Skinny Dipping (7 page)

Birgie plopped down on the plastic lawn chair she’d dragged down to the beach and watched the spectacle unfold.

As Viking funerary boats went, Naomi’s was a piss-poor example, but none of the crowd gathered round to watch seemed disappointed. Friends and neighbors and whoever the hell else these people were stood three deep on the beach, watching the pontoon bobbing gently twenty feet offshore, the poster of Ardis jouncing so gaily it seemed like Ardis was doing a little victory dance.

Maybe she was, Birgie thought. She should ask Mimi.

After the initial belch of smoke erupting from beneath the scaffolding Naomi had constructed, the fire had petered down to a few flames. Naomi, who’d pushed the pontoon out from the shore and was still standing knee-deep in the lake with the hem of her bedsheet floating around her, turned around in disgust and slogged to shore.

“This sucks,” she said to Birgie, who happened to be the closest to her. “I knew I shouldn’t have used a match. You’re supposed to shoot a flaming arrow into the pyre.”

“Ah-huh,” Birgie muttered before upending the last swigs of a can of Diet Coke into her mouth.

“I don’t understand it,” Naomi went on. “I used a gal—”

A sudden whooshing sound spun Naomi around. Birgie was already staring. The flames had found the gas. The fire shot eight feet into the air, embracing the Ardis poster in glowing orange and blue. Birgie could hear the Styrofoam backing popping as the picture slowly melted, reminding her of the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy had doused her in water. Ardis would have appreciated the comparison.

“Hot damn!” Naomi said gleefully, rubbing her hands. “Wait here. I’ll say my piece and be right back.”

“Wasn’t going anywhere, Naomi,” Birgie said, crossing her ankles. She liked Naomi. She wasn’t nearly as crazy as the younger generations thought. Except for Mimi, of course. But then most of the younger generations thought Mimi was a little odd herself, what with the medium thing and living like a gypsy. Birgie suspected Mimi dragged eighty percent of her worldly possessions with her up to the lake each year and she still didn’t fill up the trunk of a midsized car.

“Oh, Viking Maiden, may your journey to Valhalla be swift!” Naomi waded back out toward the burning pontoon, her arms raised above her head. A rising wind whipped the bedsheet around her. Birgie had to admit it, Naomi looked pretty impressive.

“May you soon reach the distant shores of eternity!”

Impressive, too, was the way that same wind was whipping the fire higher.

“May your proud spirit find rest in the halls of your great ancestors!”

And really impressive was the way the wind had turned around the pontoon with its roaring fire and was pushing it back toward shore.

“May you—Aw, shit!” Naomi hoisted up her bedsheet and lurched toward the pontoon, obviously intending to push it back out into the lake.

“Don’t do that, Naomi!” Birgie called, a little concerned. “You’ll get your hair all burned off!”

Birgie had just lumbered to her feet when a group of people burst from the woods next to the Big House and raced toward the shore. Gerry, his kid Frank, and the guy who’d been following Mimi around the picnic were in the lead, but Vida and Bill were close behind, followed by Debbie and Hank Sboda. Mimi was last, but not by much; she was hop-skipping on one leg like a madwoman.

The well-dressed guy waded into the water next to Naomi and with a clipped, “Sorry,” tore the bedsheet off her, dunked it in the lake, and flung it across the pontoon.

“Well, crap,” Naomi muttered, looking down at her Playtex Eighteen Hour bra. She turned sullenly away from the burning pontoon, now being covered with all manner of sodden bed dressing, and struggled up out of the water to Birgie’s side.

“It wasn’t going to get close enough to set anything on fire,” she grumbled. “I had it anchored offshore.”

Birgie couldn’t say she was surprised. Naomi might be colorful, but she wasn’t incautious.

“Should I tell them?” Naomi asked.

Birgie considered. The crowd on the beach had shifted its dynamic from spectators at a funeral pyre to active participants at a five-alarm fire. They’d apparently decided to concentrate their efforts on sinking the pontoon under as many sodden blankets, sheets, towels, and even one mattress, as they could pile on it.

