One Summer

by David Baldacci

  “On what?”

  “That I didn’t have a clue how to run a family.”

  “Who does? We all just wing it.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Jenna. But it’s giving me credit I don’t really deserve.”

  “You really put a lot pressure on yourself. Bet you did that in the army too.”

  “Only way you survive. You practice perfection. You have a mission, you prep the crap out of it, and you execute that prep. Same with building stuff. You have a plan, you get your materials, and you build it according to the plans.”

  “Okay, but did every mission and every building project go according to plan?”

  “Well, no. They never do.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “You improvise. Fly by the seat of your pants.”

  “I think you just defined parenting in a nutshell.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Belief isn’t a strong enough word. I basically live that.”

  “You’d think I’d know that by now, having three kids.”

  “All kids are different. It’s not like one size or model fits all. I only have Liam, but I have five siblings. We drove my parents nuts, all in different ways. It’s not smooth, it doesn’t make sense half the time, and it’s the hardest, most exasperating job you can ever have. But the payoff is also the biggest.”

  “Does it get easier?”

  “Truthfully, some parts of it do, only to be replaced by other parts that are actually harder.” Jenna gripped his shoulder. “Time, Jack. Time. And little steps. You nearly died. You lost the woman you love. You’ve moved to a different town. That’s a lot.”

  “Thanks, Jenna. I needed to hear all this.”

  “Always ready to give advice, even if most of it is wrong.”

  “I think most of it is right, at least for me.”

  She slowly pulled her hand away. “Things get complicated, Jack, awfully fast. I’m a big believer in taking your time.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see that. Thanks for dinner.”

  She pecked him on the cheek. “Thanks for asking. But why did you think this was going to change things between you and me? I think you just wanted some assurance, maybe some comfort.”

  “But those are big deals for me. I don’t go to people with things like that. I’m more of a loner. When Lizzie was alive, I’d go to her.”

  “Your soul mate?”

  “And my best friend. There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.”

  Jenna sighed resignedly. “You just described my image—no, my dream—of the perfect relationship.”

  “It wasn’t all perfect. We had our problems.”

  “But you worked them out together?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s what a marriage is, right?”

  “It’s supposed to be that way. But more and more I don’t think it is. People seem to give up on each other way too easily. Grass is greener crap.”

  “I’m surprised you never got married again. I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of offers.”

  “It wasn’t,” she admitted. “But like I said before, I guess the right offer never came along.”

  As they headed back to the house, she asked, “So how’s the lighthouse coming?”

  “Not great,” he admitted. “I guess I’ll die trying to get it to work again.”

  As he drove off later, Jenna watched from the front porch, a worried look on her face.

  53

  A week later Jack turned the wrench one more time, taped over an electrical connection, spun the operating dial to the appropriate setting, and stepped back. It had been a week since he’d had dinner with Jenna. And every night he’d been out here working until the wee hours of the morning on the lighthouse. He felt like a marathoner near the end of the run. Three times he thought he had it right. Three times he turned out to be wrong. And his anger and frustration had grown with each disappointment. He’d snapped at Sammy and at all three kids over the last few days. He’d even made Jackie cry one time and felt awful about it for days afterward. Yet still, here he was.

  “Come on,” he said, looking at the guts of the light. “Come on. Everything checks out. Down to the smallest detail. There is no good reason you won’t work.”

  He stood back and reached for the switch that powered the system. He counted to three, made a wish, took a breath, held it, and hit the switch.

  Nothing happened. The light remained as dark as it had been for years.

  Instead of another intense sense of disappointment, something seemed to snap in Jack’s head. All the misery, all the frustration, all the loss bottled up inside of him was suddenly released. He grabbed his wrench and threw it at the machinery. It struck the wall, ricocheted off, and cracked the window. Then he ran down the steps, grabbed a crate at the bottom of the lighthouse, carried it out to the rocks, and hurled it as far as he could. It crashed down, and the contents exploded over the wet rocks. With another cry of rage, he ran down to the beach, yelling and cursing, spinning around uncontrollably before he dropped down into the sand and sat there, rocking back and forth, his face in his hands, tears trickling between his clenched fingers.

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I’m sorry. I tried. I really tried. I just can’t make it work. I can’t make it work,” he said again in a quieter voice. “I can’t accept that you’re gone. I can’t! You should be here, not me. Not me!”

