But when they arrive at the house—the houses—near Little Marais, she knows she’s been wrong about that. She has not seen everything. Here is something she never has seen before—it’s almost like Maine, but not quite: there is something clearer about it, and, compared to the moody and fierce North Atlantic, the vista of the icy blue lake seems to make your heart swell rather than tremble. And it swells inside her now, brings about moodiness and longing, but something more than that too. Ruth was right. This is the landscape of her dreams, the dreams she has about Philly. This is where Philly’s spirit has gone, and this is where it is waiting for her, and she has come to the right place, she feels, and Ruth, and the whole summer, her whole friendship with Don Lowry begins to make sense. It has all led to this. Now she wonders if she has the courage to do what Ruth has told her to do. Just as she wonders this, they are pulling down a long wooded dirt road to the Merrick estate, and they find the lake again after driving maybe half a mile or so, and when they see the lake, they see an eagle take off from the tallest pine and glide out over the water, as if, ABC thinks, it is a confirmation from the spirit world.
She turns around to look at Ruth, who has grown silent, entranced, a smile on her glowing face. She does not squint into the sunlight, but instead seems to reflect it off her face through the whole car.
“Look at her face,” ABC says in a whisper to Charlie, and he looks at Ruth in his rearview.
“What?” he says.
“Her face is glowing.”
“God, what were we thinking, coming here?” Charlie says. “Do you know how awkward this is going to be?”
“We’re here,” ABC says, softly, so as not to startle Ruth.
“Home again, home again,” Ruth says, “jiggity jig.”
As soon as they park, ABC walks off ahead of the group and down to the rocky beach, hoping nobody has noticed all the tears coming down her finally happy face.
To the water, to the waves that crash and roll in as foamy and loud as any ocean, she says, “I’m coming.”
Ruth goes up the three steps to the guesthouse’s deck with ease. ABC barely holds her arm.
“Ruth,” ABC says. “You’re doing so well.”
“The water is magic,” Ruth says. “The air is magic. You’ll see! You’ll see! We’ll sleep so soundly. So soundly! We used to call it the Merrick effect, when we all came up here. We’d all sleep so well, even the kids, and in the morning you wake feeling so rested.”
“I can feel that magic,” ABC says.
“This place has always been sacred. I grew up seven miles west. We’ll drive out and see it, if you want. Though the house is no longer there. They tore it down and built a palace. But, I told you—this is a sacred place. There’s so few of them left.”
Out in the water, some black rocks, dusted with orange in the dusky light, are descended upon by a flock of squawking gulls.
“Those rocks,” Ruth says, “they know more than we can imagine.”
Later, ABC finds Ruth wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the beach with Claire. ABC, still uneasy around Claire, goes to them tentatively.
“Just checking in,” she says.
“We’re fine,” Claire says, smiling.
It is, or it at least seems to be, a genuine expression of contentment and ABC feels the nerves at the base of her spine untangle and relax. She sits down on the other side of Ruth.
“Ruth,” she says. “Are you cold?”
And Ruth holds up a translucent shard of stone and says, “Look, ABC, it’s an agate!”
ABC takes it and examines the rings in the glassy stone.
“Put it in your pocket,” Ruth says.
There is a natural tendency in couples, Claire knows, to attempt to restore order, solve problems, and rekindle passion while traveling. Claire has never understood this. She is not sure how breaking one’s routine is conducive to an action as complicated as repairing a relationship. That should be done in a grueling way, day after day of hard conversation at the kitchen table. Sober, focused, dedicated. She and Don have not done that work. They have, she has finally realized, not wanted to do it. She had not wanted to do it. A window opened and she went through it so fast she hasn’t even thought the details through; she just went.
And she knows that you can’t restore anything after you give it up entirely. After complete destruction, it’s only rebuilding that’s left to do, and sometimes it is easier to do the work of rebuilding alone. Two small kingdoms separated, built from scratch, rather than one complicated castle rising from ruins.
She doesn’t agree with Don’s idea that being away from home might give them perspective they might not have at home. She does not think a year spent splitting wood and homeschooling in northern Minnesota is the thing they need. Better to solve problems at the breakfast table in one’s own home, if one has such a place, where the pale, clear light of morning shines over everything, where nothing is hidden. If you solve your problems in some idyllic place—and looking around she has to admit, it is pretty amazingly idyllic—you have an artificial crutch. You have help. And when you return home, you will not have really solved anything. In the dim light of the place you left, you will come home in the first hours of the evening, and you will look around at the unpaid bills and the laundry and the crooked molding along the kitchen floor and smell the faintly mildewed wall behind the shower surround and you will say to each other, We weren’t gone long enough.
She thinks not of Don but of Charlie as she unpacks the children’s clothes in the lodge. He’s been cool to her of late, but perhaps he’s trying his best to be discreet around the kids. They’ve not had any moments alone since the night of the heat wave party. One night, she saw him sitting out alone by the pool, drinking beer, but she was afraid to sit with him that night, the kids were still awake in the house, and the look on Charlie’s face was pensive, sad, far away, not there but elsewhere.
