A Summer to Die

by Lois Lowry

  It is hard to give up the being together with someone.

  I sealed the packing boxes with tape, wrote "Darkroom" on them, and carried them to a corner of the kitchen. There were other boxes there already; Mom had been packing for several days. There were boxes marked "Dishes," "Cooking Utensils," and "Linens." We'd been living like campers all week, eating from paper plates, finishing up the odds and ends in the refrigerator, making meals from the last few things in Mom's little garden.

  There was a box marked "Quilt." Two nights before, my mother had snapped off a thread, looked at the quilt in surprise, and said, "I think it's finished. How can it be finished?" She turned it all around, looking for some corner or spot that she'd forgotten, but every inch was covered with the neat, close-together tows of her tiny stitches. She stood up and laid it out on the big kitchen table. There they were, all those orderly, geometric patterns of our past, Molly's and mine. All those bright squares of color: in the center, the pale pinks and yellows of our baby dresses; farther out, in carefully organized rows, the little flowery prints and the bright plaids of the years when we were little girls; and at the edges, the more subdued and faded denims and corduroys of our growing up.

  "It really is," she said slowly. "It's all done." Then she folded it and put it in the box.

  Now I could hear her serving coffee in the living room. There was an argument going on. I could hear the quick, angry voices of the visitors, and suddenly I heard my mother's soft voice say, "That's not fair" the way I had so often said the same thing to Molly.

  There was silence in the living room for a moment after Mom said that. Then I heard my father say, "There's no point in our continuing to discuss this. Let's go down the road to see Will. You should have gone to see him first, Mr. Huntington."

  Dad came into the kitchen to use the phone. "Will?" he said. "Your nephew is here. Can we come down?"

  Dad grinned as he listened to the reply. I could imagine what Will was saying; I had never heard him say a good word about his sister's son.

  "Will," said Dad on the phone. "You know that, and I know that. Nevertheless, we have to be civilized. Now calm down. We'll be there in a few minutes."

  After he hung up, he said to me, "Meg, run over to Ben and Maria's, would you? Tell them you'll stay with Happy if they'll meet us at Will's house to talk to his nephew from Boston."

  When he went back into the living room, I heard Clarice Callaway say, "I haven't finished my coffee."

  And I heard my father reply, "Clarice, I hate to inconvenience you, but." I could tell from his voice that it gave him a lot of satisfaction, saying it.

  I loved taking care of Happy. That was another thing I hated about moving back to town, that I wouldn't have a chance to watch him grow bigger and learn things. Already he was holding his head up and looking around. The newborn baby part of him was already in the past, after only a month; now he was a little person, with big eyes, a loud voice, and a definite personality. Maria said he was like Ben, with a screwball sense of humor and no respect for propriety. Ben said he was like Maria: illogical, assertive, and a showoff. Maria whacked Ben with a dish towel when he said that, and Ben grinned and said, "See what I mean?"

  I just thought he was Happy, not like anyone else but himself.

  When Ben and Maria came back from Will's, 1 asked them what was going on. Maria rolled her eyes and said, "I don't know. Craziness, that's what's going on."

  Ben was roaring with laughter. "Meg, I have to show you something." He went to the closet and got the box with the album of wedding pictures.

  "I've already seen them, Ben. I know you're married. I told my father so. Clarice can't still be worrying about that."

  "No, no, look, dummy," said Ben. He flipped through the heavy pages of colored photographs until he found the one he wanted. It was of a crowd of wedding guests, middle-aged people, drinking champagne. In the center of the crowd, looking terribly proper and at the same time a little silly from the champagne, was Will Banks' nephew.

  "It's Martin Huntington!" Ben was practically doubled up, laughing. "I couldn't believe it. I walked into Will's house, and there was this jerk with a lawyer suit on, holding a briefcase, and he looked at me with my jeans and my beard, as if he didn't want to get too close for fear of being infected with some disease. And when I realized who he was, I held out my hand—you should have been there, Meg—and said, 'Mr. Huntington, don't you remember me? I'm Ben Brady.'"

  "How do you know him?" I asked.

  "He's been a junior partner in my father's law firm for years," laughed Ben. "Oh, you should have seen it, Meg. He stood there in Will's living room with his mouth open, and then he said in that pompous way he has, 'Well, Benjamin. I, ah, of course had no idea that, ah, it was you living in my family's house. Ah, of course, this does, ah, add a certain element of, ah, awkwardness to these proceedings.'

