The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

“Well, that’s because this isn’t real life.” Mad Dog grinned. He threw his arms up to indicate the lake, and the trees, and the sky. “This is way more fun.”

  Luke looked away. He wasn’t having any fun. Though he thought he probably would have had fun on this hike a couple of years ago. He kicked another rock near his shoe and watched it roll toward the water’s edge.

  “Look, like I said. I’m not going to try to analyze you here or anything, but do you want to talk about it? Just . . . talk? I’m a pretty good listener, I think,” Mad Dog said. He produced an elastic band from a pocket and pulled his hair back in a ponytail.

  Luke hesitated. “Why does everyone always want me to talk about everything?” His guidance counselor, Officer Sawyer, his mom . . . they all acted as if talking would make things better. How did they know it wouldn’t make things worse?

  Mad Dog smiled. “It’s hard to explain. But it’s like when you take your backpack off at the end of the hike. You feel lighter. Sometimes, I think, talking can give you the same feeling. Does that make sense?”

  “Maybe,” Luke said. He’d found another rock to kick at. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you, like, grow up with your dad?” Then he felt embarrassed. Why was he even asking Mad Dog that?

  “I did. But I know people who didn’t. What about you?”

  “I’ve never met my dad. My mom couldn’t find him when she . . . knew she was going to have me,” Luke said. Mad Dog didn’t say anything. It looked like he was waiting for Luke to tell him more. And here was the thing—he suddenly did want to tell him more. It was weird. He didn’t even know why, but he told Mad Dog then, as fast as he could but also as best he could, about his Pop-Pop finding his dad a year ago and telling his mom, and his mom not telling him anything about it until the drive to the meet-up place three days ago.

  Mad Dog seemed a little confused then. “So . . . Pop-Pop’s your granddad?” he asked Luke.

  Luke nodded. “He died. But before that he told my mom about finding my dad. He didn’t tell me, though. And she didn’t, either, until a couple days ago. Why would they do that?” Luke asked.

  Here Mad Dog took a deep breath. “You mean, not tell you right away?”

  “Yeah. They should have,” Luke said. “I’m not a little kid.”

  “I don’t know,” Mad Dog said. “I met your mom at the meet-up point, though, and she seemed like a nice lady. Parents have their reasons for doing things,” he added, swatting at a mosquito.

  Luke shrugged. “She’s going to call my dad now, while I’m on this trip,” he said, looking quickly over at him. “Maybe I’ll meet him, or something. I don’t know.” He had a weird feeling in his stomach when he said that.

  “That sounds cool.”

  Luke nodded. “Yeah. That part’s . . . good.” The bad part was that Luke didn’t know what his dad would say when his mom talked to him.

  They were quiet for a while. Through the trees, Luke could hear the sounds of the other counselors and campers talking and laughing. He caught a whiff of wood smoke, too. He was pretty sure he was on campfire duty tonight. “Do we need to go back?” he asked.

  “In a while,” Mad Dog said. “We’ll give them enough time to get all the hard stuff done.”

  Luke laughed a little at this.

  A few minutes later, Mad Dog stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “Luke, you’ve got a lot going on. These are all complicated things. And you probably aren’t going to figure them all out on this trip. It might . . . take a little while. But I need you to be here. Okay? This trip doesn’t work unless we’re all part of it. And just between you and me, you’re one of the best hikers here. Plus, you’ve picked up the basics really quickly. I’m counting on you to help out. And show these other kids how it’s done.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Luke said, kind of surprised that Mad Dog needed his help.

  Mad Dog grinned. “Cool,” he said. “Good to know you’ve got my back. You can hang out here for a little while if you want to. I’m going to head up.”

  Luke nodded. After Mad Dog left, he slid down the boulder and leaned his back against it. It felt cool through his T-shirt, and he just breathed for a little while, and tried to keep the mosquitoes away from his face. Talking to Mad Dog hadn’t been bad, he realized, but there was only one person he really wanted to talk to now, and that was Pop-Pop. If he were here now, he could have explained everything to Luke, about why he and his mom had done what they did. He didn’t lecture people, Pop-Pop, but he was good at talking. He didn’t always say a lot, but what he did say he made count.

