A voice reaches her. It’s not his. “You need to step inside so I can close the doors.”
“Don’t go,” she says again as her hand lands in his. Warm skin, his skin.
Gabe doesn’t move.
“Come on, buddy. On or off?”
“I believe you,” she says. “That you didn’t know what I was talking about. I know you didn’t take the money. I’m sorry.”
Gabe glances behind him, addresses the driver. “Can I have a minute?”
“Ten seconds. Not a second more.”
Gabe steps down, ducks his head toward her, and speaks in a low, urgent voice. “Listen, don’t apologize to me. You don’t have to, you shouldn’t, ever. I’m the one who’s sorry, and it’s too late to say why, too late to say anything. And I have to go. Right now.” He’s backing away.
“It isn’t too late. Don’t get on that bus, Gabe.”
He shakes his head. She’s not getting through. Gabe was good at building things, always, especially walls. She used to know how to get beyond them. It used to be so easy.
An impulse: she pulls up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and it’s still there on his forearm, the faint circular scar. She rubs her thumb across it, touches him the way she used to when she believed he would always be hers.
“Stay with me, Gabe. This time, stay. Please.” The snow swirls between them again and she loses sight of his face. But she has hold of him.
“I know everything. Lilly told me all of it, and it’s awful, that you ever believed what happened with my parents was your fault. You were a little boy. You were just a kid. You didn’t do it on purpose.” She feels him shake, like he’s about to pull away from her, but he doesn’t. “No one should ever have hurt you like that, not your father, not my grandmother, and not me by not believing in you. I’m so, so sorry. Please don’t leave.”
“Last chance,” calls the driver. Mae keeps her hand where it is. She’s afraid to move. And then she hears it, a voice in her head. Sometimes when you’re afraid, you just have to do the thing that scares you most.
Mae does the only thing she can think to do, the only thing left: she pulls until he’s as close to her as she can get him. She stands on her toes, she finds his mouth through the snow and the cold, the confusion and the regret.
He was always there, waiting for her. And it’s easy, once you remember where you are. It’s like finding your way home.
His backpack drops from his shoulders and both his arms are around her, on her back, in her hair, touching her cheeks, pulling her closer, closer. He tastes like mint, he tastes the way the snow smells, he tastes just the way she remembers, and he feels the same way, too, like the most familiar place in the world, even after all this time.
When they resurface, the bus is long gone, but she says it again, just to be sure. “Don’t go.”
“I won’t,” he says in a voice as familiar as her own. “Never again. I promise.”
The snow has nestled around them. They know it can’t be true, but they both believe it then: that it’s just the two of them, that nothing can ever hurt them again. That they are the only two people on earth.
Do a crossword puzzle. Not only are they fun, they’re good for your brain.
Lilly walks slowly. There’s ice, even at the side of the road. Where did Mae go, and why? I am taking the dog for a walk. The dog must be walked. There’s such purpose in having a dog. She wishes they’d gotten one before.
She realizes she’s on her regular path, the one she normally walks after dinner with Viv. She should have stopped at Viv’s house, knocked on her door. Then she wouldn’t be alone. But she forgot all about Viv. It’s happening again. The spells are becoming more frequent. Soon, they will be all she is. She doesn’t want that.
Lilly steps down and goes farther along the river than she intended to. She can’t help herself. She wants to look out at the vast, cold expanse, to listen for the cracks and booms, to hear the great sounds that give her such pleasure and never startle her the way they startle others. “Good boy,” she says to the dog, because he has stopped pulling and is walking beside her. He wags his tail.
Mae. Where did she go?
She was angry.
Lilly has a wild impulse to step onto the river ice, to clear off a patch by shuffling the snow with her boots, to slide and slip, to feel momentum again. Of course, that would be foolish. But she does it anyway. Then she stands, mischievous, the ice below her feet.
Where am I?
On the river.
