The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  “He’s not even going to be at home,” J.P. was saying. “My dad’s cousin is, like, their cleaning lady, and she says all their kids go to camp in the summer. Like, away to camp, where you stay overnight. Can you believe people actually do that? It’s like . . . what was that movie that was on the Disney Channel when I was, like, nine? What was that called?”

  Camp Rock, Luke thought but didn’t say. He didn’t want to admit he’d ever heard of it before. Besides, he hadn’t told Van or J.P. yet, but he was going away to camp in about ten days. Not that North Woods Adventures was an overnight camp, because it wasn’t, not exactly. But it was sort of similar, and he knew they would think it sounded lame. Van and J.P. would never backpack or go hiking and canoeing or anything like that. The only thing they thought was cool was hanging out and playing video games. Still, his mom had been pushing this North Woods thing pretty hard, and even though he hadn’t said it to her, it did look like it might be kind of cool.

  Now Luke threw the stone he’d been holding, but it didn’t go that far this time. Should he tell Van he was going away, he wondered, looking for another stone, or should he just leave and not say anything? Maybe Van wouldn’t even notice he was gone. It was only for a couple of weeks.

  “So, what are you saying?” Van asked J.P. then, stuffing more Cheetos into his mouth.

  “I’m saying that no one is home there in the summer, not during the day,” J.P. said. “The loser kids are at summer camp, the dad’s at work, and the mom does stuff. She, like, volunteers or something.”

  “And you think we can just walk in there and take them?” Van asked.

  “Yeah, pretty much. They keep them in the barn. And they leave the keys in them. I mean, who’s that stupid? Who leaves keys in an ATV? You’re, like, asking people to take them.”

  “I still don’t get it, though,” Van said. “How do we take them?”

  “We just drive them out of the barn,” J.P. explained. “Nobody sees us because nobody’s there to see us. We drive it around on the ATV trails until it runs out of gas, and then we kind of, you know, wreck it and leave it. That’s it. They’ll get it back eventually.”

  Luke shook his head just a little bit. He didn’t mean for J.P. to see it, but he did.

  “What?” J.P. said to him. “What’s your problem?”

  “Nothing,” Luke said, picking up another stone. “I just think . . .” He didn’t throw the stone this time; he just kind of tossed it. He didn’t want it to go far. He wanted to hear it land in the water. He liked that plink sound.

  “You just think what?” J.P. challenged.

  “I just think there’s a lot of stuff that could go wrong,” Luke said finally.

  “Like . . . ?”

  Like everything, he thought, but what he said was, “Like, how do you know the barn’s not locked? Or doesn’t have an alarm or, like, a security camera?”

  “Who puts a security camera in a barn?” J.P. said scornfully.

  “The same person who puts an ATV in there,” Luke shot back. He didn’t tell Van and J.P. this, but he’d been there before, to the Greys’ place. Their Little League team used to go there for barbecues after games. And here was the thing: the Greys’ barn wasn’t really a barn. It only looked like one on the outside. On the inside, it was more like a garage. And there weren’t just ATVs in there. There was tons of other stuff, too, like snowmobiles and jet skis.

  Luke thought J.P. was going to try to get into an argument with him, but all he did was put his cigarette out in the dirt and say, “Then don’t go with us, if you’re so scared. Go have . . . Popsicle time at your little day care center.” Then he turned away from Luke and slid his phone out of his pocket. “Do you want to see a picture of Jody where her boobs are kind of hanging out?” he asked Van.

  “Sure,” Van said cheerfully. He wiped his hands, which were covered with Cheetos dust, on his pants, and took the phone from J.P. “They look nice,” he said, staring at the picture. “Do you want to . . . ?” he asked Luke, holding the phone out to him, but Luke shook his head. He didn’t think Jody was that hot, and right now, he hated J.P. anyway.

