The Grief of Others (29 page)

With a small, sticky hand, Paul helps brush the sand from her face. He’s thorough about it and surprisingly gentle. She closes her eyes and holds still. When he finishes, she opens her eyes to find him looking back at her. He is both slender and sturdy, like a young barnyard animal, a calf or colt. He’s wearing red swim trunks and, in his hair, the wreath of white clover she wove that morning. Jess is in her bathing suit, too, a modest black one-piece. Over this she wears a large blue oxford she will not take off, not even to go in the water; earlier she went wading in it, and yesterday, when it was warmer, she jumped off the dock with it on.

“So what’s this stuff ya dumpin’ on my head?”

“I didn’t dump it on your head,” he corrects reasonably, and, kneeling, sorts through the jumble. “Shell, shell, plastic thing, shell, pink grass, rock with a line in it, bottle cap, more shells . . . here.” He holds up the glinting item, the prize he has apparently come in order to show. She takes it from him with respect.

“That was down by the water? That’s dangerous.” She points out the tiny barbs that make the fish hook so dangerous, and shows him, using a fat blade of beach grass, how once the hook pierces something it cannot be pulled out again without causing greater damage. “Good thing you found it.”

He puffs out his chest. His skin is tawny from a summer’s worth of sun, his hair streaked white and yellow as the bicolor corn Ricky and John cooked last night. Jess and Paul had shucked it themselves, sitting on the big log outside the cabin, with “help” from Biscuit, who had mostly waved around her ear of corn like a maraca, pulling off a husk or two and biting into it raw before flinging it into the cold gray ash of the fireplace. Paul had scolded her perhaps too severely for this—“No, no!
Never
throw anything in the fire!”—which had so offended her that Biscuit had been compelled to respond with an immediate rebellion, throwing in after the corn the handiest thing available: her pacifier, as it turned out, direct from her mouth.

It had been, objectively speaking, high comedy, watching the consequences of her action dawn on her. At first, she’d looked slyly pleased with her insurgence. Then came the double take, and after a shocked delay, the tears. Jess, biting the insides of her cheeks in order not to smile, had fished “pie-oo” out of the ashes and gone to rinse it under the spigot. By then Biscuit had begun to wail so hysterically that John came dashing from the cabin, where he’d been making chili, wooden spoon still in hand, and Ricky, emerging from the woods with an armload of kindling, had dropped the sticks by the fireplace, scooped up the squalling girl, and taken her into the hammock for comforting.

Jess, having delivered the clean pacifier and come back to sit by the bag of corn, caught Paul’s eye in such a way that the two of them had burst into laughter, which they tried unsuccessfully to squelch and which earned them Biscuit’s disdainful refusal to acknowledge their subsequent apologies.The quality of laughter was novel to Jess, not because she’d never experienced it before but because she’d experienced it only in cahoots with a girlfriend, someone her own age, not with a little kid, a mere fiveyear-old. She looks at Paul now, sitting across from her on the towel, grains of dry sand dusting his shoulders like sugar. She wonders if the quick closeness between them could be a result of their shared blood.

The others are in the cabin now, Biscuit having her nap, John and Ricky washing the dishes. It’s become a routine, Jess bringing Paul to the beach after lunch, just the two of them until mid-afternoon, when the others wander down. Jess wonders if Ricky and John use the time to make love. She is embarrassed to be capable of such a thought, but she can’t help it. Lying at night on the couch in the cabin’s main room, she has heard them whisper and shift within their sleeping bag, and to her mortification she has strained to pick out the sounds she imagines might be associated with sex. She has not been able to, and wonders if they are abstaining because of her, and if so will they abstain the whole two weeks, and if so, how difficult is it? She has heard it can be painful, especially for a man.

