Summerlong: A Novel Part 31

"I've come close too," Claire says.

"When?"

"The heat wave party. That hot night."

"Me too. That was the night."

"Really?" Claire says.

"Yes. Must have been the heat."

"Did we get married too young?" Claire asks.

"I don't know. I think about that."

"It's only natural," Claire says. "You wonder."

"You have been the love of my life," Don says. "You are the love of my life."

Claire s.h.i.+fts, pulls her knees up to her chest, making herself smaller, more compact. "It's a long life," Claire says. "Maybe you should have more."

"More what?" Don says.

"More life," Claire says. "More love. More joy than I can give you."

"That's f.u.c.king ridiculous," Don says.

"It isn't," Claire says.

"No," Don says. "It is."

"Maybe it's just nearing forty-I feel like fifteen years of my life went by without, without, I don't know, without me doing anything."

"We had kids," Don says.

She nods. "Right. And I love them so much."

"But you don't want to be with me anymore? Is that it?"

"Don, you take all my energy. I guess that's it. You take all my energy. Living with you exhausts me. I don't like being around you some days. All of the day. I didn't like the way you changed when things got hard. I think that's it. You're only able to do easy. That's why you hid the foreclosure notices from me. How could I have been so dumb?"

Don says nothing, and Claire, who's been trying to sound comforting, realizes she may have come off as cruel.

"But you have been the love of my life too," she says. "No matter where we go from here."

"No matter what happens," Don says.

"You're funny, Don Lowry," Claire says. "You always have been."

"So, is this it?" Don says.

Claire knows then that she will go to Charlie's cabin one of these nights, and she will sleep with him again. It is the only way to move ahead in her life, she thinks. It is a portal out of this life and into a new one. And, she tells herself, it is the only way Don will understand that they have reached the end of something. One time with Charlie, drunk, and after a long, steamy party, might be forgivable, a mistake. But if she does it now, here, in the cool and limpid light of Lake Superior, it will not be a mistake.

She stares out at the water. Sometimes, a trick of clouds and the light will make you believe you see a s.h.i.+p on the horizon, or one of the Apostle Islands off the coast of Wisconsin. But other times the sky above Superior is perfectly clear, a blank white slate. This has become one of those afternoons. How fitting, she thinks. Blank slates.

"You came more than close," Don says. "Didn't you?"

She turns to him, wraps herself in her own arms, suddenly chilled.

"Don," she says. "I'm so sorry."

And now Don knows that one night soon, he will find himself alone in the world, a new person, and he will go off and look for a new life, and the world, and everybody he loves in the world, will be free to move forward, away from his ugliness, the Shadow of him, and they will be free, all of his pretty chickens, to move into the next phase of their lives, which will be beautiful or, as he looks at his kids playing, destined for beauty. He will work harder than ever. If he has to leave town to find work, he will do it. He will send them money. He will work s.h.i.+t jobs. He will allow them, and their mother, to move into a happier life without him. He will do it without bitterness. It will be his purpose. Every day as he ties on an ap.r.o.n at some Home Depot outside Waterloo or loads trucks in a warehouse off the Mississippi in Moline, he will think of his children, the reasons he is doing the work, and he will be okay with it. He'll work happily, intently, his goals as n.o.ble as goals can get.

On weekends, he'll drive to Grinnell, or wherever they are then living with their mother. He'll arrive bearing gifts and he will not allow his misery, any sadness he feels, to infect them. If he lives alone, he can keep all of that, he can keep the Shadow to himself. He will show up smiling and the children will take comfort from his newfound stoicism, his warm optimism. He will change what he has felt powerless to change. He wonders though, why not change now, right at this moment? Can't he just wake up tomorrow and understand that life, in fact, is fundamentally wonderful? That he is fundamentally wonderful? That he is not his father? That Claire is fundamentally wonderful? The kids, their lives, Iowa. Being alive should be enough. He wants to say this aloud.

Why couldn't he just say that to Claire and reverse the course of everything?

"I want you to be free of me," Don says. "I want you and the kids to have a different life. A happy one."

The kids shriek in the cold water and sprint back onto the sh.o.r.e, howling.

"The kids are happy," Claire says. "They love you. And I love you. And I, I really have-until very recently-been happy."

"This life though," Don Lowry says. "I feel like it's killing you."

She doesn't say anything to that.

Just beyond where the two children are playing, ABC and Charlie sit side by side, throwing rocks into the water. She begins to cry and Charlie puts his arm around her, the waves swell even higher, a wind blows from the woods behind them, and a cloud pa.s.ses in front of the sun, turning the warm yellow light momentarily to a metallic, golden hue.

