The High Season

by Judy Blundell

  “Ruthie!” She stopped in front of her and put a hand on her arm. She was panting, almost doubled over. “Jem…the bouncy castle! We think she’s in there with Lucas. Mom-to-mom, you should maybe check.”

  “With Lucas?”

  Now her mind speeded up in a flutter of images. Jem, expectant, every muscle quivering, staring at the entrance to the party. He makes me laugh. Lucas is going to be there. Is that his date?

  Things went white.

  She took off, running flat out. She felt a raindrop, she felt the sudden, surprising strength of a wind gust. The bouncy castle strained at its ropes, and one side lifted completely off the ground.

  The events of the night now seemed inevitable, like the end of a play. She would pay. She would pay. The knowledge seared her with each thudding footstep, the grass slick under her feet. Ruthie now clearly heard someone screaming. Jem.

  “Holy fuck!” someone yelled.

  Another gust and the house rose, tilting, the wind now underneath it, lifting it, the last three ropes straining.

  There was no breath in her lungs to shout. There was too much distance between her and the bright-pink inflatable prison, and panic and running had squeezed her lungs tight. The unfolding nightmare of this.

  The house was now a good five feet in the air, and Lucas slid out, hitting the ground with a shout of aggrieved pain. She saw Jem’s face, white and scared, holding on at the opening as the house bounced.

  Ruthie skidded to a halt underneath. Jem looked down into her face. Their eyes locked. Ruthie shook her head hard. She held up both hands to say stop. The castle was too high, she needed to wait for the gust to die.

  Behind her daughter, Doe’s hands were on Jem’s shoulders, her mouth by her ear. Someone, one of the crew, threw himself at the rope and tried to grab it as it whipped out of reach. Joe was next to him, straining to catch it.

  The wind flattened for a moment, the house tilting closer to the ground.

  Ruthie screamed a scream that could wake up a slumbering world. “Jump!”

  Doe let go of her shoulders and Jem leaped out, in the air for less time than Ruthie could even cry or pray, and then she was on the ground, landing on her feet, legs bent, even sticking the landing for a moment, her daughter, her baby, her beauty, her treasure, her heart, her love, her life, miraculously summoning up three years of gymnastic training before she got bored and too tall, then tilting onto the ground and Ruthie was there almost in time to catch her. Holding her so tightly, sobbing into her hair, saying It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

  And then the divots came loose and the house took off in a great galumphing heave, ropes swinging like Tarzan. Up, up in the sky, fifteen feet, twenty feet, and a wisp of twirling fabric drifted out of the opening, pirouetting like a tiny dancer as it fell so softly on the lawn. Jem’s bra.

  And Doe was still inside.

  Everyone looking up into the darkening sky, breaths held. People shouting holy shit, people screaming. The castle tilted past a tree, its branches scraping the bottom, past the museum grounds, riding another gust.

  Joe and the crew frozen on the lawn, looking up, and Shari screaming.

  And they all saw it then, something incredible, a blur of almost color, a dress made of light, a cloud, an angel, a girl falling through the sky.

  61

  YOU WOULD EXPECT Shari to be the type of person who would shatter. You’d expect hysteria, you’d expect appeals to Jesus.

  She was calm. She spoke urgently but politely to the paramedics. She sat in the chair in the emergency room, bent double, her face against her knees. Ruthie kept her hand flat on Shari’s back. When she sat up again her face was pale. Ruthie recognized a mother who had tightened every string, screwed every bolt, to hold herself together because she was coming apart.

  “One day I was upset about something,” she said to Ruthie. One tear trailed down her cheek. “What was it, I don’t know, probably money, it was always money. And I said out loud, What’s going to happen to us, Dora? She was, I don’t know, maybe four, maybe five? And she piped up from the floor where she was playing. We’re all going to die, Mommy. She was always a no-bullshit kid.”

  “I know,” Ruthie said. But she didn’t know. The truth was she’d never gotten to know Doe very well.

