Still Summer

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Cutting her losses, Tracy went back into her bedroom to do an idiot check for forgotten items—her reading glasses. Ah, they were on a beaded chain around her neck.

  She heard Cammie begin the ritual of her muffled, multiple progression of summer morning phone calls. (Jim was at work, but he didn’t care what time Cammie showed up. He didn’t care if she showed up at all. He paid her anyway.) Sunlight stippled the old, scrupulously polished cheeks of every wood sprite grottoed in the walnut headboard, once Jim’s German grandmother’s bed. Tracy had oiled and polished it yesterday, before going to pick up Livy. She liked order in a house, even one she was leaving.

  The phone rang.

  “For you!” Cammie shouted up the stairs. Jim refused to have a phone in their room, so Tracy had to lean over the railing while Cammie tossed up the cordless.

  “. . . having a hernia,” said her cousin. It sounded like Janis, though Janis’s voice was unnaturally hushed, and she clearly was talking on a cell phone with her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Dave?” Tracy asked. “You mean because we’re going on the trip? He’s having a hernia?”

  “I mean literally having a hernia. Bent over double. We’re at St. Anne’s.”

  Tracy sighed. Her cousin’s spouse was the world’s most generous man and the world’s biggest baby. He’d been whining since Janis first announced she was going alone on a cruise with her friends. A devil of a notion needled her: This was a faked emergency. Tracy said stoutly, “Tell him to get over it. It’s only ten days. Emma and Alexandra are big girls. They can look after their father. And Auntie Tess is five minutes away.”

  “I can’t,” Janis said. “It’s either that or he has appendicitis. Here I am, all packed and ready to swill drinks with little umbrellas and bake myself to the bone—”

  “Don’t say you’re not going! Jan, he’s got a mother and two big daughters! Come on. Dave’s mother can run farther than I can!”

  Jan was silent. Then she asked, “Would you leave Jim if he had to have surgery?”

  Tracy thought. “Yes,” she said. “Unless it was life-threatening. Jim can take care of himself.”

  “Well, Dave can’t,” Jan moaned. “I’m so sorry, honey. He wants me to go now that he knows I won’t! But he’d forgive me—every day for the rest of my life. It’s not worth it!”

  “Well, what are we going to do? We can’t get a refund!”

  “Ask Kathy. What’s her name? From your book group. If you go to the airport with a doctor’s letter, they’ll switch over. . . .”

  “I couldn’t spend ten days in a confined space with Kathy! I couldn’t spend ten hours. She has to have a wave machine and an eye mask. She doesn’t know a crayfish from a crayon!”

  “Well, there’ll be real waves! Don’t act like I don’t want to go. . . . I’m sorry. . . .” Tracy heard Janis shift voices for an instant. “No, I’m talking to my cousin. . . . Yes, I’m sorry, I’ll get right off.” Jan’s voice dropped. “You can’t use cell phones in here. I have to go to the lab with him now—”

  “This was for us, the four of us! For Olivia!”

  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” Jan whispered, and hung up.

  Tracy threw the phone on the floor. The battery popped out.

  This day was already shot, and it was barely noon. There you had it! What long-awaited day ever really lived up to its promise? But those tickets had cost big money! Olivia wouldn’t fly anything but first class, and though it hadn’t been disastrous for Tracy and Jim, it had been a stretch. Jim was setting aside every spare nickel in hopes of starting his own company within a year or two. More than that, a wasted ticket would peck at Tracy’s precise nature, casting a shadow over the entire trip. Janis would pay for the ticket. But that wasn’t the point. The crew had prepared accommodations for four guests.

  Wait. She thought briefly of an alternative, then rejected it. Camille had learned to dive when she was nine, visiting Tracy’s mother in Florida. She’d dived in Mexico with her girlfriends—a weeklong substitute for the last proposed trek around the world. How could she phrase this to Cammie?

  I don’t suppose you’d like to go on a sailing trip with me and your godmothers?

  I’ve got a surprise, Cammie!

  Cammie, want to see the Virgin Islands, run off from your job for a while?

  But did she even want Cammie along?

