Lakeside Cottage

by Susan Wiggs

  No. I’m too scared. Aaron thought the words but he didn’t say them. His teeth were chattering too hard. There was nothing else to do but help. His feet kicked something rough and hard, and he pressed against it.

  “Hey,” he said, wobbling a little. “Hey, I’m standing up.” Relief and amazement gave him back his voice.

  “Good job, genius.” Callie stayed in the water, her teeth chattering from the cold. With her hair all wet and smooth, and her eyelashes spiky, she looked different. Or maybe it was the way she was staring at Luke Newman.

  “You forgot something,” Luke told him, pointing.

  Aaron turned, filling up with dread as he saw. “My paddle.” It was floating away, hovering over calm blue water. He turned a pleading look at Callie. “Will you—”

  “You dropped it, you fetch it.”

  Just that, and nothing more. No sweet-talking, like his mom did: Come on, baby, the water won’t hurt you, his mom said whenever she tried to get him to go in over his head. I’ll be right here for you. Callie acted as if she didn’t give a hoot.

  “Fine,” he snapped. “I’ll get it.” And then, leaving no time to talk himself out of it, he stepped off the rocks and plunged into the lake again—on purpose. Because of the life vest, he didn’t go under very far before he bobbed right to the surface and struck out toward the paddle.

  Callie didn’t clap or praise him the way his mom would have. When he came back with the paddle, she simply said, “You need to help Luke now.”

  Aaron and Luke turned the kayak and tipped out the water; then Luke said to Callie, “I didn’t mean to scare you all the way into the lake.”

  “It’s all right. I love swimming.”

  What about me? Aaron wondered. Where’s my apology?

  It was lost, he realized, in the you’re-sooo-cute eye contact between Callie and Luke. “Hold the boat still,” he said loudly, “so I can get in.”

  Luke braced his arms on the hull. “Maybe I’ll see you around this summer,” he said.

  Aaron knew he was talking to Callie.

  “Just don’t sneak up on us anymore,” she said.

  “I can’t promise you that.”

  Aaron looked back to see that Callie’s face was as red as a tomato. Teenagers, he thought. They were always falling in love with each other. It didn’t look like much fun at all. It looked painful, embarrassing. He wondered why it always seemed to happen. His oldest cousin, Brent, fell in love with a different girl every other week. Sick, thought Aaron.

  “So there’s your ghost,” Callie murmured later as they paddled back toward the dock.

  Bandit had already spotted them and was trotting back and forth on the bank, baying at them.

  “I didn’t say he was the ghost,” Aaron said. His skin and hair felt cooler and fresher than ever, like there was something magical in the lake water. His fingernails were completely clean for a change.

  “There is no ghost,” Callie assured him.

  He thought about the shadows on the lake and the submerged rocks and logs. He thought about his grandfather and Uncle Phil, who were big storytellers.

  Bullshit artists, Callie would call them, but Aaron wasn’t allowed to say bullshit.

  So maybe there wasn’t a ghost after all. He felt a little saddened by the thought. In a way it was fun, believing in ghosts. Now he truly had nothing to fear.

  “That the first time you went swimming in the lake?” Callie asked.

  “I wasn’t swimming. I fell in.”

  “That’s your own fault. And you were too swimming. You swam like a snail darter.”

  In spite of everything, Aaron felt a grin spread across his face. The afternoon sun warmed his skin and took away the shivers. “Maybe we’ll do it again.”

  “As soon as we get to the dock,” Callie suggested. “You can show me how your cousins jump off.”

  “On one condition,” Aaron said, feeling strong, but at the same time strangely light, like the fear was a load of rocks and he’d just dumped them overboard.

  “Yeah? What’s that, kid?”

  “You’d better make friends with my dog.”

