The Light in Summer

by Mary McNear

  “I think I bought us a little time,” she said, lying down next to him.

  “Good,” he said, taking her in his arms. “Now let’s get this dress off you.”

  “I thought you liked this dress,” she teased, her hands in his hair, her lips on his neck.

  “I love this dress,” he said as he shimmied it down over her hips. “But I’m going to love it even more in another ten seconds, when it’s on the floor.”

  Afterward, they lay on their sides, facing each other, the top sheet tangled around them. It was so quiet in the room that, through her open windows, Billy could hear a screen door slapping shut in the house next door, and the drone of a baseball game coming from another neighbor’s television set. A heavy black fly bumped lazily against one of her window screens. Neither of them said anything, though. Neither of them wanted to break the spell.

  A breeze lifted the window curtains, and Cal, as if freed by this motion, smiled at Billy. She sighed, and something inside her stirred. She wanted him again. She wanted him now. Which seemed nothing short of amazing considering how long they’d just made love to each other. But there it was.

  “I take it back,” he said. “That was actually kind of perfect.” He reached out a hand and rested his fingers lightly against her cheek.

  She smiled, and taking his fingers, kissed them. She loved his hands, she decided. They were suntanned, like the rest of him, and pleasantly roughened from his work this summer, but there was nothing coarse or inelegant about them. They had moved over her with a confidence that was new to Billy, and with an intimacy she’d never experienced before. When she was done kissing his fingers, he pulled her closer, his bare skin touching hers, and her desire for him was like a warm tide washing over her, pulling her under, and pulling him under with her. He started kissing her again, and Billy was just arching her back, when she heard a familiar whining and scratching at the bedroom door.

  “That would be Murphy,” she said. “I think he’s jealous.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Cal said, still kissing her. But when the whining continued, he said, “You should let him in. Otherwise he might start to resent me, and I want to stay on his good side, if possible.”

  “Anyone on my good side is already on his good side,” she said. “But I think he’s been patient enough for one evening.” She gave Cal a conciliatory kiss and, sitting up, gathered the bedsheet around her.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Cal said. “You can just . . .”

  “Walk around naked?”

  He nodded, his hazel eyes glinting mischievously.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. It was hard for her to shake her natural modesty, no matter how intimate they had just been.

  “Why?” he asked. “Would Lizzie Bennet disapprove?”

  She laughed, delighted that he’d remembered her reference to her favorite Austen character. “Who knows?” she said. “There’s no telling how she and Mr. Darcy behaved behind closed doors.”

  She climbed off the bed and, trailing part of the sheet on the floor behind her, went to open the door for Murphy. He came in, wagged his tail, and immediately plopped down on his dog bed in the corner.

  “Look at him,” Cal said, propped up on one elbow. “He’s as happy as a clam.”

  “Or a dog,” Billy said, coming back over to the bed.

  “That’s right. That’s why I’ve never understood that expression ‘It’s a dog’s life.’ Murphy’s life looks pretty great to me.”

  Billy looked down at Cal admiringly. Since she was covered with the sheet, he was covered with nothing at all, though, unlike Billy, he seemed to feel perfectly comfortable this way. Why shouldn’t he be? He looked amazing. When Billy held a hand out to him, he took it and tugged on it a little, so that she fell back into bed with him.

  “Mmm,” he said, nuzzling her neck with his lips. “I will get this sheet off you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Billy said, enjoying the languorous sensation of being in bed with Cal, the daylight fading slowly in the room. When had she last done this? When she had ever done this? She laughed now as Cal’s lips, which were moving over her neck, tickled her. She looked up at the ceiling, where the shadows from the oak tree’s myriad branches quivered. She heard, as if on cue, the shhh-tik-tik-tik of her sprinkler coming to life.

  “Billy?” Cal said, the word coming out against the hollow at the base of her neck.

  “Yes?” she said, moving her hands up into his tousled brown curls.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Right now?” she asked, amused.