  None of them had seen Doe land. Within minutes they heard the sirens, even after everyone seemed to be running in circles. The paramedics arrived so fast no one at the party had time to find her. She had landed in Laura and Sam Beecham’s pool, right on top of one of the enormous inflatables that had blown into their yard. Earlier in the evening and with great irritation (it had almost hit their dog), Sam had wrestled it into the pool and tied it to the ladder. Sam was an orthopedist. He was the first one to reach Doe. He had called 911.

  “Can you call her girlfriend? She’d want to know. Lark Mantis.” Shari’s jaw wobbled, and her teeth began to chatter. “Doe has been staying over there in East Hampton all summer. They’ll want to know, right?”

  Ruthie had already tried to call Mike, but he wasn’t answering. She didn’t have Adeline’s cell number in her phone. Finally she did the only thing she could think of. She texted Joe.

  At hospital no news yet. Jem is ok. Not even a sprain. Can you tell Adeline and Mike what happened? Mike not answering. Also Doe’s girlfriend is Lark Mantis. Can you alert them? Thx

  The text came back immediately, he would do it, he would come to the hospital if she needed him, how was Jem, could he do anything.

  She stared down at the text. He was the last person she could ask to help carry her through this night. When she’d run to the car to drive Shari to the hospital, the painting had been gone from the car roof. Who else but Joe would have taken it?

  The story would unravel. The forgery, the theft, Lucas. Tomorrow would happen. The sun always does come up. She would realize that the fear and panic she’d lived with through most of August had been nothing.

  But that was tomorrow. Tonight Jem had leaped into thin air and survived. Now she sat next to her, her knees up under her chin, her face pale, her jaw working. Something was wrong with Jem. If Shari was holding herself still, Jem was frozen, except for her jaw. Everything in life had funneled down to this, sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital waiting room as minutes passed, each one ticking closer to a reality no one wanted to face.

  She could feel time move in her pocket. When she had caught Jem after the jump and held her while Doe had flown away, while everyone had screamed and shouted, while she had gasped and shuddered, she’d put one hand down on the grass and she had found Lewis Berlinger’s watch, right there, as though waiting for her.

  How it got there she didn’t know, and she never would. She would take it as the miracle it truly was. She must have been mistaken, in her distraction. She must have worn it to work earlier in the summer. The band had always been loose, it had slipped off her wrist. Finding it again…it shouldn’t have happened to her, something that lucky, not to that frantic, pathetic creature focused on something so stupid. A house. A house instead of a child.

  The automatic doors opened and Mike and Adeline rushed in. When Jem saw her father she started to cry. He ran and she stood and hurtled herself in his arms.

  She had never seen Mike look so helpless.

  “It’s all my fault, Daddy!” Jem’s face looked like her baby face, as though it had compressed into a tight ball of misery, mouth open, cheeks red and slick.

  “No, dear,” Adeline said. “It is not your fault.”

  The authority in Adeline’s voice! It filled the room, the air, their bodies!

  Ruthie wanted to kneel at this woman’s feet and thank her, because Adeline had spoken and stopped Jem’s tears.

  She put her hand on the top of Jem’s head, cupping it. “It is everyone’s fault but yours,” Adeline added. “You hear me?”

  The inner
doors to the ER swished open and a woman strode out, dressed in scrubs and clogs. The authority said doctor and the gaze was on them. They knew, and they stood. Ruthie grabbed Shari’s hand, and her hand was squeezed so tight she felt her bones come together.

  “Mrs. Callender?” The doctor reached out and put her hand on Shari’s shoulder, and the humanity of the gesture telegraphed the worst news so clearly that Shari, for the first time that night, cried out. Her knees started to go and the doctor hurriedly said, “She’s okay,” even as she helped ease her backward into the chair.

  62

  THE RIDE HOME felt so long. It was four in the morning. Gray light. Sunday morning, and the rain had stopped, and the world was slumbering. A season was turning.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Ruthie said. “Adeline is right.”