“Nah,” Birgie finally advised. “Let ’em be. They’re having fun.”

They were, too. Now that it was apparent that the forest wasn’t going to catch fire, and only a few wisps of black smoke were left curling up from the pontoon, the fire fight had become a water fight. People were dunking each other, the kids were splashing, and someone had broken into the Chez Ducky water pistol armory and pulled out the guns.

Mimi had sunk down to her knees on the sand, her arms limp in her lap as she stared at the pontoon. Her shoulders slumped with relief. As Birgie watched, the handsome guy who’d stripped the sheet from Naomi came up to Mimi and said something. She smiled up at him. He reached his hand out and she took it. For a heartbeat they froze; then he was pulling her to her feet and letting go of her hand. It didn’t matter. Birgie, who’d had half a dozen lovers, knew what she’d seen.

Sparks. Real sparks, too. Not just sex sparks—though God knew, those weren’t anything to turn your nose up at.

“Will you look at that?” Naomi murmured. She was watching the pair, too.

“Yup,” Birgie said. After being someone’s sister-in-law for fifty-some years, some communication didn’t need speech. “Know who he is?”

“Johanna said Mimi was toting around some good-looking man named Joe.”

“Joe,” Birgie said nostalgically. “I had a boyfriend named Joe once—”

“That crazy old woman.”

Birgie and Naomi looked around to see Naomi’s daughter-in-law Debbie stomping through the sand toward Naomi’s son, and Debbie’s husband, Bill. Little spits of sand punctuated each one of her angry steps.

“She could have burned this place to the ground!” Debbie declared angrily. A few of those closest looked away uncomfortably. “You’ve got to do something about her, Bill. Before one of these fool antics of hers results in a lawsuit.”

Birgie looked at Naomi. Naomi shrugged.

Debbie looked really shaken. And really mad.

“Now, Debbie. She’s my mother—”

“And I’m your wife, and those”—Debbie pointed at a pair of boys wrestling in the surf—“are your sons. And she put
us
in danger. When are you going to grow a spine and do what needs to be done?”

“Why don’t you just shut up, Debbie?” Mimi’s voice rose above the hubbub. Birgie looked around and saw Mimi hobbling toward Debbie. Joe was gone. Mimi’s expression was stony. Almost…angry. And her tone was…imperious.

It was about time someone had told Debbie to shut up, Birgie thought. Past time. It was only amazing that it had been Mimi who’d done the telling. Mimi never took the lead. She was never imperious. She always claimed she was too lazy to command anything, but Birgie had always suspected the real reason was that she didn’t want to care so much about something or someone that she’d felt compelled to act. She hadn’t cared about anything very much since her dad had disappeared.

Birgie applauded. Gerry joined in. Then Johanna and then someone else. Not everyone clapped, but enough people did that Debbie knew where she stood in relation to Naomi. Her face suffused with color.

“Well, excuse me for not wanting anyone to get hurt,” she sniffed and stomped off, nose high.

Naomi, inured to Debbie’s pain-in-the-assness by seventeen years as her mother-in-law, sighed. “Poor Bill.”

As soon as he got back to the rental car, Joe pulled off his waterlogged loafers and tossed them into the backseat. He felt a little as though he’d just popped back up out of the rabbit’s hole.

No forty-year-old women of Joe’s acquaintance would go skinny-dipping in a lake at the same time a picnic was under way a few hundred feet away. Nor would they run naked through the woods. And if bizarre circumstances should force them to do so, they’d definitely be at least a little nonplussed by the experience.

As soon as Mimi Olson had gotten the ratty stadium blanket over her, every bit of embarrassment had evaporated. It hadn’t returned, not even when she’d shown up wearing a kiddy beach robe. Nor when she’d blithely informed him that she spoke to ghosts for a living. On a ghost hotline.

