Cameo Lake

by Susan Wilson

  “You think I overreacted.” He let go of my wrist and stood up. “It's better than not reacting at all.” He dived in, swimming toward his shore with an emphatic reach. Once on shore, he didn't look back at me, just scooped his towel off the ground and went into his cabin.

  I touched my wrist where he had gripped it. There would be bruising—not an effect of violence, but of caring.

  Twelve

  Seven-thirty. Some inner time devil made me look at the clock just as it read seven-thirty. I should be in the car making the evening phone call but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'd go up in a few minutes. A few minutes either way wouldn't make any difference. Sean's mother had always preached, never go to bed angry, but I had. Nursing bitterness like a warm beer.

  Mercifully, my train of thought was derailed by the kids pounding up the back steps and into the kitchen. They had been a little reluctant to go to camp, chafing against regimentation after these three weeks of unbridled activity. However, once Lily heard that they had horses and Tim realized he knew a boy from the East Side who attended, they were aboard on the concept and already wearing the Camp Winetonka T-shirts I'd brought back after my interview with Mrs. Beckman. In honor of the perfect solution to my work dilemma, I promised myself a work-free weekend, all play, as much for myself as for them. Tomorrow we were going blueberry picking and canoeing. I thought about asking Ben to join us, but didn't. I needed family time, and maybe Ben and I needed a little space between us.

  Already it seemed as though the days were getting shorter. The long twilights of June were gone and evening settled in by eight o'clock. The heat continued oppressive, but the kids didn't seem to notice. We played a slightly moldy game of Monopoly, the fake money sticking together with the humidity. By ten, Lily and Tim were sound asleep and I was left alone with nothing to distract my thoughts.

  I got in the car and drove up to the top the drive. Sean had picked up the phone on the first ring, not commenting on the lateness of my call. “I'm all set for next Friday. I'll be up around nine.” He was quick to tell me this, quick to fend off unpleasantness. He was clearly relieved that I had found a palatable solution to having the kids with me. “Cleo, that's perfect. We should have done something like that from the start.”

  “Right.”

  “You have to admit that Cameo Lake is a far better place to hang out in the summer than Providence.” There it was, the justification for his actions. Press on the guilt, smooth it along like peanut butter.

  “Of course it is, Sean. Don't you think I felt a little selfish being here without all of you?”

  “You never said that.”

  “No, all I said was that I needed uncomplicated time to finish my work.”

  “Maybe this isn't uncomplicated but it is more fair to the kids.”

  “And to you, Sean?”

  He either missed or deliberately ignored my meaning, jumping off the subject with a bound. “I'll be up next week. Maybe we can rent a boat and sail around.”

  I sat on the porch and stared across to Ben's light, listening for his music, but there was none.

  I woke at dawn, drenched in sleeper's sweat. I got up to pee and once up couldn't bear lying down again on those damp, sticky sheets. The night had been untempered by any breeze, the air at once still and heavy. I pulled on yesterday's shorts and tank and tied my running shoes on without socks. I took a long time stretching, listening to the variety of birdcalls. Stretching my back, hands against my waist, I looked up as a hawk launched itself from a pine tree. I thought that I should stop at the library and get a bird book so that I could begin identifying some of these creatures more exotic than the robin and jay I knew.

  Putting a moderately paced tape in my Discman, I set off. No sense courting an early-morning heatstroke. I ran up through the woods along the soft path strewn with pine needles and cones. I was used to the slippery surface by now and knew how to use it. I ran quietly past the cabins with their still sleeping occupants, down to the imported-sand beach, between the rows of up-ended canoes, and on, back up through the woods, higher and higher into the deeper part of the forest. The hardest part of the run followed as I moved past a blue trail marker that served as my halfway point. Now I traveled along the ridgeline of the hills, darker and slightly cooler than any other part of the run. Here there was a little breeze and I felt it against my skin. I was tiring by now, the incline unforgiving in this weather. My pace didn't keep up with the music and the conflicting rhythms made me a little crazy. I yanked off the earphones and allowed myself to start walking. Breathless in the thick air, I bent over, a sudden stitch punching me in the side.

