Summer People (10 page)

Leah stood with arms folded across her chest, staring down at the shoreline beneath them. “What would you have done if she'd fallen?”

“Go home, I guess. Maybe there would have been a trial for criminal neglect, but more likely I would have just stayed in my room for a long time, staring up at the ceiling.”

“That would be horrible,” Leah said, hugging herself as she backed away from the edge. “Then who would I talk to when I'm here?”

“You can always talk to your pastor.”

Leah frowned and stepped back to sit beneath the shaded embankment separating the rolling hills of the Alnombak club golf course from the Point. “I can't talk with him.”

“Why not?”

“I think he has enough problems with Rachel. All she does is sleep all the time, and she hardly ever goes anywhere, even with her own kids. I think Eldwin was hoping that taking her out of Cambridge to someplace beautiful for the summer would help her kind of get over whatever's going on with her, but it's not happening. She's come down to sit with us at dinner a couple of times, but she doesn't say very much. She's like a ghost.”

Lying down beside where Leah was sitting in the shade of a birch tree, Nathan said, “Her father died in February?”

“Hmm, I think so,” Leah said, her eyes cast down at the grass.

“Grieving can take a long time.”

“How long ago did your mother die?”

“A few years ago.”

“What did she die of?”

“Lung cancer.”

“She smoked?”

“No, my dad did—or does. He's started up again.”

“Oh.”

Nathan said, “So what do the kids say about their mom?”

“I guess they've kind of gotten used to it. They lie in bed with her sometimes in the mornings, but they don't say much about her to me. Sometimes Meghan mentions playing soccer or something with her mommy back when she was ‘feeling good.' But I think it almost seems normal to them now.”

Nathan picked a dandelion and began cutting off pieces of the stem with his fingernail.

“And all Eldwin does is read,” Leah continued. “I love reading, you know? I want to go into publishing! But I feel like he uses books to escape from what's going on around him. I think he's depressed too, with Rachel in bed all the time, and I guess it can be a depressing job to have to listen to a lot of people coming to you with all their problems.”

“What kinds of problems do people have around here?”

“The same problems people have everywhere,” Leah said, frowning at him suspiciously. “I think he's an alcoholic. Did you notice how much he was drinking at the party? I think that's why we left, because he knew he was too drunk to talk to people anymore. I asked him if he wanted me to drive, and at first he was just staring out the window, and I thought for a second he was going to yell at me for embarrassing him in front of his kids or something, but then he just kind of whispered, ‘Okay.' He drinks a lot at home, too. He's always got a beer with him when he's reading, and he
doesn't really smoke in the house, but he does it all the time when we're in the car. Did you ever see a pastor smoke?”

Nathan gave the question some thought. “I once saw a Catholic bishop at a fancy restaurant smoking a cigar.”

“Plus, I think I heard him and Rachel having sex a few nights ago,” Leah said. She checked the grass behind her for stones and then stretched out to lie on her side facing him.

“Hmm, and you think that's a sign they're both depressed?”

Leah pushed Nathan's chest. “I'm just saying I think he was probably drunk or something because…I don't know. He would have had to work really hard to persuade a woman that depressed to have sex with him.”

“Well, what did you hear?”

Leah shook her head and stared down at the grass. Then she stuck out her tongue and panted heavily.

“Whoa,” Nathan said.

Leah laughed and covered her mouth. “It really wasn't that impressive.”

Nathan smiled down at her and they locked eyes for a moment, but he glanced away. Her face seemed too far away from him. In front of them, the wind was bending the long grass and wildflowers, and sunlight danced across the windblown surface of the ocean. For a while they didn't speak. Then Nathan looked over to where Leah lay with her head cradled in her arm, eyes closed, like a sleeping angel.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked quietly.

“I'm trying not to think about Eldwin and Rachel having sex. What are you thinking about?”

Nathan's hand pulled awkwardly at her hip, and he had to scoot closer to her, but they kissed. He ran his fingers through her dark, tangled hair and felt the fluttering warmth of her against him. Nothing this romantic had happened to Nathan in months, maybe years, and it was enough to persuade him, for at least a moment, that his life was not a series of random incidents but the fulfillment of a destiny.

 

L
ong after he'd kissed Leah good-bye, Nathan could still smell the faintly musky scent of her hair and taste her cherry-lip-balmed lips. Luxuriating in the sense memories of the afternoon, he watched television with Ellen, but the images rarely penetrated his reverie. During dinner he sat with his chin in his hand, nodding as Ellen spoke, until he noticed she was waiting for a response.

