The Summer Guest

by Justin Cronin

  “It’s good . . . to think . . . of Hal.”

  “I wish you could have been there, M.”

  “I was . . . Harry. You . . . told me . . . and I . . . was there. Don’t cry . . . Harry.”

  “I’m sorry, M. I’ll try not to.”

  “Remember . . . that . . . night? I told you . . . it would be . . . all right.” A long inhalation of breath. “It will . . . be.”

  “I know that, M.”

  “Tell me . . . another . . . story.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Yes . . . you . . . can.” I felt her nod, though this was, I knew, a memory. Her breath was warm and slow on my neck. “I know . . . you, Harry.”

  I took a deep breath, then heard myself speaking. My voice was strange and far away, seeming to come at once from inside me and from the air of the dark room all around.

  “Once upon a time, there was a man and a woman, and they had two boys. The first one was very little. He was sick, and for a time they thought he might die, but eventually he became well, though he stayed little because of this sickness, and his mother and father loved him very much. The second boy grew and became a man, and they loved him, too, though differently. That is what they learned in their lives together: that the little boy, because he stayed little, would always have a special kind of love, but that the other boy, who grew, would be the one who would take care of them, when they themselves grew old. The first love was sweeter, and a little sad, because when the man and the woman felt it, they were remembering. But the second was stronger, because they knew it would last them all the days of their lives. M?”

  “Yes . . . Harry?”

  “Was the story what you wanted?”

  “It . . . was always . . . what I wanted.” Then: “Tell me . . . more. Tell me . . . anything.”

  I did. I told her everything; I talked for hours, or thought I did. I told her every story I knew. Her breathing grew slow and heavy against my chest, like long waves on a beach. And when I was done, she said, quietly, “I’m . . . thirsty.”

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  “No . . . Harry.” She seemed to shake her head. “The . . . other. Please.”

  “M. I just can’t.”

  “Shhhh . . . don’t cry . . . Harry.”

  “I can’t, I can’t.”

  “I am . . . your wife, Harry. I am . . . your wife . . . and I need you . . . to do this.”

  Then the glass was in my hand. It was warm, from hours of sitting, and thick with the grains of the crushed pills; the mixture had separated a little, leaving a dark layer of medicine at the bottom, and so I took a spoon from the bedside table to stir it, quietly, so as not to disturb the silence of the room with even the slightest contact of metal on glass. I slid behind her, taking her weight on my chest, and held the straw to her lips. She was forty-five years old.

  “That’s it . . . Harry.”

  Her sips were small, like a bird taking water from a garden fountain: delicate, and without hesitation. A dozen times she drank, taking the milk and the pills into her. A stream of the bitter liquid ran down the sides of her mouth, onto her chin and neck, and when she was done I used a washcloth to wipe it all away.

  “Let’s go . . . to sleep . . . Harry.”

  “M—”

  “It’s . . . all right,” she said, and I felt her move against me and then stop. Her voice was faraway, a dreamer’s voice, and I felt a heaviness gather inside me, taking me with her.

  “It’s . . . all right. Sleep . . . my love.”

  And God save us all, I did.

  THIRTEEN

  Lucy

  J oe always said it was bad luck to watch him leave from the dock. He kissed me that day, the eve of Christmas, 1971, bounded up the gangway, and I went back to the motel and slept. I awoke to the sound of someone banging on the door, and a high, loud voice, jabbering in Spanish: the chambermaid. I took my watch from the bedside table; it was just past noon. I had long since missed my bus. Already Joe would be fifty miles out to sea.

  I yelled something to the maid about coming back later, pulled the blankets tight around me, and by the time I awoke again the sun was setting. I showered and dressed and stepped outside. A stiff wind was blowing off the water. The sun had set completely; the buildings by the water were all dark, but up the hill I could see lights and feel the presence of the city. In the office, I found the same clerk who’d checked us in the night before, watching a football game on television and paring his nails.

  “If it’s all right, I’d like to stay another night.”

