Maurie brought cups of unspiked eggnog for the girls and a plate of Keebler Christmas cookies that she put on the coffee table next to the manger scene. Then they all sat and listened to the pings and coughs from the radiator and the music from the radio. The girls looked happy, and proud of what they’d done. Maurie sat cross-legged in her chair, beaming with childlike delight, but in her papery skin and the shadows around her eyes Justine saw the old woman she soon would be, and she felt a rush of tenderness for her. She was glad she hadn’t made more of a scene about the money.
“My mother was the queen of Christmas,” Maurie said. “Decorations, cookies, tree, the whole shebang. She’d hang lights all over the porch. Even though nobody could see them but us and the Millers. Not everything needs an audience, she’d say. Then after Christmas dinner we’d invite the Millers over. Although Matthew was the only one who ever came.”
“Why didn’t Abe?” Melanie asked.
“Oh, Matthew always had an excuse for him. He wasn’t feeling well. He needed to clean the kitchen. It was ridiculous. After living out here with us all those years, you’d think—” She paused, looking past Justine at the window. Then she smiled, shaking it off. “Anyway, Matthew would come over after dinner and I’d get to stay up late. It was fun.”
Justine tried to picture it: Lucy, Lilith, their sad mother, a young Maurie, and the taciturn Matthew Miller. Having fun.
“We should invite them over,” Melanie said. “On Christmas.”
“Of course we will,” Maurie said.
“What?” Justine said.
“Why not? We’ll have a party. It’ll be like old times.”
Melanie turned a hopeful face to Justine. Justine thought of Matthew mixing powdered cocoa in his chilly, half-lit lodge. Had he spent his Christmas evenings here even after Maurie left? He probably had. He’d probably spent fifty Christmases in this room, including Lucy’s last Christmas a year ago. She turned her glass in her hand. What would it be like, to have a friend for half a century?
Melanie’s skin glowed in the Christmas lights. Soon they would leave the Millers and the ghosts of the Evans girls behind for a sunny apartment in a warm town, and the Millers would be here alone. “You’re right,” Justine said. “We should invite them.”
Lucy
Matthew’s thirteenth birthday was the Friday before Labor Day. It was the last real day of summer. On Saturday, the lake families would pack their summer clothes and prepare their houses for winter. The end-of-summer party, with Lilith’s cabaret, would be that night, and on Sunday we would drive back to the sturdy houses that waited for us on Williamsburg’s orderly streets. But on Friday we were still summer’s children, and the day was open wide.
I’d asked Matthew if his family would have a birthday celebration for him. He said they would, but not until after we’d gone. They had too much to do before we left, what with cooking and serving the food for the party. I thought it was a shame that he’d have to wait to celebrate such an important birthday, but he said it would be better to do it when his family had the lake to themselves again. That stung me a little, but I tried not to let on.
Besides, I’d made my own plans for his birthday. I’d been thinking about it for a while, and when the day came, I was ready. After lunch, I waited until Lilith left and Mother took Emily to the beach, and then I changed out of my playsuit and into my best summer dress. I took off my worn brown Mary Janes and put on the new white sandals that had sat in the closet since we’d unpacked back in June. I usually wore my long hair in a braid, to keep it out of the way, but today I left it down. I wasn’t one for looking in the mirror, but I did glance once, before I left our bedroom. With my curls falling about my face I looked different. Younger and older at the same time. I looked away, and felt like myself again.
When I was ready, I went down to the fallen log. I’d taken longer than usual, so Matthew was shuffling his feet in the grass, waiting. When he saw me, his eyes widened. “What’s with the fancy duds?”
“I’m going to a birthday party,” I said. He blushed, then laughed and looked at the ground. I felt my face reddening, too, and in our sudden awkwardness I felt a small, strange unease. I shook my head, my loose hair brushing against my arms. Don’t be silly, I told myself. “Follow me,” I said, turning into the woods, making sure to walk the same way in my sandals as I always had in my Mary Janes.