  Eleven

  Kate looked up from the screen of her laptop computer. She heard Bandit barking and a playful yell from Aaron. He and Callie must be back from their daily kayak trip. She smiled a little, even though the screen was blank and had been for the past forty minutes. The sound of her son at play always lifted her heart. And Callie’s presence was an unasked-for blessing. Though sometimes difficult and troubled, she showed remarkable patience and understanding when it came to Aaron. And instead of brooding about the fact that his cousins weren’t around, he was learning to be content with his own company, or with Callie’s, unlikely as that seemed. The girl would reach legal adulthood soon, but she had a childlike, playful side to her that Aaron adored. They squabbled like siblings, yet it seemed so…normal.

  Though tempted to go outside and join in whatever adventures they had concocted this time, Kate resisted. Her long piece on Walden Livingston was not going to be published as filler or an afterthought. It would run as a feature with plenty of photographs, some from the Smithsonian archives, others that she would provide. The unique slant, which Tanya urged her to play up, was the personal angle. In terms of the natural environment, his life had mattered greatly. His legacy was intact. However, the article was more about his personal qualities—the exuberance and commitment he gave to both his cause and to the people he cared about. Kate wanted the world to know how he had accomplished that.

  She supposed.

  Oh, Kate, she thought. Don’t start doubting yourself now. This is your shot. To motivate herself, she paged through the e-mail letters she had printed out at the library. Three other magazine editors found her profile impressive and her topics intriguing. She didn’t lack for interest. When she finished with Walden, there would be a number of options to choose from. If she didn’t watch out, she might actually make a decent living from this.

  “So finish, already,” she muttered. The trouble was, she had finished the article repeatedly. Then she’d done it over. And over. Organizing her fingers on the keyboard, she rewrote the beginning for the umpteenth time: “He grew up in the pristine beauty of a primeval rain forest, never knowing his life of privilege was funded by the destruction of the wilderness he loved.”

  Kate discovered that she could highlight a sentence with three clicks and delete it with one stroke. Poof.

  This lacked the drama of crumpling up a sheet of typing paper and lobbing it into the wastebasket, but at least it saved trees. Old Walden would’ve approved.

  She thought about other writers she knew who had found success in their freelance careers. They talked about their passion for their topic. Their inability to leave the piece alone until it was done. Their sense of urgency to get it finished.

  Why wasn’t she feeling that now?

  She clicked to a game of computer solitaire, which she won without thinking.

  All right, she told herself. Back to work. She forced herself to concentrate on her grandfather. He’d been so vibrant, so inspiring to her. Why couldn’t she bring him to life for a national readership? What was the matter with her that she couldn’t write about a man who was a real American hero?

  Studying the photograph she had propped on the desk to motivate herself, she closed the solitaire game. The picture was a yellowing Kodacolor print, circa 1979. It showed Kate standing on a deadfall log at least five feet in diameter. The log had become a nursery for ferns and moss, even other trees that wrapped their roots around its girth. On the ground next to her were Walden and Charla, the one who had been in a Marlon Brando movie. She still had that star quality, even in a casual snapshot. Her smile was genuine, her stance almost unposed. The picture was dominated by Walden himself, as all pictures seemed to be. Even standing left of center and looking at Kate rather than at the camera, he was a commanding presence, radiating vigor and energy. Kate herself—carrottop Kate, he used to call
her—looked as plainly happy and carefree as any kid spending a summer at the lake.

  She knew then why she couldn’t capture that for the article. She already owned it and didn’t have to go seeking the essence of her grandfather. There was no mystery to him, not for Kate.

  Restless, she got up and wandered outside. There had to be something wrong with her that she couldn’t write here in this quiet place, with no phone, TV or Internet to distract her. She was distracted anyway. She replayed her last meeting with JD Harris over and over in her mind, knowing it was probably not a healthy thing to do but unable to stop herself. Now, there was an intriguing mystery. He’d been amenable enough to letting her extract a fishhook from his thumb. They’d even exchanged a bit of idle conversation with personal information. But when she had guessed at his interest in medical school, he had all but shown her the door. Why? she wondered. Was he a commitment-phobe? Or was he hiding something she might not like?

  Mulling over the possibilities, she began taking down the laundry Callie had pegged out earlier in the day to dry in the sunshine. Callie—now there was yet another intriguing mystery. Her background was incredible. This summer, it seemed Kate was surrounded by people who were more interesting than she was. Maybe that could be a good thing for a freelance writer.

