Tom leans in close. “You’re not far off,” he says, and now his eyes are definitely smiling.
You grin from ear to ear.
“Jenny!” he shouts again, and this time there is something playful in his voice. He turns to us. “We eat things besides grilled cheese in Nysa, you know.”
Night Swimming
We spent the rest of that summer before our senior year of high school cleaning up Tom’s family cabin. His parents gave him a chunk of money for his “road trip,” and those were our funds. The four of us ripped out carpets, tearing up our knuckles, and laughed after we pulled so hard we fell backwards. Tom and I did light roof work, mostly patching the obvious holes and splits. We reinforced the dock and replaced some rotted boards on the deck. We trapped mice inside the house and groundhogs outside. We mowed and mowed with a mower we borrowed from our closest neighbor, about five miles away. We found four old kayaks at a garage sale.
The stories we told our parents, regarding the road trip or that we were all working at a summer camp in upstate Maine, were absorbed without incident. We told them it was a wilderness camp, so there would be no mail. No phone calls. Nothing. When I told my parents, I think my dad might have nodded while he turned the page in the newspaper, and my mother said something like, “Okay, honey, have a nice summer,” while staring wistfully out the kitchen window.
Neither Tom’s nor Shirley’s parents had any concerns. Mary told her father, but he was so drunk when they had the conversation that she wasn’t completely sure he took it in. She told us her mother was happy she could get out of the house for a time.
While the projects we did might make it sound like we were hard workers, let me settle that point at once—we spent the majority of our time lounging in the water, taking naps, going on hikes, swimming, kayaking, lying on the dock and staring at the stars, making out with our respective significant others, and falling asleep on the deck or in the living room to the sound of the crickets and the loons and the cicadas. We slept in until noon almost every day, worked until dinner, and relaxed late into the night.
On one of those late nights, when the air was warm and the waves came in off the lake in steady ripples, Tom and Shirley and I sat on the dock, staring at the moon. Mary stood up and stretched, her form a reed bending here and there. She started walking the long dock back to the cabin.
“You going to bed?” Shirley called after her, disappointment in her voice.
“I’ll be back.” She laughed, her words floating back to us.
Her departing form was backlit by the single outside light that hung by the rear door of the cabin. She was a gracefully moving shadow, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.
“Man, you’ve got it bad!” Tom shouted, hooting out into the dark void that hung over the lake. It felt like we were the only people left on the planet.
I grinned and lay on my back, staring up at the sky. Shirley laughed. The heavy summer air swallowed the sounds we made, left me feeling melancholy and reflective. It was hard to believe how quickly my life had changed—the previous summer I had been aimless and on my own.
“What a summer,” I said.
“I don’t want to go back to real life.” Shirley sighed.
Even Tom was serious. “Nothing like it,” he said, and I thought I could almost detect a huskiness in his voice, a depth of emotion he usually managed to cover up with something boisterous.
I stood up.
“You too?” Tom asked.
But I didn’t turn for the house. I walked the ten steps between us and the end of the pier, stared out over the water, and dove in.
The water was cool but not cold. I hovered there in that other world, paddling to keep myself under, my hair drifting like seaweed. If I could have survived underwater, I might have stayed there forever—everything was silence and peace and darkness. When I came up, I swam away from the dock, out into the night.
“C’mon,” Tom called after me. “Don’t go out alone, Paul.”
But I kept swimming. Pure, youthful energy had gathered in me, collected from Mary and the melancholy night and the moon, and I swam harder. Soon the porch light was a dot, like some star far behind me. A stiff breeze came and went, and the surface of the lake was brittle, choppy. When I tried floating on my back, the small waves came up over my mouth, and I coughed the water out, treading darkness.
Something came up out of the water, something large and frantic and direct. I stifled a shout, but it was only Tom.
“There you are,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Idiot. You didn’t grow up around water, did you? Don’t go out by yourself at night. Not like this. C’mon.”
He swam back to the dock, and for a moment I considered going out even farther, leaving all of them behind, even Mary. Why did I want to keep running? What was I running from? Could I see us getting older, the years gathering around us? Maybe I could sense that summer was the end of our youth, the last time things would be that way, carefree and light. I wanted to swim away from whatever it was that was coming for us, whatever it was that would take it all away.
But I didn’t keep swimming away. I followed Tom back, the small, single porch light leading us home. By the time I got to the dock, Tom was already sitting beside Shirley, and when my head peeked up over the edge of the wooden boards and I pulled myself up, he shook his head.
“You are such a—”
But he never finished, because that’s when Mary, still inside the house, screamed.
Shirley
You and I follow Tom out of the diner parking lot, sufficiently stuffed. Jenny, aka the witch queen, at the continued requests of Tom, had brought out various plates of diner food for us, and what we didn’t eat, Tom packed in Styrofoam clamshell containers and carried out with him.
“For tonight,” he said. “I love leftovers.”
Now he turns onto Main Street, away from the diner, the golden light flickering from his BMW’s turn signal. It’s a beautiful car, and with the clothes he wears, I’m beginning to think that Tom has done very well for himself.
