Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  She pawed at him with her bare hand, deliberate, afraid she’d break the screen, and of course he got away, bouncing in the space between the two panes. She laid the rag over the spigot and wiped her hands with a paper towel, watching him the whole time, willing him to stay there. She leaned over the sink, the paper towel bunched in one hand, and reached for the window like a jewel thief. In one lunging motion she shut the bottom pane and swiped across the top, trying to catch up with him, but he was too quick, lifting off before she could corner him. She turned to the room, determined to follow him, but he’d disappeared in the patterned curtains and the dark wood of the cabinets.

  She flipped on the living room light and crouched down with the paper towel, hunting, trying to spy him in flight, and imagined what they’d think if they suddenly walked in on her. She stalked into the back hall and stood by the door of the darkened bathroom, listening.

  He was in Arlene’s room, a dot on the far window, bumping the glass as if he could escape that way. As she detoured around Arlene’s bed, he made a break, taking the shortcut past her, zigzagging for the door.

  “You think you’re smart,” she said.

  She crossed the hall to her room and stood blocking the doorway, checking the windows and the air over the bed. She closed her door and then Arlene’s, inspected the bathroom with her hand on the light switch (not appreciating her grim expression in the mirror), then sealed it too.

  The living room was the hardest because of the carpet—and the couch and the fireplace, good camouflage. She wished there were a door to the kitchen to trap him in with all the white.

  She found the flyswatter hanging on the side of the fridge. It was cheap, twisted wire with a floppy yellow plastic head. She heard him and raised it straight up before looking around.

  He was on the rag draped over the faucet, as if he’d tricked her. She approached slowly, keeping her arm cocked. A shadow could make him take off, a stray air current. He sensed her and tensed, set his front legs down so he was ready to go. She watched, stock-still, waiting for him to pick them up again and begin the finicky ritual of cleaning, and when he did she banged the swatter down on top of him so hard she could feel the handle bend in midair.

  She thought she’d missed, that she’d seen him dart off to the left at the last second, and she fixed the handle while she peered around and reset herself, bringing it straight up again. She didn’t expect to get him on her first try, but there he was in the sink, half mangled and on his back, a leg waving.

  She smashed him out of reflex, leaving a raspberry splash she thought was blood on the stainless steel, and the thrill of the chase dispersed and curdled into disgust—at him, at herself—and quickly she swabbed him up with the paper towel and threw it in the garbage and ran water over the spot. There was more on the swatter, and a sectioned leg, and she cleaned it off and hung it up again, a child hiding a secret.

  She moved on to the drawers, but even then it bothered her, not guilt so much as a sense of letdown or waste, her better nature betrayed.

  It was foolish, she knew. It was just a fly.

  14

  Lise took her shower first so she could fit the laundry in before dinner, a suitable excuse to read her book in the rumbling, linty humidity. It had become a tradition of hers, a last, necessary resting place in the sequence of the week. The laundromat sat tucked in behind the Putt-Putt, across the road from the practice huts. It had a tacky charm that came from a total lack of decoration. The machines were either mustard or avocado, and the only hint that this wasn’t 1973 were the cars for sale shingling the bulletin board.

  The place was empty this time of day, and she took one of the resident secondhand kitchen chairs out the propped-open back door and watched people who’d visited the Institute file through the rocky lot to their cars parked somewhere off in the numbered fields. They came in clumps, most of them older, driven by the crossing guards. When the wind was right she could hear a warble of French horn and the bright piping of an oboe. She was tired from swimming, and Harry’s new predicament wasn’t as interesting as the light on the page, the way it angled over her shoulder, tinting the margins. She wanted to finish the book, but she found herself skimming, counting down the pages till the end. Harry had found the silver keys, everything was wonderful, blah blah blah. There was nothing real she could hang on to—it was too simple. She wanted reality, complexity, not this endless fairy tale where good was rewarded. She wanted life.

  She wondered what her life would look like in a book. Now there was a depressing idea.