  “Yes. Right now,” he said, looking up at her. “Just for a minute, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, taking her fingers out of his hair. She reached for a pillow, tucked it under her head, and patted the other half of it. He put his head next to hers. His eyes, usually hazel, looked greener, his tan darker, against the pillow’s white case. “What’s up?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “It’s just . . . I have to go back to Seattle.”

  Billy didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She was too busy feeling the way she’d felt when, as a child, the roller-coaster car dropped suddenly. The bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She’d always hated that feeling.

  “When are you going?” she heard herself say finally.

  “Tomorrow. I’ve got a six thirty P.M. flight.”

  “That’s . . . soon,” she said, pulling the sheet around her.

  “Yes. I was going to tell you, but the last couple times I saw you, we weren’t really trying to talk,” he said, smiling. “Last night we were talking about other things. Today I didn’t really have time before, you know . . .”

  “No, I get it,” Billy said. She didn’t get it, but she kept talking, more for her benefit, she thought, than for his. “You never said you were going to stay the whole summer.” She paused. There was a hurt she was trying to hold at bay, a hurt whose sharpness surprised her, and there was something else, too. Self-recrimination? she wondered. She was the one who’d told herself to keep it light. Had she really believed she’d be capable of anything that casual?

  Cal was looking at her carefully. “You’re not . . . Are you thinking that I’m leaving? As in not coming back?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  “No. God, no. I’ll be gone for a week. Ten days at the most. I should be back by the end of July. I don’t want to go. I didn’t think I’d have to go away again so soon. Meghan and I put our apartment on the market, though. It looks like we have a cash buyer. And we’ve decided we’re going to try to get divorced without attorneys. You know, use a mediator. It’s faster that way. We found one who can meet with us in a couple days.”

  “Okay,” Billy said softly. She reached out to touch him, not with hunger, but with tenderness. She tousled his hair, which was already pretty tousled.

  He smiled at her. “I’ll call you while I’m in Seattle. And when I get back, I want to see you. And I want to . . . I want to do this thing right. You know. Go out to dinner with you. Walk Murphy with you. And . . . I’d like to meet Luke, too, if that’s okay. You know, when you’re ready for it, and he’s ready for it.”

  She nodded, knowing that by being involved with Cal, her relationship with Luke could be even more complicated than it already was. But she couldn’t help that; she would have to deal with it later. Right now she was happy, a light, sweet, summer evening happiness.

  Cal started kissing her again, and this was not like the playful, ticklish kisses he had given her neck. “You don’t have anywhere you need to be tonight, do you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, watching him unwrap the sheet from her. For once it was true. The rest of this day, and the night, belonged to them.

  CHAPTER 27

  When the grandfather clock in the library struck the half hour that evening, Billy looked up from the computer at the checkout desk and eyed the clock skeptically. Was it really only six thirty? She could have sw
orn it had been hours since the library had closed, and Rae had left, and she had turned off her cell phone and sat down to do the budget she would present at the next board meeting in September. She blew a loose hair off her face and swiveled around in her chair. This was her absolutely least favorite part of being a librarian: wrangling money from taxpayers.

  She clasped her hands behind her head and stretched her back. She’d take a short break and stretch her legs, and then it was back to work. She came out from behind the desk and padded softly past the rows of shelves. She liked this part of staying after hours. She liked the stillness, the subdued lighting and, most of all, the unfettered sense of possibility. After all, it was just her, the armchairs, and four thousand books, any one of which she was free to browse through now. Then again, at this moment, there was only one book she was interested in, and she found it in fiction, shelved under A for Austen. She pulled out Sense and Sensibility and carried it over to an armchair, which she sank down into, draping her legs over one side. She flipped through its pages until she found the quote she was looking for.

  “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

  She smiled and let the book fall closed. She knew there were those who thought Sense and Sensibility was Austen’s weakest novel, but she didn’t agree with them. Besides, those words perfectly captured how she was feeling about Cal Cooper right now. She’d known him slightly longer than seven days, and she felt a closeness to him and an intimacy with him that she’d never felt with anyone before.