“I like Tom,” you say, and I can tell the food has made you sleepy. I could use an afternoon nap myself.
I don’t reply. I always liked Tom. I liked him a lot. But there is something about him now that seems far away. The man we sat beside in the diner, the one who told you funny stories about me from when I was a teenager, the one who insisted on buying the food, the one who wrote his address on the back of a napkin in case we get separated—that Tom is somehow an outer layer. I can tell the old Tom is in there somewhere, but he’s buried deep.
“So, you were old friends, huh?” you ask.
“We were. Inseparable.”
“Only the two of you?”
“Well, your grandmother and I spent a lot of time with Tom and Shirley. But I left Nysa with your father . . .”
“After Grandma went away?”
Have I told you that already, or is this one of those strange facts you seem to pull out of thin air?
“That’s right. After Grandma went away, I scooped up your daddy and left Nysa. I couldn’t bear to stay.”
“That must have been sad,” you say, and it was—the saddest thing ever—but I can’t put that into words.
I nod, clear my throat, and keep following Tom’s car as he winds his way into the countryside. At first it feels like we’re going to the old cabin—we seem to be heading in that direction. Am I ready for that so soon? I think again of the things the man in the diner said about the drownings, about staying away from the lake. I make a mental note to ask Tom about that later.
But we turn off the roads I recognize and drift through fields I don’t remember. There are road names I am unfamiliar with—did I know them at one time? Forty years ago, would I have known where we are?
At some point we turned onto a private lane with fewer potholes than the country road. Tom slows down, the lane narrows, and tree branches reach in over us like fingers. His car is sleek in the afternoon
shadows, and slants of sunlight fall through the forest. Even though the windows are closed, I can smell the fall leaves and the fields we left behind and the approaching lake.
You are peeking up over the edge of the window again.
“What do you see, Pearl?” I ask, but you won’t answer.
The narrow lane with trees pressing in on all sides suddenly opens up into a large clearing, and we arrive at Tom’s house. We have also arrived at the lake. There is green grass on both sides of the drive, and the lane which widens into a small parking area. His BMW pulls lazily into a yawning garage door.
The house is massive, part cabin, part stone house, and laid out in an irregular way. There are strange peaks and dormers and windows in places you wouldn’t expect, like some of the floors of the house are in between the main floors. It looks more like a stretch of uneven, ancient row homes than one house.
Beyond the grass, beyond the house, is the lake. This is not the lake house where we spent the summer, but that is the same lake. I feel the weight of the past.
“Oh, Grampy!” you squeal, clicking the door handle and hopping out.
I know you’re taken by the water and the size of the house—I should probably call it a mansion. I can hear your footsteps on the pavement, but the sound vanishes as your feet enter the grass.
The longer I examine the house, the larger it seems. I have an empty feeling inside of me, an uneasiness. Part of it was the sadness I saw in Tom’s eyes at the diner when he first came over, as well as the fact that my mission of finding you a place to stay in Nysa seems more and more outlandish the longer we are here. Then there’s the stillness of the trees, the removed choppiness of the lake, the way the candy-blue sky drapes around us all the way down to the tree line, placing us in a bubble.
And always, there is the knot on the side of my head.
I reach up and touch it. It feels bigger. A wave of nausea comes and goes, much faster than the other times. I grit my teeth. That’s the last thing I want to do, throw up all over Tom’s manicured lawn.
He emerges from the side door of the garage, and I stand where the driveway meets the yard. I expect to see him grinning, proud of this beautiful house, the view, the exclusivity that seclusion can bring. It’s the way I imagined him the entire drive here, speeding along in his expensive car the way he drove when he was eighteen, grinning, hand out the window. Did he roll down the window while we drove here from town? I didn’t notice.
But he’s not smiling. In fact, his face is drawn, and he seems even sadder than at the diner. You come around the corner of the house, run across to him, and grab his hand in an unexpected show of affection, and he reaches up with his other hand, pulls down gently on his chin.
“Can I show you the house?” he asks in a weary voice.
If the day outside is bright and blue and winsome, the inside of the house is nearly the opposite. Its floors are cold stone tile and dark hardwood, the walls covered in rich colors that surely took many coats of paint. The curtains are thick and swollen and keep out the light. There are old paintings on the walls, each with its own dim light above it. Some of the interior walls are brick, and I wonder if this was once a smaller home Tom added on to. I’ll have to ask him.
We follow him through a winding maze of hallways, up half a flight of stairs, back down, and around a corner.
“This will be your room, Pearl,” Tom says, and as you and I enter, I can sense the wonder rising between us.
The room is large, sits at the front left corner of the house, and would be long enough to have three beds side by side, although there is only one, right inside the door. The rest of the room stretches out in a long rectangle away from us. The ceiling is much higher than the ceilings in the other rooms, and it is painted light blue, so at the edges of my sight it feels more like the sky than a ceiling.