  I leaned back against the rough surface of a pine tree, staring through a break in the tree line toward Ben's island. I touched the place on my wrist where he had held me and looked to see if I had bruised. There was no mark, but the intensity of his grip lingered in memory. He had not frightened me. On the contrary, Ben's fear for me had worked loose feelings I had not looked for in such a casual friendship. It seemed as though I was already looking to Ben for support I should have looked to my husband for. In a strange way, as much as I felt Ben was protecting himself against revealing too much, he was open to knowing me. If I had to put a word to it, he was kind. Dare I say that at this point, in such a short acquaintance, we were becoming necessary to each other, in the way certain touchstones are necessary? Was I so lonely in my life I needed Ben? Was he so lonely he needed me? I touched my wrist and told myself I was reading too much into an act of ordinary merit. Except that the look on Ben's face was extraordinary, hardened with alarm, then softening to relief. He was right, I had thought he'd overreacted, and the look on his face did nothing to explain why.

  With the thought of Ben's hand on my wrist, I was thrust back into remembering why I had stood up to dive in the first place. The tiny bell tolling at a distance which spoke of danger. I listened to it as I began to walk back to the cabin. I replayed my recent conversations with Sean and I came up with nothing more sinister than his backing out of our deal, which I should have anticipated. There was nothing to speak of another infidelity except a trip to the zoo and more than one late night. Nothing except my intuitive mistrust. That was something I had learned, not something which came naturally to me. I hadn't been the least suspicious that summer in Narragansett. I was blindsided. But I had forgiven Sean, thus I was muzzled against speaking unsubstantiated doubts. We'd gone the counselor route, delved into the issues, made promises. He would behave and I would forgive. He still flirted, but I tolerated that. To the best of my knowledge, Sean had been faithful ever since.

  I drove a spike into the tolling bell.

  The kids were still asleep and I left them alone. I put on a pot of coffee and took a quick lukewarm shower. Selfishly, I was grateful for the gift of an hour I could work while the kids slept. I wasn't going to work at all on this Saturday, I had planned on a free weekend, but I needed to do it. I needed the power that comes of being able to manipulate and control events. Entering the world of Jay and Karen calmed me down, gave me an hour's respite from my own reality.

  Thirteen

  It had been a good weekend. The oppressive weather had finally broken midday on Saturday with a sudden drenching thunderstorm. We'd just finished packing the picnic basket when the sky darkened and the wind picked up. The first thunderclap startled us all and we huddled together in semi-mock terror. The booming echo off the hills seemed amplified against the bowl of the lake. Mentally I checked off all the reasons we were safe in the cabin: lower than anything else around it, no aerial, protected against the side of the hill. But when the lightening streaked blue against a deep gray sky, some primal fear made me squeeze my children closer to me.

  As suddenly as it arrived, the storm moved off, leaving in its wake clear fresh air. The rain diminished, then stopped entirely, only the dripping off the pine boughs kept alive the impression that it was still raining. We went out onto the porch and I suddenly noticed my laptop, still on. “Sweet Jesus,
” I muttered and went to check for lost data. I trusted surge protectors only so far. No, my morning's work was intact. Too close for comfort, I shut it down and unplugged it from the power strip.

  The three of us managed to drag the canoe out from under the porch and down to the lake's edge with somewhat of a struggle, leaving a deep groove in the muddy grass to mark our passage. Then came the scramble to find three life preservers. Then to find dry towels. As ever, getting there was more effort than fun. Finally, though, we were launched and paddling off for as yet unexplored reaches of the lake. A smoky darkness in the eastern sky was all that was left of the rapidly moving storm.