  I miss him, Luke thought. He felt a lump in his throat, and he tried to swallow past it, but he couldn’t. He was scared he was going to cry, and then his eyes blurred, and he was crying. It was too late to stop. He hunched over and put his face on his knees, and he tried to be quiet, but he made these snuffling noises he was worried they would hear in camp. It wasn’t just Pop-Pop he missed. It was his mom, too. And he saw her the way she was when she said good-bye to him, all anxious and worried. He was still mad at her, but not as much, and he thought about something Rae had said to him about his mom once. “You got yourself a good mom, Luke. There is not a thing in the world that woman wouldn’t do for you.”

  He cried some more and, after a little while, he looked up to make sure no one else had come down the path to the lake. No, he was still alone, but it was getting darker now; the sun had slid down behind the tops of the trees. He heard a burst of laughter coming from camp, and he thought he could smell something cooking, too. They were supposed to be having stew and soda bread tonight. He breathed in, sounding quivery and shaky, and then he breathed out. He pulled up his T-shirt and wiped his face with it. He’d stay for a few more minutes, he decided. By then the light would be too dim for anyone to notice he’d been crying.

  CHAPTER 25

  Well?” Cal asked, watching Billy expectantly.

  “Bliss,” Billy said. “Sheer bliss. But where did you learn how to make it?” She was referring to the spaghetti carbonara Cal had prepared for dinner. She wrapped more of it around her fork and popped it into her mouth, and Cal smiled, pleased with her reaction. No need to tell her now that it was the only dish he knew how to cook really well. He’d gone grocery shopping in town and met her at her place after she’d gotten home from work. She’d perched on the kitchen counter, sipped the red wine he’d brought, and watched as he cooked the spaghetti, fried the pancetta, beat the eggs, and tossed it all together. She’d wanted to help him, but he’d refused. Not because she’d burned their dinner, but because he’d wanted to do something concrete and tangible for her. And she had let him. It was a simple thing, he knew. So why did it feel as if he had crossed into new territory—not only in their relationship but also in his life—tonight?

  “My college roommate’s mother taught me how to make it,” he explained, only now picking up his fork and digging into it himself. “I used to spend Thanksgiving with them on the East Coast, and they pulled out all the stops. I mean, they made the whole traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner, but they also made a separate traditional Italian dinner, too. And some of those recipes had been in their family for generations.”

  “Mmm. Well, this one’s a keeper.” Billy sighed, reaching over to the bowl of grated Parmesan cheese he’d set on her kitchen table and sprinkling some more of it onto her pasta. “But since when does the Butternut IGA sell pancetta?”

  “Oh. I bought that in Minneapolis. That and the . . . wine and the Parmesan. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”

  She blushed then, a soft, lovely blush made even lovelier by the flickering light of the candles on the table. She was wearing an eyelet summer blouse and blue jeans, and her glossy, dark hair was loose on her shoulders. How was it possible, he wondered, that every single time he saw her, she was even prettier than she’d been the time before? Was she really changing? No, he thought. She wasn’t. He was the one changing.

&n
bsp; He caught site of Murphy now and smiled. While Cal had cooked the pasta and made the sauce, Murphy had lingered nearby, wagging his tail and looking hopeful. But after Billy had given him a treat and patted him, he’d wandered over to a corner of the kitchen and lay down on a small rag rug that was obviously there for that purpose. Now he seemed content, though he was keeping one soulful eye on the two of them in case they decided to toss any food his way.

  Cal took a sip of his wine. The attraction was still there between them, he knew, but while it had been nearly out of control the last time he’d seen her—he pictured the two of them entangled together in the Porsche—it was different now, thrumming gently between them like an underground river. Maybe it was because she was so preoccupied; she’d been unfailingly pleasant tonight, as always, but Cal sensed that she was only half there with him.

  “You must miss Luke,” he said.

  “I do miss him.” She looked up from her plate. “It’s more than that, though. I think . . .” She put her fork down, and her fingers came up to her temples in a gesture that combined both fatigue and stress. “I think I might have made a huge mistake with him. I mean, huge as in unforgivable.”

  “I can’t imagine you doing anything unforgivable,” Cal said. “Especially to your son.” She had never struck him as anything other than an incredibly conscientious mother.

  “No, I mean it. This time I might have.”

  “What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  She hesitated. “Do you remember the story I told you that night at the Corner Bar?”