  Yes, a chance for togetherness. But also the possibility of being trapped on a boat with a kid who could go into a sulk as suddenly as a six-year-old.

  It was moot. If Tracy made the suggestion, Camille would snort from her deepest recesses. In fact, she was already on her way out. Tracy could hear her moving about, hear the jingle of her keys. “Cam, wait,” Tracy called. “That was Aunt Jan. She can’t go. Uncle David—”

  “I heard,” Camille said. “I wish I could leave my job. I’d love to see the islands. As if you’d let me come.”

  Shocked, Tracy suggested slowly, “You could talk to Dad. It did cross my mind. You love Aunt Holly.”

  “He counts on me, Mom.”

  Tracy thought ruefully of how long it would have taken Cammie to ditch her mother had Tracy been working, as she often did, in the summer program at St. U’s. Cammie would have cut out at the speed of light.

  “I guess I could bring it up with him,” Cammie went on. “I was just going to run over to the office. But I forgot to check my e-mail. Let me do that first. Let me think about it. I would hate to let Dad down.”

  “Well, that’s good, Cam. I wouldn’t want you to.”

  Tracy sat down hard on the bed. Suddenly she was stultifyingly sleepy. She could barely keep her eyes propped. They were to leave for the airport in six hours and land in St. Thomas after midnight. She had to get a move on. Damn! Yet she had time for twenty minutes. A power nap, the kind for which Jim kept an airline pillow and blanket in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. Jim said a ten-minute snore and a huge cup of coffee gave him hours of pep.

  Jim was the kind of man who still used words like “pep.”

  Tracy woke, as befuddled in era as in real time. History seemed to have rearranged itself as she slept.

  Next to her lay Camille, not simply on the bed, but on Tracy’s side of the bed, so as to be closer to her mother. Cammie’s black hair was a vine spread over the snowy linen, prompting Tracy to involuntary thoughts of fairy tales and princesses who slept on and on. Tracy didn’t know how long she’d napped. But the clock on her dresser, impossibly, read 2:00 p.m. Jim would be here in an hour. Cammie had lain down next to her and apparently, as Tracy had, fallen asleep like a cat in the sun. Almost without moving, Tracy made a quick visual examination of her daughter. Camille had changed into pink high school sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt that had been Ted’s. Depression clothes. A raw, red-fisted place was rubbed under Cammie’s eye.

  Cam was here for a reason. Tracy shook her shoulder. “I have to get up and get ready, but what’s the matter, Cam?”

  “Nothing.” Cammie feigned a yawn. She hadn’t been asleep. She’d been doing what Tracy did when she was down in the dumps, pressing her eyes and mind closed as best she could—trying to make herself unconscious.

  “Come on,” Tracy urged her. “I have to go soon.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry,” Cammie replied in a tart little voice. “I’m not going to take a semester. I’m going back to school.”

  “What . . . ? Good. But why?”

  “Well, so I check my e-mail . . .”

  “And . . .”

  “And what he says, Trent, is that it has nothing to do with me, blah blah, I’m perfect, blah blah, if he was two people and could have two lives, blah blah . . .”

  “It doesn’t get worse if you just say it, Cam.”

  “He went back to his country club, bike-race rich bitch blond girlfriend, Mama! And not now! Before now! They talked it over, and I can just imagine how they talked it over, at spring break, and then he came over and had dinner with us! But he wro
te me just now that he could tell I was getting serious . . . about traveling, and he just had to tell me the truth. . . .”

  “With an e-mail, the cowardly shit.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Thanks, Mama,” Cammie said, two words Tracy hadn’t expected to hear until the day Cammie asked her to baby-sit for her first grandchild. Another switchback.

  Tentatively, Tracy put her arm around Cammie, who backed up against her mother’s ribs in offhand intimacy and then began to cry. Tracy began to cry, too, careful, precise rivulets from the corners of her eyes that she did not allow to build up into sobs, so as not to let her stomach shudder. That would betray her and ruin this precious parenthesis of intimacy.

  “What would help?” she finally asked Cammie.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not even . . . going to the Virgin Islands?”