  He looked at his watch, then at me. “You already did.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’ve been here two days.”

  I stood a moment, taking this in. Had I really slept through a day and a night and all the next day besides? Vague memories gathered in my mind, scattered images I’d thought were dreams: a second visit from the chambermaid, more insistent, and rising in the middle of the afternoon to use the bathroom and hearing, from outside, the rush of midday traffic on Commercial Street.

  “Listen,” the clerk was saying, “what you do is your own business, young lady, but we don’t want any druggies in here. This is a family resort.”

  “What are you talking about?” I wanted to laugh. “It’s a motel. And I was just tired.”

  “Like I said.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t want any tired people in here. You owe me thirty more dollars, tonight included. Then you be on your way.”

  There was no point in arguing. I counted out the money from my purse. Joe had given me an extra fifty to help me get home. All told, I had a little over a hundred dollars left—money I had planned to spend in Boston on Christmas presents for my parents, but had not gotten around to using.

  As I was leaving the office, the realization hit me all at once, like a gust of wind. I turned at the door; the clerk had already gone back to watching his game.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what day is it?”

  “Today?” He looked at me and laughed. “It’s Christmas Day. You almost missed it.”

  I couldn’t have said why I did what I did, not exactly. It was as if a hidden door had opened, like a passage in a castle wall. Joe, my parents, the whole kit and kaboodle that I called my life: all I had to do was go through the door, and I could leave everything behind. I thought of the girl I had seen in the restaurant in Cambridge, so confident and smart, holding the attention of the men at her table like a spell. I knew that her life—a life of money and good schools and all the choices such things buy—could never be mine. I wasn’t going to be a lawyer, or even go to college. But I wanted to know, even for a moment, what it felt like to be someone like her.

  I rented a room the next day at the YWCA on Spring Street. Seven dollars a night, and another five to eat, perhaps three more for incidentals: by these calculations, I needed to find a job in five days. There were fourteen restaurants going four or five blocks in each direction from the Y, everything from greasy-spoon diners to chowder houses with big open tanks of lobsters for the tourists. It was the slow season, I figured, but people still had to eat, and I didn’t care what kind of place it was, so long as I had work. By now my parents would be wondering what had happened to me—my lie about visiting high school friends in Boston would have long since fallen apart with just a few phone calls—but I didn’t want to tell them where I was until I had gotten myself settled. I was twenty-four years old, and never in my life had I done anything so purely on my own.

  By the third day I was beginning to panic. Everyplace the story was the same: not hiring, try back in a few weeks. But I didn’t have a few weeks. I was down to just thirty dollars, plus the eleven dollars I had to keep aside for bus fare home in case nothing worked out. I had a tidy nest egg sitting in a passbook savings account back in Sagonick—a little over three thousand dollars I’d managed to put away—but I would have had to go home to get it, or ask my parents to wire me the money. I vowed I wouldn’t
touch it, unless I got truly desperate.

  I had one solid lead: a chowder house down on Commercial, just a few hundred yards from the dock where the Jenny-Smith had been berthed. I’d visited it the first day, and the manager told me that he might be needing a waitress; one of his girls was pregnant and likely going to quit. I’d been hoping for a job as a line cook, but waitressing or even busing would be fine, I told him. Check back in a couple of days, he said. Maybe he’d know something by then.

  I waited until noon on the fourth day before I returned. The weather was a sullen, dispiriting gray, and a steady ten-knot wind whipped up the waters of the harbor, making me think of Joe, now far out to sea. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how angry I was with him. I was wearing the bracelet he’d given me—I hadn’t taken it off since our first night together—and, feeling its jangling presence against my wrist, I remembered his words: There’s a woman in town who makes these. Even as he’d spoken, I’d felt a little chill of suspicion unsnake inside me. We’d been apart for three years. I’d never asked about other women, and he’d never mentioned any, except for someone named Abby, whom I gathered was his boss’s wife and an old friend of his father’s—a nurse who had taken care of Joe Sr. when he was injured in the war. Apart from that, Joe’s descriptions of life in LeMaitre made it sound like a frontier outpost from some novel of the old West, everyone spitting and pissing where they liked. But of course, even in such a place there would be women.

