And like that, a plan formed in her mind. Rough around the edges, thin in places, but a plan nonetheless. Once she’d thought it, she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t.
“I’ll tell Thomas where to take you,” she said, at last. “Tomorrow night.”
Jack smiled to himself, a different smile from the one he used with the world. Lindie was already smoothing over the plan’s jagged spots, imagining how she’d offer it to June, how she’d cajole her, how it would feel to answer June’s will with her own, and bring June to Jack’s side.
But it was nearly midnight, Wednesday the eighth, before June’s breath warmed Lindie’s ear again, and her hands gripped Lindie’s belly. Together they rode through the cool, chirruping night, which smelled of cut grass and hummed with nocturnal possibility as the waning gibbous moon, still nearly full, glowed above them.
June was reticent, demure, so much so that it had taken two days to convince her. Lindie could understand the tug within June; she wanted to meet Jack, but it would be difficult to trust him. So Lindie had done her best to woo June with tall tales of Jack’s regrets and apology, until June shushed her with a beleaguered sigh and agreed to come along.
Now here they were, past the western town line on the two-lane highway that belonged to them. Lights and buildings were a memory out under the open canopy of stars. Lindie pulled over to the side of the road, gulped from her canteen, and checked behind them to make sure no one had trailed their escape from the alleyway behind the garage.
“Want a smoke?” she asked, offering June one of the Lucky Strikes she’d bummed off Jack.
“Where are we meeting?” June asked. She didn’t like Lindie smoking except when she wanted one herself. Lindie tucked the cigarette back into the front pocket of her overalls and ignored the question. She knew if she answered before they got there, June would forbid it; Miss Goody Two-Shoes hated trespassing.
Lindie had first heard about Idlewyld as a little girl. Lemon Gray Neely had acquired it in his heyday; legend held that it stood on the first parcel of land he’d sucked dry of oil in the great Auglaize County boom of the 1880s, before the black gold dried up and Uncle Lem and his fellow wildcatters found more reliable, lucrative territories in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. As a young man, Lem would supposedly sit on the Idlewyld porch with a cigar and watch his rigs drink on the far rim of the lake. But, by 1955, few remembered precisely where the old camp was. Sometimes the football team would drive out, searching for it as a place to party, but there were plenty of fishing and hunting shacks down the access roads, and certainly nothing as grand as the retreat that existed in their fathers’ stories. In Lindie’s imagining, Idlewyld had a porch twice as long as the one on Two Oaks, and stood three or four stories tall, with broad windows lighting up the night. This imagined lodge had danced upon the wall as her father breathed it to life at bedtime, his voice a ringing promise. Even the name: Idlewyld.
Naturally, Lindie had been beside herself when June had finally offered to take her to Idlewyld the August before. June knew exactly where the place was—apparently Cheryl Ann had found an old map and taken June out there for a Sunday picnic, only to declare it a hazard and forbid June from ever going again. Lindie had begged June to take her for weeks, until the older girl finally caved. The night they’d planned on turned out to be hidden behind layers of rain-heavy clouds; thunder threatened to the west. At the window, eyes darting up to test the sky, June suggested they put off the scheduled trip. But school was starting up again. Artie had been courting June, and Lindie could smell what was coming on the air. She knew they’d never go if June didn’t take her right then.
Ten months later, on the night Lindie took June to meet Jack five miles out of town, on the long, flat road that could take them all the way west to Indianapolis if they’d let it, they turned to their left onto a gravel road marked only by a broken white post. They dismounted just a few feet onto the gravel, as soon as the sudden oaks above them cut out the ambient light. The access road down to the lake was straight. The bass chorus of bullfrogs from the swampy waterfront affirmed they were heading in the right direction. June hemmed and hawed as Lindie knew she would, and Lindie, predictably, won her over.
On the night June had brought Lindie to Idlewyld the first time, they’d found the house by wading into the overgrown weeds, their hands the only navigation in the night. They’d cursed and laughed and bumped their shins and almost given up hope until June found a lip of porch and, satisfied they were finally far enough from civilization that no one would see them, dared to switch on the flashlight Lindie hadn’t known June was carrying.
