Summerlong: A Novel Part 33

And now, understanding how things are meant to be, she has given herself over to the idea that life will be better elsewhere. She worries that she won't be able to find Philly right away. She worries she'll have to journey through the spirit realm alone. At least Philly is out there, somewhere, she thinks. She can search for her if she needs to search for her. Love is worth it. Love is worth all things. To live a life without love is foolish. If Philly could not come back to the world, ABC would never love again.

If one could choose a last evening on earth, she would choose this very one. A meteor in the sky above her seems to confirm her resolve to push herself out into the frigid waters, to get lost there and pa.s.s out and eventually fall out and drown. Or maybe she will just have to throw herself into the deep. She will take the painkillers first if that is the case. It will not be a pleasant way to go. She understands all of that. But it is a way to go.

The doubts begin to grow, pus.h.i.+ng back the whole idea of it, but then she notices that Ruth has come onto the beach, and suddenly over the lake, in the cold wind, there's an ecological impossibility: hundreds and hundreds of fireflies come hatching up out of the waves, floating and blinking up to the moon and the stars and all of that meaningless, f.e.c.kless heaven.

Don Lowry has seen a meteor brighter than any he has ever seen before, brighter than any of the previous August meteors he has seen in his life. He feels as if he has changed somehow, and as he finds a place among the rocks near the waterfall, he nestles in and waits for the bear. Why he wants to see it again, he cannot say, he can only say that he has not felt so alive in years and if he can see the bear, if only he could see the bear once more-he waits in the dark there, watching the stars. Does he really want to die? Is that it? The thought stays with him for a moment-it is possible, it is possible that he wants to die. He is struck by the oddness of the thought and he s.h.i.+vers with cold and huddles against the rocks and pulls the watch cap lower, so it covers his ears. This dulls the rus.h.i.+ng of the waterfall, the sound, perhaps, of oblivion, which is why it is a sound that calls to Don Lowry right then, and calls to all of us, at some time, in our twisted lives, in a dark wood. Oblivion, Don thinks. If you say it's never called to you, you're lying.

But even with the rush of the falls, and the watch cap over his ears, he can hear the snapping twigs and the breathing of something not human. The air smells of dead fish and a heavy musk, which comes and goes with the breezes off the distant lake.

ABC drags the canoe to the water's edge. It is not heavy but its metal is cold and her hands sting. She wrenches her back somewhat, but she's already taken two of the painkillers and if she has hurt herself at all, in any significant way, she will probably never know.

She has dragged the canoe near the sh.o.r.e, near the fire pit where Don Lowry likes to sit. He is not out there staring at the fire, which she takes to be a good sign. Of course, he would try and stop her if he knew what she was doing. The fire is all set for lighting-Don has already made the wood stack he needs to light a fire, has stuffed paper and birch bark and sc.r.a.ps of driftwood beneath it, but must have fallen asleep before he'd gone through with it. She takes a lighter from her pocket and lights the kindling. It seems the thing to do. It seems there should be flames. Earth, wind, fire, water.

A signal she will leave behind, a way to summon Philly perhaps, though she can feel Philly as soon as she lights the fire. Philly is already here.

She begins to think of Philly, and she calls to her softly, a singing whisper: Phillllllly!

ABC stands alongside the canoe and looks out toward the water. She has no life jacket. If she had one, she might decide to wear it and change her mind. She wonders if she will die of hypothermia while swimming or if she will simply drown. They will probably find the boat before they find her. She doesn't want any of the Lowry children to find her so she tells herself that such a thing is unlikely. Didn't she hear once that Superior never gives up its dead? Where did she hear that? She may never be found.

It is hard to picture her earthly body gone, and she wonders how it will work. Will she be dressed in white too, like Philly? Where had Philly found the white clothes, since ABC remembers very clearly that when Philly died, when she'd been thrown from her bike by that recklessly careening delivery truck, she was wearing cargo pants and a blue tank top that said VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS.

It is a bear, of course, Don knows that much, though he cannot be sure if it is the same bear. He doesn't know what to do. Move, or stay still, as if asleep.

