Still Summer

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  And the gusts buffeted Opus sharply, regularly, but for a surprisingly brief time. There was no rain, only the fist of the wind. The mast shuddered, and a few metal clips tore free and clanged mournfully. The sail bellied outward, but the women didn’t see. They didn’t know that they should have fought the wind at almost any cost to rush and lower it. It was a rule they hadn’t needed to learn.

  Instead, they clung, hand to hand, in the saloon.

  Opus no longer felt like the kind, cradling, big-bellied mother who’d rocked them in her palm as they slept. Cammie wept until her face was swollen; and Olivia crawled up the stairs and over the deck on her knees, only to fetch her cloisonné box and extract a Valium. Over Cammie’s protests, she made the girl swallow it with a sip of water from the sink. She then took a pill herself. Olivia saw that the water came in a slow trickle, not in a gush, and wondered if it had something to do with the boat’s pitching. Whatever it was, Tracy would fix it.

  The weather seemed to pause for a breath. And then it stopped altogether.

  They wobbled up onto the deck. The sky was impassive, blank of stars.

  Holly found the flashlight and shined it around her. Loose things had been taken apart with abandon, as if by an angry, rough dog. The top half of a swimsuit lay on the stovetop. A long-sleeved T-shirt seemed to have thrown its arms around one of the supports of the canopy, a leg bent like an old man’s shillelagh. Life jackets bobbed in the wake behind the boat, tethered by the lines that still held them. Two loaves of bread, flattened like matzo, lay on the stairs, and glass from broken bottles of wine and mugs crunched under her feet. Because it was what a person should do, Holly found a dustpan and whisk, secured by magnet to the inside of a cabinet door, and began to sweep up. She winced as she did it, because her leg, though wrapped tightly, still refused to support her fully. She was making headway with the mess when she heard Tracy say, “Mother of God.” She followed Tracy’s eyes upward.

  The sail, plucked apart first at its carefully mended fingerling tear, had then blown to bits like an overinflated balloon. It flapped in gigantic shreds from the mainsail.

  “How could that have happened?” Tracy cried.

  “And so fast,” said Holly. “That sail was perfect.”

  “Thank God for motors,” Tracy said. “Lenny’s beautiful sail . . .”

  “They’re out there, Trace,” Holly said. “The wind might have blown them away from us, but they’ve got the motor started by now.” Tracy’s rueful glance told her that she didn’t believe for a moment this was true. “Well, they’re strong men,” Holly went on. “If anyone can make it, they can. They know this area like the back of their hands. We have to think of us, right here, now.”

  “Yeah,” Tracy said. “Well. It was my fault. I brought the boat around too fast.”

  “You’ve had a lot of experience steering fifty-foot yachts,” Holly said.

  “Don’t kid about this,” Tracy told her sharply, and Holly shrank back. She was always the one who was good for a laugh. Always. And it was lousy, yes, but for her part, she was grateful that she was soon going to be walking on dry land and gathering Ian and Evan in her arms. She imagined Chris, her husband, hauling her butt to a hospital. Action and forward motion had propelled Holly her whole life. She rarely had the patience for reflection; and if she sat down too long, even in a movie theater, she fell asleep. She was, she supposed, more like her mother than she would have liked to believe. Heidi’s maxims: Do not throw good money after bad. What can’t be cured must be endured. Her impulse was to worry about her sons; but they were not here, not at this moment. If she was to cast the line of her mind out far enough, she would be sweating the dark line that proceeded, half a centimeter at a time, up her thigh from the site of her wound. Holly had blood poisoning. She knew it, but what good would it do to tell the others? How could they help? Even with her knowledge, how could she? A few handfuls of amoxicillin wasn’t going to cure septicemia. If she didn’t get help quickly, she would go into septic shock. She already felt intermittently feverish.

  So lost in thought was she that she didn’t notice Tracy, bagging trash and, with her strong hands, straightening out the bent leg of the canopy.

  “Mommy!” Cammie screamed from the cabin.

  “I’m here,” Tracy called back.

  “Mom! Is Michel back yet? Is Lenny here?”