On the night they were to meet Jack, Lindie was prepared with her own flashlight. She’d bought it with her emergency fund, which she kept hidden in the coffee can in her father’s garage. She felt ennobled by spending her meager savings on June’s adventure with Jack. June would never know how selfless she’d been; Lindie liked how this secret sacrifice made her feel.
They neared the end of the gravel road. June was a step ahead. Lindie could almost feel the warmth radiating off June’s back, detect the sultry sweat curling in the forbidden forest at the back of her neck. Lindie licked her lips. It occurred to her then, like a shock of static electricity, that what they were actually doing was meeting a strange man in a dark place, without having told a soul. Fear locked itself around her. Perhaps Jack would be unkind, brutal. Maybe June would need someone to defend her—and suddenly that thought produced a second wave, of something else, something powerful, and arousing, that choked the fear.
Then June gasped. Lindie shrieked. She grabbed for June, but instead tripped over June’s body as she crumpled to the ground. Lindie landed on top of her, but not in a graceful or gentle way, not as a lover might hope to fall. June yelped and pummeled her fists up against Lindie, telling her to get off and let her breathe.
Lindie fumbled for her flashlight, but, before she could turn it on, he was there. His flashlight cast the world into neat yellow. He bent over them. He untangled their limbs. June whimpered when she put weight on her right ankle. Jack slung her arm over his shoulder and helped her to the porch.
Jack had a kerosene lamp waiting. It flickered in the breeze off the lake, revealing a picnic blanket spread along the front of the porch, with pillows surrounding it and a basket of food. The smell of the kerosene-laden dirt in the smudge pots filled the air and fought off the swarm of mosquitoes hungry for new blood. He’d brought a thermos of hot chocolate and a tin of oatmeal cookies, made by Crafty exactly to his specifications.
They tended to June. Lindie tried to switch her flashlight on, but it wouldn’t cooperate, and, anyway, Jack was already at June’s knee, palpating to learn the extent of her injuries—a scrape along the ridge of her shin, a slight twist of the ankle. Relieved June was all right, Lindie backed off. June had certainly suffered much worse climbing down from her window, and Lindie’d never heard her complain. But Jack remained bent over June, dabbing at the scrape with a damp handkerchief. He handed June the flashlight, and she shone it out beyond them, the beam losing itself into the vast, watery darkness, as insects rushed into its glow, until she flicked it off and the night fell into a natural play of shadow and fire.
In the dim flicker of the kerosene flame, Jack’s fingers gently cupped June’s knee. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and slacks, handsome, simple. Lindie listened to their gentle conversation—his words tender, hers grateful. She expected June to brush him off—that’s what June would have done with her—but her voice carried sorrow and appreciation, a kind of cooing softness that she never offered Lindie.
“Did you go inside?” Lindie asked Jack abruptly. June had taken her right into Idlewyld that first night, snaking her hand up through a broken pane to turn the handle to the locked front door.
“If you’re asking if I broke into someone else’s house,” Jack answered warmly, “the answer is no.” He sounded playful again, self-assured, not at all how he’d sounded when he begged for another chance
with June.
June laughed. The joy carried off into the darkness, where Lindie could no longer catch it. Why had Idlewyld been the place she’d decided they should meet? Why hadn’t she considered what bringing him here, for June, would take from herself?
“Did anyone see you leave town?” Lindie asked, eager to find fault.
“I told you, Rabbit Legs,” he said, letting go of June’s leg but still looking down at it, “I’ve got plenty of experience slipping out of sticky situations.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she muttered.
June cut her eyes at Lindie. Lindie fiddled with the switch of her flashlight again, greedy to blind June, but the dang thing was a lemon. And anyway, all Jack had to say was “I’m a master of disguise,” in that voice that was amused and assured at once, and June forgot all about Lindie as she laughed all over again.
Lindie stepped up onto the porch. She stood over them. Neither of them looked the slightest bit interested in a tour. “Let’s show him around,” she said loudly.
