The Summer We Lost Her

by Tish Cohen

  Cass was silent a moment. Then, “Are you pissed?”

  He knew she wasn’t referring to the doctor. Their daughter hadn’t been due for nine more weeks. He’d been in a rush to get to court. Straightening his tie, he’d flicked off the bulb in the walk-in closet and stepped into the inky thickness of the bedroom, where Elise lay asleep, hardly daring to breathe lest he wake her. The narcoleptic surrender that slammed other pregnant women had skipped his bride. From the moment she’d found out, she was predatory in her edginess, her inability to sit still, pacing the perimeter of every room in the house as if looking for a way out of her own body.

  He’d left the bedroom. At the next doorway, he’d stopped: the early morning light was hitting the bars of the waiting crib.

  Downstairs, looking for his black brogues, he dug through the coat closet, beneath Elise’s winter riding boots, everyday riding boots, and sneakers. He banged residual barn dirt from his shoes. It wasn’t until he was about to leave, keys in hand, that he noticed Elise’s paddock boots by the front door. She’d continued to go to the barn, of course. Her coach was training the horse. Still, he debated going back upstairs. Waking her to reassure himself that, when she did go, it wasn’t to ride. But he was late and traffic would be a nightmare. He grabbed his keys and left.

  What good would anger do now? It was what it was. Matt watched a housefly travel along the bottom of the screen, then stop and greedily rub its forelegs together. He pried the screen loose and set the creature free. “You go forward.”

  Cass accepted this without comment. Then pointed. Gracie had wiggled close to River on the log. After a few moments of watching, she said, “They put that angry little bundle in your arms, and boom. Game over.”

  There had been no bundle placed in Elise’s arms. Elise was anesthetized, so only Matt saw their daughter’s tiny legs, little bird hands and feet with fingers and toes spread, flailing in the air as one person passed her to the next. Then wires sprouted from her torso. She was put into an Isolette. The primal moment where mother meets baby got mangled.

  She weighed three pounds five ounces.

  “Yeah.” Suddenly he needed to touch his daughter’s hair. He stood with a scrape of his chair. “Let’s go out and join them.”

  Glass in hand, he and Cass went down three steps through the back room again. This time, a stack of large books—all the same—caught his eye, and he picked one up. American Dreamer. The cover was the Woodstock photo, with “Cassidy Urquhart” emblazoned across the bottom. “This is yours?”

  “Comes out next week.” She watched him flip through the pages. Photograph after photograph of children in motion. “I’m with an art house press. Small publisher, but you get a lot of attention.”

  “These are gorgeous.”

  She shrugged.

  “How smart to use the photo on the front.”

  “Yeah. My editor thought it would help sell books—‘photos by the Woodstock Girl!’ ”

  “Ever find out who took it?”

  “The publisher tried to track him down, but no luck, so they figured what the hell? Let’s use it. He never came forward to sue Life for publishing it. Anyway, I kind of love that we don’t know, that he’s this flickering memory of a scraggly red beard and a crazy name. Patch. Or Badge.”

  “Probably the only one at Woodstock besides your parents and the musicians who could afford a camera. Which means he had a job. There’s one clue.”

  “Don’t spoil the mystery.”

  On the back cover was a quote by someone named Val Reiser. “Urquhart’s work stands up to Leibovitz in her early days . . .”

  Matt stared at Cass. Her success explained, beyond her dad’s life insurance, the improvements she’d made to the house and the ability to raise River on her own without a full-time job. “Do you sell most of your work?”

  “Don’t get me started on selling. Everyone makes money except the artist. My agent makes money, the gallery owners make money, the resale dealers make money. Even the buyers make money. Collectors who bought into my work in the early days—they paid next to nothing. And now they’re selling my stuff to third parties for tens of thousands of dollars. They make a mint, while I get nothing. I don’t profit at all.”

  Matt disliked talking money. It was the way he was raised. But Cass was likely starved to discuss her predicament with someone. “More often than not it goes the other way, though, right?” he asked her. “Buyers who gamble on new artists very often lose money. Artists like you are anomalies—and the reason a resale market exists.”