  Camille lay silent. “I don’t know. I feel like I’d be a bitch.”

  “Cam, you could make a deal with yourself to be a bitch after you get back. Come on. Ask your father about me being a bitch. He says I have ten days a year when he’d like to keep me in a box and feed me through the opening. You felt this . . . breakup coming, that was all. Didn’t you?”

  “Don’t bug me about it. And don’t be so fucking understanding. It’s like you’re my guidance counselor.”

  “I’m your mother. Same thing.”

  “Not if you were a shitty mother. Trent’s mother is a total bitch. She was never home one weekend in his life when he was a kid. Once, she left him with the nanny and went to Hawaii with his father and their friends for Christmas! But he totally adores her.”

  That’s how it works, Tracy thought, riffling in her mind through the dozens of kids she’d known growing up, kids whose parents had treated them as devotedly as farm dogs treated their litters—only to get endless worship from those children in return.

  “Let’s just find out what Dad would think. He’s still at the office. He won’t be leaving for a while to drive me to the airport.”

  “What about Olivia and Aunt Holly?”

  “They would love to have you along.” Tracy had to stop herself from crossing her fingers behind her back. She had no idea if this was the case. “Here, I’ll talk to Dad.”

  For Jim, it turned out to be hardly worth the price of the phone call. If Camille had wanted to climb K2, Jim would now be ordering snow goggles. While still talking to her husband, who was gathering his things to come home, Tracy gave Camille a thumbs-up. “You’d better get going. You need a ton of stuff on this list. Sunscreen. A wind jacket—”

  “Oh, Mom,” Cammie said, “I can get everything I need in a carry-on. Can I use Ted’s sports bag? One of them?”

  “You might need more than a carry-on.”

  “No, my clothes are small.” Tracy’s glance was rueful. “Oh, come on. I’ll bring a sundress. I’ll bring a windbreaker. On the other hand, if you’re going to be the clothing police, I don’t have to go.”

  “Of course you will,” Tracy said, thinking, Why am I conceding? The spoiled little shit!

  A tendril of fleeting regret for things only she and her two friends could have talked about alone—and now would be able to talk about only when Cammie was out of earshot—shot up from her heart. But Cam would probably be out of earshot, stretched out oiled like a sardine with her iPod glued to her head, more often than not. “It’ll be fun, honey.”

  “At least I won’t have to sit here and cry and eat Dove bars while he’s dancing at the club with . . . Britt. Imagine naming your kid Britt.”

  “You’re resilient, Cam. Or you’re faking it.”

  “I’m faking it.”

  “I couldn’t fake it if I felt the way you did.”

  “That’s because you’re feeble,” said Camille, but she grinned.

  Day Three

  Holly had never experienced such abandoned, joyous sleep as she did at the Golden Iguana Hotel in St. Thomas, and sleep was Holly’s holy communion. Though the place looked like an adobe-walled restaurant in Juárez, with pink walls and garish, outsize primitive drawings on the walls, the bed was better than at the best Westin, and the room seemed to have been pumped full of some delicious narcotic. Holly didn’t recognize the scent, but if she could have, she would have stripped and bathed in it. She said, “I do believe that this is about the third time in twelve years I have not waked to the fragrance of dirty sweat socks. What is that wonderful smell?”

  “It’s frangipani,” Tracy said. “It’s more powerful at night. I looked it up while you were asleep.” She held up a little green guidebook. “I never saw anyone sleep like you do, Hols. I thought I’d have to hold a mirror to your face to see if you were breathing.”

  “It’s a never fail equation. Holly minus Ian and Evan equals the sleep of the dead. What do you think we do when we stay at a hotel overnight and leave them with you?”

  “I thought you . . . you know, caught up on your sex life. You can hardly do it at home, except when they’re at soccer. Twelve-year-olds have sharp ears.”

  “When we go to a hotel, we sleep, Trace. We sleep. If we do bump our old bodies together in the morning, we’re grateful. If we just lie there and watch the news and get room service, we’re grateful. It’s the sleep that matters. The Japanese consider sleep a sacrament. Twelve-year-olds don’t just have sharp ears. They’re as demanding and messy as racehorses. And now, I’m starving. Let’s go eat. Do I have to put on a bra?”