It was one of those hot, buzzy, late-summer days, and as I walked a light sweat broke out on my face and arms. Matthew followed close, nearly stepping on my feet, asking every ten paces where we were going. You’ll see, I told him, enjoying his curiosity and good-natured pique. The odd moment at the fallen log was forgotten now that we were walking the paths we’d walked all summer, among trees we knew as well as we knew our own hands. It wasn’t until the end that we walked on a trail we’d traveled only once before.
When we got to the clearing, I stopped, struck as always by the cathedral the Hundred Tree made, its branches like flying buttresses and the ground beneath it stippled with light that looked as though it had filtered through stained glass. A chorus of cicadas dipped and swelled, registering our presence, then forgiving it. I crossed my arms, waiting for him to see what I’d done. When he did, he brushed his hair out of his eyes and smiled his crooked-toothed smile. “You’re letting me in the tree?”
I shrugged, like it was no big deal. “Lilith doesn’t want to come here anymore.” That morning, I’d taken all of Lilith’s and my things out of the hollowed tree except the pillows and the flat log we’d used as a table. Then I’d hung a dozen sheets of Emily’s colored art paper, with stenciled holes cut in them like Chinese lanterns, from the inside of the trunk. On the log I’d put a white pillowcase, two of Mother’s flowered tea plates, and a bowl that I’d filled with the best skipping rocks I could find. I’d brought two bottles of root beer, and in a small bag were some of the homemade cookies Matthew’s grandmother sold at the lodge. It looked neat, organized, ready. My fingers picked at the dry patches on my elbows as I watched him.
“Wow,” he said. He’d picked up a stick along the way, and he fidgeted with it, passing it from one hand to the other. He looked caught off balance, as though the ground under his feet had tilted unexpectedly, and I felt sick. I’d made a horrible mistake. The dressing up, the decorating, the root beers, the cookies—it was all wrong. I’d wanted to give him a birthday party. I’d wanted to show him I was his friend. But now I saw it through his eyes, and I saw that it was something a girl would do, when I was sure the thing he liked best about me was that I wasn’t like a girl. I should have just tossed him his present during a break in our games, saying, oh, by the way, happy birthday. Like a boy would. I looked at my feet, knobby with calluses in their pretty shoes ordered from Sears at the first hint of spring, and wished I could run away.
He walked into the tree and looked up at the colored papers. “This is neat,” he said. He set down the stick. “Aren’t you coming in?” He sat down beside the table, so I did, too, fixing my skirt so it covered my legs, longing for the easy modesty of my playsuit. I hoped he couldn’t see how red my face was, but when I looked at him, he was looking at the plates and the root beers. “I’ve never had a real birthday party before,” he said. “You know, with friends and everything.” His expression was wistful.
I stopped fiddling with my skirt. I realized that despite what he’d said before about how his birthday would be better once we’d gone, he envied us town children, blowing out candles with our friends, while he marked his birthdays with his broken family, alone at their empty resort. I thought of my own birthday parties, with three or four girls from my class sitting at our dining room table in our best dresses while Mother, in her starched apron, served cake and lemonade. I thought about how lonely I’d felt at every one of them.
I opened the root beers and filled our glasses with a small flourish, like a waiter. Then I pulled the cookies from the back. “They’re your grandmother’s,” I said.
He smile
d that lopsided smile. “You know, her cookies aren’t very good. I don’t think Chippewa do much baking.” I told him they were better than any I could bake, so we’d have to make do. I took a big, decisive bite to show him I meant business, and that made him laugh, and take a bite for himself.
After that, I felt better. It was strange being inside the Tree with someone other than Lilith, but the air was the same sheltering cool it had always been, and Matthew and I talked in the easy way we had all summer long, our backs against the pillows, drinking our warm root beers, my dress and sandals forgotten in the dim light. After a while I pulled his present out of the bag I’d put the cookies in. “It’s not much,” I said, and it wasn’t. After buying the cookies and root beers, I hadn’t had any money left, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The lodge was the only place to shop, and the only gifts for sale were the dusty souvenirs on the shelf behind the pool table—the dream catchers and birch-bark baskets that his grandmother made.