  “Yeah, well. Somehow the really big money ends up flying around me, without ever landing in my hands. I’ve been considering moving to California. They have a Resale Royalty Act. Artists can claim royalties in resales. Or they could, anyway. Not sure if it still exists. But New York State—hello, we’re ground zero of art, right? We’ve never had any such thing.” She shrugged. “Whatever. I love taking pictures. All these little moments. They matter more and more to me as time passes, because you can’t get them back. Good or bad, you can’t undo them. There’s something right about that.”

  A blush crept up Cass’s neck to bloom on her cheeks. He had a flash of her as a teen—a few months younger than he was. She was sitting alone in her parents’ orange Volkswagen Beetle in the driveway, smoking a joint, blasting the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”—the anthem of every adolescent boy who pined for a girl he didn’t have the balls to ask out.

  “They’re having a launch party for me at the Bookworm in town next week,” she said. “I have this fear it’ll be only my mom and Garth in the audience, so if you guys are around . . .”

  “I doubt that’ll happen, but we’ll be there. For sure.”

  Cass looked through the back glass doors at the kids. “You hear about the bears this year?”

  “No.”

  “One walked into Grocery Mart at noon last week. Strolled right through the automatic doors and headed for the deli counter like he was picking up a platter for a backyard barbecue. It’s pretty crazy. Someone said the cold spring meant the plants came up late. Then I heard it’s the females. They’re all amorous this year for some reason.” She started outside with a chuckle. “They’re club hopping.”

  “You could’ve opened with that before we left the kids outside, Urquhart.” Matt stepped out the back door behind her and down the steps toward the fire. A heavy cloud cover had rolled across the sky. Looked like the rain had followed them from the city.

  “We haven’t seen any around here. Yet. Hey!” she called out. “Who wants to play I Spy with My Little Eye?”

  “Ten minutes, Cass,” Matt said. “It’s after midnight.”

  He watched her get the kids settled in chairs. If he’d been asked back then how Cass Urquhart would turn out—hell, if you’d asked anyone alive in the sixties how the Woodstock Girl would turn out—everyone would describe her exactly as she was: laid-back and insanely talented, living in Lake Placid, barefoot around a bonfire. Priorities in order—cupboards full of chipped mugs, but walls covered with portraits of her son.

  * * *

  BACK IN NATE’S pillowy bed, Matt glanced at his sleeping wife. He had no choice but to decline the partnership. There was no telling an athlete who’s hoped and prayed and trained and sacrificed, who’s dared to attempt something almost no one on earth will ever accomplish—now that her dream might actually come true—that the timing was a little off. This wasn’t a job to Elise. It was her life.

  – CHAPTER 8 –

  She’d forgotten how chilly an Adirondack morning in June could be. With her husband and daughter still asleep, Elise pulled a heavy sweater of Matt’s over a T-shirt and shorts and started downstairs, blowing on cold hands.

  She’d woken up from a terrible dream.

  There she was, standing outside a church, trying to pull open a door that had locked after Matt and Gracie went in. When she peered inside, Gracie had become a young woman in a wedding gown. Tall and slender
, with no crutches, she moved with refinement and fluidity. She was getting married. But Elise could see her only through a window. It was cold outside. Snow started to fall. Elise raced from window to window and banged on the glass with an open palm. No one turned. She could see now that there was a coffin on the pulpit. It was also a funeral, but whose? There was Matt, in the first pew on the right. He was holding hands with a woman. She turned enough so that Elise could see her face. It was her father’s second wife. And the person in the coffin was Elise.

  Most certainly inspired by Gracie’s plane crash question. And a waste of mental energy to think about for even one more second.

  On the paneled wall going down the stairs, the same familiar family photos: Sorensons on the lake, Sorensons on the ski hill, Sorensons at weddings, Sorenson Christmases. Matt’s cap-and-gown grad photos from high school, undergrad, law school at Rutgers. Photos of Gracie as a baby, a toddler; one when she was five and Nate was teaching her to drive his antique boat. Finally, at the bottom of the stairs, a few photos of the three of them that Matt had hung to make his wife feel better.