  Meg’s would make a good book, at least from the stories Ken had told her—running away, hitchhiking across country when she was eighteen, being a cocktail waitress in San Francisco.

  There was nothing exciting about Lise’s life. Falling in love with Ken and being his model, but that was a long time ago. The rest was just what everybody did. When she was growing up she was sure she would be special, but all kids thought that; it couldn’t be true for everyone. Ken still believed he was, despite the evidence, and while she didn’t like herself for doing it, she knew she held that against him. One of them had to be realistic.

  Flipping a page, she thought that her life was average and nothing to be ashamed of. The world wasn’t as magical as people liked to believe. That was why they read books to escape it.

  She checked her washers. The darks were done, and by the time she’d switched them over, the whites were ready. She couldn’t get back into Harry and tipped her head up and massaged her neck with one hand. She thought of accidentally leaving the book there so she wouldn’t have to pack it—or just dumping it in the garbage can with all the purple lint and dryer sheets. She couldn’t remember ever throwing a book away, it wasn’t done, no matter how bad the book was. There was always the library sale.

  The sky was blue and the sun was warm on her arms. Traffic passed on the road, and the old people crunched across the lot. She had another forty minutes or so, and less than fifty pages. There wouldn’t be time to read tonight, with the fireworks, and with a sigh she bowed her head and started in again.

  15

  They had to search for it, and then it was Kenneth who finally found the pebbly cover—like a patio stepping stone—in the far corner by the road. How was Emily supposed to know? Henry took care of these things.

  “Doesn’t it have to be pumped out before they can inspect it?” Kenneth asked, though why he was telling her this now eluded her.

  “Is that right?”

  “Maybe they’ll do that first.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” she admitted. “All I know is that the buyers asked to have it inspected. The rest is up to them.”

  Mrs. Klinginsmith said in the case of summer homes it was rare to find a full tank. They were only there a week while the bacteria worked year-round. They didn’t have a clothes washer, so they were probably okay. How many people did they have using the shower? How often did they run the dishwasher? She carried a clipboard and wrote down their answers with a pen with her name on it. Emily asked what else the inspector could find wrong with the system that would frighten the buyers.

  “I can’t imagine you have one of those old steel tanks,” Mrs. Klinginsmith asked, tramping over the grass in a box pattern as if searching for another opening. “They’re a real nightmare to replace.”

  Emily looked to Kenneth, but he didn’t know either.

  “I’m sure it’s been upgraded,” Mrs. Klinginsmith said.

  Emily couldn’t remember anyone tearing up the yard. She wouldn’t forget a project that size.

  Mrs. Klinginsmith stopped and looked around at the trees, clutching her clipboard to her chest. “You don’t have any maples that I can see. They’re what kills a system. Their roots go through the holes in your pipes and next thing you’ve got a ball of them inside there. By the time you call Roto-Rooter, you’re looking at two hundred dollars minimum, and that’s going to happen again and again. You end up having to take the tree out. You don’t w
ant to know how much that costs.”

  The real trouble around here was the water table being so close, and keeping the leach field away from the lake. Frost heaves were a problem. The boxes could tilt and overload the pipes on one side, or move them so that when the ground settled, dirt would work its way into the leach field. Emily wasn’t sure why that was a problem. Wasn’t the leach field dirt to begin with?

  No, it was stone laid around the pipes. The tank itself was concrete and watertight. When the inspector came he scratched a rough diagram on a pad for her. He was older, in a maroon Chautauqua Girls’ Softball windbreaker, his hands nicked like Henry’s. He drove a clunker of a van with a ladder tied to the luggage rack with twine, so she assumed they weren’t going to pump the tank. He had a toolbox and a checklist to go over. He scraped open the lid and got down on his hands and knees with a flashlight to look inside, and Emily stepped back from the smell. He dipped a steel rod in as if taking its temperature and wrote down some numbers, then left the rod leaning against the fence.