  “Honey, I think the boat drifted in the night. I’m sure they’re fine, but we can’t see them. It’s still too dark. Wait until dawn. Then we’ll see what’s going on with the motor and go looking for them.”

  “We’d better just go back to St. Thomas,” Olivia said, unscrewing the lid on a bottle of Evian. “We can’t go looking for them, Tracy. We don’t know where we are. That’s what they’d do. They’d go back.”

  “You know they wouldn’t. They’d come for us. Or send someone for us,” Tracy said.

  Olivia poked her head out of the saloon, scanned the sky for weather, and protested, “At least someone there will know something! What the hell happened to the sail?”

  “Mom, what if they’re dead?” Cammie clambered up the stairs. “You! Aunt Olivia! You did it with him! You came out there to the island because Michel was with me! And now he’s dead!”

  “What are you talking about, Cammie?” Tracy looked from one to the other.

  “She did!”

  “What does she mean?”

  “She slept with him. She slept with Michel! Ask her! And it was her idea! She asked him to!”

  “I did not,” Olivia said, sipping her water.

  “How? What?” Tracy said. “This isn’t making any sense.”

  “I mean she slept with Michel, Mom! She had sex with him!”

  “Surely, she’s . . . honey, you don’t mean that.”

  “Ask her! Ask her!” Cammie tugged at her hair. She looked like a supernatural creature, with matted, angled dark locks and chalky lips. Her cheeks were the only stain of color on her face. Pallor that extended down to her throat seemed to have overtaken her tan. Holly limped past Tracy and put her arms around the girl. She convinced Cammie, as much with susurrant sounds as with words, to calm down, that they didn’t have the luxury for a temper tantrum. Not for any reason.

  “This is nonsense,” Olivia murmured, and then asked, “Why did the motor cut out? I don’t mean their motor, on the dinghy. I mean ours, the big motor.”

  “I’m sure I did something stupid to it,” Tracy said. “That’s the first order of business. We have to find out what’s wrong.”

  “No, the first order of business is coffee. Coffee is proven to raise your IQ a few points. I can get around. I’ll make some coffee,” Holly said. “The stove’s propane. We have to think this through. Did anyone try a cell phone?”

  “I just did,” said Tracy. She shook her head. “No luck. Look,” she said, her voice dropping to a purr. “Come on, Cammie. Holly’s going to make us something to eat, at least some bread and coffee. And, Olivia, you’re going to come with me and get out the flares, and I’ll find the generator and turn it on. It runs on diesel, that much I know.”

  An hour later, as the boat drifted, they ate bread and slices of cheese. “Can you stand on your leg?” Olivia asked Holly.

  “It just hurts. It looks worse than it is. Honest.” She lied fluently, but then she always had. Her mother and father had been stricter than the other girls’; and Holly had narrowly escaped social annihilation at their hands when she’d insisted, with a blue-eyed opacity she practiced in front of the mirror, that all they did on Saturday nights was watch Eddie, Tracy’s brother. How many nights had she strolled out of the house with her mini-skirt, the length of two hand spans, rolled at the bottom of her gigantic purse?

  “Please, Holly, Cammie, eat something,” Tracy said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Cammie said. “I don’t see how you can be.”

  “I think it’s fair to say none of us is hungry. But for right now, we’re safe,” Holly said. “Let’s eat because we have to
work. We have to get back, to your dad and Ted, Cammie.” Tracy nodded and swallowed her bread with visible effort. “That’s the reality.”

  Cammie whispered, “This is the reality, too. This is real. And it’s the most horrible thing I could ever imagine, Mom. It’s like an awful nightmare, but you don’t wake up. It’s like being dead but seeing yourself dead.”

  “I imagine it is, Cam.”

  “You know, Mom, if it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine,” Cammie said. Her rage at losing Michel spent, she looked the way she had as a child when she was coming down with something. But she was the only one among them who could possibly make the motor work; and in the anemic dawn, Tracy could see that even the little island where Michel and Cammie had gone, probably to make love, was invisible. They had drifted that far. “If you think back to the moment, Michel was trying to do his job and I was distracting him.”