The next day, the car unloaded, the lodge and cabins opened up, the fridges stocked with groceries and supplies from Zup’s in Silver Bay, everything feels as if it is secure, safely and happily set up in the place they almost had decided not to come, and Claire and Don go out to the lodge’s deck overlooking the lake.
“I’m glad we all came,” Claire says.
Don nods.
The children are building a series of castles with the endless rocks on the beach. Charlie is sitting on the porch of his cabin, reading. Ruth and ABC sit on the porch of the guesthouse, drinking tea. And the sight of all this contentment moves Don and Claire to sit down together, side by side on a wooden Leopold bench that is on the deck. Don puts his arm around his wife and she takes it from her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says.
“Me too,” Don says, but he doesn’t know if she is apologizing for wanting his arm off her body, or if she is apologizing for something bigger, harsher, irreversible.
The surf of the lake rushes in roaring and retreats in a whisper. They have looked at this shore so many times now; this is their ninth summer here and they had done just this so much—sit on this bench and stare at this water, and Don now knows, they will not tell each other the long, long thoughts they were thinking.
“What are we going to do?” Claire asks. “We need to be less crazy. We need to be happier. Whatever happens next.”
“I know.”
“But the kids seem good. They seem okay,” Claire says.
“I think they are. I think we’ve handled things well enough. I wonder how they’ll make sense of this summer, years from now.”
“In therapy?”
“Right. Well, of course. They’ll need that. We should set some money aside now. I think parents should have to pay for college, and, after that, therapy.”
She smiles at him and it makes her eyes tear up and his too.
“I suppose it depends on how things end,” Don says.
“What things?”
“The summer. Us. Me. You.”
“I hope it’ll end as wel
l as it can end.”
“If we end it.”
“Don,” Claire says. “Doesn’t it feel like we already have? That’s why I didn’t want to confuse the issue, with this trip.”
“A last hurrah.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“We shouldn’t take it,” Claire says, when Don tells her just how much money Ruth has given him and tells her about the house.
“I mean,” Don says, “it won’t fix everything. But it will help.”
“It feels wrong,” Claire says. “Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“It buys us a year, up here, to fix things.”
Claire looks over to the guesthouse, where ABC is taking an afghan to Ruth. Claire watches ABC moving in the wind, a thin wraparound skirt and white linen blouse, the wind blowing her clothing tight against her body, so different from Claire’s own. Claire is lean, muscled, and slender and ABC is all hips and breasts and ass. Ruth appears to have dozed off. Claire doesn’t like how the trip has become linked to their floundering financial situation, the mountain of debt. Ruth is there to help them, not vice versa, and it should be vice versa. They should be doing this out of kindness, not need.
Claire also wants to say this but doesn’t: I don’t want to fix anything, Don. I’m done.
Claire wants to say something like this, but when she looks at Don, she sees that he is gazing in the opposite direction, at Charlie, who has stood up now and is walking along the beach away from the compound, holding a bottle of beer. He peels off his shirt and finds himself a sunny rock at the far end of their beach where he stretches out. It is not warm for Iowa, not compared to the July they have just been through, but the sun is high and it is warm for northern Minnesota. Very warm for this part of the world. The lake is the warmest it’s been in history, sometimes getting into the sixties off the shore, though easily plummeting back into the forties overnight. It is a moody lake. Don keeps his eyes on Charlie. Claire watches Don’s clenching jaw work a piece of gum. She touches Don’s shoulder.
“I think I’ll brew some coffee,” Claire says. She stands.
“Okay. I’d like some too. Can I come with you?”
“Of course,” she says.
“What were you thinking about?” Don asks.
Why do couples ask each other such a question? Don used to ask this of Claire often. This was back when they were young, and newly together, and Don seemed convinced that she was always thinking about something sad, about leaving him. But she is not sure he has asked it once since the children were born. It is odd to hear it after it had been a forgotten part of their conversational repertoire.
Claire surveys the scene. She shrugs. On the deck of the guesthouse, Ruth sleeps in the sun and ABC now walks barefoot over the rocks (how effortlessly she does that, Claire thinks, my feet always kill me when I do that) and she is heading toward Charlie. ABC stops and waves at the children, who are now splashing about in the shallow creek that almost leads to the lake but today, in that dry month, the creek stops about ten feet short of it. When it rains, the lake’s swell will wash up over that ten feet and the creek will rush into the lake and the lake into it.
The children wave back to ABC, who is now walking in the surf and holding her flowing skirt up high, exposing the meat of her thighs. Claire sees Don watching ABC as ABC walks toward Charlie, who stands and walks toward ABC. The surf is significant and loud and when Charlie and ABC come together and sit down next to each other at the water’s edge, one can’t tell if they are speaking or if they are simply staring at the water.
Claire notices that Don is staring at the two young guests as intently as she has been.
“They’re beautiful,” she says. “That’s what I am thinking.”
“Yes,” Don says. “Not so much younger than we are, not really, but . . . So. Much. Younger.”