  Feeling suddenly determined, I marched through slushy snow up to the front door of the restaurant and stepped inside. Only a few people were eating—mostly men in suits and ties, no doubt the usual lunch crowd from the law firms and government offices over on State, hunched over bowls of chowder and pints of Bass. At the bar I asked for the manager, and a minute later he came striding out of the kitchen.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. He was an older man, maybe fifty-five, with square glasses that made his eyes seem large and a comb-over of wispy hair that flapped a little when he walked. “I’m sorry. Maybe in a few more weeks.”

  The news hit me like a blow. “I don’t have a few weeks,” I said, and heard the tears pressing on my voice. “I only have another day.”

  “Did you try O’Neil’s? They sometimes need people.” O’Neil’s was another seafood place, further down Commercial.

  “I’ve tried everywhere.” A fat tear spilled onto my cheek, and when I tried to wipe it away, I found I was still wearing my mittens. I removed them and grabbed a cocktail napkin off the bar and blew my nose. “I’m sorry. I don’t have to waitress. Just let me sweep up or something. Please. I’m down to my last thirty dollars.”

  He regarded me another moment. The restaurant seemed to have fallen suddenly quiet. Beyond the windows, the gray sky over the harbor roiled with cold and snow.

  “Aw, hell,” he said, and scratched the back of his head. “I really shouldn’t be doing this. To tell the truth, I had pretty much decided not to hire anybody, with business being so slow. But maybe we can squeeze you in.”

  “You mean it?”

  He seemed about to laugh. “You want the job or not?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “You won’t get rich in here. I know you know that, but I’m just saying. We only pay the minimum, a buck forty an hour. That and tips, of course. And I can’t give you the dinner shift until you’ve been on awhile.”

  “Anything is fine. Really.”

  He took a peppermint from a wicker basket on the hostess station and popped it into his mouth. Then he leveled his gaze at me. “Listen,” he said quietly, sucking on the candy, “I’ve got to ask. There isn’t anything I should know about you, is there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. But not many girls come in and say they’re down to their last thirty dollars, or whatever it was. There wouldn’t be . . . anyone looking for you, would there? Like, say, a husband or boyfriend, something like that? You can tell me if there is.”

  “No, sir. I just want to work.”

  He looked at me another moment, deciding what to believe, and finally ended our negotiation with a crisp nod. “Okay, then. But it’s Deck, all right? Like the deck of a boat.”

  “Deck. Got it.”

  “Ten thirty sharp, tomorrow. Black pants if you have ’em, or else you can pick up a cheap pair at the army-navy down the street. The white shirt you have on should do fine.”

  I felt myself smiling. “You won’t be sorry.”

  “I’m guessing not.” He turned on his heel to go. “Sorry. Stupid of me, but I forgot to ask your name.”

  “Alice.” I’d said it without thinking. It was my mother’s middle name. He was being so nice, I felt a little bad about the lie. But I also liked the sound of it, the new taste of it on my tongue: Alice. Who was Alice?