  “Cammie,” Olivia said, “I know you won’t believe me. But I’m sorry, about Michel. I’m sorry for being such a fool.”

  “It would be okay now, if you said that and he was here,” Cammie told her flatly. “Because he isn’t, it sounds easy. It sounds like you’re rubbing it in.”

  “Will someone tell me what the fuck is really going on?” Holly asked. “I mean that in a polite way.”

  Olivia sighed. “It seems that I—”

  “It seems that the first night we came out, Olivia fucked Michel,” Cammie said. “He felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for the poor widow.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true, Cammie,” Olivia said, squaring her shoulders.

  “Tell me you’re kidding, Olivia. I thought Cammie was wacky. You didn’t have sex with that kid.” Holly pantomimed gagging. “Très tacky.”

  “It wasn’t all my idea.”

  “He said it was,” Cammie insisted. “You took off all your clothes.”

  “It takes two, Cammie. That’s why I didn’t want you to—”

  “It was different for us, Aunt Liv. It was two young people who might have been sort of trying to really be together, not a mercy fuck. . . .” Cammie was animated by grief and confusion. It felt almost exhilarating.

  Olivia snorted, “Love at first sight!”

  “You never loved anyone but yourself!”

  “Stop, Camille. Whatever happened, please don’t talk to Olivia that way,” Tracy said.

  “I don’t know,” Holly said. “I think I’d talk to her that way, considering. I think I just have.”

  “Aunt Holly is right! That’s what it was. Yeah, he did it. But he felt like crap about it! He thought you’d kill me, Mom, if he laid a hand on me! He was a nice boy, a nice young man! I cared about him. For her, he was just a way to prove she could screw someone other than her hundred-year-old husband.”

  “I assure you, I have had plenty of other—”

  “Stop it!” Tracy cried, putting her hands over her ears. “Both of you, stop it! You’re bickering about a boy who may be dead, and we also may be dead if we don’t get this boat back to St. Thomas or find a way to get someone to come for us.”

  The sun burst gloriously through a gray band of clouds.

  “Adventures in paradise,” said Holly.

  That night, Olivia had offered to do something nice. She supposed it was her obligation. At first she tried reading, but she quickly tired of the way the bounce of the boat made the page blur. She needed reading glasses. She would never get them. She went to get another bottle of water, her second in two hours. She was astonishingly thirsty, dehydrated and edgy. She was eating Valium as though they were Pez.

  Somehow, along the way, she must have developed a tolerance.

  When she was young, a single pastel pill could put her under for an entire night. All she’d had to do to get a bottle filled was gesture at her tummy, indicating period cramps, and the local physician quickly scrawled a prescription. Soon, she was swallowing one every night as she applied her Bugati cream. She would waken when the sun was high and the workers already in the shade with their late morning snacks. She’d rise slowly, as if still in the arms of her dream, wrapping herself in her kimono, then taking a long bath before she came down to the ground floor.

  Often it was noon before cups of strong espresso had restored her and she was ready for a languid swim or a consultation on the evening’s menu.

  Franco simply considered her delicate, in need of a great deal of sleep. He liked a wife as easily bruised as a blossom. In truth, after the first thrill of its ancient charm, Olivia, as a new wife, found Italian village life dull. Against the monotonous lowing of cattle and the dreary punctuation of church bells, there was always a feud boisterously brewing or tearfully on the mend, another baptism, a fashion show, the wheel of the religious holidays and the harvest. While they were rarely on the estate in the winter, Olivia was not, as were her few transplanted British or American friends, charmed by the light that outlined the frozen vine, the comic snowcap on the stone garden god.

  One of these friends, Eliza—who also had been a child, a student who fell under the spell of a man with an ever present silk ascot and manners so courtly that they were invisible—said she painted away the summer and slept away the winter, particularly on those nights when her own husband, Mario, hinted at amorous intentions. The weeks Eliza and Olivia spent in Paris—red-cheeked under the lights in their furs, with bottomless checkbooks, their parcels bulging with so many pairs of shoes that the women had to throw away the boxes, the sly flirtations with boys their own age—were the charms on the bracelets that locked Olivia to the gates of the Villa Montefalco.