  "'Proceedings!' Can you imagine, calling a discussion in Will Banks' living room 'proceedings'? That's so typical of Martin Huntington. I can't wait to tell my father!"

  "But what's going to happen?"

  Ben shrugged. "I don't know. But I'm going to call my father. I know what I'd like to have happen. I'd like to buy this house from Will, if my dad will lend me the money for a down payment. I'd like Happy to grow up here. How about that, Hap? Hey, Maria, doesn't that kid ever stop eating?"

  Maria was nursing Happy. She grinned at Ben. "He's gonna take after his old man," she said.

  Back home, my parents were in the living room drinking the reheated coffee. The tug was rolled up, and the curtains were gone from the windows. Little by little the house was being emptied of everything that had been ours.

  "Ben wants to buy the house," I told them. "And they'd live here always." I sighed, kicked off my shoes, and brushed away the pieces of dead leaves that were stuck to my socks and jeans. Everything in the field seemed to be dying.

  "Well, that's terrific!" said my father. "Why are you looking so glum?"

  "I'm not sure," I answered. "I guess because we're leaving. Next summer everything will be the same for them, but what about us?"

  Mom and Dad were quiet for a minute. Finally Dad said, "Listen, Meg. This house will still be here next summer. We could rent it again. But Mom and I have talked about it, and we're just not sure."

  "There are so many sad memories for us here, Meg," my mother said quietly.

  "By next summer, though," I suggested, "maybe it would be easier. Maybe it would be fun to remember Molly in this house."

  Mom smiled. "Maybe. We'll wait and see."

  The three of us stood up; Mom headed for the kitchen, to finish the packing there. Dad starred up the stairs to his study.

  "You know," he said, stopping halfway up the staircase. "At one point in the book, I wrote that the use of coincidence is an immature literary device. But when Ben walked into Will's living room today and said, 'Mr. Huntington, don't you remember me?,' well—"

  He stood there thinking for a moment. Then he started talking to himself.

  "If I rearranged the ninth chapter," he muttered, "to make it correspond to—" He walked slowly up the rest of the stairs, muttering. At the top of the stairs he stood, looked into the study at the piles of pages, then turned and called down to us triumphantly, "Lydia! Meg! The book is finished! It only needs rearranging! I didn't realize it until now!"

  So the manuscript was packed, too, and in great bold capital letters, Dad wrote on the box, "BOOK."

  The next day, the moving van came. Will Banks, Ben, and Maria, holding Happy, stood in the driveway of the little house, and waved good-bye.

  It was the end of September when my father came home after his classes one day and told me, "Meg, comb your hair. I want you to go someplace with me."

  Usually he doesn't notice or care if my hair is combed, so I knew it was someplace special. I even washed my face and changed from sneakers into my school shoes. I grabbed a jacket—it was getting chilly: the kind of September air that smells of pumpkins, apples,
and dead leaves—and got into the car. Dad drove me to the university museum, the big stone building with bronze statues in front of it.

  "Dad," I whispered as we went up the wide steps, "I have seen the Renaissance collection a thousand times. If you're going to make me take that guided tour again, I'll—"

  "Meg," he said. "Will you please hush?"

  The lady at the front desk knew Dad. "Dr. Chalmers," she said, "I was so sorry to hear about your daughter."

  "Thank you," said my father. "This is my other daughter, Meg. Meg, this is Miss Amato."

  I shook her hand, and she looked at me curiously. "Oh," she said, as if she were surprised. Didn't she know that Dad had another daughter? "Oh," she said again. "The photography exhibition is in the west wing, Dr. Chalmers."

  I hadn't even heard about a photography exhibition. Not surprising, because I'd been so busy, fixing up the new darkroom, and getting ready for school. I had a sudden sinking feeling as Dad and I walked toward the west wing.

  "Dad," I said, "you didn't submit any of my photographs to an exhibition, did you?"

  "No," he said, shaking his head. "I would never have done that without asking your permission, Meg. Someday you'll do that yourself."

  The huge white-walled room was filled with framed photographs on each wall. The sign at the entrance to the room was carefully lettered in Gothic script: Faces of New England. As I walked around the room, I recognized the names of many of the photographers: famous names, names I had seen in magazines and in books of photographs that I had taken from the library. The photographs were all of people: the old, gaunt faces of farmers who live on the back roads; the weathered, wrinkled faces of their wives; the eager-eyed, sunshine-speckled faces of children.