The air fills with the scent of musk, of dead fish. He might die here, near the river, and his body, by morning, would float into Superior, would it not? He wonders. His stomach sinks and he tries to swallow hard to keep himself from shaking. The bear is on the bank above him, maybe ten feet away. He can see the bear snuffling the ground, coming toward him.

It is this thought that gives him another thought: he thinks of the old Gordon Lightfoot song, the line "Superior, they say, never gives up her dead," and he begins to hum it softly to himself, and then he has another thought, not one about death, or the pain he is about to endure but about his son, Bryan. When Bryan had been four, they had all gone to Lake Superior, and Don and Claire's old college friend Ryan Dawson, a forgettable person to Don now, had come to the cabin, and he had brought his guitar and he had played a song for Bryan, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

Bryan had been transfixed by the tune. He had asked to hear it four times that night, and in the weeks and months afterward, after Don and Claire and the kids were back in Iowa, his son would sing in his soft small-boy voice as he played with Legos that song, that ballad, over and over. He would sing the lines he knew and he would hum the lines he didn't and Don Lowry remembered one morning as he made breakfast, his son had sung the song, the almost so-maudlin-it-was-silly song, and loudest of all he had sung the line, "'And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.'"

Don remembers all of it now. How his boy had been playing with Legos as he sang it, how his boy had been wearing a long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt, with yellow stripes against a blue background, how the family room had been a mess that morning, the children having destroyed it the day before-they were then four and two-and Don thinks back to that, to that time, and he looks back down the river path but he cannot even see the lodge where his family is now sleeping. He's wandered too far into the timber. It is too dark and there are no lights on back at Merrick's. Or perhaps trees obscure the light.

He begins to sing the song aloud. "'And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.'"

It will either anger the bear or scare it.

It is coming closer.

Don just waits.

Ruth Manetti is still awake, as she has been all night. She has found in the darkness an incredible resolve, an ability to stay awake that she has not had in years. She has smoked the joint ABC rolled for her, but she does not fall asleep. She has a will and her will is iron, even in old age, and she knows that about herself and she takes comfort in that. Everything has gone well. ABC is on the beach, prepping for her journey, which is how Ruth has planned it. She has known, she has felt it in her bones, as they say, that this night will be the night that ABC will want to leave for the spirit world. She will, Ruth knows, see one of the Leonid meteors-they are abundant every August in the second week; Ruth knows this from childhood. But ABC will see these meteors and believe they are telling her something. ABC will think everything about the North Sh.o.r.e is a sign for her escape, for her transition into the next world. For months Ruth has had to pretend to hear voices and see fireflies and to have visions and answers to ABC's persistently weird dreams, but really she has no answers, because n.o.body is allowed to have answers, you only get the answers after you die, and n.o.body has ever come back from death and told the answers to anyone.

Ruth takes her lawyer's business card from the ancient purse she has carried with her to this sh.o.r.e and she leaves it on the table with a note for Don. "It's your house," she says. She has told Mendez of her change in plan but not about what she is going to do, for that might get him in trouble. But somehow she knows tonight that he loves her still. Thirty years ago, Mendez wanted to marry Ruth. Briefly, she loved him too; when the ache of losing Gill and the shame of her children's scorn was great, he was tender with her. He was her second lover, her second affair. He would handle everything the way she wanted him to.

Ruth pictures Don asleep in the lodge. Maybe he is sleeping with Claire. She pictures him sleeping with Claire. It is not a lost cause. She has been around long enough to know that; maybe they simply needed to breathe awhile, and not feel the shame of breathing, the way so many people do.

Nothing but darkness on that beach, a million fireflies up on the lake. These she doesn't need to pretend to see; these are real and she always knows she will see them when the time comes to leave. She does believe in slipping out of the world, does believe in the portals that open up for us when we need them, does believe, has believed for years, that Lake Superior would be her portal-but she has lied, sometimes, to ABC. It is part of what she wanted to teach her. Pay attention. See the things n.o.body else sees. Ruth has lived to be an old, old woman. She has learned to do just that, those things.