"Are you okay?" Charlie says.

"I have deliberately been trying to avoid anything beautiful," ABC says. "Ever since Philly died, I've been afraid to experience beauty without her."

"Why?" Charlie says. "I don't get that."

ABC lets out a snotty laugh and buries her face in the wrist cuffs of her wool sweater. "Because you're a monster!" she says, the words choked out in a kind of sobbing guffaw.

"Probably," he says.

"Do you think you will end up with Claire?" ABC says. "Eventually."

"You mean, like, forever? Or tonight?"

"Don't do it, Charlie. Leave them alone."

"I didn't do it," Charlie says. "She did it. She doesn't love him anymore."

This life, the one at the lake: it is not killing Claire. She begins to think of what has come to be known in proper terms as the Merrick option, and she is considering it. A year at Superior-how would it feel in the winter? She was certain a lake like this would never freeze, but maybe it would-maybe you'd look out and see a vast expanse of ice, a bridge you could walk across out into nothing. This is what she likes about being so far north-you feel like you could, if you wanted to, get out into nothing. Enter a state of it, escape.

How strange it was to see them, this foursome, Don and Claire and Charlie and ABC, plus the ancient Ruth and two happy children, sharing the same s.p.a.ce that week. The s.p.a.ce was vast, of course, and this helped. And around the s.p.a.ce, around their lodgings and their private beach, only woods and sky and water. It was possible that the clean air and open vistas had transformed all of them, had brought them out from their grief and burdens. They were all like the children that first week, free to roam the beach and the woods that separated the compound from the distant highway, free to sit for hours and stare at the waves, and the changing color of the water, gray, green, blue. They gathered rocks, hunted for agates, watched the eagle, which Charlie had named Lyle Canon, patrol the sh.o.r.eline, and on still days they heard the haunted call of the loon. Once, at night, a yearning wolf echoed his howls off the stoic cliffs. The gulls gathered away from them, on a ma.s.sive stand of charcoal-colored rocks at the far end of the beach, and they walked out to the rocks and studied the intricacies of the orange lichen.

The clouds above them changed often, coming in low and swollen in the morning, dissipating into the blue by noon, then returning at sunset, gray and thin, a flattened fog separating them from the moon and stars as Don Lowry built the evening's fire. At night, Ruth would join them until she got too cold, at which point ABC would retreat with Ruth to the guesthouse for sleep. Charlie, who had lied and told everyone he had decided to write a novel, would leave the lodge soon after that. He spent much of his evenings in and near his cabin, reading, drinking coffee or beer, and pretending to write a novel on a stack of yellow legal pads he'd bought at the co-op down the road in Finland. And while his stated intention had been to write a novel, a plan he blurted out over coffee the first morning there, each night he wrote letters to old friends, letters that said almost nothing of substance, but made him feel as if, when he returned from his time on the lake, he would be part of a wider world again. Each morning, he'd drive into Finland, buy envelopes and stamps at the post office, and send the letters out into the world. Some of the addresses he had scrawled into the back pages of his Moleskine journal, some he guessed at, relying on memory. In one instance, he sent a letter to an old professor at Oberlin simply by writing down his name, the words Oberlin College, and the city, state, and zip. Some letters would reach their intended recipients and others would not. That was certain. Also certain: He would leave Grinnell. He would leave his mother with what she wanted, a tidy, organized archive of his father's insignificant work, a most unimpressive intellectual legacy. He would attempt no interpretation or insight. The work, what his father had spent decades on, was, when one was forced to be realistic, largely meaningless. He had done very little that would last. Charlie would burn all the letters. They meant nothing. He would burn the typed and retyped drafts of Gatsby himself and be done with it.

On the sixth morning, just before the break of day, Don packs a picnic lunch and canteens of water in his backpack, along with a pocketknife, a small first-aid kit, some bug spray, some sunscreen, and a whistle. Once the children wake up and have breakfast, he helps them dress for a hike. Long pants, long sleeves, socks, well-laced shoes, and hats: despite the protests that they are overbundled for summertime, Don dresses them so no skin shows at all. The deer flies and ticks are thick that time of year, and you cannot hike through the woods with bare skin, especially not at the end of a summer that has been so warm. Often, by August, the bugs are dying off, but not this year. This year, they swarm at you once you are out of the wide expanse of windy sh.o.r.eline. The mosquitoes in the thickets are as big as bats.

There is, across the highway from the Merrick place, a large parcel of land, maybe two hundred acres, all of that also owned by the Merricks, through which a series of hiking trails moves along the ledge of the Little Marais River. This is where they will hike today.