“I'm sorry, could you say that again?” Nathan asked, leaning forward, as if the problem was with his hearing.

“I just said that I don't think I'm going to be able to finish all of this steak, so perhaps we should give some of it to Rainier?”

Nathan thought there was still something he had missed. “Rainier? You mean your dog in Cleveland?”

Ellen looked at him long enough for Nathan to see the shock of recognition appear in her eyes. “Yes, that's right,” she mumbled, staring out the window at the harbor. Then she smiled apologetically. “I guess that wouldn't be terribly practical, would it?”

“No, but he seemed like a special dog,” Nathan said, shrugging, as if the idea of air-mailing leftovers was not so insane. To admit that something was seriously wrong with Ellen—that it was probably imprudent for her to be left alone for any part of the day—was to admit that he should call Glen, pack their bags, and put her on a flight home.

When they finished dinner, Nathan grabbed his sketchbook and followed Ellen onto the porch. She rocked gently in the swing, reading her book, while Nathan arranged himself in the chair beside her. He wanted to draw a picture of himself and Leah lying beside each other on the Point. He knew he would have to pay special attention to his pronounced nose and slight build for it not to seem mawkish, and knowing it would be difficult made him exhausted almost as soon as he began. He took a couple of breaks, to go to the bathroom and to pour himself a drink, and he was staring absently at the harbor when he noticed Mr. McAlister slowly marching between the rocks of Parson's Beach, wearing khaki pants and a gray polo shirt, his head hanging as if searching for shells. When he came closer, he squinted up at them and raised his palm.

“Here comes Mr. McAlister,” Nathan said, but Ellen was already waving in her regal way as the older man climbed the embankment into the yard. Halfway to the house he raised his hand to them again, but the gesture seemed strangely solemn.

“Mind if I come up?” he called from near the base of the stairs. He carried with him the sweet, dying-leaves smell of a smoked cigar, and the swollen pouches beneath his eyes made his banker's face look even longer. On the porch, he shook hands with Nathan and sat down on one of the wooden chairs beside the swing. He declined Nathan's offer of something to drink, and when Ellen commented on the beautiful evening, he smiled weakly at the boats anchored out in the harbor.

Nathan said, “I met your step-grandson, Thayer, when he came over to borrow Ellen's dinghy this morning.”

“I'm glad,” Mr. McAlister said, nodding, as he pressed his tongue along the inside bottom of his cheek. He stared down at nothing in particular in the yard before turning to Ellen. “Did you talk with Franny today?” he asked, quietly.

Ellen shook her head. “No.”

“I thought someone might have called here.” He glanced up at Nathan, but Nathan shook his head also.

Mr. McAlister leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “I wasn't expecting to be the one to have to tell you…but Carl passed away last night.”

Ellen's face drained of expression and she brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh…How?”

“They think maybe he had a heart attack. Franny didn't give me a lot of details. I think she's just trying to let people know what happened.”

Ellen looked down at her lap, her eyes beginning to water.

“So,” Mr. McAlister sighed. He stood and took a seat beside her on the swing, steadying them with his feet. He put his arm around Ellen's shoulders and held her left hand, saying, “I know. He cared an awful lot about you.”

They sat for what seemed a long time as the sun fell behind the White
Mountains. Pale, golden light reflected off the white porch columns and clapboards. Nathan asked Ellen if she would like her shawl, and Mr. McAlister suggested they all go inside. In the dimly lit living room, he and Ellen sat down on the couch—Mr. McAlister still with his arm around her—as Nathan went into the kitchen to fetch them glasses of water. Unsure of what to do when he returned, he sat down by the fireplace, stuffing newspapers between the logs. He said, “You don't know when the funeral's going to be, do you?” And Mr. McAlister said that no, he didn't know. He didn't even know if there would be one in Brightonfield Cove, given that Carl would presumably be buried in Boston. The logs were just beginning to burn when the phone rang. Instead of answering it there in the living room, Nathan hustled through the dining room and into the kitchen. Along the way it occurred to him, with sudden dread, that the call might be from Glen.

Nathan picked up on the third ring and was grateful to hear the raspy, brusque voice of the local nurse who bathed Ellen. She was calling to confirm an appointment for the following morning. Normally, Nathan would have gone in and asked Ellen. But he was afraid of embarrassing her in front of Mr. McAlister, so he told the nurse tomorrow would be fine. He stared out the kitchen window at the first stars in the lavender darkness above the water, then walked back into the living room, where Mr. McAlister held Ellen's hand in her lap. The fire cast tall, flickering shadows along the walls, and despite Mr. McAlister's dignified demeanor, he and Ellen looked smaller, somehow more vulnerable than Nathan remembered them. Standing with a hand on the banister, Nathan announced that he was headed upstairs.