  Oddly enough, though, since Cal had left for Seattle five days ago, they’d drawn even closer. They’d spent hours talking on the phone at all different times of the day and night. Billy had talked to Cal while she was walking Murphy in the early mornings through a still-quiet Butternut, her flip-flop-clad feet wet from the dewy lawns she’d cut across. She’d talked to him on her lunch hour on the library’s back porch, her turkey sandwich consigned to stay in its brown paper bag. She’d talked to him one night while she soaked in the bathtub and wondered if she was too old to sext. (She’d decided she wasn’t too old, just too proper. She had Jane to thank for that.) And she’d talked to him another night while she lay in bed, propped up on pillows, a gentle rain falling outside the window. That conversation had lasted for hours, and when they’d finally, reluctantly, said good-night and Billy had hung up, she’d wished he were there to crawl into bed beside her.

  What did they talk about? What didn’t they talk about? They’d started, at their dinner at Billy’s house, with the present, with Luke and Wesley and Meghan. Now they moved backward in time, to their childhoods, and what they’d had in common then, which was geography. They were both from the Twin Cities area, Cal from Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis, and Billy from the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul. They discovered that, growing up, they’d had many of the same experiences. They’d gone on the same field trips with their grade school classes, the same outings with their families. They’d both visited the state capitol building on desultory school trips, and trailed through the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory with their parents, holding sticky cotton candy cones. In the summers, they’d cheered on the Minnesota Twins at the Metrodome, sat through concerts at Minnehaha Park, and wandered through livestock barns at the Minnesota State Fair. In the winters, they’d spent more subzero afternoons than they could count prowling through the Mall of America and trying, valiantly, to pry open their parents’ wallets and get them to buy one thing or another. They also discovered that during high school and college, they’d both frequented many of the same restaurants and bars. And as it turned out, they’d known a couple of the same people, too. A girl from St. Paul who’d lived in Cal’s dorm his freshman year in college, Janie McNiff, had once been Billy’s neighbor. And both Billy and Cal had spent many high school afternoons with Brian O’Neil, a St. Paul man with a bad comb-over who ran excruciating dull workshops for students who wanted to improve their SAT scores.

  Gradually, though, their conversational topics moved forward in time again. Cal asked Billy about her early years with Luke, about juggling college with parenthood, and about why she’d decided to become a librarian. He was endlessly interested in her job. This was a first for Billy. (The only other people who’d ever expressed this much interest in it were her parents, and even with them, she’d often wondered if they were just being polite.) It seemed as if Cal could not get enough information about her, though, and Billy, unused to talking so much about herself, still tried to satisfy his curiosity. Of course, she asked him about himself, too, especially about his work, which she found fascinating, though privately, she was appalled by how little she knew about architecture. Occasionally, when Cal talked about his old life, and work, in Seattle, she remembered the morning in the library when she’d Googled him like a smitten schoolgirl, and she felt more than a little self-conscious. But Cal had also told her he’d grown disillusioned with the firm where he’d been a partner, and he was in the process of selling his shares back to it. This was why, he explained, he’d gone to Minneapolis earlier in July to look into working with a graduate school friend who had an architectural firm there.

  But then, the night before last, the night they’d talked into the early hours of the morning, something had happened, and the connection between them had deepened even more. He’d talked about the bitterness he’d felt at first toward Meghan because she had a tubal ligation. This summer, he thought, had helped him begin to move past it. And although he hadn’t spent any time alone with Meghan in Seattle, she’d told him one morning in the mediator’s office that she was sorry she’d lied to him. She said there was no excuse for what she’d done and she should have had the courage to tell him from the beginning about her aversion to having children.

  Billy had talked to him in turn about Luke and Wesley. She was anxious to know how Luke was doing on his trip and how he was feeling about his new knowledge of his father, and she was worried, increasingly, about Wesley. He still had not responded to her letter. How would she tell Luke this when she picked him up the day after tomorrow? And should she try to reach out to Wesley again, or try instead to temper Luke’s expectations about having a relationship with his father, at least in the near-term?

