The Color of Water in July (23 page)

After that, Lila and I kept our distance. Though we were traveling together, we rarely spoke. I could see that she was rapidly losing her prettiness. She went from being wan and green on the ship to taking on a fishwife pudginess—not surprising, as she rarely went out and dined on rich food. Finally, she started begging to go home again, and I thought to myself, Let the girl go. I supposed that she was going mad on me, like her mother. I thought it was just something that ran in their family.

I had been in Berlin for several weeks when I got the wire that Lila had drowned. Several weeks that had been the best that I had ever lived in my young life, a taste of what life was supposed to be like for others, for people who weren’t like me. I was sitting at a café on the Nollendorfplatz with Paul, drinking bitters, the warm sun slanting down on my face, when the concierge brought me the wire.

Lila drowned. Stop. Pine Lake. Stop. Funeral tomorrow.

I must not have shown much emotion at all, because Paul did not even ask the contents of the wire. I just kept looking at him—coarse red hair, translucent skin, and a gap between his teeth—and smiled just seeing him sitting there. I did not leave then—there hardly seemed to be a point. By the time I got there, the funeral would be two months past. I would never return to Wequetona. Thankfully, I would never return to the ghost-man-shadow that being there had forced me to be.

And what of Billy McKawber? He didn’t last long. The winter that followed our joyride together, he went out fishing on the frozen lake, fell through the ice, and drowned.

I never tried marriage again. Deciding not ever to go home, for me, was a much better solution. What I regret, looking back, is that I did not find a way to help Lila. I thought we had the same problem—that each of us had a love problem. I thought both of us loved across boundaries—I loved red-haired valets, and she loved Billy. I used to imagine ways I could have made it work for her, another servant along to carry our trunks, a villa in Italy somewhere, a flat in Paris. Those were the 1920s, and on the Continent, it could have been done. But whenever I mentioned Billy, Lila’s eyes went flat with utter hopelessness, an expression that I don’t think she even realized she was making. I guess her imagination wasn’t big enough to imagine a future that included the two of them.

Your grandmother did not tell me why you needed to hear this story now, Jess, but I’m willing to guess, this being July, that yours may be a love story too. I spent but a few brief days of my youth up north in Michigan, and I have seen many lovely places since. But to this day, I can close my eyes and see the exact shade of the water that day, and I’ll feel a stab of regret that I’ll never see it again. I’ve seen blues in my life: Italy, Aruba, Carmel, but never once quite that same shade, tinged through with want, and desire, and regret.

But I’m not sorry that I didn’t sacrifice all to stay there, like Lila, and like Billy. I walked away long ago, and I hazard a guess that someday you will too. (Everyone swears they won’t, but in the end, most people do.) But it’s still there for me, in my mind’s eye, blue water, and youth, and love frustrated, and I daresay, when you leave, it will still be there for you too.

I shall take the liberty to sign myself as,

Your great-uncle,

Chapin Emelius Flagg.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

Jess walked around the cottage slowly now, hesitant, the way you walk around a place that you know you are leaving, that is no longer yours.

With Russ gone, the life seemed drained out of the cottage—his newness, his oddness, his very
wrongness
had at least made the cottage seem a living place. Now, Jess saw the cottage for what it was, a summertime lair for Miss Havisham—old, faded, worn out, already dead.

Typical Russ, he hadn’t really seemed to quite get it when she had said, “Leave.”

He was looking over his shoulder, saying, “What about the photo shoot?” as she was practically shoving him out the door. She had called a cab for him, said, “I need to be alone for a while.” She stopped answering the phone. Found two of Toni Barnes’s RE/MAX cards stuck in the back screen door. The papers for the closing lay, unsigned, on her grandmother’s writing table.

It had turned to August now, you could feel it right away, the lack of sincerity of summer, the hint that it was already planning to leave. There was a fierce north wind blowing across Five Mile Point, bringing cold air down from Canada. She could see the Slades’s American flag flapping on the flagpole. Up from the lake came the clanging sound of sailboats at their moorings. The sky was a sharp, cloudless blue. Out the window, she could see the branches whipping back and forth—a smattering of green leaves were falling. It gave the impression of sunlit snow.

A week ago it had all seemed so easy. She would fly up for a week and sell the cottage; she would then pack her bags and return to her life in New York.

That long-ago afternoon when she and Mamie had sat on the upstairs bed folding pillowcases—what was it that her grandmother had said? Mamie’s face flashed in front of her, the way it had been that summer: pale-blue eyes, white skin soft but already lined with age.
Hold on to what matters
. She hadn’t understood, then, what her grandmother had been talking about. Now, after all these years, it was possible that she did.

Jess looked down at the desktop. There were two photographs, side by side, held down by the beveled glass tabletop of the mahogany desk. One was of herself, another of Margaret. The one of Margaret bore a caption:
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Neither picture was recent. Her mother was truly striking—thick, confident black eyebrows, wide dark-brown eyes, and a full, determined mouth. Of course, Margaret was much older now. You couldn’t get her to admit it, but she had pretty much retired. She could still turn heads in a restaurant though, even at her age. Margaret was a person who always looked like she mattered.

Jess had called her mother, of course, about the inheritance. Before she had left on the trip. Right after she got the official call from Mamie’s lawyer about the will.

“What cottage?” her mother said.

“Mother,”
Jess said, “don’t play games with me. I know you
know
what cottage. What do you think I should do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Sell it,” Jess said into the phone.

“Then sell it! For Christ’s sake. She gave it to you. If the money makes you feel guilty, give it to Oxfam or something.”

“But Mamie said . . . ”

“You know, Jess, I think Mamie raised the both of us to know how to do what we want.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“What’s past is past,” Margaret said, sounding just like Mamie, the way she seemed to more than ever these days.