In his room, he stripped down to his boxers and flopped on the bed. He paged through his art books and comics for more than an hour. But mostly he was thinking about Carl. Nathan hadn't known him well enough to grieve. Yet it was difficult to comprehend that if he wanted to visit the man who only nights ago had been drunk on the porch, hurling his wineglass at the ocean, that man was no longer available. The particular amalgamation of atoms that allowed for the sound of his voice and that
look in his eyes would never occur again, ever. Nathan still had a hard time internalizing this fundamental truth with regard to his mother. Even now, some part of his body expected to see her open his parents' front door before he knocked, hug him, then lead him to newspaper clippings about comic books or a local teen's triumph over adversity, and into the warm air of the kitchen, where, if he liked, she could heat up the soup she and Nathan's father had made earlier that afternoon. Nathan remembered the days after she drew her long-expected last breath—how he lay in his bed, barely eating, hiccupping with sobs, and occasionally hurling books and other mostly unbreakable objects around his room. As a boy, he had embraced the idea of the Rapture, which would allow him to escape death, and even though his faith had evaporated before he was even out of his early teens, Nathan could never completely let go of the feeling that the end could not be the end. He wondered about Leah's experiences with loss, and if similar sorrow might bring them closer together, until these thoughts led to others—more arousing—about her warm, slender body and the cherry taste of her mouth.

The Nurse Discovers Ellen ~ Leah Talks of Leaving ~ Kendra Explains Her Actions ~ Nathan and Eldwin Kayak to the Mouth of Albans Bay

P
ounding on the front door awoke Nathan again the next morning. He pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and hustled down the stairs to see the nurse's face squinting through the curtained window. As he opened the door to let her in, he noticed it hadn't been locked.

“Morning. I'll go wake her,” Nathan said. But about halfway up the stairs it occurred to him—with sudden, muscle-tightening force—that he had fallen asleep the previous evening without hearing Ellen return to her room. There had been no familiar creak of her footsteps on the stairs, or scuffing of her shoes against the carpet, and now, when he reached the open door to her room, he found that the bed was still made. He ran down the hallway, peering through open doorways at empty rooms, until the nurse yelled, “She's down here!”

Nathan hurried back toward her voice. Stumbling down a few stairs, he crouched and stared into the living room, where Ellen was sitting on the couch. “Fuck,” he said quietly. Ellen's hair had shed its hairpins and
hung in tangles as she brushed them back from her face. She wore a badly wrinkled, seashell-patterned dress, and the hem, bunched up above her right knee, revealed a little more of her pale and veiny leg than Nathan wanted to see. Even if he hadn't recognized the dress as the same one she'd worn yesterday, her disheveled appearance strongly indicated that she'd spent the night on the couch.

Nathan stood and walked casually down the remaining stairs. “Taking a little nap, Ellen?”

Ellen finished wiping the wisps of hair from her face and then drew her thumb and forefinger down the sides of her mouth.

“A long nap,” she said, finally.

Nathan smiled down at her and placed his hand affectionately on her shoulder. “Yeah, you napped for a while.” He shook his head as if to say, “What a funny, sleepy-headed woman!” but the nurse's arms were folded across her chest and her mouth was a slit.

“Are you ready for your bath, Mrs. Broderick?” she asked quietly, sympathetically, as if this were the one kind gesture that Ellen was likely to receive all day. The two of them shuffled toward the stairs, and Nathan thought of rushing ahead of them to fling back the covers on Ellen's bed, but the nurse frowned at him as he hesitated, forcing him to retreat into the kitchen.

Sunlight broke across the kitchen table and landed in trapeziums of light on the floor. Nathan fixed himself a glass of orange juice and a piece of toast, then walked out to the porch swing. Seagulls glided above the water. He breathed deeply to try and calm himself, but thoughts about how the nurse must be disgusted by him were tangled up with thoughts about Ellen, Mr. McAlister, and Carl Buchanan, and how an urgency to live propels some lives, but not others.

Nathan remembered how a few weeks after Sophie had dumped him, he'd taken a bag of groceries to his father's house because the older man was laid up in bed with the flu. Nathan often tried to avoid his parents' bedroom because it still contained so many things that reminded him of his mother. Her musical jewelry box, a collection of her shoes stuffed in
boxes at the top of the closet, and a badly painted portrait of her as a young girl that she had always seemed to love, anyway. Nathan's father had the bedcovers pushed down past his knees and lay in his briefs and white T-shirt watching
Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser.
He turned down the volume and asked Nathan what he'd been up to.

