The Summer Guest (41 page)

I was in medical school by then-Dartmouth Hitchcock, after all-sleeping four hours a night or less, and my father would sometimes telephone me at odd hours, telling me about a boat he and Bill had found in someplace weird, a garage in Goose Bay or a cornfield in Kalamazoo. You should see this thing, Kats, he always said, his voice crackly with distance, and always some odd sound in the background, the airy whoosh of traffic on an interstate, or music coming from a roadhouse jukebox. Christ, Kats, it’s like finding the Mona Lisa at a garage sale, we couldn’t whip out the checkbook fast enough. Sitting in the kitchen of my tiny third-floor apartment with a pot of black coffee warming on the stove and Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy propped on the table in front of me, or lying in my dark bedroom with the phone pressed to my ear, I would listen to his voice and the sounds around it, trying to send my mind down the miles of wire to where he was. You studying hard? he always asked. You don’t mind me calling so late, do you, Kats? Not at all, I said, you know I don’t, and smiled, thinking how strange it was, and nice too, that in the end it was my father, not I, who had flown the nest. We’d talk awhile about the boat he’d found, and about school, and what my mother was up to and when I’d next be coming down to Florida; when the time came to end our call, he’d clear his throat and say, Well. Better go. I miss you, Kats. I know you do, Daddy, I always said, and told him I missed him, too, and after a moment of silence the two of us would hang up the phone together, never saying the word good-bye.

In the summer of ’99, a month after I’d started my residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, my father flew with Bill to Salt Lake City to look at a boat he had seen advertised in WoodenBoat magazine, and at the last minute they decided to add a side trip to Lake Tahoe. They could have flown but decided to drive instead, eight hours across the dry mountains and sagebrush bowls of northern Nevada on Interstate 80. They were thirty miles east of the town of Elko when my father, in the passenger seat, asked Bill to stop the car.

Here, you mean? Bill asked. What for?

Just stop, please.

Bill pulled to the side of the road, and without another word, my father got out. What Bill told me later was that he thought my father simply wanted to take a leak and was too polite to say so. He stepped away from the car, mounted the metal guardrail, and made his way down the sandy embankment. Except for the highway, there was nothing around for miles; it was noon, not a cloud in the sky, and probably over a hundred degrees. To the north, a line of mountains shifted in the wavy haze. Perplexed, Bill got out of the car and watched my father from the guardrail. About a hundred feet from the road, my father stopped in his tracks, put his hands on his hips, and tipped his face to the empty, sun-bleached sky. Bill said he seemed almost frozen, like a statue. My father stayed that way ten seconds: ten tiny seconds to leave his life. Kats, he thought, and two thousand miles away, I heard; I hear him still, in the smallest things, in the shifting wind and jostling leaves, and the sound snow makes when it falls. Kats, something is happening. Kats, you’re my one, remember that. Then he collapsed, probably already dead, onto the desert floor.

I live here now, where I always did and always will, the lake and woods and mountains unchangeable, as much a part of me as my own fingerprints.

I married Jordan, of course. The night after he and Harry returned from their last trip together on the lake, and everybody had gone off to the hospital, we were left alone, and that was all it took. We stayed up most of the night, talking in his cabin-talking and kissing-both of us too wired, too relieved, too happy to sleep, and when dawn came, that was where it found me. Two weeks later when I left for school, it was Jordan who drove me in the truck. It wasn’t easy, the months of shuttling back and forth, the weird looks I sometimes got from my friends over this man who was, in every way, completely unlike them. Yet we managed to stay together, through that year and then all through my time in med school. When I moved down to Boston to start my residency, Jordan shut up the camp and came with me; I confess it surprised me, how easily he took to city life, eating in restaurants and going to movies and riding the T to his job managing an Orvis store in Back Bay. For a while I even thought we might stay on after my residency, buy a condo in Brookline or a little house in Needham, shop for food and furniture and preschools when that day came, and generally merge ourselves into the flow of ordinary life. It was an attractive fantasy, the sort of thing a person could easily fall for, but in my heart I knew it was somebody else’s, and not where I really belonged. At the start of my third and final year, we returned to Maine and opened up the camp for a week, and were married on the dock; Paul Kagan gave me away, and after the ceremony he asked me if I’d be interested in taking over his practice. He’d been trying to retire for close to twenty years, but no one wanted the job; if I was willing, he could probably rig it so the state of Maine would pick up my loan payments. He’d sell it for a dollar, he said, and my solemn oath to feed the fish. I jumped at it.