  His breathing slowed. His mind cleared. The longer he sat there, the greater his calm grew. He looked out to the darkened ocean. He saw the usual distant pinpoints of light representing far-off ships making their way up or down the Atlantic. They were like earthbound stars, thought Jack. So close, but so far away.

  He looked skyward toward Lizzie’s little patch of Heaven… somewhere. He’d never found it. It just swallows you up. It’s so big and we’re so small, thought Jack.

  Now he could fully realize how a little girl could become obsessed over a lighthouse. He was a grown man and it had happened to him. The mind, it seemed, was a vastly unpredictable thing.

  “Dad?”

  Jack turned to see Mikki standing behind him. She was in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, with a scared look on her face.

  “Are you okay?” she said breathlessly. I… I heard you yelling.” She wrapped her arms around his burly shoulders. “Dad, are you okay?” she asked again.

  He drew a long breath. “I’m just trying to understand things that I don’t think there’s any way to understand.”

  “Okay,” she said in a halting voice.

  He looked back at the Palace. “I moved all of us here for a really selfish reason. I wanted to be close to your mom again. She grew up here. Place was filled with stuff that belonged to her. Every day I’d find something else that she had touched.”

  “I can understand that. I didn’t want to come here at first. But now I’m glad I did.” She touched his arm. “I look at that photo of Mom you gave me every day. It makes me cry, but it also feels so good.”

  He pointed to the lighthouse. “Do you want to know why I’ve been busting my butt trying to get that damn thing to work?”

  She sat down next to him. “Because Mom loved it?” she said cautiously. “And she wanted you to repair it?”

  “At first I thought that too. But it finally just occurred to me when I saw you standing there. It was like a fog lifted from my brain.” He paused and wiped his face with his sleeve. “I realized I just wanted to fix something, anything. I wanted to go down a list, do what I was supposed to do, and the end result would be, presto, it works. Then everything would be okay again.”

  “But it didn’t happen?”

  “No, it didn’t. And you know why?”

  Mikki shook her head.

  “Because life doesn’t work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything that you think you’re supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won’t get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and madden
ing and often makes no sense.” Jack paused and looked at his daughter. “People who shouldn’t be here are, and someone who should be here isn’t. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t change it. No matter how much you may want to. It has nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with reality, which often makes no sense at all.” He grew silent and looked out to the black ocean.

  Mikki leaned against him and gripped his hand.

  “We’re here for you, Dad. I’m here for you. I’m part of your reality.”

  He smiled. And with that smile her look of fear finally was vanquished. “I know you are, baby.” He hugged her. “You know I told you I was scared when my dad was dying, that I withdrew from everybody?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, when my mom left me, I pulled back even more. If it wasn’t for your mother, I think I would’ve just kept pulling back until I disappeared. I played sports and all, but I didn’t have many friends, I guess because I didn’t want them. Then we got married and I went off to the military. Then when I got home I picked a job that required a lot of hours and a lot of sweat.”

  “You had to support your family.”

  “Yeah, but in a way I think I was still retreating. Still trying to hide.”

  “Dad, you were there for us.”

  “I missed a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I know it, and so do you.”

  She squeezed his arm. “There’s still a lot more to see,” Mikki said quietly.

  He nodded. “There is a lot more to see, honey. A lifetime more.”

  She shivered. He put his arm around her. “Come on. Let’s go in.”

  As they walked past the lighthouse, Mikki glanced at it and said, “Are you sure?”

  Jack didn’t even look at it. “I’m very sure, Mikki. Very sure.”

  54

  After Jack got back to his room, he dropped, exhausted, onto the bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. He lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Life was often unfair, insane, damaging. And yet the alternative to living in that world was not living in it. Jack had been given a miracle. He had already squandered large parts of it. That was going to stop. Now.

  He opened his nightstand and pulled out the stack of letters. He selected the envelope with the number five on it, slid out the letter, and flicked on the light. What he’d just told Mikki, he firmly believed, because he’d once written down these same sentiments. He had just forgotten or, more likely, ignored them in his quest for the impossible. He began to read.