He unwrapped the wax paper bundle. Inside was a small cloth bag with a drawstring. I’d made it using pieces I’d cut from my denim skirt, and although I wasn’t much of a seamstress, it hadn’t turned out too badly. As he held it in his hands, I rushed to explain: you tie it to your belt, and when you find something you want to keep, you put it inside. It was the only thing I could think of that he needed.
He fingered the drawstring. The Chippewa carried pouches like this, he told me, when they hunted. They made them from buffalo hide, and they kept knives in them, and arrowheads and fishing hooks. He’d seen pictures. I hadn’t known that, but it made me glad. He tied the bag to his belt and smiled at me. For a moment something passed between us that made us both look away, but then he said, “Let’s go see what we can find to put in it,” and we walked out of the Tree and into the forest.
Because we’d avoided the Hundred Tree, we’d never explored the area around it. But even Lilith and I hadn’t gone where Matthew and I went that day, far to the north and west, farther from the lake than I’d ever been. There were no paths here, just small tracks made by deer and raccoons. The air seemed hushed and alight with discovery, and I found myself walking with stealth, my nerves awake to the small sounds in the brush and the flashing of birds in the leaves. Sticks poked my feet between the straps of my sandals, and my dress and hair snagged on branches, but I didn’t think about that, or about what I’d say to Mother when she saw I’d ruined my best summer outfit. I was an ancient explorer, alone in the wilderness with my comrade, breaking humanity’s first trail through a brand-new land. I could tell by the lithe, alert way he moved that Matthew felt these things, too.
Soon, just as those ancient explorers had, we began to talk about staking our claim to the territory we traveled. We would build a tree house out here, using salvage from Matthew’s family’s backyard. We’d fortify it with fences we’d build from fallen branches, so they’d seem like part of the forest. We wondered if we could live in it year-round, and decided that of course we could. We talked about the equipment we’d need: bows and arrows, knives, rope for snares, and hollowed-out rocks for catching rainwater. We’d skin the bears we’d hunt, and use the pelts to keep us warm. If the Chippewa could do it for the thousands of years they’d roamed this country, so could we. We kept our voices low, in deference to the new terrain we traveled. Once in a while Matthew bent to pick up a rock or leaf, showing it to me before sticking it in the pouch, and whenever he did, I felt the small, private happiness that comes from giving just the right gift.
After we had walked long enough to imagine we had crossed into Canada, we emerged from a thicket to find ourselves on the edge of a road. It was just a narrow, empty strip of blacktop, and the forest continued beyond, but I recognized it: it was the road to Williamsburg. On Sunday I would travel it in the backseat of Father’s Plymouth, between Lilith and Emily, my sunburned legs sticking to the vinyl as we covered in minutes what Matthew and I had believed to be almost a nation.
Heat waves slithered in the air where the road crested a small hill to the west. Almost below the range of sound, I could hear a pulsing hum that might be faraway cars, or electricity coursing along the wires that ran on posts beside it. As Matthew and I stood there, our faces scratched by branches and our clothes pricked with thistles, I felt what the Indians must have felt when they first stumbled upon a railroad laid across the wild prairie.
Matthew whacked the scrabbly roadside grass with his stick once, hard. Then he threw the stick across the road, where it vanished in the wall of green leaves on the other side. A flurry of gnats spun angrily in the air where it passed. “Let’s go,” he said.
We turned back, and in a few steps the road was hidden. But the forest was different now. The mystery that had shrouded it all summer had dissolved like fog in the sun. The trees were just trees; the underbrush just a clutter of leaves and sticks; the only animals the squirrels and chipmunks we’d always known. We didn’t talk as we walked back to the Hundred Tree, and then on toward the lake. Though I couldn’t hear the hum of the world anymore, I knew it was there, waiting.
At last we reached the paths the other children had worn as wide and bare as sidewalks, and we walked side by side. I saw that Matthew had grown that summer; my chin barely reached his shoulder now. For some reason this made me even sadder.
“It was a great birthday,” he said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, my voice woolen.