ABC stretches into the wind as if she is trying to embrace the horizon. She reaches up as high as she can, steps up on her tiptoes, stretches toward the sun. She wags her hands in the air, as if beckoning something out of the cold deep.
“Have you slept with Charlie?” Don asks.
“No,” Claire says, instinctively. She had not meant to lie, but that is the reflex, buried within her. “Have you? Slept with ABC?”
“I’ve come close,” Don says. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ve come close too,” Claire says.
“When?”
“The heat wave party. That hot night.”
“Me too. That was the night.”
“Really?” Claire says.
“Yes. Must have been the heat.”
“Did we get married too young?” Claire asks.
“I don’t know. I think about that.”
“It’s only natural,” Claire says. “You wonder.”
“You have been the love of my life,” Don says. “You are the love of my life.”
Claire shifts, pulls her knees up to her chest, making herself smaller, more compact. “It’s a long life,” Claire says. “Maybe you should have more.”
“More what?” Don says.
“More life,” Claire says. “More love. More joy than I can give you.”
“That’s fucking ridiculous,” Don says.
“It isn’t,” Claire says.
“No,” Don says. “It is.”
“Maybe it’s just nearing forty—I feel like fifteen years of my life went by without, without, I don’t know, without me doing anything.”
“We had kids,” Don says.
She nods. “Right. And I love them so much.”
“But you don’t want to be with me anymore? Is that it?”
“Don, you take all my energy. I guess that’s it. You take all my energy. Living with you exhausts me. I don’t like being around you some days. All of the day. I didn’t like the way you changed when things got hard. I think that’s it. You’re only able to do easy. That’s why you hid the foreclosure notices from me. How could I have been so dumb?”
Don says nothing, and Claire, who’s been trying to sound comforting, realizes she may have come off as cruel.
“But you have been the love of my life too,” she says. “No matter where we go from here.”
“No matter what happens,” Don says.
“You’re funny, Don Lowry,” Claire says. “You always have been.”
“So, is this it?” Don says.
Claire knows then that she will go to Charlie’s cabin one of these nights, and she will sleep with him again. It is the only way to move ahead in her life, she thinks. It is a portal out of this life and into a new one. And, she tells herself, it is the only way Don will understand that they have reached the end of something. One time with Charlie, drunk, and after a long, steamy party, might be forgivable, a mistake. But if she does it now, here, in the cool and limpid light of Lake Superior, it will not be a mistake.
She stares out at the water. Sometimes, a trick of clouds and the light will make you believe you see a ship on the horizon, or one of the Apostle Islands off the coast of Wisconsin. But other times the sky above Superior is perfectly clear, a blank white slate. This has become one of those afternoons. How fitting, she thinks. Blank slates.
“You came more than close,” Don says. “Didn’t you?”
She turns to him, wraps herself in her own arms, suddenly chilled.
“Don,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
And now Don knows that one night soon, he will find himself alone in the world, a new person, and he will go off and look for a new life, and the world, and everybody he loves in the world, will be free to move forward, away from his ugliness, the Shadow of him, and they will be free, all of his pretty chickens, to move into the next phase of their lives, which will be beautiful or, as he looks at his kids playing, destined for beauty. He will work harder than ever. If he has to leave town to find work, he will do it. He will send them money. He will work shit jobs. He will allow them, and their mother, to move into a happier life without him. He
will do it without bitterness. It will be his purpose. Every day as he ties on an apron at some Home Depot outside Waterloo or loads trucks in a warehouse off the Mississippi in Moline, he will think of his children, the reasons he is doing the work, and he will be okay with it. He’ll work happily, intently, his goals as noble as goals can get.
On weekends, he’ll drive to Grinnell, or wherever they are then living with their mother. He’ll arrive bearing gifts and he will not allow his misery, any sadness he feels, to infect them. If he lives alone, he can keep all of that, he can keep the Shadow to himself. He will show up smiling and the children will take comfort from his newfound stoicism, his warm optimism. He will change what he has felt powerless to change. He wonders though, why not change now, right at this moment? Can’t he just wake up tomorrow and understand that life, in fact, is fundamentally wonderful? That he is fundamentally wonderful? That he is not his father? That Claire is fundamentally wonderful? The kids, their lives, Iowa. Being alive should be enough. He wants to say this aloud.
Why couldn’t he just say that to Claire and reverse the course of everything?
“I want you to be free of me,” Don says. “I want you and the kids to have a different life. A happy one.”
The kids shriek in the cold water and sprint back onto the shore, howling.
“The kids are happy,” Claire says. “They love you. And I love you. And I, I really have—until very recently—been happy.”
“This life though,” Don Lowry says. “I feel like it’s killing you.”
She doesn’t say anything to that.
Just beyond where the two children are playing, ABC and Charlie sit side by side, throwing rocks into the water. She begins to cry and Charlie puts his arm around her, the waves swell even higher, a wind blows from the woods behind them, and a cloud passes in front of the sun, turning the warm yellow light momentarily to a metallic, golden hue.
“Are you okay?” Charlie says.
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