  Luke watched as Van handed the phone back and crumpled up the empty Cheetos bag. He ate a lot of junk food, but he was still always hungry. Luke wondered about him sometimes. He was so skinny, you could count his ribs, and so pale it looked like he didn’t even go outdoors, even though he went outside sometimes when he wasn’t playing video games. Still, did anyone worry about him? Worry about stuff like whether he ate vegetables or went to bed or did his homework during the school year? Luke didn’t think so. Luke knew his mom didn’t like Van. Or she didn’t think she liked him. She didn’t know him. But she’d decided he was a bad influence on Luke. The truth was, though, Van wasn’t a bad person. He could be really nice. He just seemed like someone had . . . kind of forgotten about him.

  Van and J.P. starting talking again about stealing one of the Greys’ ATVs, but Luke didn’t say anything. He just kept throwing stones. He didn’t think they were ever going to do it, anyway, but then, when they started talking about specific things, like days and times and what was the best route to take after they stole the ATV, he got kind of nervous. They were talking about it like it was definitely going to happen. He started to think about leaving. He was getting that weird feeling he got in his stomach sometimes, mostly when he was worried about stuff.

  “What do you say, Luke?” Van asked him now, surprising him. “Like, are you coming with us?”

  “You mean, if you really do it?” Luke was looking for another stone to throw.

  “I’ll do it if you do it,” Van said.

  Luke looked at him, surprised. Was he serious? He was, he decided. Van was staring at Luke, waiting to see what he was going to say. Which was weird, because Van didn’t usually take things that seriously. It was one of the things Luke liked about him.

  “Are you going to come or not?” Van asked in a real quiet way, like it was just the two of them talking and J.P. wasn’t even there.

  “I . . . I don’t know. Do you, like, really want to?” Luke asked.

  Van nodded. “I think it’d be cool.”

  “But the thing is . . .” Luke said, rubbing some dirt off the stone he’d found. “If you get caught . . . it’s pretty serious. It’s a felony, I think.”

  “What do you know about felonies?” J.P. interjected.

  Luke shrugged. “Officer Sawyer. The day he picked us up, he told me about misdemeanors and felonies. Stealing an ATV, that would be a felony, probably. You could go to a juvenile detention center for that.”

  “It’s called juvie,” J.P. sneered. “And why do you always have to talk like that? Like you just go around reading books all the time?”

  Luke ignored him, but his face felt hot. God, he hated J.P. He wished he’d leave already and go see Jody. But Van acted like he hadn’t even heard J.P. He kept talking to Luke like it was just the two of them. “I don’t think we’d get caught,” he said. “And if we did, I don’t think it’d be that big a deal. We’d just say we were messing around.”

  I don’t think the police would see it that way, Luke thought, but he didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the rock in his hand.

  “Come on, let’s do it,” Van said, giving him a friendly push on the shoulder.

  Still Luke said nothing. He was thinking about Pop-Pop. Most of the time he tried not to think about him. Most of the time he just kind of pushed him out of his head. Because what, really, did thinking about him do, other than make him feel worse? Now he let himself think about him, though. About a conversation they’d had. They’d so many of these over the years, and the good thing about them was . . . they just happened. He and Pop-Pop just talked. Pop-Pop hadn’t lectured him the way Officer Sawyer and his guidance counselor did. Pop-Pop hadn’t told him what to do or what not to do. He let him figure it out for himself. Sometimes, when they were doing something, like fishing, or working on Luke’s model town, or just walking someplace, Luke wou
ld ask him a question, and Pop-Pop would tell him what he thought. Like once, Luke had told him about a bully who was in his third-grade class. He wasn’t bullying Luke—he was bullying another kid, and Luke felt bad for that kid. He’d told their teacher, but she hadn’t really done anything about it, and the truth was, Luke didn’t want to do anything about it, either, at least not if it meant getting in a fight with the bully. Plus, all of the other kids were going along with it. Anyway, he’d told Pop-Pop about this, and Pop-Pop had said something like, “Luke, I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll have to learn to listen to yourself. You already know what’s right. It’s who you are. It’s how you’re made. Sometimes, maybe, you’ll get confused about it, but the more you listen to yourself, the more you’ll hear that voice inside you, telling you what’s right or wrong. When you really know what that voice is saying, what other people think about you won’t matter as much.”

