Cameo Lake (11 page)

Thirteen

I
t had been a good weekend. The oppressive weather had finally broken midday on Saturday with a sudden drenching thunderstorm. We'd just finished packing the picnic basket when the sky darkened and the wind picked up. The first thunderclap startled us all and we huddled together in semi-mock terror. The booming echo off the hills seemed amplified against the bowl of the lake. Mentally I checked off all the reasons we were safe in the cabin: lower than anything else around it, no aerial, protected against the side of the hill. But when the lightening streaked blue against a deep gray sky, some primal fear made me squeeze my children closer to me.

As suddenly as it arrived, the storm moved off, leaving in its wake clear fresh air. The rain diminished, then stopped entirely, only the dripping off the pine boughs kept alive the impression that it was still raining. We went out onto the porch and I suddenly noticed my laptop, still on. “Sweet Jesus,” I muttered and went to check for lost data. I trusted surge protectors only so far. No, my morning's work was intact. Too close for comfort, I shut it down and unplugged it from the power strip.

The three of us managed to drag the canoe out from under the porch and down to the lake's edge with somewhat of a struggle, leaving a deep groove in the muddy grass to mark our passage. Then came the scramble to find three life preservers. Then to find dry towels.
As ever, getting there was more effort than fun. Finally, though, we were launched and paddling off for as yet unexplored reaches of the lake. A smoky darkness in the eastern sky was all that was left of the rapidly moving storm.

Ben was in his yard as we paddled across the reach between our shore and his. He waved first and we waved back with enthusiasm. Apparently caught unawares by the sudden storm, he'd hung out his week's washing. The polo shirts, khaki shorts, and blue jeans hung limp and dripping. In between the odd cotton garments, the johnnies fluttered a little, the first to dry in the new clean air. They were the kind of thing an elderly parent might wear in a nursing home and I wondered if he had mentioned that one of his parents might be in one close by. I thought he had said that they lived in New Jersey, still in his childhood home.

“I like Ben.” Lily kneeling in front of the bow bench, wielded the second paddle.

“Me too.” Tim was riding amidships. “He knows a lot of good jokes.”

Kneeling before the stern seat of the canoe, I gripped the hardwood paddle and dug it into the slightly choppy water, angling it to set our course. “Yeah,” I said, “I like him too.”

I stroked the paddle against the water, glad that the fresh breeze was behind us and we were easily cutting through the lake. My plan was to circumnavigate Ben's island and picnic on the West Side of the lake, where two or three picnic tables were set up in a natural grove.

Tim leaned over the gunwale, dragging a hand through the water. Below the rise of his life jacket I could see his thin little backbone, so prominent through his tanned skin, a more precious sight than the beauty of the mountains. He, like his sister, adored Sean. At eight, Tim was more inclined to worship than Lily, at almost ten. She was more open to the suggestion that Dad could make a mistake now and then. She was becoming, as the eldest and therefore the trailblazer, adept at negotiations. Tim had no idea what freedoms he would never have to fight for. Bedtime adjustments, sleep-overs, and clothing choices were battles already won.

Sean was less a stranger to children than I had been. A singleton, I had never had the experience of group games and negotiating the peaks and valleys of family life. I'd never had anyone else to blame for the spills or the missing shoe. Sean handled the commotion with ease, firm in his rules yet happy to play catch. I never doubted his love for his family, and that was why his reluctance to join us, even for the two days he might be able to, was what kept the bell chiming in the distance.

Right shoulder aching, I swapped sides, telling Lily to switch her paddle, too, and we continued stroking without a break in the rhythm.

The lake breeze felt so good after the days of stifling heat. The air cleared now of all humidity, I barely sweated as I paddled toward the West Side shore. Tim, as navigator, pointed out floating debris, leaves mostly, blown off the trees in the storm. A branch floated close by. Tim leaned over to push it away and I yelled a caution to him, perhaps a little more harshly than required. Tim threw me a startled look and sat back down. The branch bumped the side of the canoe.

“Sorry, Tim, I was afraid I'd lose you.”

“Oh, Mom.” He didn't need to finish his protest. He really wasn't in any danger of falling overboard. I reminded myself of Ben and flushed a little against the idea that our reactions might be born out of similar emotions.

“Come on, Lily, let's row the boat ashore.” I began to paddle faster and was rewarded with the squeals of delight from Lily struggling to keep up. Our mad paddling threw up geysers of lake water, drenching us all. We made landfall in moments and Tim leapt out to pull us ashore.