She needs to find the riverbank. She needs to find Mae. She needs to go back the way she came—but which way is that? There. She sees a house ahead and feels hopeful. It’s not home, though: no weather vane. It’s Jonah’s cabin. The outside light’s still on. It tells her she’s going the wrong way.
A dog barks. Then it’s right there beside her, nudging her. Whose dog is this? They should keep it in their yard. He barks again and she realizes he knows where the shore is and is trying to lead her there. But when she attempts to follow she moves too quickly. Her feet slip, she falls. It hurts her head so much.
The world has turned upside down. Lilly is forgetting again. I am on the river. I am on the ice. She hears a distant crack and this time it scares her. Pain in her head, and the tiredness, too. “George,” she calls. He will come for her, he always has. They are tethered to each other by an invisible cord that has had many years to strengthen and it can’t be broken now. “George!”
Only silence.
She looks up at the darkening sky. She’s so cold, too cold, but hot at the same time. This must be how Virginia felt. It’s clear, this thought. It brings her back, frightens her, but also comforts her. Better this, better here. No fluorescent hospital-room lights. No disappointed eyes.
I loved you so much, Virginia. I tried.
She thinks about their bedroom, her and George’s: matching lamps, books on the bedside tables, the old flip clock with its moving numbers, the clicking slide of the past, a sound she and George had grown used to. Better this, maybe, than going on the way she is. Better to go now than to forget it all and leave George and Mae to gather up her pieces.
The sky is black but stars float across it like flecks of salt from a shaker. The dog is gone, whatever his name is. A star above her grows larger. She fears it might consume her, but then a peace begins to steal over her. She still wishes she didn’t have to go, still wishes for more time, but she also understands. She understands. She’s leaving and she won’t be able to come back. But that doesn’t mean the people she loves will never follow. Lilly closes her eyes and feels only relief.
Have a brandy. It will warm you from the inside out. (But only one: it’s never good to overindulge on the hard stuff. Yes, Mom. I know I’m not old enough to drink yet, but I know what I know.)
It ends: all kisses must. Gabe pulls away first and wishes he hasn’t as soon as he has, but he needs to look at her. Those eyes, that hair, that skin. “Hi.” If her hair wasn’t full of snow, he would wonder if there had ever been a storm. He sees the taillights of the bus down the road, the old-fashioned streetlamp in front of a spindly tree that doesn’t look like it will survive winter, the blanketed parking lot. It surprises him, all of it. For a moment he had thought they were somewhere else.
“Hi,” she says in return.
“How have you been?” There’s a growing distance in her eyes. She’s thinking about something else.
“That’s a big question to cover . . . How many years has it been?” she says.
“Seventeen,” he replies, too quickly.
“Seventeen,” she repeats.
“Lilly mentioned something’s going on with you. With your life.”
Mae nods. “A broken engagement,” she says. “And I’m better off.” She brushes some of the snow from her hair. “And you?”
“Recent divorce. Better off, too.” He feels an urgent need to tell her everything and to know everything. What if they never get anything more than this moment? What if
she disappears into the night again, changes her mind? But he forces himself to be patient.
“Lilly said George called you. About your father.”
“Yes, he did call. It made me happy, to hear his voice. So I came. And you were here, too.” He smiles. There’s a lightness in his chest.
She breathes out, a silken cloud that hangs in the air. “George isn’t living at the inn right now. Things aren’t good. I’m worried. I don’t know what to do. And my grandmother—” She’s shaking, and he doesn’t know if she’s cold, but he thinks she might be scared, so he pulls her to him again. She looks up. “I’ve never seen her like that. It was horrible. It didn’t seem like her, not at all.”
“Do you want to go back?” He doesn’t. He wants to wait right there for another bus, and then they can run away together.
“Yes. I need to talk to Lilly, and do you think you could go to The Ship and talk to George? Please? Tell him we need him, tell him to come home? Tell him I’m worried about Lilly, tell him whatever you have to tell him, just get him to come home. If you can come home after all this time—then he can. Then he can get over whatever it is that has happened and get back to the inn.”