Since Sophie had left him, Nathan had been wondering with total seriousness whether he had reached the limits of human suffering. He had called in sick to work a few times, hadn't been eating or sleeping, and had even stopped drawing. In general he didn't feel comfortable talking with his father about romantic issues, but he had no close friends besides Sophie, and the few housemates he talked with had failed so miserably to console him after the breakup (“Look at it this way, dude, you got to date a super-hot girl for two years!”) that he couldn't help telling his father what had happened. His father made a few inquiries about the details, but not many, and Nathan soon changed the subject. He listened to his father talk about the ongoing landscaping he was always doing in the backyard, and the performance of the stock market; then Nathan said he had to go. He was already halfway down the hall when his father called him. Nathan returned and stood in the doorway.

“Listen,” his father said, pulling on his unshaven face. “Life, you know, it seems short to you now, because you're so young, and part of why you're anxious and upset is because life seems so short. But it isn't, and you'll understand that eventually. Your life lasts a long time.”

Now, this memory drifted in and out of Nathan's thoughts about his mishandled past and indeterminate future until the weight of such considerations began to make him feel he hadn't gotten enough sleep. He sat with his arm across the back of the swing and rested his head, blinking out at the ocean, then closing his eyes. He had almost fallen asleep when a dog barked in a neighbor's yard, and minutes later, children's voices cried from somewhere behind the house, on Harbor Avenue. Nathan sighed and grabbed his empty glass off the little table beside him. Opening the French doors, he glanced back through the spaces in the railing in time to notice that the children moving through the side yard were Eldwin's.
They wore matching blue-and-yellow bathing suits and Leah followed behind them, carrying a large canvas bag. Nathan stepped quietly into the house to watch them walk down to Parson's Beach.

They spread their towels on the sand and the children skipped toward the water. Leah unfastened her shorts, letting them drop to her ankles, then pulled off her white T-shirt, so she was wearing only her black bikini. She ran her hand through her hair, then sat down on the towel and took a bottle of suntan lotion from her bag.

Nathan hurried into the bathroom, did a quick check in the mirror, then ambled down the yard toward her.

The spaghetti straps of Leah's bathing suit were tied in a loose bow around her neck, and propping herself up with one arm, she glanced over her shoulder to smile at Nathan through windswept hair. “Hey there,” she said as Nathan sat on one of the empty cartoon-themed towels beside her.

“So what did you do yesterday after I left you?” Nathan asked.

Leah stretched out on her side and held her head in her hand. “I thought about you.”

“Yeah?”

“And I also talked to my sister, Lindsey. She's getting married in February and freaking out, so I was trying to calm her down.”

“What is she freaking out about?”

“Did I mention she's getting married?”

Nathan said, “Fair enough.”

“I have to leave on Sunday to go down to New York and help her plan,” Leah continued. “She's got this friend who's a big designer and she's going to do Lindsey's wedding dress and the bridesmaid dresses, and we're meeting with her on Monday.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Not too long. I'm supposed to come back on Wednesday.”

“Who will I talk to while you're away?”

“You can always talk to your pastor.”

Nathan lay alongside her, peering into the contents of the canvas bag
near her feet. In addition to her hair clip, suntan lotion, and lip balm, the bag contained issues of
Cosmopolitan
and
Vanity Fair,
and the same book of Chekhov short stories she had disparaged just a few days ago.

“Do you feel ready to get married?” Nathan asked.

“We've only just met.”

Nathan smiled. “No, I mean do you feel like you're emotionally ready to get married—to someone—if you met the right person?”

“Probably not for a while. My sister's five years older than me but that still seems really young. I don't even feel like an adult yet, you know?”

“You are.”

Leah shrugged. “Maybe.” She sat up and dug her hand into her bag to withdraw her sunglasses and a can of Coke. “How about you? What did you do with the rest of your day?”

Nathan groaned and told her the whole story about Carl and Franny's visit to the house a few evenings before, and then about Bill McAlister's visit last night to tell Ellen about Carl's death.

“Yikes,” Leah said, putting on sunglasses so dark Nathan could no longer see her eyes. “Do you think he was in love with Ellen?”

“I think so, calling her the most beautiful woman he'd ever met in his life, but the guy was also married to his wife for forty years.”

“So?”

“I'm just saying it was probably emotionally complicated for him.”

Leah said, “Maybe he would have left her in a minute if Ellen had wanted him.”