She’d been surprised to learn that Idlewyld was nothing but a shack, nothing like the place in Eben’s stories. Once, long before, it might have been called a cabin or a cottage, but Uncle Lem’s camp out on Lake St. Jude was as abandoned as the old man’s mind. Over time, it had grown true to its name, becoming a half-feral place, growing back to the earth. Weeds poked through the floorboards. A tree had come in through the back window, and the wind gasped through the broken panes that lined the front of the humble building. On the night June had brought Lindie there, they’d found the place in shambles, and had made a little spot for themselves in the center of the shack’s only room, dragging a waterlogged mattress out of the way to make their own sitting area on a mildewed wicker couch.
They found it just as they had left it. Lindie noticed the spot where June had dented the sofa cushion after the rain started and they had taken cover. She placed her hand in that empty pool and cursed herself. Idlewyld would no longer be theirs. Already, from the way June took Jack’s hand as he led her over a broken board, already, from the way he said, “What an enchantment,” she could see that someday, in the not too distant future, they would look back on this very night, and neither would recall that Lindie had been along too.
The girls met Jack out at Idlewyld nearly every night of the next week. It was a foregone conclusion that Lindie would always come along—June needed a chaperone, and a ride who could get her home before first light—but each of the three of them understood, without discussing it, that those nights continued for the sole reason that Jack and June had begun to believe that nothing was as real, as important, as those few hours they possessed in each other’s company, in the hush of that decrepit, dark cabin, learning everything they could about the other’s world. From Lindie’s spot on the mattress in the corner, where she’d pretend to read or nap as they mooned, she realized they reminded her of babies, the way babies only ever wanted their mothers, and treated the rest of the world as a disappointment, nothing in comparison to the promise of being once again in the company of the apples of their eyes.
June slept in daily, nibbling from the tray Apatha was made to leave outside her door at Cheryl Ann’s insistence; the poor girl was obviously heartbroken that her beloved Artie was yet to return, so completely heartbroken she simply couldn’t get out of bed, and Cheryl Ann, though not a woman who considered herself indulgent of moodiness, couldn’t help but encourage June’s eagerness to become Artie’s wife.
June would have lingered in bed all day had Cheryl Ann let her. All she wanted, during the daylight hours, was to recall the rosy curve of Jack’s bottom lip in the lamplight, and the way he’d laughed at her story about getting her baby teeth knocked out in the skating accident, and the gasping way it felt to look at him sometimes, as if he were made of fire and might accidentally burn her up. She wanted this forever—the promise of him, the memory of him, without having to ever make a choice, and she relished poring over their hours together, believing her possibilities were infinite, as infinite as he made her feel. But eventually Cheryl Ann would open the bedroom door and insist June join the day, and so June would sigh and cast her smile into a sniffle, and agree to spend a few hours on the place cards, and nod her head and accept assurances that Artie would be back soon—Clyde had promised!
It wasn’t that, now that June was meeting Jack, she didn’t imagine herself being married to Artie anymore; she genuinely enjoyed her scheduled dress fittings and sighed admiringly over the silver being shined for her wedding reception. But it wasn’t as if she did imagine it either. Over the course of those ten days, she simply allowed herself not to think beyond the next trip out to Idlewyld. She became a girl who ran her hand over her best dresses, deciding which one to wear that particular evening, who enjoyed the pleasure of drawing the chosen garment over her flesh, and of running a brush through her glossy hair, who endured the crawl of the minutes until midnight, when she would at last be able to step out her window and into the world again, free and ready to enjoy it.
In that same weeklong period, Lindie didn’t sleep much. There were late night rides out to Idlewyld and early morning calls for Erie Canal. Not to mention that she was working harder than ever before, darting all over town at Casey’s behest, and with a smile on her face, which didn’t come naturally. In contrast, the nights in Jack and June’s company, while electric at first for their novelty, soon ran into each other, not as they did for June—into a swooning fog of delicious possibility—but because nothing, as far as Lindie could tell, was actually happening. To her eyes, what Jack and June did on those nights amounted to a whole lot of polite chitchat. They sat in their assigned spots—June on the wicker couch, Jack on a creaky old kitchen chair—and combed through the minutiae of each other’s lives, oohing and aahing over the dumbest details. Every night, June made Lindie swear an oath of secrecy, as if anyone would care about the name of Jack’s first puppy, or the cost of the violet gown June had worn to the winter formal.
