“Want one dat big,” Claire had said, throwing out her chubby arms and grinning, her first joke at barely two.
Now there she was, grown, navigating the happy confusion on the bank below. Nora watched her help a young couple and their children into their canoe, waving as they set off, then turn in search of the next task. The canoes were stacked in silver pyramids under the trees at the edge of the launch area, bouquets of paddles sprouted from big wooden kegs. There were dozens of big, green inner tubes heaped in the walk-in basement and orange life jackets in wire bins, organized by size. Pairs of suntanned adolescents in red tank tops duck-walked canoes to the water; others, half-dancing to the music blaring from a boom box in the garage, unloaded slippery tubes from the wire cage built on the bed of a yellow pick-up truck or stood on the piers, tying inner tubes together with bits of rope, then helping patrons launch themselves onto the river.
Claire bent to help a father and daughter connect their inner tubes, whispering something to the little girl that made her smile. What? Nora wondered. Perhaps that she had been down the river a million times herself and there was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all! She was radiant in the sunlight, tanned and healthy. Her long hair was caught up in a single braid, damp tendrils curling around her face.
“Did we ever look like that?” Diane said, flopping onto the bench beside her. “I mean, even on our best day? Before we had a clue about, well, anything?”
In fact, Diane looked great now – long-legged and slim as a girl herself. She’d pulled her curly salt-and-pepper hair back into a ponytail that was peeking out from the back of her blue “Michigan” baseball cap. She’d been beautiful when she was young, the homecoming queen in high school, sweetheart of her ex-husband’s fraternity when she was in college. She was still beautiful, Nora thought. But as Diane liked to point out, amused and a little wistful: looking good at fifty-five is not exactly the same as . . . looking good.
Now she let out an exasperated sigh. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. Mo’s mother called when I got to the house. Okay, I know. Why did I answer the phone when I wasn’t officially there? Better question: why was Betty calling when she knew Mo would be at the clinic? The woman never has adjusted to the idea of Mo having a job, you know – wanting one when she doesn’t really need to work. Truth be told, she’s still waiting for her to find the perfect husband and settle down.”
“That would be Charlie,” Nora said.
Diane grinned. “Well, yeah. It would. You interloper!” She waved to Claire down on the bank. “Mo and I had a huge fight last night after you guys left,” she said. “Because I mentioned w-a-r in Charlie’s presence. Were you mad at me? Mo said you were.”
“No,” Nora said.
“Because I’m sorry if you are. I’d never –”
“I’m not mad. Really.”
“Good,” Diane said. “To hell with Mo then. And to hell with George W. Bush, too – and his henchmen. For now, anyway. I poured a whole bottle of merlot into an empty cranberry juice bottle for us. Let’s float.”
Claire met them as they started down the slope toward the dock, Dylan trailing behind her, and threw her arms first around Nora, then Diane.
“Time for the annual river trip,” Diane said, hugging her back. “Too bad you’ve grown up and abandoned us.”
“She told me you guys used to float here every summer when she was little,” Dylan said.
“Little,” Diane said. “Please. We floated till she was – what? Sixteen? Then –? Like I said, total abandonment. Denial!”
Claire laughed. “They’re driving me nuts,” she said to Dylan. “I’ve got, like, three moms – not to mention Dad, who’s the worst of all – wailing over the fact that I grew up. Like that’s my fault.”
“Yeah, my parents did the same thing last year.” He grinned. “Now they don’t even miss me.”
Claire punched his shoulder. “They do. I read that letter your mom sent.”
Dylan shrugged, wrestled her, giggling, into his grasp. Stocky and strong, he was about as unlikely a violinist as Nora could imagine, and she smiled when he picked up Claire and carried her down the bank, back to her station. Remembered watching them together at the street dance in town the weekend before: Claire, in overalls and a tie-dye tee shirt, swaying to the music, her arms raised, undulating, lit white in the light beams raking the street. Dylan doing some strange, wild hopping dance around her.
“They’re like puppies,” Diane said when they’d pushed off and floated out of earshot. She lay back in her inner tube, her face to the sun. “God. This is exactly what I needed.”