  As Elise crossed through the living room, she caught sight of a large animal in her periphery. A dead German shepherd on the hearth—stuffed? As she caught her breath, she realized it wasn’t just any German shepherd; it was Gunner. Nate had had his own dog taxidermied. Clearly Gracie had seen it: her tiara sat drunkenly over his ears.

  This was right out of a John Irving novel. Which was it—The Hotel New Hampshire? A taxidermied Labrador. But that was fiction—this was life! And, much like Irving’s Sorrow, this animal appeared to be thoroughly capable of scaring someone to death.

  She’d have to talk to Matt. They were not going to have Nate’s dead dog staring at them for the next two weeks.

  In the kitchen hung the vintage Ski New York poster she’d always loved. A woman in a snowflake sweater and red ski pants swishing down a slope on Splitkein wooden skis against a deep cobalt sky. Above the poster, Matt’s late grandmother’s old hickory Flexible Flyers were nailed to the log wall.

  She opened the door to the cool, moist air of the back porch, long ago winterized with electric baseboard heaters and thick storm windows Matt would remove for the sale. The battered antique table had to stretch twenty feet across the room—the top made from one long slab of pine. Neither the benches along the sides nor the mismatched wooden armchairs at the ends had cushions. Maybe Elise’s behind was bonier than the Sorensons’, because the hard wood never seemed to bother them. Tweed-covered sofa and chairs, as well as a coffee table groaning with board games, sat on a trampled rag rug in front of a fireplace that replicated the one in the main room.

  In one corner leaned a group of canoe paddles. Above the fireplace, crisscrossed wooden snowshoes. Along the strip of wall above the screened windows, a series of paint-by-numbers, all done by various Sorensons over the years, including Gracie.

  Ralph Lauren himself couldn’t have conjured up a decor more quintessentially Adirondack. Still, behind it all, lurking in every nook, every cranny . . . spiders.

  Outside, silvery-gray mist obliterated everything but the softened outline of the shed, the mass of blackish-green trees just beyond that, and the smooth surface of the lake. There was movement down by the water, not at their beachfront, but next door. A gorgeous woman in a big sweatshirt and bikini bottoms, darkish red-brown hair pulled back in a curly knot, sipped coffee at the end of the dock.

  Elise felt the tiniest bubbly sensation deep in her belly—a sip of San Pellegrino. It had happened more than once in the past few days, and she had been wondering if she’d eaten something slightly off or was fighting a stomach bug.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket.

  “So here’s what it’s like the day of the opening ceremonies,” Ronnie said when she picked up. “They keep all the athletes in a huge room for hours. You’re in there with the best of the best, right? In the downtime, you start to play games with the other members of the U.S. team. ‘Why is that Russian athlete so small?’ Then you realize: gymnast. ‘Why is that runner smoking a cigarette?’ Right—he’s French. They hand you a brown paper bag. It’s your lunch: a peanut butter sandwich, milk, and an apple. It gets that fancy. Then you change into whatever your team’s designer has decided you’ll wear.”

  “Go on.”

  “Later, you start to hear the dull roar of the stands filling up. Because countries are called out in alphabetical order, you’ll have a good long time to watch the other athletes step out. You’ll see the thrill on their faces from the monitors where you wait. There’ll be lights and music. Any number of weird effects. Finally, it’s time for the U.S. team. You file out of the dark and into the razzle-dazzle of camera flashes from the media stations all around you. You look out at all these athletes from all over the world, all of them sharing the same thought, ‘Holy hell, I made it.’ The only thing that feels better than that moment is when they hang a medal around your neck and play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

  “And you’re telling me this right now because . . . ?”

  “Mademoiselle Secretary has a suspensory ligament injury. Tamara’s pulling out of the Pan Ams in Toronto. Games open July tenth. Dressage on the eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth.”

  Elise sank down into a creaky wicker chair, tucking cold toes beneath her. The implications of Tamara’s misfortune, and the reason Ronnie had called so early, began to sink in.

