The Color of Water in July (3 page)

“Well, you be sure to stop by. I’d love to hear all about it.”

Mrs. Lewis continued along the walkway until she reached the woods, and then she circled back.

Back up on the porch, Jess turned her face away from the lake and tried not to think about her grandmother.

The sun began to set over Pine Lake, turning the water to a silvery sheen. Russ and Jess sat on the front porch drinking white wine.

“They want it to be a kitchen and solarium focus.” Russ’s sharp voice intruded upon the silence.

“What?” Jess said absently.

“For the magazine.”

“That ratty old kitchen?” Jess was surprised. “Why would they want to do a story on that?”

“Well, of course, it’s a makeover story, and those usually have the kitchen as an important focus.”

“A makeover story?”

“You know, beautiful old cottage brought up to date, with Sub-Zero appliances and stuff.”

“I thought you said the best thing about this place is that it’s never been tinkered with.”

“That’s right,” said Russ. “It’s a designer’s dream. You can leave the authentic look and just improve upon it. That gives it a kind of ‘old money’ look that’s hard to fake.”

“Russ, this place is going to be sold this week. How on earth are you talking about remodeling?”

“I’ve got some of the best people in New York who’ll work on it. I think I have a real shot at getting it on the cover of the magazine.”

“On the cover?” Jess said, honestly surprised.

“An original Gaines? Jess, this will be a real coup. Couldn’t we just sit tight while I try to pull this together? The place will be twice as valuable when we’re done.”

Jess looked at Russ’s boyish, eager face. He was a bit thinner than the average guy, wore little intellectual glasses, and had a nervous way of leaning forward and barely resting in his seat. His jeans were jet black—she had seen him turn them inside out before he washed them so they wouldn’t fade. And those fancy leather cowboy boots, hand tooled, were clearly designed for walking on cement. Everything about him said city boy. Not the kind of guy who had spent time poking sticks in the mud as a kid. Not the kind of kid who knew the names of birds and trees. Unbidden, the names of birds that someone had once taught her came back: kingfisher, pileated woodpecker, pine warbler, golden loon.
Stop
, Jess thought.
Just stop
.

She looked out at the lake again—there was something about being here that was bringing the past into sharp and uncomfortable focus. As though her life was a continuum of connected parts—not a past life and a present that had been sharply divided in two.

“Please,” Russ said. “It would really be a good thing for my career . . . ”

“Oh, all right,” Jess said as much to herself as to Russ. “You can do whatever you want.”

Russ leaned over and gave her a kiss, but she turned her head so that his lips just grazed her cheek.

He looked at her, puzzled. He didn’t read her well, didn’t often know what she was thinking. Then, he grinned a happy grin and picked up his cell phone, punching a number on his speed dial.

“Milo,” Russ crowed into the cell phone, “start booking blocks of flights up to Traverse City. It’s all systems go.” He gave her a thumbs-up sign, then stood up and walked out toward the porch, the phone pressed hard to his ear.

Russ was talking and examining one of the Indian blankets. He looked so out of place here—but that was good, wasn’t it? For years, she had kept looking for the same kind of man that she had once lost—now, finally, maybe she’d given up on old dreams, and changed for good.

Jess carried her empty wineglass into the kitchen and set it down next to the sink, and then she ducked into the pantry off the kitchen, a short, narrow hallway that had always been used as a storage space.

She pulled the string hanging from the single bulb, and a thin light lit up the room. She looked around but soon spotted what she had been looking for, leaning up against the wall in a dusty corner. It was a long switch of pine, carefully stripped of its bark, then whittled smooth. She picked it up slowly and examined it, running her fingers along the sides to feel the knife marks ticked vertically along it like measurements.

Then, she ran her fingertips over the two initials carved into it:
J
and
D
.

Up until that moment, she had been able to keep her emotions at bay—but now, they flooded over her and she felt startled awake, like being splashed by cold, clear water from the lake.

CHAPTER FOUR

J
ESS
,
AGE SEVENTEEN

That year, the water level in the lake was unusually low. Most years, the water lapped up against the wooded shoreline, except right at the swimming beach. Along the rest of the shoreline, you could only get to the lakefront by cutting through the sedge marsh, thick brambles and saplings, and sharp razor grass.

But that year, you could walk all the way out to Loeb Point along the beach. Flocks of birds congregated in the sand, and minnows swam in the shallow, stagnant pools near shore.

Jess liked to walk down the solitary beach alone. As she rounded the bend of the cove, she slipped out of sight of the beach where the sunbathers congregated, and she could not be seen from the cottages up on the bluff. None of the other summer people ever seemed to walk that way, as though there were nothing in the empty beach or woods that could interest them. But Jess loved the quiet along the beach; she watched as the seagulls that had flocked there took flight in white swirls, rising above the mallard ducks that swam along placidly at the water’s edge.

Down at the far end of the beach, Jess had found a fresh cold spring bubbling up out of the sand. In years past, the spring must have fed directly into the lake, but this year, it was visible, just a bubbling in the sand. When she stuck her foot into it, she felt icy-cold water, and her leg slipped down as far as her knee. Jess took to sitting there by the little spring. In the afternoon, she could slip away from the bathing beach with a book and stay there by the spring, reading and watching the birdlife on the water. Not once had any of the other bathers ventured in her direction.