  “Level looks fine,” he said, and asked where their toilets were.

  Kenneth led them in through the kitchen.

  “Pardon the mess,” Emily said.

  Kneeling on the bath mat, the inspector took a brown bottle from his toolbox and squeezed an eyedropper until the water in the bowl turned bright purple.

  “That’ll wash right out,” he assured her. He flushed the toilet and they all stood there and watched the purple swirl. “What we want to see when we go outside is this particular water coming in through the input to make sure there’s no blockage. We’ll do the same with the upstairs and then we’ll run some plain water to flood the tank. That pushes the dye out the outlet and into the leach field. Then while we’re pumping the tank we’ll have time to sniff around and see if there’s any breakthrough to the surface or out into the lake. We definitely want to keep it out of the lake.”

  “So you are pumping the tank,” Kenneth asked.

  “Got to,” the inspector said. “Otherwise there’s no way to check the condition of the baffles. You’d be surprised, I’ve found actual tanks with cracks in them.”

  “The buyers pay for the pumping,” Mrs. Klinginsmith interrupted.

  “New ones too,” the inspector said. “You get a bad mix, that concrete’ll fall apart. It’s like laying a road when it’s too cold.”

  She couldn’t follow what he said after that, something about the chemicals in detergents and the water level getting too high. She trusted Kenneth to remember. For her purposes, it was enough to know what could go wrong.

  The bowl had filled again, only a tinge of purple at the edges.

  “I’m going to give it one more,” the inspector said, then checked around the base before he flushed.

  Emily thought of the boys missing the toilet upstairs. She was glad she’d cleaned the bathrooms.

  “So the water should be purple,” she asked on the way across the yard.

  “The water should be purple,” the inspector said. “If it’s not, you’ve got a blockage somewhere.”

  He turned his flashlight on and stood aside. The water was purple.

  “So far so good,” Mrs. Klinginsmith said, and Emily thought of her commission, how much it was, then remembered that the two of them were rooting for the same thing.

  The second test was identical, and while the inspector was running water to flood the system, the pumping truck showed up, parking in the street for the neighbors to see. They couldn’t pump yet, the inspector said. They had to wait a good half hour for the dye to break through. The driver unrolled a hose like a fireman, then sat in his cab with the door open, reading the paper while the inspector walked around the side yard and down to the lake, taking measurements with a wheel on a stick. It was four-fifteen and their reservation at Webb’s was for six-thirty.

  “How long will it take to pump the tank?” Emily asked.

  “It depends on how full it is,” Mrs. Klinginsmith said. “I can’t imagine it’ll be more than a half hour.”

  But at five-thirty the truck was still chugging away. Emily needed to get dressed for dinner and left Kenneth with Mrs. Klinginsmith, and while she was changing she heard the truck shift up and leave. She brushed her hair and pushed her earrings in and hustled out to see if they’d found anything.

  The inspector was just dragging the lid back on, Mrs. Klinginsmith marching across the lawn with Kenneth, swinging her clipboard at her side.

  “It all checked out fine,” she said, as if she’d known all along.

  “Good,” Emily said, and thanked the inspector. Kenneth went inside to get ready.

  “I think that’s it,” Mrs. Klinginsmith said at her car—a Taurus like Arlene’s, in a sensible dark blue. “I probably won’t see you before you leave, so if you could just leave the kitchen door unlocked for the cleaners, that would be a big help. And don’t worry about any furniture you’re not taking, or anything. I use these guys all the time and you should see them, they’ll have the place emptied out in one day.”

  “When is that going to be?”

  “I know this,” she said, and flipped the top sheet on her clipboard. “The Wednesday after Labor Day. I’ve already called Goodwill.”

  “Would it be better if I left you a key? I don’t know if I like the idea of leaving the house open for that long.”

  Even as Emily said this, she knew she was just stalling.

  “Of course, if you have an extra.”

  “I do,” Emily said, and went inside to get it.

