The Summer Guest

by Justin Cronin

  “Joey, Joey, my God.”

  I rose and put my arms around him. “It’s all right, Dad. I’m home.”

  “Joey, Joey.”

  “I tried to call. I got no answer.”

  “We were at the hospital.” The voice was the second man’s; I’d almost forgotten he was there. I brought the image into focus: Paul Kagan.

  “The hospital.” I looked at Paul. “What’s wrong? Is he all right?”

  My father shook his head. “It’s not me. It’s Lucy.”

  “Lucy? What’s wrong?”

  “When did you come back?” my father said. “You should have told me, Joey.”

  “Dad, what are you talking about? What’s at the hospital?”

  “Your daughter, Joey.” He looked me firmly in the eye. “Lucy wouldn’t tell me, but I knew. Your daughter was born last night.”

  And so a family story was made: how I had returned the previous summer, unknown, under cover of darkness, to be with Lucy; and how eight months later, knowing the child we had conceived on that visit was about to be born, I had come home to claim her, and face the music of my life. A story in which I was in one way a hero, and another way not; but a story nevertheless, built foursquare on the moment when my father looked me in the eye and told me Kate was mine, and I didn’t say a word, my silence saying yes. I never learned if he knew the truth, and even in the final weeks of his life I didn’t find the courage to ask him. But my heart tells me he did not; one thing my father never could do was lie. He might have had an easier life if this had been possible, but it simply wasn’t.

  We brought Lucy and Kate home two days later. Lucy had gone into labor early on the morning of the first day of her thirty-fifth week, and when my father couldn’t get Paul Kagan on the phone, he had somehow driven her down to Farmington. By the time they arrived her labor had stopped, but they admitted her anyway, and when her contractions returned the following evening, my father was there. These were the old days, when a man at a birth (except for the doctor—always a man) was as rare as a comet in a June sky, so when I say my father was present, I mean sitting just outside the room, probably hankering hard for a cigarette nobody would let him smoke. One Joe Crosby in place of another: he told me he’d been glad to do it and knew I would have been there if I could.

  Lucy was very weak, and the day we brought her home the snow, which had held itself at bay, arrived: a heavy spring storm, flakes the size of pennies that fell from an absolutely windless sky, so that the only sound to be heard was just that: the sound of falling snow. The power failed the next evening, a beautiful, sudden dimming that seemed to freeze time, taking the furnace and phones with it, and then the cold slid in behind the snow, a heart-stopping plunge that set a record for the month of April when, on the second day, the temperature hit minus twenty-two. Lucy’s early labor had been caused by high blood pressure, and the drugs they’d given her to keep her from seizing left her ill and exhausted, almost unable to talk. I nailed blankets over the windows and filled the hearth with wood, and when Kate wasn’t feeding I took her with me to the big room by the fireplace, where I held her against my bare chest under piles of old quilts. I didn’t know a thing about babies, but it turned out I didn’t need to. It happened like this: She was another man’s child, and then she wasn’t. I held my little five-pound Kate against my skin, each one of my senses tuned to the little puffs of air that moved from her chest as she breathed and slept, and as the days slid by, taking all my loneliness with them, that’s what she became: my Kate.

  My story should end there, and in a way it does: lying on the sofa under the blankets, I agreed to be her father, that this would be my life from now on. I married Lucy, as I had always meant to, and when my father died, the camp became ours, Lucy’s, Kate’s, and mine, and it was a life I was happy to have. But between those days of cold and Kate and everything else, there was one thing left to do.

  At the end of the fourth day the power came on, and the next morning I heard the sound of chained tires outside: Porter Dante, pushing his plow. I put on my coat and boots and slogged through waist-deep snow to fetch a shovel from the shed; it was still below freezing, so the snow was dry, but it still took the rest of the morning to dig out the truck and clear a walkway to the door. After so many days inside, my body took gratefully to the work, and by the time I was through I had stripped down to a T-shirt and was still sweating like a prize-fighter. My father always kept a pack of Larks in the glove compartment of his truck; I shook one out and lit it, my first in months, and sat on the porch steps to watch the smoke from my lungs drift away into the snowy limbs. When I was done I smoked another, tossed the butts away, and returned to the house.