  The best thing about their conversations, though, was that they were free from pat advice and easy platitudes. They simply listened to each other, and the only things they offered each other were encouragement and support. It was the act of unburdening themselves that was the point, Billy understood. Not the idea that the other person might magically have all the answers. That was why they felt so much closer to each other.

  Would Jane Austen have understood that? Billy wondered. She reached for the book, but it had fallen to the floor. She didn’t need to read it again, anyway. Like most of Jane Austen’s famous quotes, she already knew this one by heart. She thought about how disposition or character—to use a more modern word—not time or opportunity, determined intimacy. Marianne, one of the two main characters in Sense and Sensibility, first fell passionately in love with the caddish Mr. Willoughby, but after having her heart broken, ended up in a more practical—if still loving—union with the reliable Colonel Brandon. Practicality over passion, Jane was arguing. And in her day, it was a sensible strategy for a woman. But surely now, in the twenty-first century, it was possible to have both. Why must they be mutually exclusive? And practicality without passion—well, that was the sum of her relationship with Beige Ted. On the other hand, passion without practicality could bring heartache. She’d told herself the day she dropped in at Cal’s cabin that she would need to keep things light, not to get emotionally involved. But it wasn’t always possible to have control over one’s feelings. And it wasn’t always desirable, either. She felt things now for Cal that she wasn’t sure she could, or even wanted, to control.

  A nois
e in the library—was it a mouse? she hoped not—made her sit up and look around. She’d completely lost track of the time, and of her surroundings. Outside the windows the evening had turned a bluish, dusky color, and inside, in the reading room, the corners were shadowy and insubstantial. Billy picked up Sense and Sensibility and carried it back over to its shelf, slotting it neatly into place. Then she went back to the checkout desk and sat down at the computer. She needed to finish this budget; tomorrow was her last full day without Luke, and she didn’t want this hanging over her head once she picked him up. It was why she’d turned off her cell phone. As much as she loved talking to Cal, she’d promised herself that tonight she’d wait until her work was done. Now, though, she couldn’t resist turning it on to check the caller history. Nothing from Cal, but she’d missed a call from someone else. She stared at the iPhone screen. She knew that number, though she’d never dialed it before. It was Wesley’s, and he’d left a message. “Oh my God,” she said softly, but there was no one else there to hear her.

  CHAPTER 28

  On the last night of the trip, Luke stirred awake. Something was digging into his ribs. He groped around on the ground. It was a rock, or a tree root, or something. Where had that been when he’d put his sleeping pad and sleeping bag down earlier in the night? He had no idea. The place he’d chosen had seemed like a perfectly flat piece of ground. He’d told Mad Dog that he wanted to sleep outside tonight, and Mad Dog had said, “Go right ahead. It’s a beautiful night to do it.”

  Should he go back in the tent now? he wondered. He could if he wanted. There was plenty of room for him in there. He was too tired, though. Too tired even to crawl the short distance over there. They’d spent the night before at a campsite on the Caribou River, then hiked almost nine miles today through birch forests with views of Lake Superior, past a pond with floating bogs in it, and past a northern hardwoods marsh before stopping to camp tonight at Dyer’s Creek. Every few miles, it seemed, there’d been surprises. A covered bridge over a creek, an old mining site, a part of the trail lined by thousands of little white flowers called bunchberries. He thought about all the places they’d passed through over the last couple of weeks: Temperance River State Park, Tettegouche State Park, Beaver Bay, and Fredenberg Creek. And they’d spent two days canoeing on Gunflint Lake and Rose Lake. He’d learned a lot, too. How to purify water, start a fire from scratch, track wildlife, and identify native plants. Tomorrow they’d go back to where they started at Split Rock Lighthouse. Then they’d hike to Gooseberry Falls, where their parents would pick them up at the visitor center.