  “Every word of it.”

  She looked surprised.

  “The one about the teenage girl who went on a fishing trip with her dad to Alaska?” he asked. “She had a fling with the guide, and later, when she told her parents she was pregnant, her dad went back to the lodge. But he couldn’t find the guide.”

  “That’s the one,” Billy said, looking faintly amused. “I’m impressed you remembered it, given the amount of scotch you’d imbibed that night.”

  “It was an interesting story,” Cal observed. “I thought it had a happy ending, though.” Right now, Billy looked anything but happy.

  “It did, for a while. But before the girl’s dad died—wait, I’m going to stop telling this in the third person, if that’s okay?”

  He smiled. “That’s fine.”

  “Before my dad died last year he hired a private investigator and found the fishing guide. And he gave me his contact information, too, in a sealed envelope. I put it away in a safe deposit box. I didn’t tell Luke. But I opened the envelope on Friday night, after I got back from driving him to camp.” She paused, considered Cal. “So you see . . . the guide didn’t just disappear. He was living on Vancouver Island the whole time. He’s got a boat charter business, a wife, two daughters, and . . . a son, of course.”

  “So he . . . knows about Luke?”

  “That depends. I wrote to him that night. He—his name is Wesley, Wesley Fitzgerald—might have gotten the letter by now. Or not.”

  “And . . . Luke?”

  “And Luke . . .” Here there was a sigh from Billy, and her fingers went to her temples again. “I told Luke about it for the first time on Friday on the drive to camp . . . It all came out.” Something about the expression on Cal’s face made her say, “I know. It wasn’t the way I wanted it to happen. I think, in retrospect, I wanted to contact his dad first and make sure he was okay with all of this. But on the way to the meet-up place, Luke said he wasn’t going on the hike, and I couldn’t make him go. He said he was going to go to Alaska, alone, to find his dad. And I just panicked. When I first told him, he was excited. But then he was angry, too, and hurt, I think, that I kept it from him for so long.”

  She picked up her fork again, but now only to poke halfheartedly at the pasta on her plate. “And then, after I told him everything, I dropped him off at Split Rock Lighthouse and sent him off on this two-week trip. I feel terrible now. I’m worried about how he’s doing, knowing all of this. I’m wondering, too, how he’s feeling . . . about me.” Her voice dropped on this last word, so that she practically whispered it. “I mean,” she said, her voice still so soft that he needed to lean closer to hear her, “Luke knows I had his dad’s contact information for a year, for more than a year, and I didn’t do anything with it. Didn’t get in touch with his dad. Didn’t tell Luke. Just . . . decided to put it all off until sometime in the future when everything would suddenly be clear to me. I was trying to protect him from all the unknowns. But what I’m wondering now is whether or not Luke will be able to trust me again. Or, if not trust me, at least forgive me.”

  Her blue eyes were shiny with what might have been tears, but she didn’t cry. She smiled, or tried to smile. “Sorry. I should have warned you. Not exactly bedtime story material, is it?”

  Cal said nothing. His first impulse was to comfort her. And he almost—almost—reached for one of her hands. They were both on the table now, smooth and graceful in the candlelight. But something stopped him. It was the understanding that Billy needed more from him than that now. The thing was, he wasn’t a parent. He couldn’t second-guess her decisions as a parent, even if he was inclined to. And he wasn’t inclined to. He wasn’t, by nature, a judgmental person. Furthermore, he knew intuitively that she was a good person and a caring mother. “I think,” he said finally, “that at the time you made the decision not to tell Luke, you thought it was the right one. Whether it was or not—and there’s no point in revisiting it—you’ve come forward now. You’ve told him. And as for him forgiving you”—he hesitated—“I’m remembering myself at thirteen. I think if there’s one thing kids that age are good at doing, it’s moving on. They’re much better at letting go of the things we hold on to even when we shouldn’t hold on to them. The trust thing—I don’t know. It might take some time for you to regain it. Then again, it might not. Life at his age is so . . . so fluid. There’s so much happening. Sports, and girls and, if he’s like me when I was his age, more girls.” He smiled. “And if he does have a relationship with his dad . . . well. That’s all the more reason for him not to dwell on it.”

  Now he took one of her hands, which was soft. He held it and ran his thumb over her knuckles. She squeezed his hand back. “What if Wesley doesn’t answer my letter, though? Or he does, and he says he wants nothing to do with Luke?”