But the walls—there are no walls, not exactly. There are only bookshelves. The walls are covered in books from floor to ceiling, from corner to corner, the only break being two tall, narrow windows that face the driveway and another window at the far side of the room that faces the side yard and, beyond it, the forest. The shelves are stained a light, almost transparent stain so that the wood comes alive. Light comes through the far window in a long, shining beam.
“Oh,” you say, and that is all. You take two or three hesitant steps into the room, waiting for Tom to say it’s a mistake, this is not your room, you shouldn’t go any farther. But he doesn’t say anything. I glance at him, and he is watching you, his face placid, his eyes sharp.
The floors of the room are a light wood, but the wood is only visible around the edges, because the floor is covered in the most incredible Persian rug I’ve ever seen, bright red with swirling patterns of blue and green and tan. The short ends of the rug have long, ancient-looking tassels that are tangled on each other. Your feet sink into the rug.
“That’s why we take off our shoes before we come into the house,” Tom says in an emotionless voice.
You nod, your face serious, looking slightly embarrassed because you have your shoes on. You slip carefully out of them and place them beside the door. There is a round table by the far wall of books, and you move toward it. Three books rest on the table, and you sit lightly in one of the two chairs, your eyes sinking into the book you open.
“This is the room I built for Shirley at the end,” Tom says in a quiet voice. The room is so long and he talks so quietly that I doubt you can hear us. “She lived her last days in here, reading, sleeping.” He pauses, and his voice is without emotion. “Don’t tell the girl. I wouldn’t want her to be afraid.”
“Shirley’s . . . gone?”
He sighs. “Yes.”
“How?”
“She had cancer. But that’s not how she died.”
I look at him, waiting.
“She drowned,” he says, and I can feel my pulse quicken.
“Drowned?”
He nods. I think again of what the man told me in the diner, but I’d rather talk about that with Tom when Pearl isn’t around.
“So, you were married all this time?”
“Nearly forty years,” he says.
I sense his disappointment that we weren’t together all that time, that he and Shirley and Mary and I weren’t great friends for all of those decades. Disappointment that I left them. That I never came back.
“So, we just missed her.”
“She would have loved seeing you.” He glances over at Pearl. “And her.”
I am penetrated by a deep guilt. “This room. It’s rather incredible.”
“I don’t come in here much.”
I nod, walk to the table, and check out the three books. One is called Pan’s Labyrinth. It has a blue cover with a girl in the middle and tall trees growing up around the edges. I fold over the book you’re reading and see it is a worn paperback called The Golden Key. The third is a beautiful, sky-blue, hardback book embossed in gold lettering: The Light Princess.
Tom walks up behind me. “Shirley’s favorites.”
I look around at the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the endless books, and the rich red rug. I didn’t even look at the bed as we walked in. I guess the walls of books distracted both of us. But even the bed is perfect, sitting a little lower than most, with a post at each corner and pure white sheers rustling in the light.
“Are you sure?” I ask Tom.
He looks at me with questions in his eyes.
“She’s eleven years old,” I explain. “It’s very nice. I’m afraid she might ruin something. This rug is incredible.”
He waves away my concern. “Everything in here is very sturdy. Even the rug’s attached to the floor.”
“My main concern is not that she’s going to remove the rug,” I mumble.
“Does she wet the bed?” he asks in a loud voice.
“Wet the bed?” you say from the table, indignant, suddenly coming up out of the book.
“Yes,” Tom says without any hint of humor. “Do you
wet the bed?”
“No!”
“Can you follow simple instructions?” he asks.
“Yes,” you say, still indignant.
“Simple instructions,” Tom repeats, “such as, take off your shoes before coming inside?”
Your pale skin blushes red, and you stare at the carpet, nodding. You murmur something that sounds like, “Of course.”
“Do you know how to read a book without breaking the binding?”
You look at him. You don’t know how to read a book without breaking the binding.
“All right,” he says in a stern voice. “I’ll show you.”
Tom crosses the room and pulls out the chair beside you. He shows you how to hold the book so that the spine doesn’t crease, and that you shouldn’t press down on the pages when the hardback is open. But I can’t hear him because he’s talking in almost a whisper, or perhaps it’s the room and all the books are swallowing up the sound of his voice.
I stand there and watch him with you, and I think of all the things I won’t be able to teach you after I’m gone, all the things you’ll have to learn on your own or from people I don’t even know. It’s a source of pain, the idea that important people will enter your life who I will never know.
I turn and walk out of the room.
The Woman at the Window
I ran as fast as I could to the house, the rough wood trying to push splinters into my wet feet. The summer air was so heavy it held me back as I ran, the way dreams can keep you from lengthening your stride. Behind me, I could hear Tom catching up and Shirley shouting right behind him.
“Mary!”
The lone light above the deck entrance flickered as I flung open the screen and shot into the house. Mary screamed again, and her voice came from some muffled place.
“Mary! Where are you?”
I scanned the living room and the kitchen. Nothing. I ran through the small entryway and into the downstairs bathroom. She wasn’t there.
“Mary!”
But she wasn’t returning my cry. I ran up the stairs to the two small bedrooms.
The Weight of Memory Page 10