On the beach, there is almost no light at all except for the moon and ABC's small fire, and the stars, and the swell and rising up of fireflies from the lake, and on occasion, overhead, a meteor. She has grown up with the stars and the sound and smell and feel of this lake and she will leave the world surrounded by them. She feels suddenly warm and attentive, as if someone is whispering in her ear an ancient, ancient story where none of the contemporary concerns of the day matter at all. Now, there is almost nothing between her and the canoe but ABC. Ruth has been shuffling along in the dark a long time, wearing her blue jeans and boots and silk thermal underwear and two sweaters and now she has on a knit cap. She has her medicines with her, all of the painkillers she's been given and told not to abuse over the last five years. She has taken five now and the five sleeping pills already and she is sipping from a coffee mug of ABC's bourbon, too harsh for her, though she has had a lifetime of sweet wine, and she doesn't mind that her last drink will be one that burns a little going down. She has missed the North Sh.o.r.e. She has thought about it so much in the last few weeks, knowing she would see it again.

It is Claire, not a bear, who appears on the ledge of the cliff and who grabs Don Lowry's hand, while she clings to the trunk of a tree with her other hand, and who hoists him up from the abyss, even though maybe he doesn't actually need the help, and then they embrace like that, their hearts mad with thundering beats, their faces drenched in adrenaline's acrid sweat, and Claire holds Don and they go to a safer place, to the footpath away from the edge of the ridge and she holds on to Don, and in his ear, she says, "It's not as terrible as you think."

"It's not?" he says, breathless himself.

"Wild horses," she says. And then again, "Wild f.u.c.king horses."

Above them, on the path, near the berry patch, huffs a startled black bear.

In the middle of the night, Charlie's cell phone rings.

"It's about your father." Someone whom he doesn't know tells him this. "He's dead."

Outside, something like the green embers of fireflies glow and fade, glow and fade, and Ruth begins to walk up to the canoe, sans flashlight, with a cup of whiskey and with the pills in her pocket, and she walks over the rocks, afraid of falling but knowing, somehow, that there is no reason to save her strength anymore, that this will be the last thing she will need to do in a lifetime of doing things that require strength. She has not said good-bye to anyone but ABC, but how many good-byes does one need? She has been at the age, for years, where people always say good-bye as if there may not ever be another farewell. And she has letters, in her desk drawer, that she has written in her moments alone, painstakingly clutching the pen with her arthritic fingers and trying, somehow, to make conversation with a few distant friends who also write letters.

Ruth finds ABC asleep on the rocks, near the boat and the fire, just as she had hoped. Ruth had told her to take four pills, plus a Xanax-not a lethal dose for someone so healthy, but enough to maybe make you pa.s.s out in the middle of an elaborate plan.

In her drugged hesitation, ABC has not gotten into the boat. She's fallen asleep next to the boat. Ruth covers her with one of the blankets from the canoe. Her plan has worked, but now she has work to do, so that she too doesn't fall asleep beside ABC.

She tries to push the large metal canoe into the water. But it will not budge. She is too weak. The pot and the wine and the pills and the nearly nine decades of exhausting life have worn her out. She needs to get the canoe into the water. She does not want to go back to Iowa and wait to die in front of a television in a house she never really liked, in a town, if she admits it, she never would have lived in if not for her husband's work. She has not done much on her own terms in her life but she will die on her own terms. She crawls into the canoe.

Then Ruth nudges ABC with an oar.

"Wake up," she says.

ABC wakes slowly, pus.h.i.+ng herself up in a kind of slow-motion stretch. Her face is damp. She begins to s.h.i.+ver.

"ABC, push me out to sea."

ABC groggily stands up. "Ruth!" she says. "What are you doing?"

ABC sits back down. Her eyes are closing.

"I am doing what you were going to do," Ruth says.

ABC opens her eyes, stands again. She tries to get Ruth out of the boat. "You are gonna freeze to death."

She is too groggy and weak from the pills.

"Exactly," Ruth says. "Or maybe drown."

"Ruth," ABC says.

"I've been seeing fireflies all summer and they've given me a way out of life. They were not meant to give you a way out."

