“It’s different. You were just a kid. I’m supposed to be an adult. And I do things like this, I just do.”
“It’s okay to make mistakes. And sometimes, bad things just happen.”
“I can’t make this mistake and I can’t make the next one I’m going to make, the one that has to do with you and me. I need you too much. That’s not good.”
“Why?”
“Because whenever I need someone, they—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re always going somewhere, Gabe. You were always going. Across the river, out of my life . . . You can say right now that you aren’t going anywhere, but it’s just a matter of time before you see that I’m right, that everything I’m saying is right, and then you’ll be gone, too.”
“George will be back soon,” he says. “You’ll see. And everything will start to feel better. Meanwhile, I’m here. I’m not leaving. Don’t push me away.”
“I care about you so much. You know I do.” He looks so happy, for just a second. It makes her wish she hadn’t said it, except she doesn’t think she would have been able to keep it in, knowing it would be her last chance to say it to him. She almost said more. “And it’s too late for us. Friends. We could be friends again. But friends only.”
Gabe takes two steps toward her, then stops. “No,” he says.
“No?” she repeats.
“I can’t do it again. I won’t. I’m not saying we should jump into something. I know our history, I know a lot of shit is going on right now.” He rubs the stubble on his chin. “I just got a divorce. You and this guy . . .” He clenches and unclenches a fist.
“Gabe—”
“There’s nothing you can ever do or say or reveal that’s going to make me stop loving you. Nothing. You can sit around blaming yourself for whatever you want to blame yourself for—I’m always going to just love you. I love you. So let me.”
I love you. She now takes two steps toward him. “I love you, too,” she says, and it’s such a relief. She’s lived beside a river long enough, lost enough to it, to know that when someone offers you a lifeline, you take it. And being told that she is loved by someone, just loved, always, she’s been waiting for that since that morning in the boathouse, the moment before she lost almost everything. “How are we going to do this?”
“I was thinking about it: I’ll take you on dates—adult dates where we go out for dinner and get to know each other again and don’t sleep together at the end of it. No rushing.”
She smiles; she can’t help it now. She allows her heart to feel what it wants. She lets herself feel safe and hopes she can make this feeling last. “Okay,” she says.
“Really?” He grins.
“Maybe we could go to Cavallario’s. We could eat steak and discuss current events. Or . . . stare awkwardly at each other. A legitimate first date.”
He holds out his hand. “Tonight?”
She pictures the steakhouse, with its faux-castle exterior and dark interior. She imagines being there with Gabe. “Let’s try it.” She lets him lead her out of the boathouse, then stops.
“You’ll stay?” she asks him. “You’ll stay here for a while, at the inn? You won’t go anywhere?”
“We haven’t even had our first date, and you’re asking me to move in?” But he pulls her close, and the rest of what he says is muffled by her hair against his lips. “I’m staying. Please believe me when I say I can’t leave you again.”
Get on the Great Lakes Seaway Trail and drive. You’ll find your way back.
George has been driving for two days. But Lilly hasn’t returned to him, not yet. That night in the cemetery, sitting in the car, he’d gawked at her sitting there until finally he took a chance and spoke.
“Lilly? Is it really you?”
“Of course it’s really me. What have you done, George, why did you throw my ashes on his grave?”
He was in mourning, he told himself, in shock. And this was an invention of his mind. And you don’t talk to ghosts. But he couldn’t help himself, the anger still seething, even now. “You’re his, Lilly. Now it’s official.”
She shook her head. “First of all, I’m my own. I don’t belong to anyone, not even you. And second, I certainly do not belong in a clump of snow in a lonely graveyard. You really don’t know me at all, do you? Vivian is right. Men are useless.”
George marveled at her lovely white hair. Lilly was just as pretty as she got older, maybe even more so.
“Did you ever listen to me, George? Did you ever hear a thing I said in our entire lives?”
“Of course I did. I—”
“If you had ever understood me, then you would know how much I loved you.”
“The first time I ever told you I loved you, do you remember what you said?”
She lifts her chin. “I said thank you.”
“You didn’t tell me you loved me back, because you didn’t yet.”
“Oh, but I did. I thought you knew that—I thought what you didn’t know was how grateful I was to you, how deeply grateful. It was important to me for you to know that.”
“I saw you! The other night, I saw your face when you were looking at that photo of him!”
“I was losing my mind, damn it! Don’t you see, can’t you see, even now, what was happening to me?”
And then he could. He could see what he had missed and what he had lost as a result. He put his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so very sorry.”
But when he peered at the front seat through his fingers, she was gone. “Come back!” he shouted. The only response was the dog whining in the backseat, frightened by the sight of George sitting there, shouting at nothing. He started the car. “I’m going,” he said. “You can’t stop me.” But even that didn’t make her return.
Go scuba diving and check out one of the many shipwrecks lurking below the surface of our river. Who cares if it’s raining? You’ll already be wet.