  Dear Lizzie,

  As I’ve watched things from my bed, I have a confession to make to you. And an apology. I haven’t been a very good husband or father. Half our marriage I was fighting a war, and the other half I was working too hard. I heard once that no one would like to have on their tombstone that they wished they’d spent more time at work. I guess I fall into that category, but it’s too late for me to change now. I had my chance. When I see the kids coming and going, I realize how much I missed. Mikki already is grown up with her own life. Cory is complex and quiet. Even Jackie has his own personality. And I missed most of it. My greatest regret in life will be leaving you long before I should. My second greatest regret is not being more involved in my children’s lives. I guess I thought I would have more time to make up for it, but that’s not really an excuse. It’s sad when you realize the most important things in life too late to do anything about them. They say Christmas is the season of second chances. My hope is to make these last few days my second chance to do the right thing for the people that I love the most.

  Love,

  Jack

  Jack slowly folded the letter and put it away. These letters, when he was writing them, were the only things he had left, really. They represented the outpouring from his heart, the sort of things you think about when the trivial issues of life are no longer important because you have precious little time left. If everyone could live as though they were in jeopardy of shortly dying, Jack thought, the world would be a much better place. But in the end they were only letters. Lizzie would have read them, and perhaps they would have made her feel better, but they were still just words. Now was the time for action. He knew what he had to do.

  Be a father for my children. Repair that part of my life.

  Jack rose and went from room to room, checking on his kids. He sat next to Jackie as the little boy slept peacefully, his hand curled around his monster truck. Cory slept on his stomach, his arms coiled under him. A tiny snore escaped his lips. Next, Jack stood in the doorway of Mikki’s room, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the gentle sound of her breathing.

  He closed her door and went downstairs and onto the rear screened porch. From here he could see the lighthouse soaring into the sky. He had built it into some mythical symbol, but it was only a pile of bricks and cinder blocks and metal guts. It wasn’t Lizzie. It had no heart. Not like the trio beating in the bedrooms above. Three people who needed him to be their father.

  In this last letter he had been lamenting that there were no second chances left to him. Yet that insane, unfair world that he had sometimes railed against had done something remarkable. It had given him another shot at life.

  I’m done running.

  Jack went back to bed and slept through the night for the first time in a long time.

  55

  Beginning the next day, Jack literally hung up his tool belt for the rest of the summer. Instead of going to work, he drove Jackie and Cory to Anne Bethune’s camp. And he didn’t just drop them off and leave. He stayed. He sat and drew pictures and built intricate Lego structures with Jackie, and then, laughing, helped his son knock them down. He instructed Jackie on how to tie his shoes and cut up his food. He helped construct the sets for a play that Cory was going to be in. He also helped his oldest son with his lines.

  After camp they would go to the beach, swim, build sand castles, and throw the ball or the Frisbee. Jack got some kites and taught the boys how to make them do loops and twisters. They found some fishing tackle under the deck at the Palace and did some surf fishing. They never caught anything but had great fun in their abject failure to hook a single fish.

  Jenna and Liam came by regularly. Sometimes Liam would bring his drums, and he and Mikki would practice for the talent competition. Since the Palace wasn’t soundproofed, the pair would go up to the top of the lighthouse. That high up, their powerful sound was dissipated, although the seagulls were probably entertained.

  At least the lighthouse was good for something, thought Jack.

  He and Mikki took long walks on the beach, talking about things they had never talked about before. About Lizzie—and high school and boys and music and what she wanted to do with her life.

  Mikki continued to waitress at the Little Bit. Jack and Sammy dropped in to eat frequently. And they also did some repairs for Jenna, but only because she refused to charge them for their meals. Charles Pinckney visited them at the Palace. He would tell them stories of the past, of when Lizzie was a little girl about Jackie’s age. And all of them would sit and listen in rapt attention, especially Jack.

  Jack took Jenna for rides on the Harley, and they were over at each other’s homes for meals. They would take walks on the beach and talk. They laughed a lot and occasionally drew close, and arms and fingers touched and grazed, but that was all.

  They were friends.

  The summer was finally going as Jack had hoped it would. He would lie awake at night, listening to the sounds in the darkness, trying to differentiate among his children’s breathing. He got pretty good at it. Sometimes Jackie would have a nightmare and would bump open his dad’s door and climb into bed with him. The little boy would lay tight against his dad, and Jack would gently stroke his son’s hair until he fell asleep again.

  One evening he and Sammy were drinking beers out on the screen porch. Mikki and Liam were at the top of the lighthouse having one last practice before the competition. The two boys were down on the