On one of those days, Jess was seated on a flat rock next to the bubbling spring, reading a book. There were clouds in the sky and the weather was changeable. When the sun was out, the water was calm and blue, but then a dark cloud would pass with a gust of wind, and the water would turn slate colored, with tiny whitecaps. Because of the threat of storm, few boats were out, and so Jess was surprised when she saw a canoe slip around the corner of the cove. A young man with his shirt off was paddling, his clean strokes slicing through the water.

The canoer seemed to take no notice of her. Perhaps he couldn’t see her because of the sun that had just flashed out from behind a cloud, and which must have been shining in his eyes. Jess, on the other hand, had the sun behind her, and she immediately noticed his stillness and unusual ease in the canoe. His fluid motions as he paddled made him appear to scarcely move, but she could see the muscles in his deeply tanned bare torso, slipping across his ribs as his oar plunged into the water.

To her surprise, as he drew nearer to shore, with one graceful motion he jumped out of the canoe, pulling it up on the sand not fifteen feet from where she sat, although he still didn’t appear to have noticed her. Closer, she could see that he was a boy of about her age, wearing faded red swim trunks, with an unruly tangle of brown wavy hair streaked through with gold.

His motions were slow and deliberate. He pulled the canoe out of the water and then laid his wooden oar across the seats. The canoe was also a faded red, like his swim trunks. Jess sat perfectly still, perched on the rock, almost directly in front of him.

Finally, he put his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun and looked straight at her.

“Have you seen the great blues?”

In spite of his quiet movements, he had a quick smile. Jess could see that the sun had burned the end of his nose, which was peeling, leaving pink skin and freckles showing through. The rest of his body was brown and glistened faintly with perspiration.

“I don’t know,” Jess said. She did not want to let on that she had no idea what he was talking about. “I’ve been reading.”

“Well, I’ve seen you sitting here before. You scare the birds away.”

Jess felt the pit of her stomach tense up.

“I do not! I’ve always seen a lot of birds while I’m sitting here.”

“Not as many as there would be if you weren’t sitting here. The blue herons have been coming—were coming—until you started bothering them.”

“I did not come here to bother the birds,” Jess said. “Look at them.” She pointed to several ducks pecking in a shallow pool.

“Oh, the mallards . . . they don’t scare easy. It’s the great blue herons I’m interested in. They never used to come around here, but now with this mudflat . . . ” He stopped speaking for a moment, scanning the sky. “I’ve been trying to shoot them.”

“You have no business shooting them. They’re wild birds.”

He laughed, tipping his head back and showing his even white teeth. “No, I mean taking pictures,” he said.

He reached down into his canoe and pulled out a camera, with a variety of lenses hanging in their cases from the strap. Again, Jess noticed his unusual grace.

“I like to take pictures of birds. Usually, around here it’s the woodland birds, you know, black-throated green warblers, American redstarts. But now, with the mudflat, we’re getting some of the shoreline birds.”

Jess didn’t say anything else and she looked back down at her book, but she could feel that the boy was still looking at her. She did not know the names of any birds—except pigeons, of course. If the blue herons had been there, she did not believe she would have noticed.

When Jess’s cheeks stopped burning, she hazarded a glance toward the boy. Now, he was squatting ankle deep in the water, his telephoto lens pointed out toward Hemingway Point. Jess examined him carefully, though all she could see was the side of his face and his back.

This summer, she had noticed that most of the American boys had their hair cut short and were wearing these expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses. This guy’s hair was kind of long, and his body was lean. He was kneeling in the sand holding his camera with the telephoto, but Jess couldn’t see what he was looking at.

“There they are,” he said softly, almost to himself.

Jess looked up at the sky but still saw nothing, looked back at the boy who still crouched motionless on the sand.

“I don’t see them,” Jess said.

“Sh . . . ,” he whispered. “They won’t land here while we’re sitting here. You can tell them when they’re flying. They have a wide wingspan and they stutter.”

“Stutter?”

“Yeah, I mean that’s what it looks like. It looks like they stutter.”

Jess scanned the sky again, wondering what stuttering looked like.

“Do you think I could get you to hold the light meter for me, for just a sec? I don’t want to lose my focus.”

Jess stood up from the flat rock, hesitating awkwardly for a second.

“It’s in the canoe, the little flat thing, looks kind of like a flash.”

Jess walked over to the canoe and rummaged in the camera bag. She picked up what she thought he was talking about.

“This it?”

“Just hold it up,” he said. “About a foot in front of me, a little to the left.”

He took his eye off the camera and glanced up at the light meter.

“Perfect,” he said, and squeezed the shutter several times in rapid succession. “You can just throw that back in the bag.”

Jess stared at the empty sky again, wondering what it was that he could see. She saw a couple of birds, black blobs at this distance, an airplane, and a number of scattered cumulus clouds, white on top, their undersides purple. All of a sudden, he jumped up, threw his camera into his bag, and swiftly dragged his canoe back into the water, leaping into it the second it began to fully float.