  She moved along the clothesline, folding the clean clothes and linens one by one and putting them in the basket. As each item was plucked from the line, a broader view was revealed. The highest peak was called Mount Storm King—for good reason. In the winter, the peak was the scene of violent, blinding storms producing snows so deep that remnants lingered even in the summer, thin veins of white tucked into the shadowy folds of the mountaintop.

  Callie had so little, Kate thought, folding one of the girl’s T-shirts, size XL, with the Incubus logo on the front. All Callie seemed to own were a few pairs of jeans and sweatpants, T-shirts and sweatshirts and two nightgowns, all extra large.

  Kate was tempted to do something, more than she already had. Callie tolerated her help sometimes. At the drugstore in town, they had stocked up on hair and skin products. Styling gel and acne lotion would not repair the damage done to Callie’s childhood, but anything that boosted her self-esteem, even a tiny bit, seemed worth it to Kate.

  Her brother, Phil, had reminded her to proceed with caution. “She’s a runaway, Kate,” he said during their last phone conversation after her visit to the library. “It’s what she does, and she’ll do it again if you spook her.”

  While at the library, Kate had also toyed with the idea of doing an Internet search for JD Harris, just as Aaron had predicted she would. She couldn’t do it, though. It felt dishonest, somehow. Besides, she rationalized, the name was so common she’d probably wind up with about 14,000 matches, most of them having to do with genealogy.

  Phil had some advice for that as well. “Quit sneaking around and ask the guy.”

  “What if I spook him, too?”

  “If a guy gets spooked by a beautiful woman asking questions, then he’s not worth having.”

  She thought about his reaction to her snooping in his house. No way would she be asking him nosy questions anytime soon.

  She plucked the last item from the line, a crisply clean bedsheet. As she was folding it, she heard another bark from Bandit. The dog was small but had a voice like a pack of hounds on the hunt. Then she heard a splash and another bark, and glanced in the direction of the dock.

  The clean sheet, half folded, slipped from her fingers. She barely felt it underfoot as she raced down the bank toward the lake.

  Aaron had fallen into the water. Her Aaron, deathly afraid to go in over his head, unable to swim.

  “I’m coming, baby,” Kate shouted, pounding along the dock. She could see him in the water a few yards from the end. She jumped, fully clothed, into the lake.

  The shockingly cold water stole her breath, but she was already swimming strongly toward him as she broke the surface. Fortunately, his state-of-the-art life jacket had a handle on the back of the collar for dragging him out.

  “Mom,” said Aaron. “Mom.”

  “I’ve got you, baby. You’re all right now.” Kate swam like a pro. She was filled with the adrenaline of a mother’s panic for a child. It was the most powerful performance-enhancing drug there was. Under its influence, a mother could walk on water, lift a crashed car, scale a skyscraper in order to save her child.

  “Mom. You can let go now,” Aaron said. “I can swim on my own.”

  Kate’s numb fingers kept hold of his life vest. “What?”

  “Callie’s teaching me to swim,” he said with a curiously adult-sounding patience.

  Kate twisted around to look at Callie, calmly treading water in her life vest. Then she looked back at her son.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You can let go.”

  Kate opened her hand and he drifted away from her. She resisted the urge to snatch him back.

  “It’s not really swimming on account of I’m wearing a vest,” Aaron explained. “But I went in, didn’t I, Callie?”

  “Underwater and everything. Just for a second,” she hastened to tell Kate.

  “Watch me jump off the dock, Mom,” he said. “Just watch.”

  “I’m watching.” There was no getting used to the glacial water of the lake. Pretty soon, they would all succumb to hypothermia. A few more minutes, she thought.

  Aaron swam clumsily to the dock ladder. Like a turtle with an oversize shell, he climbed up and out. Callie was busy tying the kayak to a cleat on the dock. Bandit paced back and forth, and then pounced with joy as Aaron got out. He stepped back a few paces, then ran for it.

