by Kirk Landers
“Are you Gabe Pender?” she asked. No smile.
“Hi, Evelyn. It’s been a long time.”
“Must be twenty-five years.”
“I hope they’ve been good ones for you,” said Pender.
“Very good.” Evelyn looked away, then back at him. “How’s Peg?”
“Peg is pretty much the king of the universe right now. Company president. Rich. Powerful. Looks younger than she did when she was thirty-five. Has men lining up to ask her out.”
Evelyn cocked her head. “You’re . . .”
“Yeah, divorced. Just this year. It turns out, you’re never too old.”
Evelyn didn’t smile. In fact, her face seemed grimmer somehow.
“Have you found God yet, Gabe?”
“No,” sighed Pender. “All I’ve found is a great spiritual wasteland.”
“You need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” She rattled off the words like a familiar script, her face still a stern mask.
“It’s just not in me.” Pender tried to say it in a way that wouldn’t offend.
“It’s in all of us. Just open your heart to the Lord.”
“I’ll keep trying,” Pender said.
“What brings you here?” Her tone was cold again. Suspicious.
“Just passing through on my way north. Every time I come through the area I think about you. And John. And Peg and I. How it was.” As Pender talked, Evelyn’s face turned sour.
“I know,” he said. “We’ve all moved on from there. But it was a happy time. I just stopped in for one final salute to happy times.” He raised his coffee cup to her and sipped from it.
Evelyn gave him a cold stare, shaking her head from side to side. “I don’t remember anything happy about those times. We were stupid and irresponsible. When I think of how I was then, I shudder.”
Pender shrugged. “When I think of how you were then, I see someone who was happy and living life to the fullest. That’s how I see all of us back then.”
“We were ruled by our vices. Smoking, drinking, lust. It was evil. That’s why all the bad things happened to us . . . the divorces, my baby . . . all of it.”
“Do you think I’m evil, Evelyn?”
She nodded yes, slowly but emphatically.
Pender stared, mesmerized by the woman in front of him and the memory of how she used to be. He tried to break the tension. “I guess you’ll want me to pay in cash then.”
Her face wore the coldness of a vengeful prophet. “I want you not to come back.”
Pender looked her in the eye for a moment, saw no trace of humanity. “Okay,” he said with a sadness that started deep in his core. He rose and said goodbye softly, hoping maybe she’d change her mind, let the person she used to be come forth, at least for a moment. But her grim countenance never changed. He reached into his pocket for cash, left a tip on the table and twelve dollars with his receipt by the cash register. When he reached the door, he glanced back. Evelyn was still sitting at the table, staring at the far wall. She looked like a statue hammered from stone by an angry artist.
As he walked to his car, Pender got that feeling again, the one where he was maybe dead, where he couldn’t feel his body anymore and was seeing everything from someplace else. The people from the happy moments in his life were gone, turned to dust by the ravages of life. This was worse than losing Peg. She at least had a life. Evelyn, once so full of life, was just going through the motions now. Her human goodness was long dead. He wished he could cry, could somehow wash away the morose currents that were sweeping him to a far-off sea.
4
“I have things set up so I can get away next week. If you’d like a little company.”
Annette blinked, caught off guard, momentarily at a loss for words.
“Bill,” she said, “this is personal time for me.”
“We haven’t been seeing much of each other. I thought you might like a little company out there.”
Annette didn’t want to state the obvious, didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He was a nice man, a lonely man trying to rekindle something that was over months ago and shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
“I’m not lonely out there,” she told him. “I feel peace. I love the silence. I love the space. But, this isn’t my usual solo trip. I’m meeting an old college boyfriend in the park.”
Bill’s face flushed and his jaw tensed. “I can’t believe it. After all we’ve meant to each other. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it’s not your business. Our affair was over months ago. We never should have gotten involved in the first place. May is one of my best friends. So are you. Let’s keep it there.”
“You know she can’t . . .” Bill didn’t finish the sentence.
“I know. But that doesn’t give us the right to sneak around behind her back. She’d be devastated if she found out.”
“It’s not hurting her!” he exclaimed. “I’m still there for her. I don’t let her want for anything.”
“I know,” said Annette. “You’re a good man. The best. I just can’t do it anymore. Period. It’s over. I hope we can still be friends, but we will never be lovers again.”
Bill’s anger melted into a sadness so profound Annette wanted to hug him. He looked like a child who had just lost a parent. She understood the feeling. The Canadian Shield was the most beautiful place on earth, except when your life was out of balance. Then it was a desolate, empty land where aching loneliness stalked you through endless days in summer and endless nights in winter.
“Okay,” he said. He choked a little, then hurried from her sight so she wouldn’t see him lose control.
The metallic sound of the door latch clicking into place echoed in her mind, a door closing on the brief experiment with romance in her second life. It was the beginning of another period of aloneness. She still had Christy and Rebecca, but they would be moving on sooner or later. It would happen fast. A man would come along, a spark would ignite, Christy would have to take a chance that it was the real thing, and she’d be off to Toronto or Winnipeg or one of the cities to the south. And Annette would be left to face the endless dark winters alone. Again.