Nora lay back, too, trailing her hands in the cool water, paddling half-heartedly if they floated too near trees or rocks along the bank. The river was like a wide road, gray-green and sparkling, narrowing to a point on the horizon. The water was shallow, the bottom sandy, littered with smooth gray stones. Silver minnows flitted beneath the surface, an occasional turtle lay, sunning, on a fallen limb. There was a fishy scent and the scent of pine trees. The scent of sunscreen on their bodies: Coppertone, a scent that never failed to fill Nora with vague longing.
“Are you worried about Claire?” Diane asked. “I mean, sex? God, the two of them are veritably exuding hormones.”
“I talked to her about sex,” Nora said. “Before. Dylan, I mean. In the abstract. You know, birth control, being careful, all that. Maybe I should talk to her about it again. I’ve thought about it, but I feel – I don’t know, like it would be intruding. She’s a smart girl. I don’t know for sure that she’s had sex with Dylan – and if I knew for sure they had, what would I say? Stop?”
Diane laughed.
“Actually, I’m not really worried about it,” Nora said. “Which kind of surprises me.”
“Charlie?”
“Who would know what Charlie thinks?” Nora asked. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s convinced himself that Claire and Dylan are really, really, really good friends.”
“They do seem like friends.” Diane smiled. “In addition to the fact that they can’t keep their hands off each other.”
“I know,” Nora said. “It’s nice.”
They drifted quietly awhile, occasionally sipping the wine Diane had poured. The sky was blue, with a few cottony clouds; the sun warm on their bare skin. There were houses and cabins here and there along the bank and Nora peered through the green scrim of foliage for signs of life as they passed by, determined not to let her mind reel backward again as it had done since last night with the talk about war.
Diane said, “Sometimes I wonder what that’s like, you know? To be in love, the way Claire and Dylan are? When I was that age myself, I’d watch my girlfriends and think, when is that going to happen to me? It certainly didn’t with Bob. By the time I figured out why it never happened, it was too late to be young and in love. Just – in love, like I am with Mo. Which is plenty lucky, I know. A lot of people never even get that.”
She sighed. “Jesus, I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately. Hormones, I guess. Only not the good, sexy kind. The kind that – I keep . . . thinking about things. Like just now. I was remembering looking out of the window of my room in the sorority house, seeing these two girls walking, holding hands, and being just totally overcome with sadness. I was nineteen. I was so out of it I’m not even sure if I knew then that girls could be together sexually. It just seemed so nice, the way they were. Now I look back and think, I should have known.
“And, okay, this Iraq thing. Why, I have no idea, since at the time I was almost totally oblivious, but every time I hear about Iraq I think about Vietnam and how we’re headed for the same place again and nobody even cares. That’s what I got into an argument with Mo about last night,” she said. “Mo and I never argue about politics. Am I crazy about this, Nora? Tell me if you think I am.”
“No,” Nora said. “Either that, or we both are. I’d probably be arguing with Charlie about it, too, if he’d even acknowledge it was happening. You saw hi
m last night. He’s not going there.”
“It is like Vietnam, isn’t it?” Diane said.
“Yeah,” Nora said. “It seems like that to me.
“Fucking Bob,” Diane said. “Amazing how I can still get pissed off at him after all these years – and about whole new things. He had me convinced that the antiwar protesters were all drug addicts and hippies out to brainwash our children, but now I think they weren’t. They were telling the truth. They knew.
“It’s what pisses me off about that poor woman from Philadelphia. The goddamn government still won’t admit the protestors were right – and, please! She put a bomb under a police car thirty years ago that never went off, that never hurt anyone – and she’s a ‘domestic terrorist’? Give me a break.
“Okay,” she said. “I know that’s not Bob’s fault – and it’s not like he set out to brainwash me then. I was just shell-shocked from going from life as a shallow, dopey little sorority girl to being married with a set of twins to take care of practically overnight. Jesus. All I really remember from the entire decade of my twenties is being in a permanent state of exhaustion.