And my mother? After my father died, she stayed in Big Pine awhile, almost three years. But I knew she was lonely, and Florida had always been his idea, not hers. Eventually she moved back to Maine, rented an apartment in Portland, and bought a little café near the harbor, which she rechristened Alice’s. Deck had died ten years before, but May was still in town, living just where she always had-a woman of over eighty years, still spry in the way that only old women from northern climes can be, though she used a cane to get around and was half blind from glaucoma. My mother began stopping by her house once a week to read her the Sunday paper, and the two became fast friends; they even took a trip to Europe together, a bus-junket tour of twelve cities in fourteen days, and the following winter went on a cruise to South America. Last year, when May’s eyesight failed completely, my mother gave up the apartment and moved into her house. I thought this meant no more trips, but I was wrong: last I heard, they were deciding between another cruise, to Alaska this time, or else Australia. They must seem a curious pair-this old, old woman with a cane and a huge plastic shield over eyeglasses thick as cut crystal, and my mother, who is still quite young really, and looks it. I keep waiting for her to invite me along on one of these trips, but so far she hasn’t, and I think I know why: for now, and for a little while longer, she gets to be the daughter.

I had delivered over a hundred babies, so when I became pregnant in the fall of ’03, Jordan and I decided to go about our lives as usual as long as we could. We both knew the risks: if anything happened, there would be no other doctor around, the hospital was an hour away, and I had a family history of miscarriage, preeclampsia, and premature labor. But I was young and healthy, and taking everything into consideration from both a personal and professional point of view, I saw no reason why we couldn’t plan to stay at the camp until I was within a week or so of my due date. I took my blood pressure each morning before I saw my first patient, cleared out an hour in the afternoons so I could rest, filled my office fridge and glove compartment with snacks and bottled water, and in general went about my business as if nothing were out of the ordinary. And for a long time, just about thirty-seven weeks, nothing was.

On a night in late April, Jordan and I were watching television-we’d sprung for a satellite hookup to watch the Sox-when I began to feel contractions. Nothing regular or strong, just a quick tightening across the belly, and because I was eight months along, I thought little of this; having a few contractions every now and then was completely normal, the body’s way of preparing itself for the big show. The week before, I’d driven to my OB in Farmington, and as far as either of us could tell, the baby hadn’t even dropped yet. They didn’t hurt at all, nothing more unpleasant than the feeling I might have gotten from doing a sit-up. I even placed Jordan’s hand over my belly so he could feel them, though he said he couldn’t; the sensations were inside. We watched the rest of the game, cursing ourselves for staying up so late when the Sox had lost again, and went upstairs to bed.

Sometime around four in the morning I awakened with a start: something was wrong. I felt it then, a contraction so intense it seemed to shove all the air from my chest, and in the dark I fumbled for Jordan, unable even to cry out. I told myself to count the seconds, but somewhere after thirty I gave up-the pain was too strong.

Jordan flicked on the light and sat up beside me. “Kate, what is it?”

I took a deep breath to calm myself. I tried to speak but couldn’t, and when I opened my mouth a wave of nausea seized me; I tore back the sheets and raced from the room, barely making it to the toilet in time for dinner and the ice cream we’d eaten during the ball game to come up.