Mimi Olson, he had come to the sad conclusion, was quirky.

That should have been it for Joe, whose few interactions with quirky women had led to no particular desire for more. In his experience, “quirky” people were either “affected” or possibly “mentally lacking.” But he decided that Mimi Olson deserved special dispensation. She was obviously the product of her upbringing—as evidenced by her family’s peculiar pontoon-burning ritual. Small wonder Mimi was a little odd.

Hell, spend enough time with the Olsons and anyone would be odd. Why, he’d been drawn into odd behavior after just a short time in their company. Should anyone have told him this morning that by afternoon he would be standing fully clad knee-deep in a boggy lake ripping a sheet off an old lady, he would have laid very large odds against it.

He stripped off his sodden socks and wrung the sandy lake water out of them.

Besides, Mimi wasn’t
just
quirky. He’d been impressed by the lucid, unsentimental argument she’d forwarded in favor of keeping Chez Ducky in the family. Joe found lucid thinking incredibly sexy. It was one of the chief reasons he’d been attracted to Karen.

He’d met Karen as a senior at Miami Ohio, where she’d just started her freshman year. They’d sat next to each other in an advanced stats class. She’d shown him her class notes and he’d fallen like a ton of bricks. Her notes were a paean to organization and precise detail. Soon they were studying together, then sleeping together.

He knew his frat brothers couldn’t figure out what the attraction was on either part, but he knew exactly why he’d fallen for Karen. He’d been the only child of a variously employed couple dedicated to melodrama. For a kid whose home life was in perennial disarray, nothing was as beautiful as meticulousness, order, and reason. Karen was the high priestess of all these traits.

Joe reached down and turned his pant cuffs inside out, upending a pile of sand onto the ground.

No one could have been more surprised than him when Karen had agreed to marry him after they’d gotten pregnant, but Karen, a devout Catholic, wanted to keep the baby. What should have been a Nobel Prize–winning career had been derailed. Joe had landed a good job straight out of college and threw himself into work, determined to earn enough money to send Karen, who’d selflessly opted to stay at home with Prescott, back to college. Soon Joe was making a name for himself as the go-to guy. Unfortunately, that invariably meant “going-to” another city, another state, another country, sometimes for weeks, often for months.

Five years later, he’d taken Karen out to dinner for her twenty-fourth birthday. After dessert, he’d slid a blank check and an application to the University of Chicago across the table toward her.

“What is this?” she’d asked, her face knotted with surprise.

“It’s a check. And an application. To the University of Chicago. But that’s just for show. You can go anywhere you want to go to school.”

“Huh?”

“It’s true. You can finally become a nuclear research physicist.”

“I have a job,” she’d replied coldly.

Mortified by his clumsy misstep, Joe had attempted to backpedal. “I know you do. And you are an exceptional mother.” She’d preened a little. “I meant your dream job.”

“What about Prescott?”

“Prescott is nearly five. Ready for school himself.”

“School?” Karen’s voice had risen, drawing glances from nearby diners. “Where do you intend to find a preschool appropriate for a child with an IQ in excess of 150?”

Joe had heard it before, how important Prescott’s environment was in order for their son to reach his full potential. “I’m sure there are Montessori schools—”

“
Montessori?
Montessori is for the terminally B-plus child.” She’d shaken her head. “No. Thank you for thinking of me, but I have a career, Joe. Not just a job, a full-time
career
. As Prescott’s teacher. He is blooming under my guidance.
Blooming.
”

“But what about you?”

“I’m blooming, too. Can’t you tell?” She’d smiled, and he’d had to admit, she seemed happy. “I cannot imagine doing anything more rewarding. Or fascinating. The models for developing cognitive skill sets in gifted children are changing daily. I have so much to learn and so many things I want to try with Prescott.”

“I didn’t realize…”

“You’re gone a lot,” she’d said, and then, upon seeing his expression, she added, “I’m not complaining. It’s an observation.”