In the woods, on the uphill, Wendy and Bryan trudge behind Don after the first hour and soon they are tired and thirsty, and although it is not yet ten, Don leads them to a spot on the ridge he had found the summer before, while hiking alone, and they take shade under the birches and pines.

"Look," Don says, pointing down the trail toward the waterfall, the white rush of it still intense from the rains of early summer. "We can swim near those falls later. There is a trail down to it."

The image of Claire swimming in the falls with Charlie, nude, flares up in his brain in a way he cannot shake.

"Are there sharks?" Wendy asks. She has an obsession with sharks ever since Don had let her watch some of Shark Week on cable months ago.

"No! Freshwater, dummy," Bryan says.

"And blueberries," Don says, squatting down to show the children the blueberry plants in fully ripened splendor. He picks three berries and pops them into his mouth.

"I want one," Wendy says. "Wait!"

"Plenty for everyone," Don says, and he savors the berries, the tart sweetness of them, makes a point of looking at the falls and listening to the rustle of pine needles as he eats them, the full sensory experience of the north woods. You give your children something like this, you feel like a hero. How many kids would grow up and never experience anything so beautiful and pristine and real? The air seems to be even clearer up on the ridge, and like a drowning man suddenly saved, he begins to take in great gulps of it, filling his lungs.

But it does not change anything. He wants it to, so badly, but it doesn't.

Lunch is served. The children's collective mood, bolstered by food and rest and the sheer beauty of their perch, rises. Would they remember their father this way? The way he is on a small handful of days of the year, the leader of an expedition to a place still and beautiful? Or, more likely, will they remember him in a state of half misery, a sad, shambling man with a clipboard and boxes of real estate flyers, a man muttering out of anger as he pays the bills in his study or muttering out of boredom as he washes what feels like an endless, infinite stack of dishes.

Now, a dull roar comes from behind him, a snort of some kind, a harrumph. Before he turns to look, already Don Lowry knows he will see a bear. How many bears, he wonders, as the musky smell, a dank mix of dead fish and damp earth, hits him. He looks. Three bears: a mother and two cubs. The children begin to whimper behind him. Don watches as the two cubs step ahead of their mother, and despite her throaty moan, ignore her and make for the berries.

The bear, the mother, stands, sniffs the air, and then goes back on four paws. Don stands less than six feet from the cubs. "Bryan," Don says calmly. "Take Wendy and begin to back away. Go the way we came, go back away. I will stay here."

Don has the idea that he can protect his kids if he stands his ground.

"Go on," Don says. "You kids start going back. You go first."

"Come on," Bryan hisses at his sister. "Come on!" The bear, agitated, begins to pace. Don readies himself to act as a human s.h.i.+eld should the bear charge. It will kill him, of course, that bear, but his children might be spared.

He waits for a long time like that, standing still enough to be the wall between the bear and his children. The cubs continue to fall on the berries. On the berries they fell. Fell they did, on the berries. This is how Don's mind works in those tense moments. He simply runs that sentence in his head as long as he can and hopes to keep the fear from his heart, his lungs, his scent.

A sharp wail echoes off the cliffs above the river and Don tenses his muscles. Wendy . . . Oh s.h.i.+t, Wendy. He has no choice but to go to her. So Don turns and walks away from the bear and feels the bear trotting toward him-he cannot run or he will lead the angry, frightened, or whatever the f.u.c.k it is bear right back to the kids.

"Is Wendy okay?" Don yells.

Silence.

"Bee sting," Bryan says.

"Is her face swollen?" Don calls. The bear inches toward him, now three feet from him, maybe less. The bear stands again.

"No," Wendy says. "Daddy, where is the bear?"

"Bryan, you guys calmly begin walking home."

The bear's rotten breath blows in Don's face. He winces.

"The way we came," Don says. And then, once he thinks the kids are safely away, Don begins to inch his way toward the cubs.

"You can kill me," he whispers to the bear.

The bear seems to be calmed by the whispering.

"Yeah," Don says, "please kill me."

The bear sniffs at the air again.

"Me. Not them. Me. You can kill me, but not them."

The bear weighs the offer, goes at the blueberries alongside her cubs. Don begins to back away. If he wanted to be killed, right there, in a way that could only be described as accidental, he could do it. He could hara.s.s the cubs. He could charge them, now that the kids were safely away, out of sight. Bryan could lead them home. He could run to the road and call 911 and by then it would be too late. And what a blameless way to go: Many years ago, in the dizzyingly hot summer of 2012, on a blueberry-covered ridge above a waterfall in northern Minnesota, our father died while saving us from a bear.

"Kill me, you f.u.c.king bears," Don whispers. "Go ahead."

The bears continue to eat the berries. Every so often, the mother bear looks over her shoulder at Don, but then she goes back to eating.