  And suddenly there was my face. It was a large photograph, against a white mount, framed in a narrow black frame, and it was not just the coincidence of a stranger who happened to look like me; it was my face. It was taken at an angle; the wind was blowing my hair, and I was looking off in the distance somewhere, far beyond the meticulously trimmed edges of the photograph or the rigid confines of its frame. The outline of my neck and chin and half-turned cheek was sharp against the blurred and subtle shapes of pine trees in the background.

  I knew, though I had not known it then, that Will had taken it. He had taken it in the village cemetery the day we buried Molly there and heaped her grave with goldenrod.

  There was something of Molly in my face. It startled me, seeing it. The line that defined my face, the line that separated the darkness of the trees from the light that curved into my forehead and cheek was the same line that had once identified Molly by its shape. The way I held my shoulders was the way she had held hers. It was a transient thing, I knew, but when Will had held the camera and released the shutter for one five-hundredth of a second, he had captured it and made permanent whatever of Molly was in me. I was grateful, and glad.

  I went close to read what was written below the photograph. The title was "Fringed Gentian"; on the other side was his signature: William Banks.

  "Dad," I said, "I have to go back. I have to see Will. I promised him."

  My father took me back on the weekend. I remembered, in the car, what a long trip it had seemed last winter, when we went for the first time to the house in the country. Now the distance seemed short. Perhaps it is part of a place becoming familiar that makes it seem closer; perhaps it is just apart of growing up.

  There was Will, with his head inside the open hood of his truck. He stood up straight when we drove in, wiped his hands, and chuckled, "Spark plugs."

  "Will, I came so you could show me the fringed gentian. I'm sorry I forgot."

  "You didn't forget, Meg," he told me. "It wasn't time until now."

  My father waited at Will's house while we walked across the fields. Almost all of the flowers were gone. Ben and Maria's house was closed up tight and empty, although the curtains Maria had made still hung at the windows. They had gone back so that Ben could complete the last course for his master's degree at Harvard.

  "They'll be back," said Will, watching me look at the house, with its paint still new and its garden still tidy and weeded, even though the vegetables were gone. "The house is theirs now. Maybe next summer you can help Happy learn to walk."

  Maybe. Maybe there would be another summer filled with flowers and the laughter of a little boy whose life was still brand-new.

  Will went right to the place on the side of the woods where the spruce tree was beside the birches. I had forgotten the spot that he had pointed out months before, but this was his land; he knew it like his life. He pushed aside the underbrush and led me to the place where he knew the gentians would be growing. It was very quiet there. The ground was mostly moss, and the sunlight came down through the tall trees in patches, lighting the deep green here and there in patterns like the patchwork of a quilt.

  The little clump of fringed gentians stood alone, the purple blossoms at the tops of straight stems that grew up toward the sunlight from the damp earth. Will and I stood and looked at them together.

  "They're my favorite flower," he told me, "I suppose because they're the last of the season. And because they grow here all alone, not caring whether anyone sees them or not."

  "They're beautiful, Will," I said; and they were.

  "'It tried to be a rose,'" Will said, and I knew he was quoting again, "'and failed, and all the summer laughed: but just before the snows there came a purple creature that ravished all the hill; and summer hid her forehead, and mockery was still.'"

  "Will," I said, as we turned to leave the woods, "you should have been a poet."

  He laughed. "A truck mechanic would have been more practical."

  I fell a little way behind him as we walked back across the field, wanting to capture every image in my mind. Even the goldenrod was gone. The tall grasses had turned brownish and brittle, like the sepia tones of an old and faded photograph. In my mind, in quick sequences as if a film were stopping and starting, I saw Molly again. I saw her standing in the grass when it was green, her arms full of flowers; with the wind in her hair, with her quick smile, reaching for the next flower, and the next. The floating pollen drifted in patterns through the sunlight around her, as she looked back over her shoulder, laughing.

  Somewhere, for Molly, I thought suddenly, it would be summer still, summer always.

  Across the field I saw the little house that had been our house. And ahead of me I saw Will. I watched as he walked toward home, pushing the grass aside with his heavy stick, and realized that he was leaning on it as he walked, that he needed its support. Walking through the rocky field wasn't as easy for him as it was for me. I understood then what Ben had told me once, about knowing and accepting that bad things will happen, because I understood, watching him, that someday Will would be gone from me too.

  I ran to catch up. "Will," I said, "do you know that the picture of me is hanging in the university museum?"

  He nodded. "Do you mind?"

  I shook my head. "You made me beautiful," I said shyly.

  "Meg," he laughed, putting one arm over my shoulders, "you were beautiful all along."