  She tilted her head back to stare at the plank ceiling. “And she’s traveling reserve.”

  “Was. Now you’re traveling reserve.”

  “I’m going to the Pan Ams?”

  “And I need you back early, before we convene at Gladstone.”

  * * *

  SHE STOOD IN the kitchen, dazed. Life was changing so fast. But she didn’t have to return right away—she could take a few days up here. Still. How to tell Matt? How to tell Gracie?

  She thought, stupidly, for a moment, What if Gracie comes home with me? She could hang out at the stable while Elise rode, as she’d done so many summer days in the past. In the summer, kids of all ages hung out, whether in training themselves or waiting for Mom or Dad. Was it selfish parenting or good parenting to want Gracie with her? Selfish, maybe. Gracie was far better off here at the lake with Matt’s full attention.

  Breakfast. Get breakfast going. She’d stopped for groceries on the way out of Montclair to surprise her husband and daughter with French toast and fresh-squeezed orange juice. She set the old cast-iron pan on the stovetop, watched a dollop of butter spit and sizzle in the heat, then cracked four eggs into a large bowl.

  As she started to beat the eggs with a fork, glasses in the old porcelain sink caught her eye and she froze. Two stemmed glasses, inside each, a tiny puddle of red wine. She picked one up. It had lipstick on the rim.

  She glanced outside. The woman was gone.

  The familiar hammering inside her rib cage. Every time she was away, she convinced herself she’d beaten it. The distance padded her somehow, made her feel independent and strong. But when she returned, the fear that Matt might abandon her wrapped itself around her neck once again and squeezed.

  * * *

  IT WAS SEPTEMBER 7, 2004, the last time they’d celebrate the anniversary of their first date before the wedding day came along a year later to eclipse it. Elise wanted to go to the River Café, an old floating barge permanently moored beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The food was widely known to be mediocre, but the atmosphere was iconic New York City. There they were, Annie Hall and Alvy Singer, basking in the golden interior, looking out at the watery purples of the East River, the jewel-box Manhattan skyline, the ominous underside of the bridge, while Gershwin wafted in from another room. It was a bridge-and-tunnel crowd for sure, but a big rush of pride came with that view.

  “It was right in front of you,” Elise said, shaking out her napkin and refolding it on her lap. They were headed to the cabin the next morning, for Nate’s birthday. Matt had bought his grandfather new
binoculars and searched the entire apartment for Scotch tape so he could wrap the gift. Elise arrived home to pull the tape out of a drawer he’d already opened three times. Matt had been joking she’d planted it there.

  “Your plan is showing, E, and it’s not pretty.” He dipped a piece of bread in olive oil and popped it in his mouth. “You want to slowly drive me mad by hiding things and magically finding them.”

  “And what would be my end goal?”

  He considered this. “The heady intoxication of superiority. Winning at all cost. I wind up in a straitjacket and you get the bed to yourself. No more toilet seats up . . . that’s a bonus.”

  “Actually . . .” She ran her fingertip along the mouth of her wineglass. “This isn’t sounding half-bad. Plus, way less laundry.”

  “Matt Sorenson. Can I never be free of you?” A woman with long black hair and a kind smile stopped at their table. Like every woman who worked with Matt, Harriet wore heels Elise could never walk in.

  Matt got up to give her a quick hug. “They don’t like to advertise it,” he said, “but my job is to make sure the newbies have zero life outside the office.” He held out a hand to the towering bald man beside her, then gestured to Elise. “Finally you get to meet the beautiful woman I’m seeing. Elise, Harriet and her husband, Brent. Harriet came to us from Gerhart Lewison Carter. She’s on the Maaske case with me.”

  “And the Sincero case, and the Langton-Wan case, and the Levin case.”

  “Nice kid,” Matt said when they’d gone. “But she makes this weird clicking sound with her tongue when she’s focused.” Matt mimicked it by inhaling saliva pooled in his cheeks. “Gets annoying.”

  Elise stared out the window, lost in thought.

  “What?” he said. “What’d I do?”