“You’ve raised Prescott almost single-handedly,” Joe had said. “At least get some help.”

“I don’t need any help,” she’d said tightly.

“Then tell me what I can do to make your life a little easier. That promotion I was telling you about? I’ll turn it down so at least I won’t be around even less than I already am.”

“No!” She’d frowned heavily. “No, don’t do that. Prescott’s education is going to be expensive, and I’m not just talking about undergraduate school. I want all the resources he might need made available to him as soon as he needs them, no matter what the cost.”

“Then I’ll only take it if they promise to let me cut back on the travel.”

She’d met his gaze. She’d looked frightened, and abruptly Joe had realized why. She’d been afraid he was going to take away some part of the career she found so fulfilling. She’d given up everything, and this, being Prescott’s mother, was all she had by which to define herself.

“Please, Joe,” she said, substantiating his suspicion. “Don’t. Don’t interfere. Don’t take this away from me.”

That sealed the deal. He’d agreed.

I kept my word,
Joe thought, swinging his damp pant legs into the car and starting the engine.
What an idiot.

Joe parked the car in front of the four-car garage and got out. Prescott’s place looked like something out of Disney World, and with about as much North Woods ambience as a pine-scented car deodorizer.

He wanted to like it. He really did. Because he could tell Prescott was proud of it. But…it was so damn big. And bogus. And…
big.

Small wonder Mimi loathed it and Prescott. He couldn’t say he blamed her. Poor Mimi. She’d looked so mortified when he’d said Prescott was his son. She’d gulped something and been about to launch into unnecessary apologizes when the kid had arrived with the news about the pontoon-cum-pyre. Later she’d tried to apologize again but he’d cut her off, telling her not to worry about it. He’d wanted to say more—he wasn’t sure what—but her attention had moved on to—what was her name? Debbie?—stomping over the sand shouting.

Joe reached into the backseat, got his tote and picked his way carefully to the front door on tender bare feet. A little red electronic eye, discreetly nestled in a pinecone above the front door, stared down at him. There was no doorbell, just a small, brass-plated intercom speaker.

He looked up at the red eye and smiled weakly. He hated surveillance cameras and webcams. “Hi, Pres. It’s me. Joe.” He would have said, “Dad,” except Prescott referred to him only as Joe. “I made it. But you already know that.”

There was no response.

“This is really some place you have here.” Silence.

“Pres? You there?” If Prescott had left there was no saying when he’d be back. Maybe days. “How am I supposed to get into this fortress, anyway?” he muttered, trying the front door knob. It was locked.

“Go around the back,” Prescott’s disembodied voice answered. “The French doors leading to the deck are unlocked.”

I should have known
, Joe thought.
He’s been watching me, waiting for me to say something incriminating. Let the games begin!

He headed around to the back of the lodge—what was it Prescott called it? Bum Deal House?—and climbed onto an enormous, prow-shaped cedar deck furnished with expensive cushioned loungers and chairs. Unfortunately, they would never know the imprint of a human butt because the only one who would have used them would be Prescott, and his many unhappily sequential seasonal allergies prohibited his spending any leisure time outdoors.

Prescott refused to take shots. Karen had been suspicious of introducing any chemical into Prescott’s body, as it might somehow migrate to his brain. She’d often said, “You don’t mess with perfection.”

Joe, who’d seen what allergies did to Prescott, would have traded a few IQ points to stop his nose from running. But that was him.

He pushed open the French doors, breaching the purity of Prescott’s hermetically sealed house, and looked around. He was standing in a room the size of a gymnasium that stretched in one vast open expanse from one end of the house to the other. Though no walls divided this room, function separated it into three main areas: a great room (though Joe was tempted to call it a Great Big Room) sparsely but attractively furnished with a sofa and some chairs; a dining area; and a kitchen so large it could have serviced a small hotel.

In a far corner of the living area, Joe could see into a hall and from there through an open door and into a bedroom. Apparently the north side of the house was the bedroom wing. Who knew what the rooms on the second and third floors were for.

