Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Meredith took my hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

I wanted to tell her this was so, but couldn’t. It would not be all right. I looked at her hand in mine, then back out the window, where the darkness of a winter night hid everything from view.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Our car was waiting in the station lot, the windshield and fenders dusted with snow. Hal was still at a friend’s; we would have the house to ourselves. As we stepped into the front hall I felt a sudden rush of panic. The stairs, the narrow doorways, the bathrooms with their sleek tile floors: everything would have to be changed. Meredith would need a bedroom on the first floor; we would have to add on, or move. What a heavy task, to plan for these things, to sit at the kitchen table over cups of coffee and describe to a carpenter the ramps and handholds we would need to install before they actually became necessary.

The house was cold, even for me. I let Ritzy out into the yard, adjusted the thermostat, and got myself a whiskey; Meredith moved through the house, turning on lights and setting things to rights. I heard her dial the kitchen phone, then her voice, tired but somehow bright, speaking to the mother of the boy Hal had passed the day with: oh yes, absolutely, everything was fine, it was a nice day to be in the city, especially with the holidays over and all that craziness done for the year, and would it be all right, we were wondering, for Hal to spend the night? We so rarely got an evening to ourselves. One of us would come by in the morning, to pick him up for school. Wonderful, she said, loud enough for me to hear. We couldn’t thank her enough.

She came to me where I was sitting on the sofa, a glass of whiskey in my hand, though I had yet to take a sip.

“Do you want one?” I raised my glass. “I could make tea too.”

She shook her head: no. After all that had happened, after this long day of all long days, she still looked fresh: her gray suit still pressed, her makeup in order, her brown hair framing her face. Around her neck she wore the pearls I had given her for our fifth anniversary; somewhere between the front door and the kitchen she had removed her shoes.

“I always knew, Harry,” she said finally. “Not exactly, not the name for it, but the kind of thing it was. In a way I’m relieved to hear it.”

“How did you…?” But of course I knew how. It was her body; she’d felt it moving away.

“That’s not important. And I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” Her eyes were unyielding; she had decided something. “I’m tired, Harry. I need you to warm me up.”

“I set the thermostat. I can build a fire too.”

“Never mind that.” She extended a hand to me. Beneath the skin her bones were rods of ice. “What I mean is, you’re my husband, and I want you to come upstairs with me, now.”

She led me up the stairs, slowly, each step cautiously planted, as she had learned to do. In our room she turned on a bedside lamp, a blaze of light that neither of us wanted, and she quickly doused it again. The house had never felt so quiet. It seemed as if the whole world had forgotten about us, that the lights had dimmed everywhere, all across the planet. In New York and Chicago, Paris and Peking, in all the towns and villages of the world, humanity had lapsed into a sleep that did not include us, even in dreams. In the dark we undressed and got under the covers of our bed. For months, a year even, making love had been impossible; she was simply not able. We held each other a long while without speaking, both of us crying a little; I thought how we would have to be content with this from now on, holding and crying, but then she left my side. I felt myself sink into the warmth and softness of her, then the familiar pulsing that seemed to come from everywhere at once: from what she was doing and the air of the room and deeper still, through all the walls of the house, into the foundation, straight down through miles of rock to the center of the turning earth, and I closed my eyes and followed it. I understood what she was telling me; this was how we would make love from now on. She would love me with her body, however she could, until this could happen no more.

I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough, or well enough, because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all.

And yet to say I loved Lucy would be a lie, or at least a kind of self-flattering half-truth. Those weeks in summer: I took them like medicine, a balm against my life, and Meredith’s slow dying. All year long I didn’t think of the place at all; I saw to my business and took Meredith to the doctor and learned to dress and bathe her, and hired the nurses that would help me do these things; I learned, in due course, about the drugs she needed for pain and infection, and how to keep her skin healthy and dry, and about the pans and bags, when that time came. When she could no longer hold a book or magazine or even a newspaper, I read them aloud, or sat in our bed beside her, turning the pages as she asked. I did all these things, and then each July, I packed the car, leaving Meredith in the care of her nurse, and drove north, and the camp would be there waiting, as if I’d never left. Nothing was ever stated or planned; and yet Lucy would find me at the check-in desk, timing some minor chore to coincide with my arrival, or else leave a basket waiting for me in the cabin, always number nine, and tucked in with the sandwich and fruit and sweating bottle of beer still cold from the icebox, a sarcastic, flirty note: Back for more raspberry pancakes, huh? or Warning, this basket will self-destruct in ten seconds, so eat fast. Innocent enough, though they were nothing I could bring myself to throw away or allow myself to keep.

Hal accompanied me only a handful of times in those years; it was boring, he said, by which he meant quiet and always the same, and he missed being at home with his friends. He was an athletic kid who liked and did well at sports, rough games where boys collided into other boys: basketball for most of the year but also football in the fall and lacrosse when he was old enough. Standing in a cold stream or sitting stock-still in the bottom of a canoe for hours at a time, not even daring to speak so as not to scare the fish-these were as anathema to his nature as needlepoint. By the summer he was twelve he had had his fill, and it wasn’t for years and years, not until long after his mother had died, that he joined me again; for now I went alone.

“Tell me about Meredith.”

It was the summer of 1968, our fifth July, when Lucy asked me this. A year of tribulations: King was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, there were riots in the slums and in the prisons, that great liar Johnson had all but locked himself away, a mad king in his tower; on television every night we watched the prosecution of a war that seemed to test not one’s patriotism but the human appetite for gore. In March, Meredith had broken her hip in a fall in the bathroom; two surgeries, and it was still unclear if she would be able to walk again. The worst possible year. And yet here I was, drinking a beer on the dock after a day so idyllic I hadn’t wanted even to cast a flyline into it, lest even this small fingerprint of my presence disturb its perfection. I had spent the morning walking the long trail that ran beside the river, and then taken a canoe out for an aimless paddle around the lake. I hadn’t spoken a word since breakfast, not until Lucy had seen me on the dock and taken the Adirondack chair next to mine. That summer she had taken over the kitchen from Daphne Markham, who, it was said, had met a man through a Methodist missionary pen-pal service and gone off with him to Ecuador.