* * *
“How did he take it?” There was genuine surprise on Christy’s face as she asked the question. She was a tall, strong woman, like her mother, with large, soft eyes that spoke of compassion and a face that seemed to radiate gentle humor.
“Not well,” Annette sighed. When Christy returned home an adult woman, one of Annette’s first resolutions was to keep no secrets, even the embarrassing stuff. That included her affair with Bill and her correspondence with Pender.
“It’s not easy to accept what’s left,” Annette said. “I understand how he feels.”
“Why did you do it then? It’s not like anyone was getting hurt.”
Annette shook her head. “That’s what I used to tell myself. But that was never the real question. I was betraying a friend. And I was doing something that made me feel guilty. It had to stop.”
“Was it because you’re meeting that guy in the park?”
Annette had thought about that before. “Maybe. I hope not, but maybe,” she said.
“Why?” asked Christy. “It’s not any of his business who you’re sleeping with.”
Annette smiled at her daughter. Christy’s support was one of the few luxuries in her life. “No, none of his business at all. But I think what happened was, when we started e-mailing and decided to meet, it made me think back to those times when we were so young and life was waiting for us and I was sort of piecing together the things I believed in. When I looked at myself through that young woman’s eyes, I liked a lot of what I saw—you and Rebecca, Annie, this business. But I didn’t like seeing me having an affair with a married man. It wasn’t right, and it was . . . desperate.”
They were quiet for a while, lost in their own thoughts as they folded linens and towels for the cabins.
“I saw your little confront
ation with the guy in number three this morning,” said Annette.
Christy smiled slyly. “Oh, that.”
“What happened?”
“Just what you think happened,” said Christy. “He came in while I was making the bed. I started to leave so he could have some privacy, and he tried to kiss me. He followed me out and I smacked him.”
“You sure did. I could hear it from here. What did you say to him?”
“I told him if he touched my body again, I’d rip the flesh off his face.”
“My goodness. What a violent thought.”
“It worked.”
“I guess it did,” said Annette. “I thought he was going to cry.”
“What would you have done if he kept trying to force himself on me?” asked Christy.
Annette laughed. “I would have run down there and ripped the flesh off his face.”
After another silence, Christy stopped her labors to take a sip of coffee. She glanced at her mother, still folding towels. “Are you sure about meeting that guy alone in the park?”
“Gabe Pender?” replied Annette. “Why not?”
“Well, he sounds kind of violent. And you’d be out there all by yourself.”
Annette stopped folding. “The Gabe Pender I knew had trouble with authority. If you told him he had to do something, he’d rebel. If you gave him his space, he gave you yours.”
“So you don’t think he’s dangerous?”
“No. In his e-mails he sounds a lot like the guy I knew in college.”
“You haven’t seen him in forty years. He could be psychotic. He could be a rapist or a dope addict.”
“Do you think we change so much between twenty-one and sixty?”
“He’s divorced. Do you know why his wife left him? Maybe he beat her.”
“I know what he said. He said they just drifted apart. Different interests, different values.”
“What wife beater ever said the marriage ended because he liked to beat the crap out of women?”
Annette sighed. “I just can’t picture Gabe Pender hitting a woman.”
“He hit his boss, didn’t he? And he accosted those guys in the canoe race.”
“I can see him hitting his boss, especially if the guy was as much of a jerk as Pender said he was. And I’ve thought about the thing with the canoeists. You know, if they knocked someone over in one of our races, chances are they’d need medical attention at the ER. Pender just broke their paddles.”
“I bet he wanted to break their noses.”
“He probably did.”
Christy stared at her mother. “You two didn’t just date in college, did you?” She said it suspiciously, more statement than question.
“What else do you think we did?” Annette responded flippantly.
“I mean, he wasn’t just another guy you dated. He was special.”
“I guess he was, in a way.”
Christy cocked her head and smiled. “Come on,” she said.
“He was special. Of the men I knew in college, your father and Pender are the only ones I remember.” Annette glanced away, deep in thought. “We argued a lot. Sometimes he’d argue the other side even when he agreed with me. He could be really frustrating, but it was always interesting with him.”
“He sounds like one of those people who likes to hear themselves talk.” Christy wrinkled her nose when she said it.
“No. That was your dad. Pender liked to engage me in debate. He was showing off, but he respected my intellect, too. Sounds passé to you now, but back then a lot of men didn’t like women who had opinions and smarts. He did. That’s why it was so exciting being with him. One reason.”
“Were you involved with him sexually?”
Annette frowned, trying to decide how much she should share with her daughter. “Yes,” she said, finally.
“And?”
“And we enjoyed each other. And that’s as far as I’m going with this.”
Christy laughed. “I believe you’re actually blushing!”
“Believe what you want.”
“Still,” said Christy, “I’d feel a lot better if someone was going with you. Just in case. I can get away for a few days, just to make sure he’s okay . . .”