Prescott was nowhere in sight.

“Pres?” Nothing. He walked into the kitchen and removed the caramel cashew bar he’d carefully wrapped in a napkin from his pocket. He set it out on the corner of a granite-topped island the size of an Egyptian sarcophagus.

The only sound was the softest susurration of a high-tech air-filtration system. Few noises made it in from outside, no bird calls, not the wind moving through the upper branches of the trees, not even the sound of the Olsons partying next door. Joe looked up above the huge dining room table, where the antlers from an entire herd of deer formed a chandelier the size of a tractor tire.

Now, Joe liked nice things. He enjoyed excellence in every way—well-tailored clothing, good music, beautiful artwork, and fine food. But he disliked waste just as much. And this place was an enormous waste of space and materials.

“Prescott! I’m in the kitchen! I brought you a cookie!”

“You don’t have to yell, Joe.” Prescott’s voice, marked by the faintly tinny sound of one speaking from inside a drum, came calmly through a series of speakers neatly concealed in the kitchen’s coffered ceiling. He sounded eerily like HAL from
2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I can hear you quite clearly.”

Joe looked at the ceiling, trying to spy another red-eyed camera lens. He didn’t see any. Thank God. He didn’t think he could sleep knowing his REM cycles were being recorded. “Why do you need an intercom system, anyway? You’re alone here.”

“When the cleaning people come, I like to be able to tell them what needs doing without following after them. Or shouting,” Prescott replied without intonation.

“How often do you have cleaning people?” Joe asked curiously. How much clutter could one man create? Not that he disapproved. He appreciated cleanliness as much as the next man. Okay. More.

Prescott didn’t bother to reply, but the message was clear. It was the same message Joe had been receiving since Prescott had started emitting sound:
Joe wouldn’t understand.

Still, Joe gave it another shot. “I brought you a caramel cashew bar from next door. These things are amazing—”

“Perhaps sometime in the past you noticed my weight. I’m fat,” the disembodied voice broke in. “Perhaps then you will not be surprised when you hear that henceforth I would appreciate it if you could refrain from bringing food such as caramel cashew cookie bars into the house.”

“You’re not fat. Hefty.” Joe considered the word. “No. Large.” That wasn’t it either. “Sol—”

“Please stop.”

Joe stopped and stood there, staring at the ceiling like an idiot and imagining Prescott, in whatever room he was in, similarly staring. Why, Joe wondered, was he still making a pilgrimage to Prescott’s door every year, when Prescott clearly saw him as an inconvenience and a nuisance?

He didn’t have a good answer. The fact was he’d never felt much like a father.

He recalled the first time he’d seen Prescott in the hospital. Joe had been in the hospital corridor avoiding the accusing glares of Karen’s already elderly parents when the nurse had come out of the delivery room, pushing what looked like a motorized cake cart. Inside had been this tiny, scrawny creature wearing minuscule black swimmer’s goggles. It had looked like an alien space monkey after crash landing, worried, wiggling, and making squalling sounds.

“He’s a little jaundiced, so we had him under the bilirubin lights and had to put goggles on him,” the nurse had explained as she maneuvered the cart in such a way that she’d hemmed Joe in next to the water fountain. “But otherwise, he’s healthy. Do you want to hold him?”

“Not really.” He’d drop him.

The nurse didn’t look surprised. “Okay, then. I’ll take him in to see his grandparents.”

She started to pull the cart back, but something made Joe put out his hand and stop it. He leaned over the Plexiglas cubicle. The little space oddity had disks taped to his tiny dark hide, connected by wires to a machine embedded in the cart. A monitor read out numbers. Joe had looked at those numbers and that helpless creature and felt an avalanche of responsibility sliding down over his shoulders.

He still felt it. As much as he would have sometimes liked to, he could not give himself permission to quit trying to work out this paternal riddle that refused to give up its secrets.