  Ben was in his yard as we paddled across the reach between our shore and his. He waved first and we waved back with enthusiasm. Apparently caught unawares by the sudden storm, he'd hung out his week's washing. The polo shirts, khaki shorts, and blue jeans hung limp and dripping. In between the odd cotton garments, the johnnies fluttered a little, the first to dry in the new clean air. They were the kind of thing an elderly parent might wear in a nursing home and I wondered if he had mentioned that one of his parents might be in one close by. I thought he had said that they lived in New Jersey, still in his childhood home.

  “I like Ben.” Lily kneeling in front of the bow bench, wielded the second paddle.

  “Me too.” Tim was riding amidships. “He knows a lot of good jokes.”

  Kneeling before the stern seat of the canoe, I gripped the hardwood paddle and dug it into the slightly choppy water, angling it to set our course. “Yeah,” I said, “I like him too.”

  I stroked the paddle against the water, glad that the fresh breeze was behind us and we were easily cutting through the lake. My plan was to circumnavigate Ben's island and picnic on the West Side of the lake, where two or three picnic tables were set up in a natural grove.

  Tim leaned over the gunwale, dragging a hand through the water. Below the rise of his life jacket I could see his thin little backbone, so prominent through his tanned skin, a more precious sight than the beauty of the mountains. He, like his sister, adored Sean. At eight, Tim was more inclined to worship than Lily, at almost ten. She was more open to the suggestion that Dad could make a mistake now and then. She was becoming, as the eldest and therefore the trailblazer, adept at negotiations. Tim had no idea what freedoms he would never have to fight for. Bedtime adjustments, sleep-overs, and clothing choices were battles already won.

  Sean was less a stranger to children than I had been. A singleton, I had never had the experience of group games and negotiating the peaks and valleys of family life. I'd never had anyone else to blame for the spills or the missing shoe. Sean handled the commotion with ease, firm in his rules yet happy to play catch. I never doubted his love for his family, and that was why his reluctance to join us, even for the two days he might be able to, was what kept the bell chiming in the distance.

  Right shoulder aching, I swapped sides, telling Lily to switch her paddle, too, and we continued stroking without a break in the rhythm.

  The lake breeze felt so good after the days of stifling heat. The air cleared now of all humidity, I barely sweated as I paddled toward the West Side shore. Tim, as navigator, pointed out floating debris, leaves mostly, blown off the trees in the storm. A branch floated close by. Tim leaned over to push it away and I yelled a caution to him, perhaps a little more harshly than required. Tim threw me a startled look and sat back down. The branch bumped the side of the canoe.

  “Sorry, Tim, I was afraid I'd lose you.”

  “Oh, Mom.” He didn't need to finish his protest. He really wasn't in any danger of falling overboard. I reminded myself of Ben and flushed a little against the idea that our reactions might be born out of similar emotions.

  “Come on, Lily, let's row the boat ashore.” I began to paddle faster and was rewarded with the squeals of delight from Lily struggling to keep up. Our mad paddling threw up geysers of lake water, drenching us all. We made landfall in moments and Tim leapt out to pull us ashore.

  The picnic benches were still wet from the storm, the sun never quite touching them through the canopy of thick pines. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered but enjoying ourselves.

  I was exhausted and fell asleep easily moments after the kids did. The ride back from the West Side was a lot harder with the breeze in our face. It took half again as long to get home as it had to get to the picnic grove. I had been asleep for only an hour when I woke suddenly. I took stock of what might have wakened me, but no sounds alerted me to either of the kids being up. Everything was still inside the cabin. The moon without its nimbus of humidity was quite bright at that hour. I got up to pull the shade and then I heard it, Ben's musical homage. I left the shade up and lay back down on my bed. The by now familiar strains were intertwined with new variations.

  As he played, I thought about my characters, letting his music influence my words. Finally, I got up and went out onto the porch, where I opened my laptop. The music repeated over and over, and I could tell he was experimenting, as each repetition was slightly different. Every now and then he stopped and I imagined him writing down what he was doing, notating his work. Once more he began at the beginning of the piece, this time going through it nonstop. To me, hearing it against the backdrop of my story, it sounded like poignancy set counterpoint to mischief, developed against an underlying grief.