  Luke threw the stone he was holding. It plinked into the water. The sky was getting darker. The water looked almost black. He heard thunder again. It didn’t seem closer yet, but it was a long, slow roll this time.

  “I’m not gonna do it,” he said suddenly, turning to Van. “The other stuff we did”—he meant the smoking and the tagging—“that was different. We didn’t, like, hurt anyone. But this . . . I don’t want to steal things, even from people I don’t like.”

  Van looked away from him and shrugged, but J.P. scowled at him.

  “I told you we shouldn’t tell him about it,” he said to Van angrily. “I told you he’s only going to snitch on us.”

  “I’m not going to snitch,” Luke said, getting up. He saw the first raindrops on the water, and in the distance, he saw lightning. He started walking up the riverbank, but J.P. caught up to him, put his hand on his shoulder, and got his face really close to his, so close that Luke could smell cigarettes on his breath. “Remember, snitches get stitches,” he said to Luke.

  He pushed J.P.’s hand away and kept going. He thought J.P. would follow him and start a fight, but he didn’t. When Luke got to the place where he’d left his skateboard and they’d left their bicycles, near the road but behind a tree, he stopped and turned back. They were still sitting there like nothing had happened. Like it wasn’t even starting to rain.

  “Van,” he called down. “Are you coming?”

  Van didn’t turn around or say anything.

  “Get lost, loser,” J.P. called up.

  Luke grabbed his skateboard and carried it over to the road. He got on it and pushed off, hard. And as he headed into town, he started shivering, even though the rain wasn’t that cold.

  CHAPTER 20

  Billy knocked on the door of the little lakeside cottage, waited, and then knocked again. She knew someone was home. There was an unfamiliar car parked in the driveway beside Mrs. Streeter’s old Volvo wagon, and she could hear something, a game show on TV inside.

  Maybe she’d come at a bad time, she thought, and she was considering leaving her present in the mailbox when a middle-aged woman who, despite the noon hour, already looked weary, opened the door. “Yes?”

  “Hi, I’m a friend of Mrs. Streeter’s,” Billy explained. “I brought her a DVD from the library—”

  “Billy? Is that you?” Mrs. Streeter called from inside the cottage. Billy had heard that she’d been released from the hospital only the day before—this was after a brief bout with pneumonia—but she sounded surprisingly vigorous now.

  “Yes,” Billy called back. “I brought you something, Mrs. Streeter.”

  “You can’t come in, dear,” Mrs. Streeter said.

  “Oh, that’s fine. I can give—”

  The woman at the door, obviously a home health aide, leaned closer and said to Billy in an undertone, “She doesn’t want anyone to see her in her bathrobe and slippers. She says unless she can wear an outfit with a matching hat . . .” The woman rolled her eyes. “She says she has a reputation to maintain.”

  “Of course,” Billy said, reaching into her handbag and pulling out the DVD. “Why don’t you just give this to her—”

  “Billy! What have you brought me?” shouted Mrs. Streeter.

  “Only Angels Have Wings,” Billy called, feeling a little ridiculous about all of this yelling back and forth. “And you can keep it, Mrs. Streeter. You don’t have to return it to the library.” Billy, knowing that the library’s DVD order wouldn’t be in for a couple more weeks, had had Amazon overnight it to her personally.

  “I don’t want to pay for it, though,” called Mrs. Streeter.

  “You don’t have to. It’s a gift,” Billy assured her.

  “Oh, no. I’ll return it to the library. But I don’t know when I can get it back, and I don’t want to be paying a late fee.”

  “No. No late fees,” Billy called, giving the DVD to the home health worker. “I hope you feel better, Mrs. Streeter.”

  There was a long pause and then Mrs. Streeter yelled back, “Well, you’d better get going, dear.”