  “Okay, Alice,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

  As easy as that, I got my wish, stepped through the door from my old life and into another. I was no longer Lucy, but Alice: Alice, the waitress from Portland. I started work the next day, as promised, ten thirty on the dot with a smile on my face and pants so crisply new they rustled when I walked; a week later I was working the dinner shift and taking in a solid thirty dollars a night in tips. The Y was fine, if a little noisy, but they wouldn’t let me stay longer than a month anyway; one of the other waitresses told me about an available apartment in the triple-decker where she lived, and I went one evening to look at it: a single room with a toilet and tub but no sink except for in the kitchen. But the windows were big—I thought on clear days I might even be able to see the water—and it came furnished, with a bed, a table, and some plywood-and-milk-crate shelves. The only way in was up three flights of rickety stairs from the rear of the building, open to the weather and slick with ice. The rent was $120, utilities included; I took it on the spot, walked back to the Y to fetch my things—a single suitcase of clothing, a grocery bag of magazines and knicknacks, and an asparagus fern I’d bought to keep me company—and slept that night in my own apartment, a feeling as strange and wondrous to me as a first kiss.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I finally wrote my parents a letter. I didn’t want to lie, but the truth was too hard to explain—I didn’t even have words for it myself—so I simply told them that I had decided I needed to set out on my own for a bit, that I was safe and well, and where they could reach me if they needed to and that they should not tell Joe where I was if he called. I tucked a twenty-dollar bill in the envelope, and explained that it was money I had planned to spend on Christmas presents, and that I hoped they would buy themselves something nice with it. Dad, I wrote, I know you need gloves, you always do, and Mom, I was thinking you might like some perfume, or else earrings. I’m sorry I had to do this. It has nothing to do with Joe, or not exactly, so please don’t be angry with him, or with me. Don’t worry, as I really am okay, better than I’ve been in a while in fact, and just need some time for whatever it is that’s going on with me. Weeping, I signed it Love, Lucy, already feeling like an imposter for using this name.

  My new life felt simple, clean, uncluttered, like a child’s dollhouse, or the pages of an empty book. I worked the dinner shift from five to eleven, slept the mornings away, rose at ten to do small chores—shopping for food, or else laundry; I had very little clothing, and was constantly washing what I had—ate a small, early dinner at my tiny table, then left in twilight for the restaurant. The Y was just a few blocks away from my apartment, and afternoons on my way to work I would go there to swim, something I had never really done before, at least not in a pool. Twenty-five cents, plus a nickel for a towel; when I recall those months, it’s these trips to the pool that return most vividly to mind, each sensory detail forever etched in memory. The feel of the towel in my hand, warm from the dryer and so crisped with bleach it felt deep-fried; the cold against my skin as I undressed hurriedly in the frigid locker room; the feeling of immersion, the world above me wiped away, and the building heat
of my muscles as they set to work in a rhythm that was a kind of music. Kick-stroke/ kick-stroke/head turn-breathe, kick-stroke/ kick-stroke/head turn-breathe. I saw other people doing flip-turns and wanted to try it; the first time, I got so much water up my nose the lifeguard came down from his stand to ask me if I would be all right, but before long I had mastered it, and was swimming a mile a day.

  If it’s true that I was sometimes homesick—a sudden ache, nearly physical, which always took me by surprise—it was also the case that I was happy, and that this happiness felt sweeter for my loneliness. The world seemed to have forgotten me, forgotten Lucy, and when I thought about the people and places of my old life, the love I felt for them was tinged with nostalgia, as if I were recalling them across a span of many years. The sensation was so new to me I wondered if it could possibly last, until one deep, cold night in the first week of March, when I awakened to the feeling that someone was watching me. It was late, after three A.M. Not someone, I thought: something. I rose quickly in my icy apartment, and when I went to my window I was so startled by what I found that I forgot all about the fear that had pulled me from bed. A great, billowing apparition of blue-green light, like pool water, but shot with flecks of gold, hung over the sleeping city, folded like a drape. It moved back and forth, pushed by an invisible wind—a wind of light and stars. I knew what I was looking at; I had seen the aurora borealis before, of course; yet at that moment, standing by my window, I felt as if I were witnessing something far more: the purest light of angels in their heaven, remembering the world.

  The next day, a Saturday, I rose early, did a load of laundry in the basement, swam my usual mile. It was just before five when I arrived at the Lobster Tank. Only a few customers were eating, mostly older folks in for the early bird four-dollar special. I took a clean apron and a tray from the pile by the dishwasher and got to work. By six the place was packed. I was putting up an order on the clips when I turned and saw Deck watching me.