In the Riverview Room, where Gabe is sleeping—just like he did when he was a kid—he imagines Mae in her own room, getting dressed for their date. He imagines her naked. He imagines walking down the hall and pushing open the door, but he doesn’t do that, can’t do that, and it is surely the hundredth time today he has had a thought like this. He said he wanted to take it slow, but he can hardly breathe when he’s near her.
Now he goes to the bathroom to brush his teeth. She comes in and stands beside him and brushes her teeth, too. She’s wearing a sweater and fitted jeans. Her hair is in a ponytail. He feels like they’ve been standing beside each other brushing their teeth in front of the mirror every day for years. He catches her eye. Her eyes crinkle up at the sides and she smiles with her toothbrush in her mouth and a little bit of toothpaste on her cheek. He likes what brushing their teeth before their date suggests: that there will be kissing later. He doesn’t remember ever doing things like this with Natasha. She would go into the bathroom and close and lock the door when she was getting ready. She said the mystery was an important thing, but she didn’t seem to have a contingency plan for when the enigmatic divide that existed between them became a chasm.
“See you downstairs,” Mae says.
It’s dusk. Mae is silent as they walk down the driveway together. He holds her hand and looks on either side of them, at the snow-piled cabins they used to play in, at the shed at the end of the drive with the lawn mower and the tools he would use when he was helping George with various tasks around the property. George called earlier, but they were out getting coffee. He left a message, no callback number. “Just checking in with you,” was all he said. “Everything is fine, but I don’t know when I’ll be back.” There were traffic sounds in the background, but no other clues. Mae went to her room after listening to the message, closed the door and came out a little later with red eyes. She said, “Do you think I should hire someone to try to find him?”
“Let’s just give him a little more time,” Gabe said, but he vowed to be t
here the next time George called. They needed to talk.
Gabe had made a reservation at the restaurant, but there was little point. The place is only half full. A waitress with ashy-blond hair, dark roots and catlike eyes with bags underneath them recites the specials in a bored voice, then slaps down their menus and walks away.
Mae leans in. “I think that was Heidi Tanner,” she whispers. “Do you remember her from high school? She was so mean, and so pretty. I was in awe of her, but she terrified me.”
“I wasn’t really paying attention to her, back then or now,” says Gabe. He had been staring at Mae in the candlelight, watching the way she pursed her lips and looked thoughtful and attentive as she listened to the specials, even though he knew she hated salmon and wasn’t going to order it.
“Can you imagine living in this town forever?” She looks away, down at the menu, sighs and flips the pages. “Steak for sure, why would you come here for anything else, right? And besides, I don’t like salmon, so I won’t get the special. What do you feel like? Want to share an appetizer?”
Gabe opens his menu, too. “Sure. Whatever you want.”
They read their menus in silence until Heidi returns. She raises an overplucked eyebrow now, looks to Gabe, then to Mae. “Hey, I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother, Mae. But what are you still doing in town? I thought you were long gone, off marrying some rich guy in NYC and living happily ever after.” Gabe can see Mae’s cheeks reddening, even in the semidark. Now Heidi turns to him. “And you—never thought I’d see you back here at all, Gabe Broadbent. What rock have you been hiding under?”
Mae closes her menu with a snap. “We need a minute,” she says. “Thanks.” When Heidi is gone, Mae lowers her voice. “Do you want to leave?”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” But he does. He longs for the anonymity of the city, where there are legions more people but you can have all the privacy you want. “It’s just Heidi Tanner. She peaked in high school and now she works at a steakhouse. Who cares?”
“Okay. Right. Who cares? We’re on our first official date. That’s all that matters. Let’s have fun. I want the filet mignon—stuffed, maybe? Do you think that would be good, or disgusting? And let’s share a shrimp cocktail.” She pushes her menu away.
“Sure, let’s go for stuffed. A first.” He closes his own menu and sips his water. “So, this guy you were going to marry—what was he like? There must have been some kind of redeeming quality, at least at first, before it all fell apart.” He finds he feels jealous, even thinking of him. When Heidi mentioned her marrying the rich guy, he imagined Mae in white silk, walking down a church aisle, eyes wide and adoring. It made him feel sick, and now he’s asked her about what he knows is the last thing she wants to talk about.
But she only shakes her head. “I told you before. He wasn’t a good guy. He wasn’t who I thought he was.”
“And now, that’s just it, it’s over? Something went wrong, you broke up and you’re not in contact anymore?” He hates the way he sounds, so possessive, but he’s said it now.
She plays with her fork. “It was more than just something going wrong.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“It’s fine.” But she still doesn’t look at him. “How about you? What was your wife like? I can’t picture you in a tux, in a church, getting married . . .”
“Oh, we didn’t do that. We got married at city hall and had our reception at a dive bar.”
Now she laughs. “Of course you did.”
“It was her idea, actually.”
There’s a Don Henley song piping through the speakers above, a song about memories and sunglasses. Gabe doesn’t want to talk about Natasha. The chair is uncomfortable. He butters a piece of bread and takes a bite; it tastes funny, like chemicals. “Natasha was . . . she was an anesthesiologist. You have to go to school forever to be one of those, you have to be completely focused. She was intense. One of those people who has it all together, knows exactly what she wants. I never could figure out what she saw in me.”