The picnic benches were still wet from the storm, the sun never quite touching them through the canopy of thick pines. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered but enjoying ourselves.

I was exhausted and fell asleep easily moments after the kids did. The ride back from the West Side was a lot harder with the breeze in our face. It took half again as long to get home as it had to get to the picnic
grove. I had been asleep for only an hour when I woke suddenly. I took stock of what might have wakened me, but no sounds alerted me to either of the kids being up. Everything was still inside the cabin. The moon without its nimbus of humidity was quite bright at that hour. I got up to pull the shade and then I heard it, Ben's musical homage. I left the shade up and lay back down on my bed. The by now familiar strains were intertwined with new variations.

As he played, I thought about my characters, letting his music influence my words. Finally, I got up and went out onto the porch, where I opened my laptop. The music repeated over and over, and I could tell he was experimenting, as each repetition was slightly different. Every now and then he stopped and I imagined him writing down what he was doing, notating his work. Once more he began at the beginning of the piece, this time going through it nonstop. To me, hearing it against the backdrop of my story, it sounded like poignancy set counterpoint to mischief, developed against an underlying grief.

Suddenly the sweet piano notes became discordant and then the discordant notes became the impotent banging of the keys. Then silence. Hearing Ben's frustration only underscored my recent sense of the tenuous grasp any of us have on happiness. I sat still, letting the emotions I'd created for my characters ebb away, only to be replaced by my own. I remembered something about nature abhorring a vacuum. Not for an instant did I have an empty place without some feeling—manufactured or real—curling up in it like a worm. My anger at Sean had dissipated along with the guilt I had harbored deep down over not having the kids at the lake in the first place. What replaced that were my doubts about Sean. What stopped those from being unbearable were my distracting thoughts about Ben.

Initially our conversations on the raft were made up of general chat, then weighty discussions of things nonpersonal and outside of our lives, like politics and crime. Soon enough there came anecdotes and we swapped family stories. I spoke of my kids, he spoke of his nieces and nephews. He made only oblique references to being “on the road,” such that he might have been a salesman. As yet I held back about asking him if what Sean had said was true.

I tried to speak of Sean only in ordinary ways, as he fit into those family stories. I was a little embarrassed that I had grumbled about Sean leaving the kids. In dark moments I recognized the disloyalty and the danger of making Sean out to be a villain. Yet, as much as I didn't really want to paint Sean as all bad, I knew that I was beginning to see from a distance the cracks in our marriage, the distance between us now physical, measured in miles, while the distance at home was measured in hours of silence.

Ben made very few references to his wife, keeping that part of his life closely held. But lately there had been a shift in our relationship and I knew we were at that juncture where we would begin making revelations about ourselves, about those things we kept bottled up. In the quiet I resolved to gently loosen Ben's story from him.

The silence was profound. I closed my laptop and went back to bed.

Fourteen

M
onday morning I hurried the kids through breakfast and charged up the rutted drive to the main road around to the West Side and to Camp Winetonka.

“I love you, have a great time. I'll pick you up at four!” and I was back in the big car and away. I didn't look in the rearview mirror to see if they were standing forlornly abandoned or happily rushing off to meet new friends. I didn't need to know that. I just needed to get to the grocery store and back to work.

I had spent quality time with them all weekend, playing and eating and joking and falling instantly asleep. Now I was desperate to get past the midway point in my novel and on toward the end. I always likened the first half of a novel to climbing up a hill. Sometimes getting there took a long time, but once there, at the turning point, at the crisis, everything began to come tumbling down, moving under its own weight to conclusion. I was a little tired of pushing this novel up the hill, and I wanted very much to be finished with it. I had less gotten away from my daily distractions than I seemed to have multiplied them by leaving Providence.

I didn't want to take the time to drive to the next town and to the Big G, so I pulled into the parking lot of the mom-and-pop grocery store, Abair's Market. Their prices were a bit higher, but they specialized
in good vegetables and fresh-baked bread. The floor was aged pine and the shelves held the staples of three generations, Postum and Wheatena, Hostess Cupcakes, and Poland Spring Water. I always felt slowed down as I walked through the four aisles which made up the whole of the store. Without Muzak to move me along, or to influence my choices, I actually stopped and thought about what I was buying. Restocked with peanut butter, wheat bread, a bag of oranges, and juice, I stood at the old-fashioned register, with its three rows of metal keys, and stared out the window at the view past the parking lot as Mrs. Abair tallied my purchases. My earlier sense of hurry had relaxed to a more contemplative mood. It was still only nine o'clock, plenty of time to devote to the novel before I needed to go get the kids.

