Summerlong: A Novel Part 25

"So many!" Ruth says. "Gorgeous."

ABC feels weightless. The magnificent weed makes her feel as if she's floating with the fireflies.

"Ruth," ABC says. "It all makes sense now. I know how to find Philly."

"Lake Superior?" Ruth says.

"Yes!"

"You read my mind," Ruth says.

"How did all these fireflies get inside?" ABC says, then busts out laughing.

"The North Sh.o.r.e is a sacred place," Ruth says. "I thought maybe you were dreaming of it all along, the first time you told me about the dream you had, about Philly, the first night that Don Lowry slept here."

"Right? This can't just be coincidence?"

"It's meant to be," Ruth says.

ABC would find Philly again.

"How do I do it?"

Ruth thinks about it for a long while. ABC dozes off, watching the fireflies, and when she wakes up, Ruth is standing in the center of the room, as if she is making a speech to an a.s.sembled crowd.

It has to be early, Ruth says, when ABC does it, hours before dawn-in the time of night when the magic is not afraid of being discovered by the morning sun. ABC will take some of Ruth's painkillers and some of her own old anti-anxiety medicine and also wash down a few sleeping pills, those Driftozines the doctor had given Ruth, with beer, plus a bottle of Scotch just in case she is too wakeful, and a Ziploc bag of more pills, also just in case, and push herself out in a small kayak. ABC will wait until the lake is rough, a storm swell, maybe-Ruth has been reading about Superior online-and she will allow herself to be carried out to Lake Superior, where the spirit world will find a way to take her in.

"Just like that," ABC says. "It's like you've been thinking about this already."

"I'm an old woman," Ruth says. "I think about death a lot."

Would ABC drown or would she freeze or would the pills shut down her body before either of these things happened? She hopes to be unconscious no matter what stops her heart.

"Will it work?" ABC says.

"Are you scared?" Ruth asks her.

"You're like a G.o.ddess or something. Or maybe a good witch," ABC says.

"You live long enough," Ruth says, "you find much wisdom, you shed what doesn't matter. You want to die, ABC, so you can find your dead lover before she wanders too far into the spirit world. Most of the world wouldn't understand that, but I get it. I understand it."

When ABC goes back upstairs, she looks at Don, swaying in the hammock, and he mutters, "Drown."

He mutters it, so she cannot be sure, but she hears it as drown. Inside her body, a brief terror makes her tremble and sweat and shake with chills, but then a strange honey warmth spreads over her, beginning at her very core, as if coming from her womb. She pictures Philly and now knows with an odd certainty that she will find her. That she will soon see her dead friend, as easily as if Philly is waiting for her to get off a plane.

ABC stands and goes to the window, and the blue night floats with fireflies.

And now she's there and she's ready. My G.o.d. She isn't even scared.

PART V.

I'm filled with desire.

Could it be the devil in me.

Or is this the way love's supposed to be?

-Martha and the Vandellas, "Heat Wave"

On the twenty-third day of July, the temperature, which has been rising through the nineties all week long, finally reaches 100 degrees. Grinnell's wide empty streets bake in the desolate light. Claire has dropped off the kids that morning in West Des Moines, at Don's sister's house, and although Rosie has planned to take all of the kids to Adventureland for the day, the heat makes such an idea unfeasible. Instead, Rosie rents a stack of movies, and allows the kids to do nothing but lie about in the bas.e.m.e.nt rec room all day. How did summer in the Midwest get too hot for kids to go outside and play? How many days would they spend inside bas.e.m.e.nts, watching movies in canned and chilled air?

Claire can tell that her kids are disappointed. But she drops them off with their aunt anyway, craving a day of solitude, and, yes, if she is to admit it, there is actually a party she wants to go to that night.

It's been a long time since Claire wanted to go to a party. Claire is the introvert, that's what everyone says. Don is the social one. But now, having lived three weeks without the cloud of Don Lowry storming up her world, she's feeling freer than she has in so long. So, a party! A stupid, shallow party of middle-aged professors and their ilk milling about in a wine-soaked haze of s.e.xual innuendo and intellectual pretension.

She's looking forward to it.

Since she's moved into the Gulliver house with the kids, she's tried to keep herself from being alone with Charlie somehow; her attraction to him seems sadder and more pathetic with kids in the house: Claire, writing in her bedroom late at night-she's resumed working, at Charlie's suggestion having tossed out the ten-year-old bloated ma.n.u.script and begun something wholly new-stays up battling the hormonal surges she thinks belong better to a sixteen-year-old girl, not an almost-forty-year-old woman. So it's not that she doesn't want Charlie anymore-she does-but even the thought of her children suspecting that desire is enough to keep her away from him. She wants them to know that she has left their father for herself, for independence from him and his shadows, for a new start at life, and not for another man.