"Go ahead, I want to die," Don whispers, and the mother bear turns to him and grunts and snorts in a way that seems to say, "No. You don't." But Don has no time to process that, because he hears another scream.

"Daddy!" He hears Wendy's scream echoing up the rocks of the river. "Daddy! Help!"

It is earlier on this day, back in Grinnell, where the weather is not as clear or as crisp and the meteor showers of the North Sh.o.r.e are never visible, that Gill Gulliver awakes from sad dreams two hours before dawn. He has p.i.s.sed the bed, G.o.dd.a.m.nit, and stands s.h.i.+vering beside it and suddenly thinks of how ashamed he will be if anyone ever sees him like that, ever sees him in such a state, half naked, p.i.s.sed on by his own self. Instead of pressing his Help b.u.t.ton and turning on the lights, he dresses, which he still can sometimes do, and wears his khakis and his sweats.h.i.+rt and socks and the slip-on loafers that do not need lacing. He knows his own name and he says it to himself.

He goes to the window. In what is mostly a misty, humid darkness, he sees lights, a small band of dying fireflies that he has never seen before, not from that window, and he opens the window because something in his brain, some stray synapse, fires and says he should try and touch one of the fireflies, and he slides open the window farther than it could ever open in the past when he has tried to open it. The alarms that are supposed to sound do not sound.

He reaches out and catches in his loose fist a firefly and feels it dissolve in his fist and his hand feels strong when he does it. He reaches up and catches another one and again it seems to dissolve in his hand, this time the other hand, and now he is feeling drawn to the warmth of the night, and the noninst.i.tutional air and he boosts himself out into it, that air. He goes out the window and begins to walk to the simultaneously familiar and foreign lights of downtown.

As he walks, he lectures. Why does he lecture? Because his students are flanking him-not just his recent students, but decades' worth of them, all of them young and beautiful, the women and the men, all of them hanging on his every word as he turns and says to them: "And it is not fair to give Gatsby the label of a novel of socioeconomic or political or cultural conditions. It is not fair to call it a novel that serves to both mythicize and criticize the American dream as it stood in the raging days of early American capitalism, of Wall Street and wealth run amok. This is not the novel Fitzgerald wrote! Fitzgerald wrote a novel of a young man finding his literary calling, and finding too that the world was not a safe place for a sensitive young person, an easily wounded, easily influenced young person! Not without writing. Not without language and the power of observation and the power to remain outside all of the ugliness. Yes? Are you following me?"

And when he asks this, he looks about himself and sees that they are gone. All the students have left him, except for one, except for-no, she was no student. She is John Manetti's wife, Ruth, his first lover at Grinnell. Fifty, maybe older, she never would tell him exactly, but she is a generation his senior, and she is there, brus.h.i.+ng her dark hair in the window of the house on Broad Street where he used to sneak in to see her, back in the days when he used to love her. He has aged, but she has not, has she? He looks up at the window on the third floor and she waves down to him. This is her husband's study. He knows it well. They have made love on his desk, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. She had never loved her husband; she moaned this confession into his ear one day, on that desk. She loved to f.u.c.k on that desk, as if somehow she was sabotaging something, taking some power back that wasn't hers to take. She worried that she had wasted her life, she told him that too. Afterward, picking up the papers and the books, she had cried.

"Tell him," Gill had said.

And she did. Gill believed that she had told her husband, told him that she loved another man, a younger man, and that she was leaving him. And Gill had promised her they'd leave Grinnell, just as soon as he could get another job, but then Gill fell in love with someone else, Kathy, someone his own age who could give him a child, only one it turned out, but a child nonetheless, a son, and Ruth rarely spoke to him again. He never loved Kathy the way he loved Ruth, with that sucking, aching need one must love with if it is to last.

He looks up at Ruth, brus.h.i.+ng her hair in the window. He will have to tell her he was wrong. He has made mistakes.

He moves through the dark to Ruth Manetti.

The key, as it has been for many years, is under the flowerpot on the porch. He finds the house dark. He grapples for the lights, labors up the three flights of stairs, and finds the study dark. "Ruth?" he says, entering the attic room. It has been so long. His tongue grows thick with the antic.i.p.ation of pleasure. When the lights switch on, he finds the room empty. He has come from somewhere else. His confusion is a thick honey in his mind.

He wanders through the room, and browses the shelves, fingers the volumes, disorganized and chaotically shelved, until he finds Gatsby, and he pulls the slim novel down, a hardcover edition, an anniversary edition from Scribner's, and a key falls from the book. Its pages have been hollowed out to make a place to hide things and hidden here there is a key.