* * *
They part in front of The Ship. Gabe watches her walk away. He doesn’t move. He’s not afraid to go in and talk to George, he just needs time to think. Finally, he turns and looks at the building: neat siding painted gray with white trim, a white sign with a picture of a red ship hanging out front. A mix of optimism and desolation; a motel in a tourist town in the middle of winter is one of the loneliest places in the world, but summer does always come.
He walks toward the building and imagines his father staying here. Instead of a hospital bed, he can picture him here in this place. He tries now to think of one good memory of his father, just one. Jonah wasn’t always raging, drunk, filthy, swearing, hitting, hurting—was he? But he did do those things enough times that they’ve blurred all the calmer moments away, the moments when he and Gabe might have sat together at the kitchen table, eating soup or chili or whatever it was Jonah had dumped out of a can that night. And he had taught Gabe to fish, how to bait a hook and drill a hole in the ice and “think like a muskie.” And sometimes, if they were out ice fishing, there would be a few moments before Jonah was entirely drunk when Gabe had even been able pretend that they were just a normal father and son, out on the ice together in Half Moon Bay.
Inside, the clerk, who looks vaguely familiar, calls George’s room, then tells Gabe to go ahead. Unit 12. Gabe knocks, waits. The door opens.
“You came.”
For the first moment, Gabe focuses on George’s eyes. It’s jarring to see a person after almost twenty years. Change is inevitable, and George was never young to Gabe, but he’s an old, old man now. It strikes a chord of fear in Gabe’s heart.
“The hospital called, not too long ago, about your father,” George says. “Is that why you’re here? I’m sorry, son.”
That memory, so fresh in his mind, of fishing with his father—Gabe feels like he’s been punched. “He’s gone?”
“Yes. They couldn’t find you. He was alone when he died.” There’s a sadness passing over George’s face that Gabe doesn’t know what to do with. Because how could anyone, and especially George Summers, grieve for Jonah Broadbent, how could anyone who saw what he had done to Gabe over the years care if he died alone? The sucker-punch feeling is gone already, replaced with only anger, then numbness. It’s over, Jonah is dead, Gabe is finally free—and he didn’t have to sit there not wanting to hold his father’s cold hand, not knowing what to feel, or when the right time would be to get up and leave.
George opens the door wide. “Come in and we’ll talk more,” he says, turning and heading down the narrow hallway, which leads to a room with a double bed covered in a green-and-burgundy-flowered polyester duvet. At Summers’ Inn, each room had a theme—Wildflower, Riverview, Garden, Rosebud. Gabe always stayed in the Riverview, which had simple blue-and-white decor and the best view. He never understood why they gave him the room with the best view.
There’s a chair at a battered writing desk and George pulls it out for Gabe, then sits on the bed.
“The nurse called because I’m the one who brought him in. I spent a little time with your father recently. We were both staying here and he was in need. To be honest, so was I. Your father loved you, you know. He did. I know he hurt you, but he loved you. He would spend time in your room, he told me. He was sleeping in there toward the end. He missed you. He thought of you until his mind went and he couldn’t.”
Gabe focuses on a stain on the carpet to the left of George’s chair leg.
“All right,” George finally says. “I understand. Maybe we can talk about him another time.”
Gabe can look up again. “What are you doing in this place? And what will it take to get you to go back home?”
“It’s not something I want to talk about.”
“Maybe I can help.”
George shakes his head. “No one can help.”
“Mae is home,” Gabe says. “She’s the one who sent me here. I was just with her. She wants you home, too. She needs you.”
“I know. I got the message she left with the front desk. But her being here is even more reason for me to stay away.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand a lot of things,” George says, and Gabe realizes he’s talking about something else now. He wants an explanation from Gabe, he must. Lilly told him the same thing, that he stole the money, and when George looks at Gabe he sees a thief. Gabe tries to hang on to the feeling he had on the train platform with Mae, that feeling of absolution. He can’t tell Lilly’s lie to George, not now, not when Mae asked him to bring George home. “I’m sorry,” is all he can say.