“Well. And I remember Bob’s mother. Ha! Grace-the misnamed. The only person in the world who was happy when I left Bob and the girls to run off with Audrey Collins, because it meant she could have them all to herself.
“Not going there,” Diane reminded herself, smiling faintly. “Anyway, a couple of Bob’s fraternity brothers went to Vietnam. Some guys I went to high school with. But nobody whose life really affected mine. Did you? Know anyone who went?”
A dragonfly hovered between them, its blue wings translucent, then swooped away, skimming across the sunlit water.
“My brother,” Nora said. “I had a brother who went.”
“Oh!” Diane sat up in her tube, nearly tipping it. “Nora. I had no idea . . . I –”
“It’s okay. Charlie doesn’t even know. Nobody does. It was . . . we were never – close. It was a long time ago.”
Diane’s eyes filled with tears. “See? All this emotional turmoil,” she said. “It just dredges up – shit. Things you can’t change. Oh, God, I might as well tell you what’s really going on, even though I haven’t told Mo yet. I don’t exactly know how.”
“What?” Nora asked, alarmed.
“I had a letter from Carah yesterday. She’s pregnant. She wants to come see me. She wants me to come there for the baby’s birth, in January.”
“But that’s wonderful,” Nora said.
“I know,” Diane said, crying in earnest now. “I know. But since I got the letter all I can think about is myself when she and Rose were babies. How miserable I was. How much I loved them, but didn’t know what to do with them half the time. How I just gave them up because of Audrey. Totally buckled and let Bob and his mother –”
Nora reached across the inner tube and took Diane’s hand. “Diane,” she said. “Come on. They were seniors in high school when that happened. You were a wonderful mother to them until then. You’d have kept on being wonderful to them, if they’d have let you. If Bob hadn’t let his mother poison them against you. Now Carah’s pregnant and seeing what she should’ve seen all along. Isn’t this what you always hoped for?”
“Yes,” Diane sobbed.
“Of course, Mo will be happy for you. Won’t she?”
“Yes,” Diane said. “I don’t know. I’m scared, Nora. You know how she hates change.”
“But a baby,” Nora said.
Just then, a long line of canoes approached and they had to paddle madly to get out of the way. Teenagers wearing bright yellow tee shirts with “Got Jesus?” printed on the back.
“I swear,” Diane said. “This morning, I read about this Christian camp in Maine where they have Bible verses on the canoe paddles,” she said. “All I could think was, ‘For God so loved the world,’ smack. ‘Lead me by the still waters,’ smack. That’ll pretty much tell you what kind of state I’m in.”
Nora laughed. “A baby,” she repeated. “A baby is a glorious thing.”
“Yes!” Diane said, smiling through her tears. “My God. Break out the wine again. I’m going to be a grandmother. How bizarre is that?”
They drank a toast, ate the sandwiches Diane had packed and, for the next hour or so, drifted lazily toward Lake Michigan. Nora closed her eyes and dozed intermittently, warmed by the green sunshine dappling down through the pines. There was the small slap of water against the inner tube, the occasional splash of fish, the low buzz of insects.
“I had a brother who went,” she had said.
She was grateful that Diane had not questioned her about Bobby, but in the next days could not help thinking about him. Sitting in the booth at the Big Wheel laughing and sharing secrets that Christmas break before he shipped out – and how his time in Vietnam, his death there, had set her on the path that had brought her to this life which, then, she could never have imagined.
16
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
The first week of August, the litany of Claire’s last moments began: last day at work, last volleyball game, last sunset picnic on the beach, last overnight with her high school girlfriends, last cheeseburger at the Friendly. Tonight was the last concert of the season at Interlochen, a tradition since Claire was a baby. Even Jo was going. They’d loaded her wheelchair into Monique’s van, then strapped her, muddled but cheerful, into the backseat, Claire and Dylan on either side of her.
It was a beautiful evening, cool and clear, still light as they joined the throngs of people winding along the various wooded paths, all of which led to the Kellogg Arena at the center of the grounds. There were stone and clapboard practice huts set back among the trees, the occasional earnest camper framed in a window bent over his instrument and the strains of music drifting into the evening air, mingling with the sound of people talking.