I'd spent longer running errands than I had planned and so skipped my run and ate lunch while working. I lifted my head up from the screen only to noodle a phrase around, staring with oblivious eyes across the water toward Ben's very quiet cabin. I was barely aware of the voices coming up from the beach, children's playful shrieks, mothers' scoldings, a radio talk show host's garbled voice. It all existed outside of my screen, nothing to do with me. On this Monday, I managed to get into the dream and the outside world faded away.

When I finally pulled myself out of my trance, I was taken completely aback. I would be late picking up the kids on their very first day. “Oh shit.” I fumbled to find my Birkenstocks under my chair without looking, as I hit
CTRL-F
and
SAVE
without shutting off the computer. I was at the car before the screen door slammed behind me. I peeled out of the dirt drive and onto the pavement with an embarrassing spin of wheels.

I was greeted at the gate to Camp Winetonka by two scowling children. They climbed into the car without speaking, and without arguing about who was going to ride “shotgun.” I felt my heart sink at the sight of their frowns.

“So?” I finally ventured after getting the monster car turned around. “How was it?”

Their giggles had me glancing in the rearview mirror. Phony scowls gave way to laughter. “We love it . . . we had so much fun . . . we got to . . .” The grin on my face was as much relief as anything else. It was Sean's trick. Pretending to be angry or disappointed and then bursting into laughter.

“So, I should cancel the rest of your week?”

“No!” They bounced on the backseat, “We have a sleep-over on Thursday! We wanta go camping!”

“Well, you don't seem to like it very much . . .” Two could play at this game, but I let it go easily and headed for Tony's Pizza.

Tim talked me into buying two pizzas. “Let's get Ben over and we can play Trivial Pursuit.”

“I don't know if he has plans, Tim.”

“He never has plans.”

“How am I supposed to let him know we want him to come over? What if he isn't outside?”

Lily rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Mommy, we don't have a phone, but he does.”

“You'll go far in life, Lily May McCarthy.”

I paid for the pizzas and asked to borrow the restaurant's phone book. I wrote Ben's number on a napkin, which made me think of a bar pickup.

We got a double cheese pizza and one with pepperoni and green peppers for more adult tastes. Even if Ben couldn't make it, the kids could take cold leftover pizza for lunch tomorrow. Lily rode shotgun and took the napkin from my hand, taking it upon herself to issue the invitation.

“Ben, this is Lily McCarthy from across the lake. We have pizza and we need you to eat the one with pepperoni. And we need you to be the brown circle for Trivial Pursuit. Okay?” She listened intently, bottom lip caught between her sharp top teeth. “Start paddling. We'll be home in—how long, Mom?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes.” She listened again, “Good,” and pushed the off button. She'd make a great hostess someday.

“So?”

“He's got ice cream.”

It was almost five o'clock. “Hey, let's call Daddy right now.” I pushed the number for Sean's office and got Eleanor. “Mr. McCarthy, please.”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

I forbore to correct her with
whom
and answered with just the tiniest of proprietary flavor, “Mrs. McCarthy.”

“Oh. Hi!” I was greeted with Eleanor's most saccharine rendition of long-lost friend. “He's right here, Cleo.”

“Thanks.” I twisted a lock of Lily's curly hair around my forefinger-while I waited for Sean to get to the phone.

“Hi, honey.” He sounded pleased to be called, and I felt myself giving up some of my lingering annoyance.

“We're all here, I'm going to see if I can get this thing on speaker.” I pressed the right buttons, and Sean's voice came out of the phone set as if he was hidden in the glove compartment, but audible to all of us. The kids chattered about camp, overriding each other until I began to direct, giving each one the opportunity to tell a story. Sean made the appropriate remarks and then asked to be taken off speaker.

“I'm glad you called early, Clee, I'm out tonight and I knew I'd miss your call.”

“Aren't you getting a little tired of dinner meetings?”

“Actually, it beats being home alone.”

“I won't remind you that you weren't alone until recently. Your second-shift activities aren't new.”

“It's business, Cleo.”

“I don't suggest that it's not.” I turned my face toward my open window. “Are you still coming on Friday?”

“Yes. But it'll be late.”

“I expected that.” I made no attempt to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I wasn't above letting Sean know I was still annoyed with him, even as things were working out. “Say goodbye to the kids, I've got to get this pizza home.” I pushed him back onto speaker and then, goodbyes said, off.