  “Doe jumped in to save me,” Jem said. “She saw what was happening and she jumped in.”

  Ruthie knew what every parent knew. She was in the perfect place to have this conversation: the car. It was the place teenagers told their secrets, because it was the place they did not have to meet their parents’ eyes.

  “What was happening?” she asked. “I mean, before.”

  Jem jerked her head and looked out the window. “I liked Lucas,” she said.

  “So he was the boy.”

  “Yeah. I know he was too old, okay?”

  Ruthie’s hands tightened on the wheel. She was grateful for the past tense, but she would kill him anyway. She had a whole list of crimes on her sorry docket, why not add one more?

  “Were you…seeing him?”

  “No! He came to the farm stand to see me. And I saw him a few times. Not a date or anything! Just, like, walks around Greenport. He’d buy me ice cream or whatever. We texted a lot. Tonight I just wanted…I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But I started it. I said, Let’s go into the castle before they take it down. I just wanted to be alone with him. We went in together and we just sort of fell, the way you do in a bouncy castle. He said it was like a waterbed. And so we kissed and stuff.”

  And stuff. What a wide load of possibility in that. Ruthie thought of the bra, revolving in the wind.

  “He doesn’t care about me,” Jem said. “He didn’t even try to help. He pushed past me, Mom. He jumped out. And then when Doe fell, did you see? He just took off. He didn’t check to see if I was okay or if she was okay. He just left! How could he do that, Mommy? How could somebody do that?”

  Should she drop off Jem, drive directly to Adeline’s, and kill him now?

  She thought of the wild turkeys in Orient. Those prehistoric creatures, noble and hulky. They took their own time. They meandered across the road with majesty and purpose, with elastic, nodding necks. They did not scurry, they did not hesitate, no matter how many cars honked. They owned their own road. Squirrels were common roadkill. Deer. Turkeys? Never.

  The secret was to let the monster bearing down on you know that you had a path and you were sticking to it. The secret was to take your time.

  She parked the car by the playhouse. The pool glinted an unreal blue.

  Jem got out, hugging herself. There was a slight chill in the air, the first chill of fall. Ruthie’s phone buzzed. It was Joe.

  Doe?

  She’s ok. Staying overnight at hospital.

  She waited, her fingers in the air.

  Thank you.

  She stared hard at the ellipses on the phone that told her he was typing. They weren’t even a mile apart. Holding their phones and not knowing what to say. The dots disappeared—he erased something. Appeared again.

  I’m so glad. Btw I delivered your pizza.

  …

  Sleep tight.

  She didn’t know what that meant but it seemed he was telling her to go to sleep. Which was good, because now they were so exhausted that they could barely walk. They changed into pajamas. They were reckless and did not floss.

  “Will you sleep in my bed?” Jem asked. Blue smudges under her eyes.

  Ruthie drew up Carole’s fine cotton blanket. In the dimness she saw the streak of tears on Jem’s face, steady, silver, dripping down cheek, rolling off chin, down her neck.

  “I had sex with him, Mommy,” she said.

  The softness of Carole’s blanket. The exquisite comfort of the sheet under her hand as she smoothed it over Jem. Ruthie was wide awake now.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I just wanted to connect with somebody,” Jem said. “I wanted a boyfriend. I know that’s stupid.”

  “Not stupid. Did he force you?”

  “No. I wanted to.”

  Ruthie let out her breath slowly, so Jem wouldn’t hear it.

  “I figured okay, this is my time. Then years from now, even if I’m being a total idiot, even if I regret it, even if he’s way too old, it will just become part of my story, like what hospital I was born in or what age I was when I got my ears pierced.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I sort of let him think I wasn’t a virgin.”

  “Mmm.”

  “But it was so wrong!” Jem began to sob.

  Ruthie got out of bed for the tissue box. It took effort not to rend it asunder. She got back in bed and handed Jem a tissue.

  “Did you ask him to stop?”

