The Fourth Summer

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  Seth hopped off the table when she came out and took a step toward her.

  “So this must be the boyfriend,” Gabe drawled, and as he spoke, Seth had come close enough for Gabe to recognize him. “Oh...you’re—” Gabe’s voice was less cocky. He turned to Caitlin. “You didn’t tell me that he was your boyfriend.”

  Caitlin shrugged.

  Seth stepped forward, his hand out. “Yes, I’m Seth Street. It’s good to meet you.” He was sounding very poised, very grown.

  Gabe muttered something and shook Seth’s hand without making eye contact.

  “So you work here?” Seth said, trying to make conversation.

  “Yeah”—Gabe still wasn’t looking at Seth—“I run the place, and Caitlin, tomorrow you need to do what I said.”

  What he had said was that someone needed to retrain Cyanne on the register. Cyanne was the girl who had messed up her drawer. Retraining her was not Caitlin’s job, and until this minute Gabe hadn’t thought so either. He just wanted to boss her around in front of Seth.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asked Seth.

  “Sure.” He took her skateboard from her as he often did, but when they reached the car, he came around to her side and opened the door for her, something he had never done before.

  “Okay, let me explain,” she said as soon as he was in the driver’s seat. “The other girls told me to tell him that I had a boyfriend. So I did. That was all. I didn’t mention any names or say anything else. But, of course, he would think it was you. I hope—”

  “I don’t mind,” he interrupted. “Why would I? If I needed to tell someone that I had a girlfriend, I probably would tell them that it was you. It doesn’t seem like any big deal.” He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

  It did seem like a big deal to Caitlin. She wouldn’t want Seth telling people that she was his girlfriend. She wanted to be his girlfriend.

  “You were awfully smooth back there,” she said.

  “I’ve been meeting with sales reps, and Nate’s mom set up some media training for some of us. I told you that.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “You thought it sounded arrogant and pretentious.”

  “Okay, I did.”

  “The guys on top, Caitlin, they are awesome riders. They’re so much better than anyone else, they really are. But they do more than go out there and shred. They sit for interviews, they give speeches, they even model clothes from their sponsors. I want to be ready for that.”

  “And isn’t it going to help that you’ve gotten so good looking?” They had talked about her boobs; they could talk about how he was turning out.

  He shrugged. “People say Ben is the best looking of the three of us.”

  They usually had an hour before MeeMaw expected her home. The skate park was closed, and an hour wasn’t enough time to go out to the lake. If the night was nice, they sprayed bug repellent on their ankles and went and futzed around on the children’s playground equipment in the park; in bad weather they would go to MeeMaw’s and play cards or work on a jigsaw puzzle.

  They only had forty minutes tonight, but the night was warm and dry. Seth parked along the curb near the playground. When they were out of the car, Caitlin reached out her hand for the bug juice, but instead of handing it to her, he knelt down and sprayed her ankles himself. First he sprayed above her sock. Then, lightly, without touching her, he hooked the cuff of the sock with his index finger, pulling the sock open so he could spray more deeply.

  Then when he went to spray himself, Caitlin took the can from him. She knelt down.

  How strong his calves were, almost out of proportion to his lean torso. He wasn’t wearing socks, just the battered Sperrys he wore when he didn’t feel like lacing up athletic shoes.

  She was going to touch him. She put her hand on his ankle and started to ease his foot from the shoe. She heard him inhale sharply. She let his foot rest on her thigh while she sprayed it.

  She was too close to the spray and its sharp metallic vapors, but she didn’t care.

  When she had finished, she put her hand out for him to help her up. Even when she fell at the skate park, she didn’t do that. She always preferred to get up herself.

  Not this time.

  She felt his strength flash through her as she let him pull her up. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

  “My folks,” he said at last, “already think we are boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  Caitlin imagined that her grandmother did as well. “They’re just words, Seth.”

  “No. It’s a lot more than that.” And he bent his head to kiss her.

  How hungry they were for each other. Where to kiss, what to touch, hands, lips, everything was urgent, fevered. The slow, sweet kisses that they might have shared two years ago were swamped by the tidal wave, the whirlpool, of passion, longing, waiting. Everything was dark; nothing was enough.

  Headlights from a car swept over them. A horn honked. A jeer splintered across the park.

  Caitlin didn’t care.

  Seth did. “People can see us.” He was breathing hard. “This isn’t right. Not here. Not like this.” He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. “Let’s go sit for a minute.”

  They went over to the children’s swings, sitting side by side, just as they had in his backyard at the end of last summer.

  “How far do we—do you—want to take this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she sighed. “It’s what I want, you know it is, but I don’t want to be like my sister.”

  “But aren’t you taking the pill?”

  “It’s more than that. Trina said that she couldn’t help herself. I don’t want to be like that. Ever. To feel like I have no choice.”

  He was shaking his head. “That’s not us. We’re strong, both of us.”

  “We are, aren’t we?”

  He nodded.

  “Then let’s not play games. I’ll tell you when I’m ready.”

  “That sounds fair.”

  “I’m assuming that you’re already ready.”