  Lucy and Kate were sleeping. My father was sitting in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tea.

  “We’re out of everything,” I said. “The roads are probably clear by now. I thought I’d go into town.”

  “You smell like smoke. Didn’t think you did that anymore.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t, not really. I helped myself to a couple of yours, though.”

  He sighed, rising to rinse his cup. On a shelf above the sink was an old mayonnaise jar where he kept a few bills; balancing on his cane, he reached into it and handed me a twenty.

  “Just be careful,” he said.

  The IGA was open but the shelves were nearly bare, picked clean in the panicked hours before the storm. I took what I could find—milk, eggs, instant coffee, a package of bacon, a big bag of Oreos, some cans of beans and vegetables and a jumbo pack of diapers—and loaded it all in the truck. The sun had finally broken through the clouds, a welcome sight, and the streets were already half flooded with slushy runoff. Despite my father’s warning I wasn’t worried about being seen, not really; the storm seemed to have wiped everything, all other cares, away.

  I was a mile from the county road when Darryl Tanner’s police cruiser appeared at the crest of the next hill. Too late: there was nowhere to turn, no way to pull off and let him pass without seeing me. I dropped my speed to the limit, forty-five, and prayed my beard would be enough to throw him off the trail, though of course there was no way to disguise the truck itself, a pea-green ’58 Ford with the camp name painted on the driver’s door. Tanner would know perfectly well whose truck it was and wonder who in hell was driving it, beard or no. My only hope was that the driving was slick enough that Tanner would be too busy keeping his cruiser on the road to give me a serious look. As we passed each other he lifted a finger off the steering wheel in greeting; I returned the gesture, my breath stuck in my chest. I lifted my eyes to the mirror and counted to three, each second taking Tanner’s cruiser farther away from me.

  “You didn’t even see me!” I cried out, and slapped the wheel with joy. “It’s me, you asshole!”

  Then I saw it: the flash of Tanner’s brake lights in my mirror, like two red eyes flaring. The gesture was pure reflex, the barest tap of the foot; it was over in a heartbeat. But in that instant I knew his body was registering what his mind had told him; that he knew just who he’d seen.

  They arrived the morning of the next day, Tanner’s cruiser followed by an army jeep. I watched from a window upstairs in Lucy’s room, where she was feeding Kate. Tanner and two MPs got out and spoke a moment; from his gestures I could tell he was pointing out where the various exits were, in case I decided to make a run for it. One of the MPs split off, headed for the rear of the house.

  My father appeared in the bedroom door. “Joey—”

  I turned from the window as Tanner and the other MP vanished from view beneath the snow-covered porch roof below me. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ll talk to them.”

  Lucy lifted Kate onto her shoulder to burp her, and looked up at the two of us from bed. “Talk to who? What’s going on?”

  I kissed the top of Kate’s head. From downstairs I heard three hard pounds on the front door. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I opened the door just as Tanner had lifted his fist to bang a second
time. “There’s no cause to make such a racket, Darryl. We can hear you fine.”

  He looked around me through the screen. “Your father home, Joey?”

  “Just me and Lucy.” The MP stood behind him, his hand on his holster. He looked like a senior in high school. “You can tell your buddy no use slogging around in the snow. I’m right here. And for god’s sake stop fooling with that gun. We’ve got a baby in the house.”

  Tanner frowned. “They’re just doing it by the numbers, Joey.”

  The second MP appeared at the base of the porch, clumps of snow stuck to him all the way up to his waist. He was a little out of breath. “Is that the guy?”

  “Right here, in the flesh.” I pushed open the screen door. “Might as well do this inside so we don’t let all the cold air in. Mind your shoes now, everyone.”

  I led them to the main room, where my father was waiting with Lucy and, swaddled to her chin, Kate.

  “Well, look here.” He might have been the sheriff, ready to haul me off to jail, but Darryl was a grandfather too. Smiling broadly, he took off his hat and approached Lucy. “May I?”

  She turned Kate around to show him, and Darryl bent at the neck to look. He gave a little admiring whistle.

  “What do you call her?”

  “Kate.”