  “No. It wasn’t like that.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to ask this, did you use—”

  “Yeah. He had one. But I don’t think he…um, finished. I just didn’t think there would be so much pushing involved. To you know, get it done, I guess? I just waited for it to be over. All of a sudden I wasn’t into it at all. And that was the worst. And that’s when I noticed the castle really tilting. I could feel the wind underneath it. He didn’t notice at first, because…you know. And I got panicky and he told me to be quiet.” Jem put her hands over her face. “He told me to be quiet! Like I didn’t matter!”

  The story came out in shuddered bursts now. Ruthie handed her one tissue after another. “Then he realized what was happening and he got scared. We felt it lift. And the next thing I knew he was pulling up his pants and running for the door. He kept slipping and falling, it was almost funny. Only it wasn’t. I think that’s when Doe crawled in. She smacked him really hard. Right in the face.”

  Score one for Doe. She owed her Jem’s life, and now this. Flowers weren’t enough, a basket from Locavoracious, nothing was enough except a trunk full of gold.

  “And he just jumped out and left us! I was hanging on so hard, and Doe told me I had to time a jump and I would have to let go. I said I couldn’t and she said I could. I looked down and saw you yelling jump, and Doe yelled now, and I jumped. And then she blew away. I was on the ground and she was in the air. And he…was running for his car.”

  Ruthie held her, rocking her, but Jem sat up straight.

  “You have to promise not to tell Daddy.”

  “I can’t promise that, honey.”

  “Mom, just listen. It will break up him and Adeline. You know it will.”

  Of course it would.

  “It just feels like…with everything…somebody should be happy. If I was the reason they broke up, that would be just sort of awful, you know?”

  “But you aren’t the reason, Lucas is,” Ruthie said.

  Jem gave her a look through her tears that clearly said Give me a break.

  “But if they do get married, you’re going to have to see him, at least sometimes. You’ll be sort of…family.”

  A look came over Jem’s face then that gave Ruthie a different picture of her daughter. The strong person she would become. No. Already was. “Not family.”

  “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  “Please, Mom!”

  “Let me sleep on it. It’s time for bed now. It’s time for sleep. We can talk more in the morning.”

  Murmurin
g, she drew up the covers again. In the moonlight she placed her head close on the same pillow. She whispered in Jem’s hair. Not your fault, baby, not your fault, Doe is fine, everything will be okay. Still whispering, she felt the moment Jem slid into sleep. She lifted on one elbow to watch her. The moon was so bright.

  Despite all of it, this terrible, terrible night, she felt the bright presence of hope.

  Pool toys and fortunate landings and the light of the moon. Miracles abounding.

  63

  EVERYTHING HURT, AND all they gave her was extra-strong ibuprofen. A torn ligament in her knee, two bruised ribs from hitting a branch on the way down (which, apparently, was lucky because it broke the fall). She had landed like a circus performer, the doctor said approvingly. Feet first. Doe had no memory of hitting the pool or what came after until the ambulance. The last thing she remembered was running across the lawn, jumping in the castle, punching Lucas, telling Jem to jump, and then…liftoff.

  Somewhere along the way she’d lost Lucas’s watch. She had put it in her pocket and now it was gone.

  Nothing lost that was hers. Nothing broken.

  Lark had not come. She had not called, or texted.

  Doe swung her legs over the bed. “You need rest,” the nurses all said, and then they woke you up every fifteen fucking minutes to check your whatevers. Now it was the next day. Shari had gone for coffee and breakfast. The relief of her absence was something, anyway. She had a crashing headache but it wasn’t from injuries, it was from Shari, talking, making plans. Doe would be released as soon as the doctor came. The doctor would be here soon they kept saying. That was two hours ago.

  The bouncy castle was front-page news. It was THE BIG BOUNCE in the New York Post and MANTIS BASH CRASH in the Daily News. She wouldn’t want to be Lark at the breakfast table this morning. It was only a matter of time before they blamed her lack of experience for the disaster.