  “Yeah, pretty much.”

  * * * *

  Revelation was clearly as complicated a game as Teddy had said. It had world-building characters set in what was indeed a postapocalyptic setting. It also featured all kinds of historical losses: the Alexandrian library, Sappho’s manuscripts, and the paintings that Savonarola had had burned in the fifteen-century Bonfire of the Vanities. The unwritten Canterbury Tales and the seven deadly sins figured in the game in some bewildering way.

  Thanks to a series of moves involving the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Seth won the first game. Teddy wanted to play another round. Caitlin watched as the men reset the board. At noon, one of the deputies brought in several big bags from McDonald’s. This was their third consecutive fast-food meal. Someone had purchased big two-liter plastic bottles of soda, but the water was in the motel’s pitchers.

  Seth, Marcus, and Keith all stood up from the game.

  “But we will go on playing while we eat, won’t we?” All morning Teddy had seemed more like a kid than ever, so happy to have his favorite toy that he hadn’t cared about anything else.

  “We don’t want anything to get on Caitlin’s game,” Marcus said quietly.

  “Oh, we will be careful.”

  “Not with french fries we can’t,” Seth said.

  The deputy had menus from a Chinese restaurant and told them that they should order their dinner now.

  “Let’s each pick one,” Joan suggested, “and then we can see if we have a decent mix.”

  “But if we each pick one, we will have way too much food,” Delia said. “I don’t need to pick.”

  And instantly all of the women said that they didn’t need to pick either.

  How were
they ever going to agree on a verdict if they couldn’t order Chinese?

  “I don’t like having all that different food jumbled on my plate,” Teddy said, “so I’m just going to order for myself.”

  “Me too,” Fred said. “Because you know that whoever is first in line will pick all the good stuff out and just leave sauce for the rest of us.”

  Caitlin thought that the person most likely to do that was Fred.

  After lunch she sat down at the jigsaw puzzle. But the people who had been working on it were being territorial and assigned her a part that was too easy. A deputy wheeled in a television with a DVD player. That began the discussion of what movie to watch, which took a while.

  This is Friday, Friday afternoon, and we still have to survive Saturday and Sunday before we get back in the courtroom and be bored out of our skulls.

  And Monday. Monday was the Fourth of July. Caitlin had forgotten. Court wouldn’t meet then either.

  The movie was mildly amusing, but April found it riotous. Ah hee. Ah hee. Ah hee ha. It was worse than Joan’s snoring.

  In the middle of the movie there was a shout from the Revelation table. Marcus had won. “Well done, man!” Seth congratulated him. “I never saw that coming.”

  Teddy was frowning at the board. “I don’t see how you did that.”

  Marcus, Caitlin noticed, had a very pleasing smile, slight and sweet. His skin was much darker than many African Americans, and so when his lips parted, the whiteness of his teeth emphasized the gentle curve of his lips. Caitlin thought that he would be someone worth getting to know, but Teddy was clamoring to play the game for a third time.

  Then the people who didn’t get their phone calls were allowed to go out to the lobby to the two pay phones. A deputy monitored the call, but could only hear the juror’s side. Caitlin supposed that it would be possible for a family member to just start talking about all the things that the jury wasn’t supposed to know. If Caitlin’s family did that, knowingly violating a court order, she would have hung up and dialed 911. Her parents’ brains had been taken over by little green Martians.

  But they weren’t answering the home phone. They did have cell phones, and Caitlin had their cell phone numbers programmed into her own phone, but she didn’t remember what they were.

  That left her sister, whose cell phone number she did know.

  “Oh my God,” Trina gushed. “Mom said that you’d been sequ—”

  “Trina, I’m sorry, but I need to you to listen. I’ve got some important professional stuff that has to be taken care of. Are you someplace that you can take notes?”

  “No. I’m at the grocery store. But I have an app on my phone so I can record the call. Shall I do that?”

  “Oh, yes, please. That would be perfect.”

  So Caitlin read through her lists and messages as quickly as she could, giving her passwords in code...then the two-letter abbreviation for the state where Dad was born and the four-digit street address for the house we visited in the summers... In the background she could hear Trina continue to shop for groceries.

  But Trina had been listening. “It’s a little late,” she said when Caitlin was done, “but I’ll make sure that someone gets to the courthouse before five to pick up your computer today. I think I can handle the rest of it.”

  “Thank you, Trina. Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t get that invoice out. I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “No, no,” Trina said. “I want to do it. You’ve never asked me to do anything before.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “No, it is. Even when I got my driver’s license, you didn’t even want to ask me for a ride.”

  I had my skateboard, Caitlin started to say. But no, not now. She wasn’t up for reviewing family drama. “Well, thank you. I do need you now.”

  She walked back to the breakfast room, struggling between gratitude and guilt. She decided to focus on the gratitude. It was comforting that her sister would know where their father had been born and what their grandmother’s street address was. For most people the longest relationship that they would ever have was with their siblings. Maybe Caitlin should try to make a little more of hers.