Charlie and Monique walked ahead a bit under the canopy of trees, chatting as they always did, about their time at the camp as teenagers. The rules were stricter then, they never failed to remember. Campers were always in their uniforms: girls in navy blue corduroy knickers, pale blue shirts and red knee socks; boys in navy blue pants and blue oxford shirts. Now they were dressed in infinite variations of navy blue and red – most only vaguely in uniform, sporting red knee socks with a blue mini-skirt or a blue “Interlochen” sweatshirt over a pair of jeans.
Dylan pushed Jo’s wheelchair and Claire walked alongside, chatting to her grandmother who gazed up at her, beatific, as if she could not imagine why this lovely young woman had decided to be so attentive to her.
“It’s sweet,” Diane said, as if reading her thoughts. “The two of them with Jo.” Then smiled. “Getting ready to come tonight, I was thinking about the time we went to visit her and they’d wheeled everybody into the lounge to hear the old guys playing big band music.”
“God,” Nora said. “The piano player on oxygen!”
“And all those old ladies bobbing to ‘A String of Pearls.’ Probably feeling twenty. All I could think was that it’ll be us in thirty years, only it’ll be, what? ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? It’s so bizarre, isn’t it? I think of my mom at the age we are now, and she was old.”
“We’re old,” Nora said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Not old like my mom was in her fifties,” Diane said. “We don’t have that awful helmet hair, do we? We’re not wearing knits. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m going to be a grandmother – speaking of which, Carah called today. Both she and Rose are coming. In September.”
Nora stopped short and gave her a hug. “They’re really, truly coming!”
Diane nodded, blinking back tears. “God. I’m so – emotional about it. I know I’m about to drive Mo crazy. I can’t wait, I’m scared to death. We’re fixing up Betty’s room for them,” she said. “Painting. Taking down those hideous drapes and getting blinds that let the light in. We’ve got a guy coming tomorrow to give us an estimate.”
“W
ait,” Nora said. “You’re redecorating Betty’s room?”
“It was Mo’s idea,” Diane said. “You can’t get Betty out of Florida with a crowbar anymore, and Mo said, why should we keep that hideous early American furniture just because she picked it out forty years ago.
“Mo said that?”
Diane laughed. “She’s not saying she thinks we ought to get rid of it. Knowing Mo, she’ll make an annex to the Museum of Charlie, and put it there. But she’s been so great about the girls coming. She’s so happy for me. She totally surprises me sometimes, you know?”
“Mmm,” Nora had responded, thinking that she could not remember the last time Charlie had surprised her, or if he had ever surprised her at all. She tried as she had countless times in the past months to remember how it had felt to be happy with Charlie, before Claire’s school decision came between them. Days and days, each virtually the same. What a comfort they had seemed to her, unfolding – Claire at the center of them. Charlie kept a shoebox of her baby things out in the barn, along with the mementoes from his own childhood. Her pacifier, a teething ring, a tiny pair of moccasins. Her first bike was there, too: pink, with a flowered seat and glittery plastic streamers. All the images that came to mind when she concentrated on remembering Charlie in those happy times had Claire in them – the two of them often framed by a window or doorway. Charlie bending over to position the awkward baseball glove on her little hand, adjusting the brim of the “Michigan” baseball cap so she could see better, then throwing the softball again and again – from just steps away, so she would be sure to catch it. Charlie sitting beside her on the piano bench, leaning to run one finger across the notes on the score as she played to help her keep track of them and, years later, the two of them making music together – Claire on the cello, Charlie on his old violin.
Clear as anything, Nora saw them: Charlie giving Claire a hand-up so she could climb into his pickup and tag along on some errand with him, carrying her into Lake Michigan, showing her the right way to brush the dogs in the kennel. They’d built countless sand castles together, flown countless kites in the meadow. When she was not quite a year old, Nora remembered, Claire would raise her chubby arms when she saw him and he would walk her in a circle – through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and back through the kitchen again – until one day, to his great delight, she let go and toddled away from him.
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