Into this strange week slipped Diane DeSoto. Lindie didn’t suppose she was keeping Diane a secret from June, not exactly, but neither did she recount the surprising development of Diane adopting her as what Ricky called a “set pet.” If Jack noticed, he didn’t mention it, and Lindie grumpily supposed he simply didn’t notice, because he didn’t notice anything but June.
It was Thursday the ninth that it began, the morning after the girls first met Jack out at Idlewyld. Lindie was helping Ricky buff black leather boots in that field beside the canal when Casey called her name. She stammered a “yessir,” wondering what she’d done wrong, when he pitched his thumb over his shoulder. Turned out Diane had requested a P.A. to stand just off camera to hold her carafe of lemon water, a concoction she swore by to keep her voice in check, and she liked the idea of the P.A. being a girl. Within the day she asked whether Lindie thought her hair should be reset. Even more bizarre, she started taking Lindie’s advice, a turn that did not win Lindie any favors in Hair and Makeup until she learned to say she wouldn’t change a thing.
Inside Diane’s trailer, pink and pillowed, Diane drew bright red Elizabeth Arden lipstick onto Lindie with her cool, sharp fingers, and Lindie found she didn’t much mind. It was nice to brush Diane’s golden tresses, even though Hair had asked numerous times to leave that to them. Diane missed her poodle, Bernadette, and told Lindie of the dog’s adventures in the Hollywood scene; she even had a funny voice for the dog that never failed to make Lindie giggle.
In between scenes, Diane asked Lindie to run lines. Lindie would sit in the makeup chair with Diane’s name embroidered on the back, and Diane would drape herself across the pink velvet couch Ricky claimed she’d had brought in all the way from Chicago. It was hard for her to remember her lines; they’d run the scenes twenty times or more, and still she’d be fumbling over sentences that Lindie could recite as if she’d written them herself. “Why can’t I seem to remember?” Diane asked once, voice shaking. Lindie assured her she’d get it, even though
it seemed like a lie. She came to understand that Diane DeSoto was like cotton candy: light as air, but, if you gripped her tight, she hardened. Lindie wondered how the woman had gotten that way.
Despite their closeness, it made Lindie’s stomach churn to see the way Diane looked at Jack. Toward the end of that second week of shooting, Diane and Jack took thirteen takes of a scene in the rotunda erected just for the occasion in the middle of Center Square. In the scene, Diane’s beautiful, determined Mary wept and pounded Jack Montgomery’s chest, cursing him for leaving her alone in order to take a canal boat up to Albany. In every take, Diane would turn to leave, but then he’d grab her arm and pull her back to him, take her chin into his other hand, and bring her in for a rough kiss. Again and again, thirteen times Lindie watched Jack kiss Diane. In between takes, he unhanded her, but Diane clung close, giddily eyeing him as the makeup girls touched her up or the director gave them notes. That night, as Lindie watched June climb down to meet her, she wanted to tell her friend how Jack had spent his day; it would certainly make the evening more lively. But she knew she wouldn’t. She wanted those twenty minutes of June’s breath against her cheek. She knew June would shoot the messenger.
That wasn’t the only secret Lindie was keeping from June; she still had Artie’s letter. She wanted to be rid of it, but even burning it wouldn’t erase the twang of guilt she felt every time she thought about it. She’d read it a hundred times, witnessed his honor and his honesty, and wondered all over again if she’d been wrong about him, and if he would make June a good match after all. But then she’d remember she’d as good as heard from Clyde’s own mouth that the only reason he wanted his brother to marry June was that he believed Uncle Lem was leaving her everything. And then Lindie’s insides would twist up again—June into Jack into Diane into Artie into Clyde—and she’d see Casey tap his watch, and she’d let out a little groan and get on with her day.
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