  The Chinese food arrived before anyone was hungry. Once again the other three men made Teddy stop playing. Teddy took his container of General Tso chicken and ate that and only that. Fred kept his shrimp in lobster sauce by his side, but then took some of all the other things, too.

  “We knew that would happen,” Norma whispered to her. “Don’t get upset by it.”

  She had a point. But it was hard not to feel bad for Yvette. The girl went through the line last. By then there was no more plum sauce for the moo shu pork even though that’s what Yvette had wanted to order. Clearly she almost never went out to eat, and even crappy Chinese food was a treat.

  “Is something wrong?” Seth asked her. “Are you getting dehydrated?”

  She looked at his plate for signs of excessive plum sauce—had he been the selfish plum-sauce pig?—but he had loaded up his plate with vegetables...not that the vegetables, gleaming with sesame oil, were all that healthy. “Probably, and all this soy sauce isn’t going to help.”

  “Marcus is filling his glass full of ice so the water is really cold and then adding a little bit of juice. It helps.”

  Caitlin tried that, and it did help except when it was that cold and sweet, it was hard to drink enough.

  Why was she being such a princess about the water? How spoiled could a person be? Very spoiled, apparently. Her friends in San Francisco were all aficionados of bottled water, each person having a preferred brand.

  After dinner the men went back to their game and Stephanie to the jigsaw puzzle. Caitlin felt as if everyone else was looking at her, waiting for her to tell them what would be fun to do.

  Why are you looking at me? I’m not the popular girl. That was my sister. Trina had been the fun one, at least until she had gotten pregnant.

  This isn’t my job.

  She had been coxswain on her high school and college crew teams. The coxswain was the one person on the boat who didn’t row. The coxswain’s job was to motivate the rowers, keeping them functioning as a team. She had been good at it, and that skill had paid her way through Stanford. It didn’t seem to be helping her now. The eight rowers in her boat had been driven athletes with bitingly competitive natures and the capacity to keep rowing with perfect technique when their muscles were shrieking. What could she do with this crowd?

  “I’m not a teacher like Joan,” she heard herself say, “but would anyone like to have a little drawing lesson?”

  The drawing lesson was a great hit. Dave, the burly trucker who loved his outdoor grill and his smoker, proved to have a fair bit of natural talent.

  At 8:00 p.m. Andrea, the tall deputy, came back on duty. She seemed disappointed that Seth was so involved in the game.

  The motel staff had said that Caitlin could store the boxes in their supply closet and could even leave the jigsaw puzzle out, but if one of the other guests wanted to work on it during their breakfast hour, the staff wouldn’t stop them.

  “That’s fine,” she said. The puzzle had fifteen hundred pieces and would take hours and hours to finish.

  At nine thirty, people helped her pack things up, although Stephanie, who seemed to be the helpful type, was clearly having trouble pulling herself away from the puzzle. Teddy picked up the Revelation game, said good night, and started to leave the breakfast room.

  “That’s Caitlin’s game,” Keith said. “She may want to keep it with her other things.”

  “Oh.” Teddy looked disappointed. “Could I at least take the instruction book? I want to reread it.”

  Seth and Marcus had won the first two games. Then Keith had won the third; good farmer that he was, he had paid attention to the food supply. So
everyone had won except Teddy. That clearly bothered him. But his taking only the instruction book seemed like a great way for the instruction book to get lost. “No, just take the whole thing.”

  Caitlin had kept out the book light and some books for herself. Then she handed Seth the CD player.

  “What’s this?” he asked, looking down at the sparkling “TRINA” on the front of the purple case.

  “Music. In case you can’t sleep.”

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I have the book light, and Norma doesn’t snore.”

  She slept surprisingly well, and in the shower the next morning she resolved to take better care of herself. She would force herself to drink the water; she would ask Seth to design a series of exercises she could do on the floor of her room without any equipment. She would play one game of Scrabble, but then work on the jigsaw puzzle. She would be a healthy, well-adjusted person who could help other people and still meet her own needs.

  But Stephanie had finished the jigsaw puzzle. All fifteen hundred pieces. It lay on the table, a swirl of blues and lavenders, the overhead light reflecting off its glossy surface.

  Caitlin wasn’t the only person disappointed. “That really wasn’t fair,” someone grumbled. “It was here for all of us.”

  Actually, no, Caitlin thought, it was here for me. And I worked on it for fifteen minutes.

  “She must have stayed up late,” was all she said.

  She went to sit by Marcus, and a few minutes later Seth joined them. He handed her the CD player and Trina’s sparkling purple CD case. “I shouldn’t be an ingrate, but that was some kind of heinous music.”

  “I’m sure it was, but my sister was a major teenybopper. What did you listen to when you were eleven?”

  “Metal. It scared the shit out of me, but that’s what the older guys were listening to, and I wanted to be cool. But seriously, thank you. It made a big difference.”

  “Then keep it. My folks sent plenty of batteries.”

  He took it and reached to put it on one of the empty tables. He had to stretch and tilt his chair back on two legs. The move was effortless, graceful. He seemed refreshed, energized, far beyond the healing capacity of Trina’s boy-band music.