Jess was still surprised by such a clear international connection. She hadn’t gotten used to hearing her mother’s voice without the familiar crackling of static overlaying it, the tinny faraway sound that Jess had eventually grown to associate with comfort.

“Mom,” Jess said, not wanting to lose such a good connection, “when are you coming to New York?”

Jess edged back the glass top. She grasped the corner of the picture and slid it out from under the heavy glass. Underneath, Jess saw that there were several more pictures of Margaret, each one showing a younger face. Jess shuffled through the little pile of pictures: Margaret in a cap and gown, Margaret in a white dress holding flowers, Margaret holding a microphone.

With surprise, Jess came upon the last picture in the pile. It was not a picture of Margaret at all, but the image of a young man wearing a soldier’s uniform—a tall man with broad shoulders, very young to be a soldier. He was wearing a peaked navy cap and tunic, and was holding an ornamental sword in his hand. For some reason, he looked a little familiar, though she was certain she had never seen the picture before. Jess turned the picture over.

On the back was written: “On the occasion of his enlistment in the Navy. Thomas Cardwell Cleves. 1917.”

The big old cottage ticked and creaked around Jess, never perfectly silent, always with its own faint music. Jess recognized the melody now. It was made up of the songs of a family whose lives, like familiar refrains, still mattered.

All this time, she had felt guilty about the cottage, thinking that Mamie wanted her to hold on to it, imagining that was what Mamie had in mind. But she should have known Mamie better than that, should have known right away what Mamie wanted.

Hold on to what matters.

What matters
. . .

Jess sat at Mamie’s desk looking out toward Hemingway Point. She could see the spot, about halfway across, where the water was bluer, deeper, and where the surface was always flecked by the path of the wind. Through the doorway, she could see into the shadowy interior of the cottage, the interior that would always have the patina of so many summers past.

She glanced at her watch. It was not yet noon. The closing was scheduled for two, the flight for four. She hesitated, not long, just enough to hear her heart beat once or twice, then, leaving the unsigned papers lying on the desk, she walked slowly toward the back door, ever so slowly, like she wasn’t going anywhere. As she crossed the sill, she broke into a run.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

J
ESS
,
AGE THIRTY-THREE

She had known that it would be easy to find him, but that she would have to look. At first, every time she had rounded an aisle in Olsen’s Market, or turned a corner when walking in town, she had that tiny anticipation that she would look up and there he would be. But in the end, she had known that it would not be a chance meeting. She would have to seek him out, if only she could find the courage to do so.

She rushed headlong out the back door, letting the screen door screech and then slam behind her. She moved so quickly up the back slope, up the stone steps in front of the garage, past the row of hollyhocks that stood brightly in a line in front of the stone wall. For a moment, she sat still, key in the ignition, inhaling the new-car smell of the blue-plush upholstery in the rental car, then she flipped the ignition and gunned it a little bit, spraying gravel as she went down the back road and out the stone gates toward M-66.

In town, the scene around her was tranquil—not too many tourists in the streets at this time of day. She saw an elderly couple, almost matching in blue and white clothing, walking slowly down the sidewalk just barely holding hands. From behind, a boy in a neon shirt raced up on a scooter, neatly arcing around the old couple and skimming on down the street.

Jess forced herself to think about the possibilities. He was out on an expedition. Hadn’t Toni said he would be? He would surely be married (his wife would no doubt be a beautiful marine biologist). What if he was married and his wife was handling the front desk? What if he answered the door with a baby balanced on his hip?

She just wanted to see him; that was all. Trying to conjure a feeling that seemed platonic and mild, Jess stood up from the bench and walked down Pine Street toward the chamber of commerce building. Without hesitation, she followed the walk around the back of it, where a small office, more of a shack, really, was built close to the water’s edge. She saw a sign that read:
S
OO
E
XPEDITIONS.
D
.
P
AINTER,
P
ROPRIETOR.
Forcing herself—feeling outside herself—she walked in the half-open door.

Surprised to see no one behind the desk, Jess took a moment to look at the simple surroundings: some brochures in a metal rack, an electric clock on the wall, a gray-metal counter across the middle of the small room, a feed-store calendar with a grainy picture of a couple of grazing cows. It took her a moment to see the little paper tent resting on the countertop scrawled in pencil with the words
Out Back
. Jess pushed the door open and blinked for a second in the glaring light; she peered around the rear of the shack, but it appeared to be flush with the wharf. Around the other side, however, the cement path continued, where there was a cement parking lot backing up to the water. There were several white trailers, each of them stacked with green and red canoes resting on white-metal railings, two across, three up. One canoe, a worn-looking red one, was resting on cinderblocks. Next to it, a broad-shouldered man was squatting in shorts and Teva sandals, facing away from her, holding a small can of shiny black paint. She stood there watching the man’s back, not sure. Cottages, she had found, don’t change much over the years. She could recognize Journey’s End in her sleep, in a trance, in her dreams; but a person . . . Broad shouldered, close-cropped hair with a few visible flecks of silver. The man put down the paint pot and stood up, turning so slowly that she realized he had known she was there all along.

“Toni told me you decided to sell it,” he said. “Somehow, I kept thinking that in the end you wouldn’t.”

Jess held her hand up to her brow, thinking that if she could block the sun she would be able to see more clearly.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Where are my manners?” Wiping his painty hands on the sides of his frayed khaki shorts, he stepped forward, holding out his hand.

“Welcome home to the North Country, Jess.”

Later, looking back, it was the word
home
that struck her first and hardest; that left an immediate and indelible mark.

Daniel Painter had perfect white teeth that showed as his lips parted into an easy grin.

“There is something I need to tell you,” she said.