  She could back out right now, nothing was stopping her. She could save it to announce at dinner, deliver the good news over dessert, a last-second reprieve.

  The key was in a dish on the mantel, part of a heavy ring with the extra boat key and the keys for the garage and the pump house and the front door and the lock on Henry’s toolchest and a dozen more—all labeled with tape in Henry’s neat hand. She had to fight to get it off, but she did.

  16

  “Come on,” Sam yelled at Arlene’s back, “strike him out! Throw him the old radio ball!”

  “All right,” Arlene said, “no mercy. What’s the count?”

  “Two and two,” Justin said, rocking in the batter’s box. He was supposed to be Nomar Garciaparra.

  “Maxwell working from the stretch,” she said. “Checks the runner—he’s invisible. Here’s the windup, and here’s the pitch.”

  It bounced in the grass, running the count full, and she bent over and bulged one cheek out and pretended to spit, then glared in at Justin. He glared back, dead serious.

  At recess she pitched to both teams, so she knew her way around the plate, but there she was strictly business, trying to give them something to hit, every minute precious. Henry entertained, throwing behind his back and between his legs, all the while delivering a ridiculous play-by-play—“Here’s Sammy ‘Whammy-bammy’ Maxwell, he’s oh for ten today.” He’d been doing this routine since Kenneth and Margaret could swing a wiffle bat, and Arlene was surprised to find she’d absorbed so much of it.

  “Two out, man on first, and a full count to the squirt from Detrert. Maxwell looks like she’s tiring out there. This could be her last batter, depending on how long those girls take to get ready.”

  “No batta,” Sam chanted. He was playing shallow, halfway to the lake. Justin had already struck out twice, and the single they’d given him was a tapper. She could barely bend over in her dress to field it.

  “Sets and checks the runner, and here’s the payoff pitch.”

  She wanted to lay it out in the middle of the plate to give him a chance, but the ball ran in on him. He swung in self-defense as it plunked him square in the chest.

  “The whiff!” Sam said, running in to take his place.

  “No,” she said, “it hit him.”

  “He swung at it.”

  “I swung,” Justin surrendered.

  “Nope. Take your base. First and second. They’re giving Maxwell a warning. Watch out
, it could get ugly out here.”

  She was trying to groove one for him when Emily stepped out of the screenporch with her white purse and a camera. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Playing wiffle ball.”

  “Not in those clothes you’re not. I swear. Come on, I want to take all of your pictures in front of the house.”

  “Grandma’s no fun,” Arlene said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said.

  “Grandma is so fun,” Emily said. “Now stand right there and look this way. Everybody say ‘Aunt Arlene is crazy.’”

  “Am not,” she said after the flash.

  “Are too.”

  17

  On the way they passed the Putt-Putt, and with a twinge Ken realized that he’d missed his chance to shoot it. Next year it would probably be gone, replaced by a gas station or turned into a parking lot for the Institute. He’d had all week, and he’d wasted it chasing after Tracy Ann Caler. He thought he should get Webb’s too—the boys standing on the huge flukes of the anchor out front, the hokey gift shop—but he’d come unarmed. By the time they got back to the cottage the light would be gone.

  He had a whole list—Hogan’s Hut and the True Value and the ferry seen from the bridge. He needed another week, another three days. He could do it in one day, make that the frame, wake up at four and do nothing but drive around shooting, arrange them by time like those awful coffee-table books. One Day in the Life of Lake Chautauqua.

  He could mock the obviousness of the idea and still see the potential in it, and thought that said something about him. He was unoriginal, even his best work secondhand, his worst bordering on incompetent.

  Lise slowed for someone turning in, and he caught a fat marmalade cat bolting for cover under a hedge, a basketball on the lawn. The light was soft on the grass, bringing out motes and flying insects under the trees, wafting seeds—pretty clichés. He could see them on Hallmark cards or posters with inspirational slogans. Maybe that was his calling.