She looks out to the lake and there are dozens of fireflies just over the water. ABC knows enough about Lake Superior to know that one doesn't usually see that. The fireflies do not hover in blinking cl.u.s.ters above the open water-it is too cold and windy here. But hundreds of them blink in a weird straight line, like they are lining a path into the open water, like they are reproducing and multiplying in midair.

"See?" Ruth says. "That's for me."

ABC looks around the beach to see if anyone is awake, but there is no stirring anywhere. For a moment, it is as if she has heard the sound of a man singing, but she has not.

"ABC," Ruth says. "You had the right idea, but your timing is off. It's my time to go."

"Jesus, Ruth."

"Look, I've already taken sleeping pills. I won't be awake for any of it. And look, I brought whiskey and morphine. Hurry. Don't keep me here. I'll be in worse shape than I am in now. The lake, that's where I want to end my days, nowhere else."

She laughs then and smiles up at ABC in a way that radiates the now obscured beauty of her youth.

"ABC," she says, "you have to live your f.u.c.king life. It's not over."

ABC puts her sneaker on the edge of the canoe, standing behind Ruth, and pushes the canoe down the rocky beach a foot or two, closer to the water.

"That's right," Ruth says.

"Ruth," ABC says, but she pushes the canoe farther with her foot. Her hands are in her pockets because it is cold, and she feels nauseated from the pills and the alcohol. She also keeps her hands in her pockets because it feels less real if she does not touch the boat with her hands. It might be considered a dream that way.

The wind has picked up out of the west and so the relatively still lake is blowing in ripples away from the sh.o.r.e.

"No," ABC says. She starts to try to get Ruth out of the canoe.

"ABC," Ruth says, "you know the right thing to do."

ABC shakes her head no. "It doesn't feel right."

"Don't be a coward. You get this. You understand this. It's what you wanted, but you know now you did not want it at all."

ABC nudges Ruth toward the lake once more, the metal canoe making a gritty sliding sound on the rocks that hurts her teeth.

"Good," Ruth says. "Quickly now, before you wake everybody up. Before you think too much more."

ABC is s.h.i.+vering now. It seems suddenly to plunge from chilly to frigid, the wind, the mist off the waves. Ruth doesn't tremble at all, and ABC leans in and kisses her on the cheek.

Then ABC gives her one hearty push, this time with her hands, and soon the boat is drifting out into the lake. "Just live your f.u.c.king lives," Ruth says, and then ABC smiles because she knows she will remember that, the unexpected parting words she can share with everyone, if she is able to tell them what happened. Maybe she'll play dumb. Maybe she'll pretend to be as shocked as everyone else.

And Ruth?

She is almost surprised but not surprised, not really, when ABC, a loyal, helpful friend in the truest sense of true, does shove her out on the lake. Ruth lies down in the canoe then so ABC cannot see her and says her last words, lacking in profundity but certainly memorable. She hopes ABC can only see the canoe from the sh.o.r.e. It will be easier if she says she saw nothing but a canoe. Just a boat on the water in the dark, drifting down a path lit by firefly light.

Another meteor streaks across the sky when Ruth looks up, and then another. She hopes ABC has seen it. And then some fireflies light up the grim darkness just above the canoe and then go dark and do not blink again. Now all Ruth can see is the stars, all she can feel is the cold and the swell of the undulating waves.

She knows that ABC will stay out by the fire, watching the canoe until it disappears.

How could she not? And Ruth seems to see everything then, what will happen in the moments and hours and days and years ahead on the sh.o.r.e behind her. Don and Claire will come running down from the river path, screaming their way toward the beach, though the bear will have long since lost interest and, as it turns out, is not behind them. Charlie, already woken up by the phone call about his father, will hear this screaming and be shaken from his weeping and he'll come out onto the beach to find a shouting, sweating Don and a hysterically laughing Claire, this long married couple buzzing with adrenaline, half-insane with it. Charlie will ask them what is the matter, what is happening, and when they finally stop laughing and swearing, they will all finally notice ABC, crying by the fire, and they will go to her, and sit on either side of her, and ask what is wrong.