Jess was left standing there stupidly watching him push. Her ears burned. She hadn’t even learned his name. She wanted to ask him,
Were those the blue herons? Did you see them? What did they look like?
But before she had prepared herself to open her mouth, he was gone.

He was paddling away, toward the point and the South Arm. Just when he was almost out of earshot, he called over his shoulder, “See you around.” Then, slicing clearly through the water, his canoe rounded the point and disappeared from sight.

Jess was up at the cottage counting sheets with Mamie. Every year, Mamie opened the cottage, putting fresh sheets on every bed in all the bedrooms. They rarely, if ever, expected visitors. Sometimes, a few of Cousin Edith’s daughters would come up from Texas for a week. But most of the time, it was just Mamie and Jess—Mamie downstairs in the master bedroom, and Jess upstairs. She always slept in the same room, the front bedroom with a dormer overlooking the lake on the side adjacent to the woods.

Jess knew that kids said the cottage was haunted; there was an old story about her great-aunt Lila, who had drowned in the lake, ages ago, way before Jess’s time. But Jess found the old cottage homey and familiar. She appreciated its rambling space since she lived in a city apartment for most of the year.

Mamie was holding a yellow legal pad on which she had written at the top, in her distinctive hand,
Journey’s End Sheet Count.
This, like everything else, was a yearly ritual. Every year they counted sheets, and any that were frayed were either mended or cut into rags. Mamie had always ordered the heavy cotton sheets from a special supplier in Savannah, until one year, the mill closed down. Mamie bought ten sheets and carefully laid them away, folded in crisp white tissue paper on the back of the top linen-closet shelf. Now, she would dole them out one by one as though parting with jewels. Mamie didn’t like change, in sheets or in life, as Jess saw it.

“Jess,” Mamie began, clearing her throat a bit, as if she had something important to say.

Jess looked up at her grandmother warily. They rarely talked to each other about personal matters.

“When a young woman gets to be your age . . . I know that sometimes she starts to think about young men.”

Mamie spoke with an old-fashioned soft Texas drawl. “Living all around as you do, with your mother . . . ”

“All around,” Jess thought, was not entirely fair. Her mother was a journalist. They lived in Paris now, before that London, and sometimes Milan. Other people, Jess had noticed, found their itinerant lifestyle interesting, even admirable. People seemed amazed that she could speak French and that she had visited so many far-off places. Not Mamie though, who seemed to see those cities, all of them, as indistinguishable, foreign parts.

“Well, I just want to remind you, Jess. At Wequetona, there are nice boys from families we know, families we’ve known since your great-grandmother Ada’s time.”

Mamie was folding pillowcases into crisp squares, matching up the hand-stitched embroidered hems just so.

“Look around while you’re here, Jess. I don’t want you meeting someone . . . uh . . . in a foreign country . . . Someone who might not . . . quite fit in . . . at the Club, you know.”

Jess smiled at Mamie in a way that she hoped was pleasant. Jess was used to her grandmother. She knew what Mamie thought, what she cared about. She was old, Jess thought, and as rigid as the stays in her corsets.

Jess’s mother, Margaret, could never take this kind of thing from her mother. “Mamie!” she would holler. “Just stay out of what you don’t understand, which is most things!”

But Jess took a more diplomatic approach with her grandmother. “Well, Miss Mamie,” she said evenly, “I’ll try to bear that in mind.” Margaret could never accept how set in her ways Mamie was, but Jess admired Mamie in a certain way. Life with her mother had always been exciting and rootless, in equal parts grimy and glamorous. Mamie represented another way. She knew how she did things, the same way as her mother before her.

Jess picked up another of the oblong pillowcases, worn to a silky softness from years of use. All the sheets and pillowcases were identical, but some were more than seventy years old. A few had stamped black initials inside,
LT
and
MT
, ones that her grandmother and her great-aunt had used when they were girls. Jess loved the way these old ones felt between her fingers, so soft and worn, and yet the warp and weft of the fabric still maintaining its basic strength.

“I still remember, Jess, my dear daddy standing in the center of the living room downstairs. He pointed up around the balcony. ‘Look how many bedrooms,’ he said. ‘My grandchildren will come here. And their children too.’” She picked up another pillowcase, matched the corners smartly, and laid it on the bed, smoothing it with quick, sure strokes as she spoke. “You will marry well, my dear, and the cottage, someday, will go to you.” She considered her words.

“Not to your mother, Jess,” she said. “The way she lives . . . ”

Jess’s cheeks burned. She hated it when Mamie criticized her mother—could never think of the right way to respond. Most often, she said nothing. But this time, she was thinking about Mamie’s words. Why was Mamie so sure that Jess would “marry well”? It wasn’t exactly something that ran in the family, and what did it even mean?

Losing husbands and fathers seemed to be something that the women in her family specialized in. Her own father was a one-night stand, and Mamie’s husband hadn’t stuck around for long. Perhaps it was understandable, Jess thought, that she had little conception of the married state, nor any reason to think she’d be especially good at it.