  Cammie would get over this bullshit idea of love.

  Cammie was doing something Olivia had never done, romanticizing a fling.

  Olivia was certain that Michel had not “cared for her,” as he had said. That was only a way to get into Cammie’s pants. Love, Olivia had observed, was either an adjective trotted out helplessly to describe the throes of a strong attraction or the bond that outlasted that attraction and translated into the interdependency of age.

  Had she loved Franco? She was almost certain that she never had, even when she was most grateful for his generous protection. Would she have loved him in time, if he had lived to be old? She thought not. She had seen her parents together, Sal and Anna Maria, side by side in the car, her mother sitting on the middle of the bench the way girls sat next to their boyfriends before bucket seats, side by side holding hands on the couch, side by side in bed. Never once had she been allowed to sit next to her mother in a restaurant booth or crawl into her parents’ bed on a stormy night, though she had stood at their door and knocked. They had certainly been close, doing everything together, even the laundry and grocery shopping. Now that her father had died, Olivia was certain that her mother described theirs as a great love, to her friends from church, to her sister, to anyone who asked. But even this was a riddle. Olivia had watched her parents eat whole meals without speaking to each other or to Olivia or to her brother. Was this because love conferred an understanding that didn’t require words? Olivia doubted it. Her own happiest times were spent in the occasional stunning conversation or in the company of books. Having never loved a child, or felt loved as a child, having never loved a sibling or felt protected by a sibling, never shared confidences in quite the way she knew that Janis and Holly and Tracy had, she had observed the world in a puzzled silence until she became old enough to realize that she was beautiful and needed to be no more than that to have power over others.

  On the other hand, she didn’t like discomfort or the feeling that something was expected of her.

  She was again alone, the observer; and she didn’t want the blame for any part of this calamity, minor as it was.

  She imagined the Coast Guard would come soon, and she would be relieved, but Olivia wanted to walk off this boat with her friendships, the only bonds in her life that had truly lasted, intact. Whatever frisson of excitement she had felt about the drama of the crew had long since dissipated. It was sad about the men, i
f they really were lost at sea; but would the world be poorer for two footloose sailors—though hadn’t the older one had a young child? The Canadian boy, well, it had been an affirming interlude, but she had been with more adroit men. She hadn’t really known them. And now, while she was not frightened, she was physically spent from hauling around this and pulling up that. Tracy’s unwonted demands, along with the nervous tedium, were ghastly. This couldn’t last for very long; it was too awful. The others, she knew, had worked harder physically than she had.

  Hence Olivia’s solitude. She’d offered to do something nice. She volunteered to sit alone and steer while all the others caught a few hours of sleep, until the fogs cleared off. She scanned the murky, seamless verge of the ocean for some sign of light or life. There was nothing. A far-off airplane. A star that seemed to bob and recede—a trick of her eye, Olivia thought. Finally, just before a smudged dawn broke, she knelt and placed her elbows on the storage seats and prayed, “Oh, heavenly Father, forgive me my manifold sins and wickednesses which I have committed against Thy divine mercy. Please have mercy on the souls of Lenny and Michel, and guide them in Your great sea, where our boat is so small. . . .”

  It sounded right.

  Cammie slept and dreamed of Michel, of lying on the rug in the sun with Michel, of his dark, slender face, his cheekbones that lifted when he smiled, his hair streaked like a lion’s mane, gold and dark, the touch of the stubble on his cheek the last time she’d touched him. She woke crying and saw her mother, still awake, watching her. “I’m okay, Mom,” she said.

  She dropped off again and less than an hour later woke again. She had been dreaming that she could not sleep. “Even in my sleep, I can’t sleep. My mind feels like I tore it, Mom. Can’t use it. Can’t rest it.”

  “It’s natural. Cry it out, Cam.”

  “Did you ever cry this hard? Until you were so worn out?”

  “Of course,” Tracy said.