  “Well, hello, Miss Kate.” He touched her ear and shifted his eyes to me. “This have something to do with you, Joey?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, good for you. Though under the circumstances I’m afraid it doesn’t change a thing.” Darryl looked at my father then. “Joey says you’re not here. Good thing, because if you were, that would be aiding and abetting.”

  My father folded his arms over his chest. “Cut the crap, Darryl. You want to arrest me, too, go right ahead.”

  “Joe, if I’d wanted to arrest you, I could have done it long ago. Joey, I’m afraid you’re a different story. I’m guessing you know why these gentlemen are here.”

  “Was I speeding?”

  Darryl sighed impatiently. “I’ll say it to both of you, right now, and excuse me, Lucy, especially with the new baby and all. But you can just knock it the hell off. This isn’t a social call, and we’re not talking about a few mailboxes, Joey. I’ve got an outstanding warrant for you on the charge of desertion, and it’s my job to arrest you and turn you over to these nice fellows, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Is that clear to everyone?”

  “Nice speech, Darryl,” I said. I looked at the two MPs. “How about it, guys, you want some coffee?”

  The taller one, whom I guessed was in charge, checked his watch. His face had a bit of acne. “We don’t have to be back on base until fifteen hundred.”

  Darryl frowned. “A little coffee isn’t going to solve this, Joey.”

  “Didn’t say it would. Just trying to be hospitable.” I turned to Lucy. “You think my father could mind the baby a minute?”

  Lucy passed Kate to my father. Tanner cleared his throat and looked at me cautiously. “No funny stuff, all right, Joey? I would hate to see you make a run for it.”

  I wanted to laugh. “Christ, Darryl, where would I go?” I showed the MPs where the kitchen was. “Coffee right through there, guys, cream in the fridge, sugar over the stove. Help yourself to some cookies too. We’ll be back in a minute.”

  Lucy followed me upstairs to her room and shut the door behind us. “Joe, they’re going to arrest you.”

  “I know.” We sat together on the bed. “I’ll tell you something. I want them to. Not for any reason other than to have this be over. A couple of years, probably. I’ve heard of guys who’ve gotten less.”

  She began to cry. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  I took her hands and made her look at me. I’d never felt so certain of anything in my life. “Don’t be, because I’m not. Not anymore. I’m tired of running, Lucy. I need to come home.”

  “I want you to, Joe. I think that’s all I ever wanted.”

  “Good. Here’s the other thing. I’m sorry this is so fast, but it has to be. I’ll raise Kate, be her father. You can tell Harry, but not for a while, at least until we know what’s going to happen to me. I just want us to be together, a family. Agreed?”

  I was prepared to tell her more, but I didn’t have to. She put her arms around me, nodding fiercely.

  When we came downstairs five minutes later, everyone was waiting in the kitchen. One of the MPs was holding Kate in his lap while the other was doing itsy-bitsy spider for her. When they saw us the one who was holding her stood quickly, his face flustered with embarrassment, and handed her back to Lucy.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Your father said it would be all right. She sure is a cutie. I’ve got a niece not much bigger than that.”

  Lucy let the error pass. “I don’t think I got your name, soldier.”

  “Samuels, ma’am. Corporal Samuels.” He tipped his head toward his companion. “That’s Hickock.”

  “Well, you held her very nicely, Corporal Samuels. You ever want a job babysitting, you come by, all right?”

  He nodded nervously, his face pink as a ham. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lucy and I sat at the table and told Darryl Tanner what we wanted to do. He listened to what we had to say, helping himself to Oreos from the open bag on the table as we talked.

  “That’s a new one on me,” he said when we were finished, and scratched his head. “Problem is, the state of Maine says a three-day wait once you get the license. But I might be able to pull a string or two, assuming it’s all right with these fellows. What do you say, gentlemen? A little detour?”

  They exchanged a look and shrugged. “As long as it’s on the way,” Hickock said. “One guy, we stopped at his mother’s house to help him move a sofa.”

  Tanner went to the office to use the phone. A few minutes later he returned, rubbing his hands together.

  “Well, you’re in luck. Woman who answered in the county clerk’s office knows my sister pretty well. French Catholic, so this is right up her alley. She says she can backdate the license, so long as we all keep it under our hats. The question of officiation is another issue. The county clerk is away in Florida, got stranded by the storm. But she’s looking around to see who she can scare up.”