  “Then you’ll . . . you’ll deal with it. One step at a time, though, Billy. Just . . . one step.”

  “I think I can do that,” she said, her fingers moving to caress his hand. And he noticed, for the first time, the faint bluish circles under her eyes. She was tired. Of course she was. She was exhausted. She probably hadn’t been sleeping well. Should he ask her if she wanted him to leave? He didn’t want to leave, though. He wanted to be there for her, even if all he could do was hold her hand.

  “Cal?” she said, tightening her fingers around his. “That night I drove you home from the Corner Bar? That was a turning point for me, in a way. After I got back, I thought about what you’d said, about . . . your wife lying to you about wanting to have children. And I realized I was doing the same thing to Luke. I was lying to him.”

  Cal shook his head. “No, it’s very different, Billy. You were trying to protect Luke. Meghan . . . I don’t know who she was trying to protect, unless it was herself. She . . .” He stopped. “I’ve never told anyone this before. I mean, I told you and Allie she didn’t want kids, but I didn’t tell you how I found out.” Billy looked at him questioningly. “Do you have time for another story?”

  “Always,” she said, with the trace of a smile. She fingered the rim of her wineglass with the hand that wasn’t holding his.

  “All right, let’s see. Where to start . . .” But there was only one place to start, and that was with him finding the file. Still, Billy needed a little backstory. “So . . . this was about three months ago, give or take a little. Meghan was at a spa weekend in wine country with two of her friends. It was s
omething they did every year.” The point of these weekends was not to drink wine—which Meghan thought was too caloric—but to get various scrubs and wraps and treatments done. This was more detail than Billy needed, though, and he was determined, to keep any bitterness out of this telling, if possible. He started again. “While she was away, I was paying our taxes, and I needed some information from her on her medical deductions. I didn’t want to disturb one of her herbal wraps or whatever, so I went into her home office and looked in her file cabinet for the medical deductions folder. I didn’t have any trouble finding it. Every one of her files was perfectly labeled. Except for one. It was blank. And damn it, I was curious,” he admitted. “An unlabeled file?” That, of course, was the antithesis of Meghan’s organizational style, which bordered on the fanatical. “Anyway, I took out the file and I flipped through it. At first I couldn’t even understand what I was reading. Then, when I did finally understand it, I didn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Am I losing my mind? Or do these forms belong to someone else—a friend of Meghan’s, maybe?’ They were hers, though. They had her name, her personal information, everything. I made myself go through them again. All of them. The postoperative instructions, the hospital bill, the credit card receipt. Not surprisingly, she didn’t submit any of this information to our insurance company.”

  He stopped again and reached for his wineglass. “Turns out she’d gotten a laparoscopic tubal ligation,” he said. Billy frowned slightly. “She had her tubes tied,” he clarified. “Which, as you probably know, is only recommended for someone who’s looking for a permanent method of birth control. Someone who’s sure she doesn’t want to become pregnant in the future. Here’s the thing, though. As far as I knew, we’d spent the last year trying to have a baby. She told me she’d gone off birth control pills—which, obviously, she had, but only because she’d found a more reliable form of birth control.”

  “When had she . . . ?”

  “Gotten the procedure? Seven months earlier. I did the math. She’d done it while I was at a conference in Chicago. And when I got home from that, I remembered, she’d seemed fine. Of course, it was outpatient surgery, with a pretty quick recovery time.” The other thing he’d remembered, which he didn’t share with Billy now, was that she hadn’t felt like sex for about a week after he’d gotten back. He’d been disappointed. Less about the sex than about the fact that he’d sat next to a couple with a baby on the flight back from Chicago, and the baby was so goddamned cute that he couldn’t wait to get home and keep trying to have one with Meghan. “Anyway,” he said, pushing on, “after I found the file, I spent the rest of that weekend in a fog. I kept dodging her texts and kind of wandering around our apartment, drinking scotch. By the time she got home—I’m not going to sugarcoat this—I was drunk. Dead drunk,” he added flatly. “I’d finished a whole bottle of scotch by myself. That, and the one night here at the Corner Bar, are the only two times I’ve gotten drunk in recent memory. The night Meghan came home was a doozy, though.”