Maggie took her plate and ate by herself on the front porch. Gwen pretended not to notice, but Amy knew that she did.
After dinner Maggie was scheduled to help with the dishes. She didn’t.
When the kitchen was almost clean, Ian came to apologize for her. “She must have forgotten to look at the kaper chart. I’m sorry.” He was obviously sincere. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Gwen shook her head. “We’re almost done.” Then she laid down her dish towel. “I hope you remember that Hal and I want to take care of your kids so you and Joyce can have a night in town as Phoebe and Giles did. Why don’t you go tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” Ian sounded surprised.
“Why not? Everyone must have had their share of togetherness on the canoe trip. Scott and Emily will be fine here without you.”
“I know they will.” Ian paused. “That actually sounds like a pretty good idea. I’ll go talk to Joyce.”
He left. When they heard the door bang shut, Holly spoke. “Do you think they will go?”
“I hope,” Gwen answered, “although the rest of us may be in for a rocky time. It will be interesting to see how Maggie handles herself when her mother isn’t around to make things perfect for her.”
But Gwen’s curiosity was not to be satisfied. The next morning they all discovered that Maggie was insisting on going into town with Ian and Joyce.
“But I thought the point was for each couple to have some time to themselves,” Jack said.
“Indeed.” It was clear that Gwen did not approve. “They let that child make all the decisions. That’s why Scott and Emily are so demanding. They know they are second.”
It was easy to lump all four of the younger kids into one squirming little mass, occasionally dividing them by their sex, the two boys, the two girls, but there was, Amy knew, another division—Phoebe and Giles’s two did behave better than Ian and Joyce’s. All four always wanted to go first all the time, but it was usually Scott or Emily who shrieked a claim ahead of the others. Their voices were more urgent, their need to have things their way more desperate.
And Amy could see that they knew they weren’t as important as Maggie.
“Why does Maggie want to go?” Giles asked. “What does she think there is to do there?”
“You and Phoebe had a great time,” Jack pointed out.
“Yes, but it was not entirely family entertainment.”
“Oh”—Jack grinned—“I see.”
“At least,” Giles continued, “I hope it doesn’t result in any more family.”
Ian sensed everyone’s disapproval, and when he came over to the main cabin to get the keys to Hal’s car so that he could drive into town, his face was tight and tense. He wanted everyone to think that he was doing the right thing, and he knew that no one did. It wasn’t clear that he felt he was doing the right thing, but obviously he felt trapped. Maggie was too insistent, Joyce too determined.
Amy had never thought much about her brother’s life, but as she watched the car ease around the big Norway in the center of the driveway, she longed to be reassured that he was well, that there were joys and satisfactions in his life.
At the campfire that night, she sat down next to her father. “Dad, this is embarrassing because I should already know this, but how is Ian doing professionally?” Here she had pitied herself because her family seemed to pay so little attention to her career, but did she pay any attention to theirs? “I know what he does—learns dying Indian languages—but is he doing well?”
Gwen and Holly both stopped their conversations. They were interested. Amy supposed that they too wanted to be reassured that something was going well for him.
“He’s doing great,” Hal said easily. “He’s terrific at what he does. He can learn a language, figure out its grammar faster than anyone. The whole linguistics community has known that since his first year in graduate school.”
“So it was easy for him to get tenure?” Holly obviously knew something about academic careers.
“Not at all.” Hal shook his head. “Everything’s always been a struggle for him. He’s a practical linguist, and when he was in school, no one was doing practical linguistics. They were all theoreticians. His department was completely unsupportive of his dissertation. It didn’t seem to matter that he would have been, at best, a B-plus theoretician while he is really gifted at what he does. They wanted him to change, but he stuck to his guns.”
“So why is he doing so well now?” Holly asked.
“Funding. He’s the only linguist who can get any kind of funding. The government is not interested in the theoretical stuff, but he has a couple of California congressmen who are really behind him, and his money is solid. He supports three or four graduate students year in, year out, on his grants, and in this day and age that’s incredible.”
Amy had only the haziest notion of the difference between practical and theoretic linguistics, but she heard the larger theme. Everyone had told Ian to change, to stop doing what he was good at, to start doing what everyone else was doing. “So it is like my not being able to jump,” she said. “It would have been easier if he had done the theory stuff, but he ended up better off because he did it his way.”
Her father turned to her, obviously not having made this connection before. “Yes, I guess it is the same.”
It was so odd to think this, that her career and Ian’s had something in common.
Hal put his arm around her. “I suppose that’s your mother in you; she always made her own rules. She wouldn’t have had children who follow the crowd.”