  Kate couldn’t believe her eyes. Her son, skinny arms and legs splayed like a starfish against the blue summer sky, was flinging himself into the water.

  He landed with a splash, going under for a fraction of a second before the buoyancy of the vest brought him to the surface.

  “Way to go, Aaron,” Kate said, beaming at him. “I’m so proud of you.” She turned to ask Callie what she had done to get Aaron in the water, but Callie was already headed toward the house.

  “I’ll get us some towels,” she said over her shoulder, and hurried to the clothesline. The wet clothes were plastered against the girl’s body, and self-consciousness seemed to roll off her.

  Body-image issues. All teenage girls suffered from that. For Kate, it had been an excruciating embarrassment about her stick legs and flat chest. For Callie, it was a palpable sense of shame and defeat that she was so heavy and had bad skin. Kate ached for her. She wanted to assure Callie that she was attractive and smart, that how she felt inside was more important than how she thought she appeared to the world.

  Kate watched Aaron jump in a few more times. Callie returned with the towels from the clothesline and sat down. Wrapped in a striped towel, she dangled her bare feet in the water. Bandit sat beside her, and she shot him a look of distrust but then gave the dog a tentative pat on the head. He licked her face, which made her cringe, but she stayed where she was and endured the licking.

  “How did you get him in the water?” Kate asked Callie.

  “I went in by accident,” Aaron explained, paddling to the ladder.

  “Oh, God…” A chill crawled over Kate’s skin.

  “I was right there with him,” Callie said hastily.

  “Once I was in, I just stayed in. Simple.”

  “I should have dumped you in the lake long ago, then,” said Kate.

  “I said I’d swim if she would make friends with Bandit,” Aaron said.

  “That’s a very sophisticated agreement,” she said, “but there’s something you need to know about swimming in this lake. If you stay in too long, you get hypothermia.”

  Over his protests, she made him get out. He agreed only when she promised to let him swim every day for the rest of the summer.

  “One of these days I’m going to go in without the life vest,” he announced, peeling it off and dropping it on the doc
k.

  “Only if someone’s watching you,” she said, overriding her protective instincts to forbid him. Every child had to learn to swim. There was no getting around it.

  “Of course,” he said expansively.

  Kate caught Callie’s eye, and Callie nodded. “I’d never let anything happen to him,” she said. “I swear.”

  “We saw the ghost,” Aaron said, jumping up and holding the towel around his neck like a superhero’s cape. “We saw the ghost of the drowned boy.”

  Callie rolled her eyes. “It was a guy named Luke Newman. He’s Mrs. Newman’s grandson.” The girl’s face changed when she spoke of him. Her eyes became unfocused and her features dreamy, and the towel she held tightly around her slipped a little. She quickly wrapped herself back up.

  It was one of the rare occasions Kate had seen her acting like a typical teenager. It broke Kate’s heart that it took so little.

  “I haven’t seen Luke in years,” she said. “I bet he was younger than Aaron last time I saw him.”

  “He graduated this month and came to spend the summer with his grandmother.” Callie’s voice held a note of wonderment. It was, perhaps, hard for her to fathom the concept of spending the summer with a relative.

  “It’s fine if you want to invite him here whenever you like,” Kate said. “I don’t mind if you have friends over.”

  “I don’t have any friends.” Callie stood abruptly, pulled the towel firmly under her arms and headed toward the house.

  “I’m your friend,” Aaron said, trotting along behind her. “Hey! Callie! Wait up. I’m your friend. And Bandit, too.” The dog trotted at their heels.

  Callie reached out and gently cuffed him on the head. “Whatever you say, kid.”

  Bemused, Kate went to make sure the kayak was secure and the life vests hung up to dry. The image of Aaron plunging into the lake with joyous abandon lingered in her mind.

  Leaving a great fear behind was such a liberating thing. She wondered if Callie knew what a gift she’d given Aaron.

  In the zipper pocket of Aaron’s life vest, she found some treasures he had collected—two fossils and an agate. She set them down on the picnic table, then turned when she heard a car coming down the driveway.