And ABC will pull out her flashlight and s.h.i.+ne it onto the water, where a swarm of fireflies will be moving again, in a long, speckled beam of light pointed due north, and Charlie will say, "Jesus, look at that, what do you suppose that is?" and Claire will say, "Fireflies?" and Don will say the reflection of a meteor, and ABC will say, "Yes, it's all of those things; also, that's Ruth."

Ruth begins to s.h.i.+ver with cold or happiness and she is not sure which it is, but it feels like the latter. She is not sure what any of them will say. Maybe they'll finally be quiet. That will be a good start. How much of the story will ABC tell and how much of it will she keep to herself? And if she tells the story exactly as it happened, they'll have to come up with next steps. Whom will they call? How will they tell the story of the summer? And will they call for help right away, or wait until morning? Will they call 911? The Coast Guard? Would they call Ruth's estranged kids or her nieces and nephews in Davenport who want her money, or will they call Mendez, her lawyer back in Grinnell, who will be trying to reach Charlie about the estate of Gill Gulliver, whom Ruth, at that moment, somehow, suddenly, knows is dead.

A cloud drifts up past the moon and the stars grow dimmer. She's long since stopped seeing the meteors above her, and the fireflies have also gone dim, have blown off into the wind like small clouds of ash. On her knees now, she prepares to collapse into the lap of the waves, the unseeable, unsayable truths beneath them.

There will be logistics. Ruth knows this. She thinks of the foursome gathered on the sh.o.r.e. She can almost feel them looking out at the water, paralyzed by what has just occurred. What will they do next?

She doesn't know, but she does know, with some certainty, one simple truth: they'll find some way through. They'll figure it out.

This is, more or less, true of everybody.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

My thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellows.h.i.+p that facilitated the early drafting of this novel, as well as the Mark Gates Memorial Foundation for Wayward Writers. I'm grateful to the incredibly supportive administration, bright colleagues, and wonderful students I have at Grinnell College as well as the inspiring, warm community I find each winter teaching in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, especially Ellen Bryant Voigt, Charles Baxter, Maurice Manning, Alix Ohlin, Megan Staffel, James Longenbach, and Stacey D'Erasmo, whose lectures and readings directly influenced this novel.

Big love to my family, especially my kids, Lydia and Amos, artists and storytellers both, for the sustaining joy, patience, humor, and beauty that help me through each day.

Many individuals contributed to the writing of this book with their friends.h.i.+p, creative influence, or both: Christina Campbell, Ralph Savarese, Kim Steele, Coleman, William Jasper, Lee Boudreaux, Ryan Willard, Tina and Caleb Elfenbien, Tim and Jennifer Dobe, Lee Running, Jeremy Chen, Amy Martin, Michael Perry, Natalie Bakopoulos, Justin Vernon, Mere Martinez, Benjamin Percy, Brian Bartels, Marta Rose, Daleth Hall, Patrick Somerville, Emma Borges-Scott, Steve Myck, Steve Pett, David Wells (and the Terry Family Foundation), and Bridget McCarthy. And extra big thanks to Becky Saletan.

Thanks to the Parkington Sisters-Ariel, Sarah, and Rose-whose music, beauty, and wit lit up a dark night of the soul in Iowa City when I needed it most.

The line "Why is it all so difficult?" on page 44 is inspired by Stephen Dobyns' poem "How To Like It."

The conversation between Don and Claire on page 318 is influenced by a line in Charles Bukowksi's Post Office: "This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us."

I'd especially like to thank everyone at Ecco Books, including Daniel Halpern, Sonya Cheuse, and Eleanor Kriseman, and, especially my editor, Megan Lynch, as clear-eyed, patient, and bright as they come. When she showed up, so did the light. And finally, deepest grat.i.tude to my agent Amy Williams, an unflappable, hard-nosed, full-hearted, deal-making, and life-changing pal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

DEAN BAKOPOULOS is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Please Don't Come Back from the Moon and My American Unhappiness. He holds an MFA from the University of WisconsinMadison, and is the winner of a Guggenheim fellows.h.i.+p and a National Endowment for the Arts fellows.h.i.+p. He is the writer-in-residence at Grinnell College, and lives in Iowa.

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ALSO BY DEAN BAKOPOULOS.

Please Don't Come Back from the Moon.

My American Unhappiness.