“That’s sweet of you, honey,” said Annette. “But no. I’m going alone. I can handle whatever comes along. Goodness knows I’ve dealt with men when I had to.”
“What if he, you know, wants to have sex?”
Annette laughed. “Christy,” she exclaimed, “I’m sixty years old. So is he. If he wants to have sex and has the erection to prove it, let’s just accept it for the miracle it is.”
“Does that mean you’d say yes?”
“That means I’d make up my mind when it happens, which it won’t.”
As they labored in silence, Annette’s mind filled with college memories.
“You got the same grade I did and you don’t have a single footnote!” She wasn’t just angry, she was pissed. She didn’t like him anyway. He argued every point in every discussion, always had a different point of view on every book and character. He didn’t socialize with anyone. And he got an A on a paper that contained no research.
“Footnotes aren’t important. They just mean, instead of thinking for yourself, you copied down what a bunch of self-important assholes said about something.”
She flushed and fumed. It would have felt good to slap him. So disrespectful. And yet, as she locked eyes with him, he wasn’t sneering. He didn’t seem disrespectful.
“You’re too smart to settle for being a parrot,” he said.
“How do you know?”
He blushed and fidgeted. All her anger and resentment evaporated as she realized he couldn’t find words. He was interested in her, and he was vulnerable. The two thoughts came to her simultaneously and rocked her. She blinked. He was kind of handsome. His face was expressive. There was fire in his eyes.
“It’s obvious.” He was still beet red.
She didn’t know what to say. She’d know what to say if she just wanted to leave him there, but that’s not what she wanted. The silence got uncomfortable. He shuffled his feet and locked eyes with her again.
“Could we have coffee sometime?”
So began the most intense love affair of her life.
5
Sleep came in tortured bits for Pender, a continuing replay of his encounter with Evelyn. He woke every time he looked into her dead eyes, a queasy feeling in his stomach, his mind filled with fear and mourning. Lives that started with such joy and promise shouldn’t have turned out this way.
An hour before sunrise, he gave up trying to sleep and started north. As he drove through the black void of predawn, he felt like he was living an eerie nightmare in which everything in his life had been destroyed in the blink of an eye. He survived the toxic episode only to find himself a solitary man surrounded by a phantom race of people who looked real but who were indifferent to everyone and everything.
If he could relive those years, would he? The more Pender thought about it, the more he thought, no. It had been so pointless. It would have been better if he had died in Vietnam so that someone else could live instead, maybe one of the people whose loved ones left notes and teddy bears for them at the memorial. Someone whose life would have been more cherished than his.
When daylight came, he tried to decide whether to keep heading north, out of the state, or spend a couple of days on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior shore. When he was planning this part of the trip, he liked the idea of taking in the arty, weather-beaten towns along the coast, enjoying the cafés, the galleries, the rugged Lake Superior coastline. And he could look in on his best friend and most valued colleague, Patrick O’Quinn, for a final farewell.
But Evelyn’s ghost was chasing him from the state like a vengeful ghoul. If he stayed in Wisconsin even an extra hour or two, the cancer that was eating the easygoing vacationland of his youth would consume him, too.
He was still equivocating as he nea
red the city of Superior and the sign for Highway 13 came into view. It was the road that followed the Lake Superior shore along the peninsula, to Cornucopia, Bayfield, the Apostle Islands, and Ashland. He stopped on the shoulder of the road and thought it over for a moment. As much as he wanted to escape the nightmare, he hated to give in to his fears. And he couldn’t shake the thought that he would never see O’Quinn again.
Like a dread-filled grunt taking the point on a patrol in hostile territory, he headed up the peninsula on 13. It was too early to go to Quetico. There were farewells to be made, doors to close.
* * *
Patrick O’Quinn’s tiny village consisted of maybe a dozen buildings strung along Highway 13. The community centerpiece was a natural bay that housed a marina and walking paths. A sign at the edge of town set the population at ninety-eight, most of whom lived on the back roads in the sprawling pine forests. Only a few houses were located along the commercial drag. Pender found a coffee shop. He ordered coffee and asked for a phone book. The proprietor laughed, said he hadn’t seen one in years, asked who Pender was looking for.
“A guy named Patrick O’Quinn. Photographer—”
“Wears a beret,” the proprietor cut in.
Pender nodded. Smiled. That stupid hat probably got him a ton of abuse in the northern reaches of Wisconsin. The Tennessee of the North he had called it back in the days of their youth when they traveled the state looking for stories, stopping to fish.
The proprietor directed him to a flat above an art gallery. Figured.
Pender didn’t have a cell phone, and there weren’t any pay phones in town, so he drank coffee, read a newspaper, and strolled the harbor until nine o’clock, then went calling.
His knock on the second-floor door brought a cautious peek through a narrow opening, a chain holding the door partially closed. The partial face on the other side belonged to a woman with gray-blue eyes, medium height.
“Yes?” Her voice was hesitant, suspicious. Jesus, Pender thought, this isn’t exactly Bedford-Stuyvesant.