  Suddenly the sweet piano notes became discordant and then the discordant notes became the impotent banging of the keys. Then silence. Hearing Ben's frustration only underscored my recent sense of the tenuous grasp any of us have on happiness. I sat still, letting the emotions I'd created for my characters ebb away, only to be replaced by my own. I remembered something about nature abhorring a vacuum. Not for an instant did I have an empty place without some feeling—manufactured or real—curling up in it like a worm. My anger at Sean had dissipated along with the guilt I had harbored deep down over not having the kids at the lake in the first place. What replaced that were my doubts about Sean. What stopped those from being unbearable were my distracting thoughts about Ben.

  Initially our conversations on the raft were made up of general chat, then weighty discussions of things nonpersonal and outside of our lives, like politics and crime. Soon enough there came anecdotes and we swapped family stories. I spoke of my kids, he spoke of his nieces and nephews. He made only oblique references to being “on the road,” such that he might have been a salesman. As yet I held back about asking him if what Sean had said was true.

  I tried to speak of Sean only in ordinary ways, as he fit into those family stories. I was a little embarrassed that I had grumbled about Sean leaving the kids. In dark moments I recognized the disloyalty and the danger of making Sean out to be a villain. Yet, as much as I didn't really want to paint Sean as all bad, I knew that I was beginning to see from a distance the cracks in our marriage, the distance between us now physical, measured in miles, while the distance at home was measured in hours of silence.

  Ben made very few references to his wife, keeping that part of his life closely held. But lately there had been a shift in our relationship and I knew we were at that juncture where we would begin making revelations about ourselves, about those things we kept bottled up. In the quiet I resolved to gently loosen Ben's story from him.

  The silence was profound. I closed my laptop and went back to bed.

  Fourteen

  Monday morning I hurried the kids through breakfast and charged up the rutted drive to the main road around to the West Side and to Camp Winetonka.

  “I love you, have a great time. I'll pick you up at four!” and I was back in the big car and away. I didn't look in the rearview mirror to see if they were standing forlornly abandoned or happily rushing off to meet new friends. I didn't need to know that. I just needed to get to the grocery store and back to work.

  I had spent quality time with them all weekend, playing and eating and joking and falling instantly asleep. Now I was desperate to get past the midway point in my nov
el and on toward the end. I always likened the first half of a novel to climbing up a hill. Sometimes getting there took a long time, but once there, at the turning point, at the crisis, everything began to come tumbling down, moving under its own weight to conclusion. I was a little tired of pushing this novel up the hill, and I wanted very much to be finished with it. I had less gotten away from my daily distractions than I seemed to have multiplied them by leaving Providence.

  I didn't want to take the time to drive to the next town and to the Big G, so I pulled into the parking lot of the mom-and-pop grocery store, Abair's Market. Their prices were a bit higher, but they specialized in good vegetables and fresh-baked bread. The floor was aged pine and the shelves held the staples of three generations, Postum and Wheatena, Hostess Cupcakes, and Poland Spring Water. I always felt slowed down as I walked through the four aisles which made up the whole of the store. Without Muzak to move me along, or to influence my choices, I actually stopped and thought about what I was buying. Restocked with peanut butter, wheat bread, a bag of oranges, and juice, I stood at the old-fashioned register, with its three rows of metal keys, and stared out the window at the view past the parking lot as Mrs. Abair tallied my purchases. My earlier sense of hurry had relaxed to a more contemplative mood. It was still only nine o'clock, plenty of time to devote to the novel before I needed to go get the kids.

  I'd spent longer running errands than I had planned and so skipped my run and ate lunch while working. I lifted my head up from the screen only to noodle a phrase around, staring with oblivious eyes across the water toward Ben's very quiet cabin. I was barely aware of the voices coming up from the beach, children's playful shrieks, mothers' scoldings, a radio talk show host's garbled voice. It all existed outside of my screen, nothing to do with me. On this Monday, I managed to get into the dream and the outside world faded away.