  “You pay three hundred bucks for nothing but a bed to sleep on?” She tried to remember the last time she and Jim had stayed in a hotel without screwing their brains out.

  “Yeah, and I’m going to spend as much time on that boat as I can fast asleep.”

  “You’re crazy! You’d miss seeing . . . the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean to lie on a boat and sleep?”

  “In a second,” Holly said. “I didn’t say the whole time. Just lots of it.”

  As they searched for the promised continental breakfast, Holly explained that some women’s guilty pleasure was reading romance novels. And some women’s guilty pleasure was chocolate or recording a week’s worth of Oprah and watching it all on Sunday. But hers was to sleep as much as possible during the day. She couldn’t do it at home. While the boys were in school, she had to study for the degree in nurse administration she was trying to finish. Sleep during the day, for Holly, was like a venial sin, as delicious as it was wrong; and this trip had given her peremptory absolution. When she slept during the day, Holly had the sense that others were taking care of the world. She was temporarily off duty. Nights often left her anxious, prowling, frightening even her own cats. The moment that her twin twelve-year-old sons—great, loud, lolloping things, like human retrievers, towering over Holly—were out of earshot, she could instantly lose consciousness. Her only affliction with Evan and Ian was a surfeit of adoration. She suffered too much on their behalf. Each time one rode the bench during a game, or there was a birthday party to which only one was invited, Holly anguished to a degree she considered pathological. She often told Tracy that the boys had broken her. She wasn’t built for the mental torture of motherhood.

  “But you adore them. You’re a wonderful mother,” Tracy would tell her when Holly confessed this. “I wanted six. I’d have another one in a New York second if I could.”

  “You could,” Holly invariably replied. “Movie stars do, at our age. Even regular people. You could adopt a baby from China. I love being a mother, too. I just can’t take the worry.”

  Tracy had thought about it, about adopting another child. She knew Jim would. With Ted a junior in high school, he was already mourning the prospect of an empty nest. But Tracy had started so young. That baby time seemed to have receded into the sweet bygone. Holly, who’d waited until she was nearly thirty, was still in the thick of middle school.

  “Ev is better at most things than Ian,” she said to Tracy as they roamed what seemed a laby
rinth of halls, more than a hotel with twelve rooms could rightfully contain. “He gets grades easily, and he’s more athletic. But Ian has all the friends. When Ian gets invited to hang with some kids, and Ev is left out, I don’t just feel sorry for him, I want to murder the little bastards. Like Kevin Wastawicky. Do you know him?” Tracy, trying to listen and navigate, nodded. “The little bastard downloads songs onto discs and sells them for ten bucks to the other sixth graders. He’s going to end up in the federal pen. So, two months ago he invites Ian to his birthday party. Shit, they live next door. I see Ev looking out the window. I say, ‘Do you want to go to the mall?’ He shakes his head. He wants to be out there, with all the kids playing with Kevin’s new radio-controlled plane. I will give Ian credit. He came home early and went to the park with Ev to kick the ball around.”

  “So, he’s good, too,” Tracy comforted her. “They’re brothers.”

  “They’re twins. It’s different. It’s eerie. It was like Ian could hear Ev’s thoughts the whole time he was at that party.”

  “I think I can hear Ted’s thoughts sometimes. And what I can’t hear he tells me.”

  “Ted is one of the world’s great humans.”

  “You’re just saying that because you know . . . she isn’t.”

  “Cammie? I adore Cammie. What are you talking about?”

  “She was . . . on a tear yesterday. Until she found out she could come with us. I guess she had an excuse. Trent dumped her.”

  “Well, you said he was a pompous ass. I guess if I were nineteen, I’d cheer up over a free trip on a yacht, too.”

  “Do you mind she came?”

  “Why would I? She’s not going to get in the way. She’s always been like that. She could talk to her toys for hours, remember? Even when she was two? At Christmas, she got down on the floor with Evan and Ian and started building that robot.”