“Maybe,” Nathan answered. But this uncharitable perspective on Carl depressed him, and it seemed like bad luck to talk with Leah about people's capacity for betrayal.

In front of them, the children worked in focused silence, dripping wet sand from a bucket to form the lopsided turrets of a castle. When Nathan heard a distant screen door slap closed behind them, he glanced back to see the nurse glaring down at him from the porch. He stood and shouted, “Okay!” and waved his hand to indicate that he'd seen her. But the nurse just shook her head and turned back into the house.

Nathan explained to Leah that he had to go. “Do you feel like taking a walk this evening?”

“I think you're supposed to go kayaking with Eldwin.”

“I am?”

“He said if I saw you, to tell you he would plan on coming over around nine o'clock.”

“No. I didn't tell him I'd
definitely
do it, did I?”

Leah sipped her drink and watched him.

Nathan ran his hands up both sides of his head and clutched his hair. “All right. Well. What are you doing tomorrow evening?”

“I was invited to a party.”

“Whose party?”

“Thayer Something. It's at the same house we were at a few days ago, if you want to come.”

Nathan told her about his meeting with Thayer when the young man had borrowed the
Little Red Hen.
“It doesn't sound like the party's going to be very big, though,” Nathan said. “He made it sound like it's just going to be a few of his friends.”

“Hmm.”

The synapses of Nathan's brain were crackling with far better ideas of how he and Leah could spend the last night before she left for New York. He wanted to kneel down and kiss her, but with the children watching, he just waved and backed away, saying he'd call or stop by soon but that the party sounded like fun.

 

A
t the club that afternoon, older men ran back and forth across the courts, wiping sweat from their brows. Ellen smiled occasionally at things they said or the way one man kept lunging after the ball, grunting like he'd been punched in the stomach, but Nathan was too preoccupied with Kendra Garfield to pay much attention. She was sitting just three rows ahead of him beneath the same green-and-white-striped canopy. She wore a white skirt and polo shirt, and the hairs on the back of her slender neck were dark with perspiration. The blond woman beside
her said something, and Kendra threw her head back, laughing, as her ponytail slid down between the damp crescents of her shoulder blades, visible through her shirt. “That's right. That's exactly right,” she said, nodding gaily. But soon, Nathan thought, she would get up from that chair and notice that he and Ellen were there, too. He felt pleasurably nervous waiting for Kendra's confident laughter to wilt and die as she anticipated the awkwardness of having to say hello.

In the meantime, Nathan made idle conversation with Ellen about the tennis matches and about how the windy weather must be wonderful for sailing. She had spent much of the early afternoon on her porch watching a man stand broad legged on a catamaran in the harbor as he instructed a group of children in pint-size sailboats on how to harness the wind. She had shaken her head, laughing, as the children tacked haphazardly through the shallows, and sitting beside her, Nathan wondered if perhaps she had forgotten her grief. He did not mention Carl's death or inquire as to how she'd ended up sleeping on the couch, and was now heartened to see her taking pleasure in the tennis matches in front of them. They'd been sitting there for half an hour when—having exhausted his capacity for mostly one-sided small talk—Nathan fell silent.

“Would you like something to drink?” Ellen asked him.

In the clubhouse, the mousy lady took a long time to fill his order of two half-and-halves, asking Nathan about himself and telling him about her daughter who had recently married a man from Cleveland. But Nathan was too distracted by the view through the window. Kendra and her friend were getting up from their seats. “On the tab—Broderick,” Nathan said, hurriedly gathering the two drinks from the counter. On his way down the porch steps, he saw Kendra, her friend, and two men who had been playing tennis gathered around Ellen.

“Here you go,” Nathan said, handing Ellen her drink. But the ice-filled glass was so cold in her bony hands that she whimpered and looked around for someone to take it from her.

Nathan stepped forward to help, but Kendra was already taking the glass. “Here, Aunt Ellen. I'll put it right down here by your seat, and you
just let me know when you want a drink. I'm sorry, Nathan, you were probably sitting here, weren't you?”

Kendra stepped away from where she'd been standing in front of Nathan's chair.

“I'm fine,” Nathan said, pulling up another chair to sit on Ellen's far side.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure.”

Kendra glanced at her companions—perhaps wondering whether to introduce them—but they were already talking among themselves, waiting for her to finish.

Kendra crouched in front of Ellen and Nathan like an adult squatting down to have a private moment with her children. “You know, Nathan, Lucien and I were talking about the confusion down at the yacht club and how embarrassed I feel about what happened. With your different clothes on, and in all that glare from the sun, I think I just didn't recognize you.”