“Did you love her? Sorry, that’s a stupid question. You married her. Obviously you did.”
“Did you love your guy?”
She doesn’t answer. “Sorry,” he says. “To answer your question—well, I can’t, actually. She told me I didn’t love her as much as I should have. I probably didn’t. She told me I was always in love with you. She’s with someone else already. Pregnant, with twins. I think she’s happy.”
Awkward silence. “I think I’m bad at dates,” Mae says.
“You’re great. This is fine.”
“It isn’t, though, is it? This is awful. And I don’t feel like stuffed steak. Let’s get out of here. Grab a bottle of wine, go to the inn, order pizza. Come on.” She stands and grabs his hand and they walk quickly out of the restaurant. When they’re outside, he reaches for her and kisses her. He can taste it in his mouth—her toothpaste.
Dance in the rain.
Sometimes George drives in circles around the same town. Sometimes he drives straight through a town and vows never to return. He stays at the sort of motels he deplores. Lonely places, lost-soul havens. Then he drives to Vermont. He’s always wanted to do that. He has ice cream, a lot of it. “What a world,” he says to the girl who scoops his double cone. “You can have anything you want.” She smiles at him in the way servers smile at old people.
He almost stays at a little inn he comes upon, an old white house with gables and black shutters, lights on in the windows welcoming him at dusk. But it would only make his broken heart worse, being somewhere nice like that without Lilly.
He finds the right government office in one of the towns he passes through; he applies to renew his long-expired passport; he stays at a Motel 6 while he waits for it to be ready. But he doesn’t like it. He argued with the clerk the night before about their disingenuous slogan. “ ‘We’ll keep the lights on?’ Don’t you always have to keep the lights on? Don’t some of these lights not turn off at all?” Although he supposes it can’t really be called an argument, given how one-sided it was. The clerk gave him a look similar to the one the young woman at the ice cream place had given him, but also dismissive, guarded.
During the night, he wakes, his body a tangle of aches and pains. “Lilly!” he calls out. The dog growls, noses his arm.
He knows his destination, but drives off in the opposite direction. There’s a closer border, but he’s decided on the Queenston–Lewiston Bridge, because he wants there to be a substantial demarcation as he crosses into Canada, rather than just an invisible divide that must be believed in and passed over without really knowing when you did it. But he chose the worst time: Friday morning. The lineup of trucks and cars is five miles long. When he’s about halfway to the front of the line, Lilly comes back to him.
“George, don’t do this. Don’t go to them. They’re not going to be able to help you. They can’t possibly have changed. You should be protecting Mae from people like that, not trying to bring them into her life.”
He’s so relieved, he can’t speak at first, but then he gets scared she might think he’s ignoring her and disappear, so he says, “I’m going and you don’t have a say. You’re gone, I’m not enough and I’m sorry, but I’ll never be certain of Gabe, not completely, not after what happened. He’s got a little of Jonah in him, maybe always will.”
She releases an irritated little sigh that’s so welcome and so familiar to him.
“Oh, Lilly,” and he almost reaches for her. But he draws back, for fear of reaching into nothingness.
“You’re being absurd. You belong at the inn. You need to go home.”
“You actually still believe I belong at that inn, his inn?”
“Sixty-seven years spent in that one place, running it and making it our own, and you still believe it isn’t yours?”
“It’s not mine and it never was, and now that you’re gone I’m never going back.”
The sun is pouring
through the passenger side window and illuminating her. He has to focus on not plunging his foot down on the gas and rear-ending the SUV in front of him.
“Our lives were a lie,” he says. “I can’t go back there and face that truth. And I need to find a way to make sure she’ll be all right, taken care of if I don’t.”
A sigh, like a breeze, in the car. The guard says, “Hello, sir. Your passport, please.”
He looks at the dog. “Got immunization papers for him?”
“I’ve got his tags, on his collar.”
The guard frowns. “Fine,” he says, “but bring papers next time.”
He hands George his passport, but George doesn’t move. “Is that all?” George asks, hoping.
“Yeah. That’s all. You’re free to go.”
Stay in bed, sleep in. Better yet if you have someone to stay in bed with. (My mom said to cross that last part out, but I’m not going to. This is an inn, what does she think the beds are for?)
We need a task.” Mae is standing beside Gabe’s bed when he opens his eyes. “We can’t just wallow around the inn.”
“We’ve been wallowing?”
“Well, no. But we haven’t been doing much, just watching movies and ordering takeout. We might start wallowing if we’re not careful. Let’s go clean out the cabin. You’re selling it, right? You have to clean it out first. I know it won’t be easy, but I’ll help you.”
Gabe had actually been hoping the cabin, and the mess inside, would disappear. He hadn’t even thought about selling it. Who would want it? And he’d been enjoying ordering takeout and watching movies with her. These past few days had been a pleasant blur. His only source of anxiety: working up the courage to do more than kiss her. He hasn’t yet, but he’s thought about almost nothing else.
“Come on, please?”
“You know I can’t say no to you.”
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