Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Why Joe thought cabin nine I’ll never know; part of me still thinks he simply turned the number upside down in his head. He’d called early that evening from a pay phone in Machias; he’d already crossed the border. A lot of people think Vietnam draft evaders never came home, but the truth is a lot did, and Joe was one. He’d either hitch a ride in the trunk of a friend’s car, as he had that night, or else work his passage on a coastal trawler and jump ship at Portland or Grand Manan and thumb the rest of the way. No one in town could see him, of course, and after that night on the porch when Harry caught us, we agreed it was far too risky for him to set foot anywhere near the place. We’d meet at a friend’s house, or else rendezvous at the motel in Twining, thirty miles away. Three or four days, though it always felt like less: we’d barely set foot from the room, eating take-out food from the diner up the street and playing cards in our underwear, like a pair of criminals.

Once we even spent a week together in Boston. It was December, close to Christmas, all the stores dressed with lights, though the weather was mild and most days it rained. That is how I remember that week, the constant rain, and the two of us eating in restaurants and going to movies, like regular people. We were staying in somebody’s apartment in Central Square: I was never exactly clear on the arrangement. It belonged to a friend of a friend who knew somebody, who knew somebody else-somehow it had made its way into our possession. I took a bus down from Augusta and met Joe at the depot. A single room in an old frame house webbed with fire escapes, with books in towering piles and a mattress on the dusty floor. The books pleased me: I thought we might pass some time reading to one another. But when I looked closer, I saw they were all in German.

The work had made him strong; he became a grown man in those years, my Joe. I could feel this strength in him just by holding his arm as we walked, the two of us close under an umbrella, or waiting for the T, or standing in line for tickets in the never-ending rain. More than the firmness of muscle and bone: the strength in him held a deeper hardness, geological, like cooled steel. His beard was full, with flecks of red. We sat on the bed in our coats and exchanged Christmas presents. I had knitted him a scarf, dark blue, with snowflakes; in his letters he always complained of the cold.

“When did you learn to knit?” He had barely paused to examine it, but wrapped it at once around his neck.

“Don’t look too closely, there are lots of mistakes.”

“I’m never taking it off.” He kissed me quickly and removed a small cardboard box from his rucksack. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to wrap it.”

It was a charm bracelet, braided silver strands strung with multi-colored chips of polished sea glass.

“Do you like it?”

I held it up to the window so the glass could catch the light. Little bits of refracted color fell on the floor at our feet. “It’s beautiful, Joe. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure. You’re a hard girl to shop for, Luce. There’s a woman in town who does these.”

I undid the tiny clasp and slipped it on my wrist. Had my face given me away? Just for a second, as he’d taken the box from his bag, I’d thought it was a ring. Though that was impossible: we’d agreed to do nothing until, somehow, Joe was able to come home-when the war ended, or else some kind of amnesty was declared. It was 1971; that fall, Joe’s father had testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of a group called WWII Veterans Against the War. I’d read about it in the Portland Press Herald. “Look at my face,” he’d said. “I know what it means to sacrifice for my country. Gentlemen, this war isn’t worth a hangnail.” An editorial in the local paper had described him as “our very own Benedict Arnold,” and “a known abettor to deserters, hippies, and other undesirables, whose own son is a wanted criminal.” But there were others in town who felt differently. Nobody believed that things could go on as they had much longer.

“It really is beautiful,” I said again. I shook my wrist to feel it move against my skin. “Thank you.”

We had the apartment for six nights. Joe had arranged passage back to New Brunswick on a commercial groundfisher out of Portland, the day before Christmas. I would see him off and take the bus back home, where I was working in the office at the sawmill and waiting tables at the Pine Tree at night. The deadline hung over our heads like a countdown. Everything we did, the meals we ate and walks we took and movies we saw, even making love, felt like items being ticked off a list. For me, the effect was always the same: the awkwardness of first reunion would yield within hours to a feeling of comfort that I knew was false, ripening over the days into a desperate, melancholy longing punctuated by moments of unfocused anger. Often we quarreled as the time of Joe’s departure neared, but the final moments were the same: I would always cry.

Our last night, we ate dinner at a hamburger restaurant near Harvard Square, a single large room, as harshly lit as a bus station, with an open grill behind the counter and sawdust on the floor. A rowing shell was suspended upside down from the rafters; the room was packed with students, stuffed into booths and wedged shoulder to shoulder at the counter. Joe ordered a T-bone, thick as a Bible; he was always hungry. I watched him eat, already missing him, but something else too: I felt like I was missing my life.

He finished his meal and lit a cigarette. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

I had barely touched my cheeseburger. I tried to smile. “It’s just the heat. And the onions.” Everybody in the room was wiping their eyes.

“My father used to come here in the thirties,” Joe said. “Everybody complained about the onions then too.”

We were seated in a booth at the rear of the restaurant; my back was to the wall. For a moment I let my gaze wander the bright, busy room. Didn’t college students go home for Christmas? But I had no idea, really, how such people lived their lives. At a large round table in the center of the room, six of them, five men and a woman, all in bulky sweaters and jeans, were engaged in a fierce conversation, the subject of which I could glean only from single phrases that punched through the din of voices in the room: “diminished capacity,” “elements of negligence,” something I heard as “actual and proximate cause and damage.” I realized they were talking in turns; one would stop, close up his notes, and then the discussion would resume as another began to speak. A pitcher of beer sat on the table; when it was the woman’s turn to lead, the man to her left offered to fill her glass, but she held her hand over it and shook her head: no. She took a sip of water instead. Then she opened her notes.

Joe glanced over his shoulder, following my look. “Somebody you know?”

“Very funny.” I shook my head. “Do you ever wish you’d, I don’t know, gone to Harvard?”

Joe laughed a cloud of smoke. “Me? I don’t think so.”

“College, then. Somewhere.”

“The subject never came up. Really, Luce. Be serious.”

“Your father did. Why not you?”

“A thousand reasons.” He was looking at me incredulously. “What’s gotten into you?”

At the center table, the woman was still speaking from her notes. Though she was sitting I could tell she was tall and athletically built; she played a sport, I guessed, or had, something interesting and maybe a little fancy, like fencing or squash. Perhaps before law school she had rowed for the college crew team, and liked to come here with her friends because of the shell that hung from the rafters and the happy memories it gave her. She had fine features and auburn hair pulled into a thick ponytail; as she read to the men at her table, one hand or the other would lift from time to time and move in small circles in the air, following her thoughts.