Jordan was kneeling beside me. “Kate, tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” I gripped the sides of the toilet as another contraction surged through me. I felt my water break, a warm wetness that soaked my nightshirt and the backs of my thighs, and behind this, unmistakably, the urge to push.

“Oh, Jesus, I think the baby’s coming.”

“Tonight? You’re only eight months.”

“Not just tonight.” I heard myself hiccup, the sound ricocheting inside the porcelain bowl. Strange, but it was the hiccup that made me understand. “Right now.”

Jordan dashed to the phone. In a wink he was back at my side, helping me to stand. “I called the ambulance. They’ll be here in thirty minutes.”

“Too long,” I managed to say. “You’ll have to do it.”

“Deliver the baby? You’re kidding.”

“It’s your baby, Jordan. Who else is there? Oh, Christ…” I braced myself against the bathroom wall; the contractions were barely thirty seconds apart, not even, and hard as a vise. My head swarmed with panic. What was supposed to take twelve hours or more was happening in ten minutes. With my family history, I was going to have a baby an hour from the nearest hospital. How could we have been so dumb?

“Get me to the bed,” I said.

He helped me down the hall. The room seemed changed somehow, both the place where I had slept for years and someplace entirely new. Jordan stood at the foot of the bed in his boxers and T-shirt; his face was pale with fear.

“Tell me what to do, Kate. I don’t know what to do.”

“She’ll be little.” It was the only thing I could think of. “Get some blankets from the nursery.”

“Jesus. What about you?”

“I’ll be fine.” I folded his hand into mine. I was shaking, though I didn’t feel cold. “You’ll be fine. My body knows what to do. Just take care of our baby.”

I closed my eyes, let the next contraction take me, felt my knees rising to meet my hands like the ends of a circle joining. She is coming, I thought, she is practically here. We would call her Josephine, our little baby Joe. There would be blood, a lot of blood. I’m sorry for the blood, Jordan. I bore down and time stopped.

“Oh, God, Kate. I can see her.”

I released my knees, felt the baby creep back up inside me. The pain was so vast it had become something else, a pain too large for one life, one person. It filled me like a kind of love. I’d barely caught a breath before the next contraction came.

Seconds passed, minutes, hours. I pushed and pushed and pushed. Like love, I thought, and that’s what I was thinking when I heard it: the sound of Jordan’s happy weeping, and the sharp music of a child’s first cry.

Many individuals offered their expertise in the research and writing of this book. My thanks to: Tom Barbash, James Sullivan, Paul Molyneaux, Annette O’Connor, Craig Pendelton, John Baky, Anthony Kurtz, Tisha Bridge, Andrea McGeary, Anne Marie Risavy, Margo Lipschultz, and Skip Graffam.

The battlefield events described in the prologue are loosely based on the experiences of my wife’s grandfather, Herbert William Mauritz (1916-2002), who served as a technical sergeant with Baker Company of the 612
^th
Tank Destroyer Battalion and was wounded by sniper fire at the Battle of Normandy. His eulogy, written by my father-in-law, Gary Kurtzahn, was instrumental.

For financial support during the writing of this manuscript, I am indebted to the College of Arts and Sciences of La Salle University, the Pew Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

Special thanks, now and always, are owed to the two heroic women of my writing life: my agent, Ellen Levine, a tireless advocate and true friend; and my editor at The Dial Press, Susan Kamil, whose brilliance with the page is matched only by the warmth and generosity of her spirit.

This is a love story, and it’s a story about fathers and daughters. This is stuff you can’t make up, and I’m the luckiest man alive, because I didn’t have to. From the bottom of my heart, I thank my wife, Leslie, for all the nights of talk when we figured out this book together, and Iris, for teaching me what it means to be the father of a daughter. This book is theirs.

Born and raised in New England, Justin Cronin is the author of the novel-in-stories Mary and O’Neil, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize. Other awards for his fiction include a Whiting Writer’s Award, an NEA fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his family in Houston, Texas.