  Billy smiled wanly at the home health worker and turned away. Rae had been right. Mrs. Streeter would not thank her for this gift. As she started down the steps, a gust of wind caught her skirt, and she shivered in her short-sleeved cotton blouse. After it threatened to storm all day yesterday, there had finally been a torrential downpour last night. Now the day, while mostly sunny, had a crisp feel to it, despite the fact it was only the first week of July. Overhead the wind pushed scraps of clouds hurriedly along, and on the nearby lake, it churned up little waves, their foam white against the dark blue water.

  Billy got into her car, glancing over at the two architectural books on the front passenger seat. They’d come in that morning from interlibrary loan, and she’d texted Cal to say she’d be “out his way,” and would he like her to drop them off at his cabin? He would, he’d texted back, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. He was taking the day off from working on Jack’s cottage, and some “non–Hardy Boys” reading material would be great.

  Now, as she drove the several more miles to his cabin, she reflected on the last time she’d seen him, standing in her kitchen a week ago. She’d basically given him a polite but gentle push, not only out the door but also out of her life. Or at least, that’s how she saw it in retrospect. She’d had misgivings ever since. He was the first man she’d been really attracted to in years, maybe even in fourteen years . . . There had been Beige Ted, but she’d never been that attracted to him. He’d just been a really nice, responsible man who lived in Butternut and had expressed an interest in her. And there had been a couple of guys she’d dated in Minneapolis-St. Paul when Luke was young and they were living with her parents. But none of them had stirred her the way Cal had. Her thoughts about him lately would make Jane Austen blush. Surely none of her female characters had such lustful fantasies. So she’d decided, over a recent glass of chardonnay on her back porch, served with a side of fireflies, to take him up on his kiss. She’d reminded herself, though, in the sternest possible terms, to not get too emotionally involved, to keep it light. After all, she had no idea how long he’d even be in Butternut.

  Still, she was nervous as she pulled into his driveway. He made it easy for her, though. Even before she’d turned off the engine, he came out onto the front porch. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and he was barefoot. As Billy came up the steps to the cabin, she found herself staring at his feet. They were just like the rest of him, she thought. Tan. Tan and gorgeous. More gorgeous than feet had any right to be.

  “Hey,” he said when she handed the books to him. “Thank you for bringing these over. Is this, uh, a new service the library’s offering? Home delivery?”

  Billy blushed. “I thought since I was already going to be in the neighborhood . . . Mrs. Streeter—she’s one of your neighbors—has pneumonia, so I brought her a DVD.”

  “Mrs. Streeter and I are neighbors?” Cal asked, surprised.

  “If by neighbors you mean you live across the lake from each other, then yes.”

 
; Cal laughed. “Well, I’m glad you came. And I hope Mrs. Streeter is feeling better.”

  “I think she is,” Billy said. Now his hazel eyes had her attention.

  “Good. Can I offer you an iced tea? Or maybe something . . . hot?” Cal asked. Billy had shivered again.

  She hesitated. “I’m on my lunch hour, so I need to be getting back, but . . . why not?”

  Cal smiled. “I won’t keep you long. Come on in.”

  She followed him into the cabin, the inside of which was as unlike his apartment in Seattle as it was possible for any place to be. There was nothing intimidating about it, Billy thought, glancing around at its knotty pine paneling, stone fireplace, and unintentionally retro decor. Rae could definitely have her glass of red wine here; she could even spill a few drops without someone having a nervous breakdown.

  “What do you think?” Cal asked.

  “I like it,” Billy said honestly.

  “It belongs to a very specific decorating school that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet from museums and auctions houses. It’s called midtwentieth-century cabin.”

  She smiled. “But you’ve been comfortable here, haven’t you?” she asked as Cal went into the kitchen, a cheerful room where open shelving revealed brightly colored Fiesta dishes.

  “Very comfortable,” Cal said, pouring them iced teas. “It’s just an easy place to be. I keep hearing echoes of my childhood, though. My mother spent something like eighteen years telling my sister and me not to let the screen door slam.”