Gently, as if by accident, his fingers brushed against mine. Then he took my hand and held it. His hand was heavy and warm, and rough from the dishes he washed, the fish he cleaned, the trees he climbed. Above my dirt-streaked calves my ruined skirt swung against my knees, and I could feel every part of my body at once. Matthew didn’t look at me, nor I at him, but he didn’t let go of my hand and I didn’t pull it away.
We were still holding hands when we came upon Lilith and Abe. They were in a small clearing, a chapel of green and golden light about two hundred yards from the houses. We didn’t hear them before we saw them, and when we saw them we stopped walking.
Lilith lay on her back in the dead brown leaves, her legs bent at the knees, her skirt crumpled at her hips. Abe was on top of her. His pants were around his ankles and his naked buttocks rocked in and out between her legs. Her white fingers clutched at his shirt, pulling him closer, and her head was back, her neck arched, her teeth bared, her eyes staring sightlessly up at the trees. The sounds they made—fleshy and wet, sucking and rutting and moaning and gasping—drowned out even the blood pounding in my ears.
I don’t know how long we stood there, watching, our hands tight together, listening, as the whole forest, known and unknown, telescoped upon that one glade, until Abe gave a long, shuddering thrust and Lilith cried out, and when that happened I screamed loud and high, and Lilith heard me and shoved Abe off of her. Her dress was unbuttoned and her bra had slipped down, and I saw her pale new breasts, the pink nipples small and hard, and it made my head swim to see them naked like that, those tender things I’d helped her hide away behind white cotton cups with delicate metal hooks only a few months before, in her bedroom.
She began buttoning her dress. Abe scrambled to his feet, his hands covering the dark and swollen thing that hung between his legs. Then he pulled up his trousers and stood with his shoulders hunched. Matthew let go of my hand, which felt suddenly light, the air cool on my empty palm. He called his brother in a voice I didn’t recognize. Then he walked away, and Abe followed. I don’t know if Matthew looked at me, or what might have been in his face if he did, because I didn’t look at him. I looked at Lilith.
She got to her feet more slowly. She was wearing her white dress with the blue sash, and it clung to her sweaty skin from her collarbones to her calves. Her long black hair was tangled and littered with leaves. Her lips were red and wet and her cheeks were flushed. She stood before me, one hand at her throat, in a shaft of light that filtered through the leaves, and for a moment she looked like a wild nymph, exposed to the world,
beautiful and damaged. Then I saw her white panties, crumpled in the leaves at her feet.
I turned and ran, pushing at branches and tripping on roots, crashing through the forest that slammed shut behind me with savage green teeth, not stopping until I burst onto the grassy verge where our clothesline stood and our dresses, their bows limp and wet, hung motionless in the hot, still air.
Justine
The school gym was too small. It was filled with metal chairs, but still people stood in the back and along the sides, clustering around a holiday bake sale by the door. Justine and Maurie found a place to stand along the left side of the chairs. Maurie looked stiff, the skin around her mouth tense. The gym was an annex to the main school building, and the dedication above the door said it was built in 1945. Justine tried to imagine her mother as a girl here, in gym class or maybe a school play, but she couldn’t.
A woman Maurie’s age was staring at them from her seat three rows away. She said something to the man next to her, and he turned, too.
“Do you know them?” Justine asked.
“No.” Maurie looked the woman square in the eye until she turned back around.
Justine didn’t know anyone, of course, but she recognized some of the mothers who waited for their children on the sidewalk after school. She also saw Elizabeth Sorensen in the front row with a Nordic-looking man and an older blond couple. Her profile was elegant beneath a sleek French twist. Justine scanned the program and saw Claire and Maxwell Sorensen. She wondered what grade Claire was in.
The chorus, which had been running through warm-ups despite the din, stopped singing. The chorus teacher moved the children closer together and relocated a boy from one row to another. She directed the older children to sit, then waited with the stiff back of a circus ringmaster for the audience to stop talking and the herd of squatting fathers with video cameras to settle into their places in the center aisle. When it was quiet, she raised her baton and launched the younger singers into an energetic rendition of “Jingle Bells.”
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