As a couple, John and Ricky are enormously interesting to her, which is repulsive because this means she is having inappropriate thoughts about her father, even though he isn’t her
father
father. She’s shaken enough by her own inability to stop thinking about such things that she has been avoiding John. She thinks he is feeling bad about this, hurt, but what else can she do? They are so different from her own parents, who, though peaceably wedded, seem not particularly interested in each other. Or interested: yes; but intrigued, entranced: no. John and Ricky have the crackling charge of film stars. They speak in funny little halfsentences, call each other Baby and Sweet Pea, and carry on their own secret dialogue of glance and touch, right in front of Jess and the kids. There is a palpable complexity, as though the air between them has been folded into many layers, within which lie all the artifacts of their history together. Jess tries to monitor her gaze so as not to look at them too long at any one time.

Not, evidently, a concern for Paul, who has been regarding her unblinking these past several moments.

“What are you looking at?”

He shrugs.

She mimics the gesture, but he continues to stare. “Here. Look at that.” She holds the fish hook out on the flat of her palm so that Paul can better see its tiny, wicked barbs. He brings his face in close. She can feel the breath from his nostrils flowing against her skin in two distinct streams. He remains in this position, surely too close to the hook to be able to focus on it—in fact, she notes, he seems to have half shut his eyes—inhaling deeply. “What are you doing? It’s not
food
.”

“You smell like eggs.”

“Great.”

“Easter eggs,” he says appreciatively.

Jess runs her tongue over her braces. “I’d like to take you home and show you to my mother.”

A skeptical crease appears between his eyebrows. “Why?”

“’Cause you’re a kick.”

What she’d really like is to show her mother herself: her, here, with the Ryries. She is something new here, something shiny, different, at the lake with this family. She feels older somehow and also excitingly young, aware of the possibilities of her youth, the great array of things she might eventually be and do. The only thing missing from the experience is a witness, someone who knows her in real life and could perform the task of saying: yes. This is all true. This could all be true.

“So,” says Jess, holding up the hook. “What are we going to do with this sucker?”

“Throw it away?”

“When we go back, but for now, I mean.”

“Put it someplace safe?”

“Here.” She picks up her library book, a romance novel, one of seven she has brought. She consumes one every two days.They are, she knows, essentially all the same, and not what she would describe as good, but that’s beside the point; they seem to be a kind of requirement for her these days, as basic as bread. This book’s protective film, she sees, has somehow been infiltrated by sand, sharp grains of it denting the plastic from the inside, a fact that should make her feel guilty but gives her perverse satisfaction: she has marked it, this piece of public property, with a bit of herself. The sand physical evidence of the book’s journey from Elsmere Public Library to Cabruda Lake. Jess opens the back cover and slips the fish hook into the empty card pocket. “Good?”

Paul nods. The clover wreath on his head slips over one ear and she settles it back on his crown. She can feel his infatuation extending toward her in waves as distinct, as palpable, as earlier she’d felt the twin streams of his breath on her palm. Her feeling of love for this little boy is like a new frequency she’s discovering, a new channel within her. She is awash in it, shining and addled. He’s cross-legged on her towel and as golden, as bitable, as a toasted marshmallow. It’s yesterday again and they are dissolved in laughter in front of the cold outdoor fireplace, strands of corn silk strewn all around, edges of the sky seeming to tilt and spin them together. It’s tomorrow and she’ll wake to him sitting on her legs, on her sleeping bag, drinking his milk in front of the woodstove. She is fifteen and experiencing for the first time what she thinks of as grown-up love. It turns out not to be the thing described in her romance novels. Nor is it the thing John and Ricky have, although what they have continues to fascinate her, to make her both wistful and uncomfortable. But what she has discovered is another variety altogether, almost another species. This love, she thinks, is selfless, beyond self, mature.

 

 

“WHAT ELSE?” John is taking down the shopping list that Ricky dictates. So far he’s written milk, tomatoes, hot dogs and garlic, butter and chocolate bars and toilet paper.

“And more of that corn,” says Ricky. “The corn was good.”