“No, no. Don’t. It’s all right. It was a long time ago. We would have given you the money, you know. I was always sure Lilly felt that way, too, though we never talked about it.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The phone rings, startling both of them. George reaches for the receiver.
“Hello?”
Gabe can hear Mae’s voice from where he’s sitting. “Grandpa?”
“Mae,” George says. “What is it?”
“I can’t find Grandma.”
The cabin smells like spilled liquor and mildew and failure to thrive. A black garbage bag spills its contents onto the kitchen floor.
“Jonah?” Virginia calls. A groan. She follows the sound to the living room. He’s facedown on the couch, an empty bottle on the upended milk crate beside him. She shakes him, hard. “Jonah, Chase took out the hovercraft and didn’t come back, and now it’s raining and getting warmer and the ice isn’t safe and—oh, wake up, come on! I need you to take me out in your ice cutter to find him. Or give me the keys. Where are the keys, Jonah?”
She shakes him again and he mutters, “Tell the boy to stay away as long as he wants, I don’t care. How many times do I have to hit him before he gets it and just goes?”
Gabe, poor Gabe. She’s going to adopt Gabe herself, she decides then and there. Right after she finds Chase. “Where are the keys to your cutter, Jonah?”
“Aw, fuck off, will you?”
She looks for the keys herself. Sticky patches on the counters, old newspapers, flyers, opened cans of stew, half of them still full and stinking, the flotsam and jetsam of a wasted life: matchbooks, lottery tickets, expired coupons.
Back in the kitchen, she picks up the phone and hears only dead air. “Pay your goddamn phone bill! I hate you!” she shouts. But it isn’t true: hating Jonah would be like hating a wounded animal. And also, she can’t. Could never. She still has memories of him as someone else. A friend, and a true one.
She slams the door as she leaves the cabin. She slides across the dock and looks for the keys in the cutter, but they aren’t there. It’s raining harder than she can remember it raining, ever; she’s soaked to her underclothes.
S
he’s on the river again, no choice. She’s running across the ice. It feels soft. There’s a layer of water over the ice now, but it still holds her. It’s not too late. It’s never too late. Virginia thinks of Mae, safe in the attic of the inn with Gabe, playing pirates. “Be brave, always.” Virginia runs. For Chase, but also for Mae. Her love swells, surprises her, delights her, terrifies her. It is because of this love that Virginia believes harder. It is because of this love that Virginia presses on, determined that she will not give up, no matter how hard it rains, that she will live to teach her daughter to do the same.
PART TWO
Make newspaper boats and look for puddles outside to float them in, or head to the creek. This is a terrific family activity that will distract you from the rain.
In the basement of the church, there are half a dozen women Lilly’s age. They bustle back and forth with sandwich trays. Their low heels clack on the polished concrete floor. Mae takes off her coat and hangs it on a wire hanger near the door. She’s wearing a black jersey dress she bought the day before. She knows she’ll never wear this dress again.
She arrived with George but he has allowed himself to be led away by the women. She watches him go. Did he always shuffle like that? She stands beside the coat rack with its row of empty wire hangers, and imagines them full, soon, with the coats of Lilly’s friends, all come to mourn her. Because Lilly is dead. Mae lifts her hand. She wants to call her grandfather back. But he’s already gone.
“Tea?” One of the women has materialized beside her and leads her away from the empty coat rack and those sad, guilty thoughts. A warm Styrofoam cup is pressed into her hand.
“Thank you,” Mae murmurs. Maybe it will help with the nausea that is now a constant companion, as if her grief were manifesting itself in physical illness. She leaves the basement and walks upstairs, where she finds George in the sanctuary with the minister, holding his own cup of tea. The minister pats Mae’s shoulder when she approaches.
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