  Lucy, Kate, and I rode together in the back of Tanner’s cruiser, my father and the MPs following in the jeep. By the time we arrived in Farmington it was after two. We stopped in a diner across from the courthouse for hamburgers and Cokes while Lucy changed Kate’s diaper and the MPs phoned the stockade to tell them we were running late, and then we walked across the street, where the woman Tanner had spoken to on the phone was waiting for us in the clerk’s office. She was a woman in her fifties, round as a beachball and with hair frizzed by too many trips to the beauty parlor. When she saw the MPs she gave a startled look.

  “Friends of the family,” I said.

  Lucy and I filled out the paperwork, each of us holding Kate while the other one signed the license. Then we followed the woman into an empty courtroom.

  “You all have a seat,” she said. “He’ll be along in just a minute.”

  “Who will?” Lucy asked, bouncing Kate.

  “Carl Hinkle, fellow who owns the shoe store around the corner,” she said.

  A little while later the door opened and in walked a slender man wearing a parka over his brown suit, and shiny new loafers.

  “Is this my happy couple?” His eyes found the MPs, then Kate, sitting in Lucy’s lap. “I see. I guess we better get a move on.”

  “Is this legal?” Lucy asked.

  He showed us his JP’s license, a slip of damp paper he produced from the folds of his wallet. Kate had begun to fuss, so we all waited while Lucy fed her, holding her inside her heavy coat.

  “Do you want me to say a few words?” Carl asked me quietly. One of the MPs had brought a deck of cards, and the two of them and Darryl Tanner were playing a round of hearts. “Perhaps,” he offered, “given your situation, you
’d like something quicker.”

  “Take your time,” I said.

  After the ceremony we signed some more papers and walked around the block to the shoe store, where Carl told Lucy and me to pick something out. Lucy selected a pair of black mary-janes, and little pink lace-ups for Kate. I tried on a pair of loafers, like Carl’s, but these seemed impractical given where I was headed, and I opted for a pair of steel-toed work boots instead. When we tried to pay, Carl refused.

  “Comes with the service,” he explained. “Footwear is a living, but it’s the weddings that are my real calling.”

  He kissed Lucy on the cheek, shook my hand and then my father’s. Outside by the jeep, Darryl Tanner officially transferred my custody to the MPs, and Hickock took out a pair of handcuffs from a compartment on his belt.

  “I’m real sorry about this, Joe.”

  “That’s okay. Could we do it in front?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t. I’ll make ’em real loose, though.” He clicked the bracelets closed and regarded my feet. “Those are good boots,” he said.

  The day was late. I looked toward the snowy sidewalk, where my father and Darryl were standing.

  “You make sure my family gets home all right, Darryl. And Dad, look after my girls now. I’m counting on you.”

  He nodded soberly. “You have my word, Joey.”

  I kissed Lucy, then Kate, leaning against them. We were all three crying a little. It was me who stopped first, though that was only because somebody had to. Then the MPs helped me into the back of the jeep and took me away.

  TWENTY

  Jordan

  B y two I’d seen neither Harry nor Hal (I’d spoken briefly with Frances as she made her way back and forth to the kitchen for sandwiches and sodas; no change, was the gist of what she said); the moose-canoers were still somewhere upstream floating our direction; Joe was still out with the lawyers at the old Zisko Dam; and I found myself with absolutely nothing to do but wait. I killed a couple of hours rebuilding the loose stair-risers to cabin three—whatever a three-stage, thirteen planetary gear system was, it drove a deckscrew like a champ—and when that was done, lubed and cleaned out a couple of the outboards, working down by the dock below Harry’s cabin. Once in a while I saw Hal step out with January, or Frances would appear to stretch and wave or head off to the kitchen or phone. Sometime after four, Lucy came down, bringing me a thermos of coffee and a bacon sandwich, and while I ate we sat together on the dock, just as we had done a thousand times before—spinning out the coming week’s details, the chores that needed to be done and who was coming in for how many days and which cabins needed to be tidied and stocked. When I’d finished my sandwich and thanked her, she rose, tucking the thermos under her elbow, and looked back at the cabin where Harry and his family were waiting out the afternoon.