The time is flying. Already they are more than halfway through the vacation. Although she wasn’t expecting it (not this summer, not with John’s daughter on the scene), Ricky realizes there have been a few stellar days, or parts of days: moments that seemed instantly to become emblazoned in her mind as postcards she will look back on. Scavenging for late-season blueberries, and Biscuit turning out to be the best seeker of them all. Playing cards all day, the day it rained without stopping, and eating popcorn straight from the metal pot. Hiking on the blazed trails and logging roads that suddenly opened up and as suddenly stopped, like ghost boulevards in the old forest; the sun filtering down as if in slow motion through the crown cover, the light somehow altered, distilled, as though it had been sent from a long time ago. The evening paddle with John in the bow, Ricky in the stern, Jess and the children sitting on boat cushions in the bottom of the canoe. They’d seen a whole family of deer drinking from the lake, and also, on a branch that stretched out into the water, a prehistoriclooking creature that Ricky said was a turkey vulture. Paul, wondrous and a little frightened, had shrunk against Jess, but Biscuit had been entranced and was barely restrained from climbing out of the canoe; she kept calling lustily, “Bird! Bird,
come
!”

How strange to discover the pleasure of being five. Five of them instead of four. Fitting together as though
this
, after all, was the natural number for their family. The only thing Ricky wishes for is sex; after ten days she is minding the physical deprivations that are the result of their lack of privacy.

The cabin at this hour is cool and dim. Jess is at the beach with both kids; Biscuit having been delivered there after her nap. Ricky has come back to the cabin to change into her suit and figure out with John what they need from town. As she finishes dictating the shopping list, she begins to strip. She throws her jeans on the bed and reaches for her suit, which is hanging over the alcove curtain, still damp from her early-morning swim. She likes going alone, partly for the solitude but also for the peculiar beauty that seems uniquely enabled by the solitude: the needle sharpness of the light, the champagne chill of the air, the hushed skin of the lake.

This morning Jess asked Ricky if she could come.They’d left John with the children and gone down the path as silently as though it were a library corridor.They deposited their towels on the sand and went to the end of the dock, Jess still wearing a man’s button-down shirt over her suit. “You don’t want to wear that to swim in,” Ricky said. She understood the girl was modest, and said it in a careless voice, squinting out across the lake.

Jess turned away to undo her buttons, and then, tossing the shirt quickly behind her, plunged in ahead of Ricky, who jumped back, startled by the cold spray of the splash. Now in the cabin Ricky pulls off her sweater and, in her bra and damp bathing suit bottom, says, “Why don’t you pick up a bottle of wine, too?”

John adds wine to the list.

Ricky covers his fly with her hand. They stand like that. The warmth between her palm and the denim grows.

“You can’t just do that,” says John, shifting his hips. After a moment, he whispers, “You’re so bad.”

He says the same thing whenever she arouses him.
You’re so bad.
He says it always the same way, back in his throat, and every time the words unsettle her. In what sense does he mean it? It seems to her the words are at once approving and indicting. They draw her to him, lay claim. They mark some private knowledge between them that is neither entirely pleasing nor entirely unprecious. Sometimes she thinks what holds them together is just this: his minor distrust, the permanent crack in his faith.

She unhooks her bra, lets it fall. John looks at her a long moment in something like pained reverence, then shakes his head.

“Just quickly,” she says.

“You told Jess you’d be right down.”

She turns back to the alcove, finishes putting on her suit.

“Ricky.”

“What?”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to.”

“Okay.”

“Ricky.”

“It’s fine.” She moves briskly through the cabin, gathering the crossword, her sunglasses, a couple of juice boxes. She can feel him tracking her, trying to figure out what he should say. She says, “You have the list?”

“What? Yeah.” He looks at the paper in his hand, puts it in his pocket. “I may get a haircut, too.” He always does, during their annual two weeks in the Adirondacks; there’s an old-style barbershop he likes. “Bye, baby.” The screen door smacks behind him. Minutes later the engine starts.

When Ricky gets to the lake she sees it is bustling with activity, both in the water and along the shore, which is sprinkled with other cabins, some of them evident only in the mornings and evenings, when columns of smoke rise from their chimneys. There are clusters of dots on the various small beaches, and many small craft skimming about: Sunfish and rowboats, catamarans and JetSkis. The party boat is out, too: a flat-bottomed boat people rent by the day, recognizable at a distance by its blue-and-white-striped awning.