But then, though she'll never admit this to anyone-she can barely admit it to herself-when she had heard that Charlie was going to this stupid party too, she had called Rosie, made up a story, and found a way that she could come home from that party, that night, just the two of them, maybe drunkenly holding his hand, leaning on him as he walked her up the path and to the empty, childless house.

Her foot on the throat of her marriage.

Rosie had texted Don that morning, after she had the kids: Don. FYI I have the kids for a few days. Did u know??? Maybe u and Claire can have some alone time!!! May b just what u 2 need!!!

Thanks!!!!! he texted back. His sister would appreciate the exclamation points. GOOD IDEA!!!!! He offered her some ALL CAPS for emphasis. She was that kind of person. When he read her texts, he always thought of her voice shouting and shouting.

Don knew that Rosie had been praying for Don and Claire to stay together. In fact, Don knew that an entire two-thousand-member megachurch had prayed for them a few Sundays ago. Please pray for the brother and sister-in-law who do not know Jesus and who are in a dark time in their holy bond of marriage. That's how Rosie had asked for prayers in a weepy speech in front of all of those Christians. Rosie's husband had taken the video with his phone and had sent it to Don with the subject line: Jesus and his followers have lifted you up in prayer!!!! It was a thing they did at that church. They prayed for you and e-mailed you a video about it.

THANKS!!!! Don had texted back. G.o.d is AWESOME!!! Rosie's husband was also that kind of person.

Rosie and her husband had not sent the video to Claire because they knew she would be mad; Don had not shown the video to Claire either, for the same reason. Though, truth be told, he wondered if she might have found it screamingly funny too.

Some days, what breaks his heart most is that he no longer knows if she will find the things he wants to say funny. How he loves to make her laugh. How he once loved making her laugh more than anything else in the world, aside from making love to her after he had made her laugh.

Don waits a few minutes before he calls Claire on her cell. She's driving down I-80 when she answers and Don suggests they meet at Relish for lunch.

"Don," she says.

"What?"

"Lunch?"

"I just want to talk."

"We've talked so much."

"When will we go?" he says. "To counseling? Like I suggested?"

"One, that's expensive," Claire says, "and two, Don, I don't think we should stay married."

"Could we just do one session before Minnesota?"

"I think you should go there. With the kids, just you and them. I'll stay behind."

"I'm not gonna sign the divorce pet.i.tion."

"Don."

"Relish? Twelve thirty. Please? I just want to talk."

"I'm a sucker for you, Don. And I hate it."

She hangs up.

He is sitting outside on the patio, in a normally lush and beautiful garden that is, this summer, dried out and anemic.

"Do you want to be outside?" he says as she approaches in a yellow sundress he's never seen before. So many clothes he's never known before. Was she saving them? Are they new? Where does she have the money? Does Charlie buy her clothes?

"Is this okay?" he says.

He stands and pulls out her chair; she grimaces a little bit, a slight roll of eyes.

"It's fine," she says and sits.

She s.h.i.+elds her eyes from the sun, which has come out from behind a cloud in the hazy white light.

"Sorry about the sun," he says. "Should we go inside?"

"No. This is good."

"Is that a new dress? Are you trying to kill me?"

"Sit down," Claire says, grinning, then grimacing, as if suppressing something buried.

"Sorry," Don says.

"For what?"

"For the lunch invitation. And the comment about your dress."

"You're fine."

"I know I'm fine. How are you?"

The waiter comes with water. When he leaves, they sip in silence for a moment.

"Why do you do that?" she says. "It has nothing to do with you. You shouldn't apologize to me when I say things like that. Don't take the blame."

"Sorry," he says again, not meaning to say it.

He suddenly realizes there-one does have sudden realizations like that, in the bright glare of summer, when one's life is falling apart, and Don Lowry has been having sudden realizations almost hourly since he lost his family-that he has faulted himself for every disappointment that Claire has ever had to face: leaving college, leaving New York, leaving graduate school, buying a house she didn't like, the sun in her eyes at lunch.

"Do you see how that infantilizes me? That it implies all of our life has been your choice and none of it has been me. We did everything together; we f.u.c.ked up everything together."

"We didn't f.u.c.k up."

"We're broke, Don."

He nods.

"I'll get my sungla.s.ses from the car," she says, and gets up.

Men notice her as they drive by, as she walks down the street toward the Suburban.

Don watches as a student on a bike, a retired professor walking a dog, and a contractor in a mud-spattered truck all watch Claire move down Park Street and back. He wonders if she is aware of it.

"What is it?" she says. "You're staring at me."

"You look amazing."

"Don, do you see how offensive that is to me? I just told you how I feel like an accessory to your life, to your world, and you've just complimented my appearance as if to confirm that belief."

"I just meant that-"

"Don't. It's fine. I'm done being mad at you."