Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“What I’m saying to you, Joey, is you’re all I have. I know I haven’t been the best father. There are things I should have told you, things I should have done.” He looked at his chapped hands. “You were there in the station, you know, with us. Me and your mother. Just a baby.” He stopped; it was as if he had never said any of these words before, not even to himself. “It was snowing, like today, and it was as if I’d found something nobody else knew, a way to understand my life. And then your mother died, and I kept on anyway. I told her I would keep you safe. Those were the last words I said to her, and that’s what I’m saying to you now. If something happened to you, I couldn’t bear it, Joey.”

He rose and stood before me. My father: it was as if I hadn’t really looked at him in years. Beneath his flannel shirt and jeans, his body had grown thin; his face was gray and lined. White stubble covered his cheeks, except for a square of pinkish skin where his jaw had shattered, a bare patch the color of a burn, where hair could never grow. Of course I would do as he asked; I had been waiting for him to ask it, all along.

“You were there at the station, you see, in that room,” he said quietly. “That’s what I’m telling you. That’s why I want you to come with me now, Joey, before the storm.”

He had it all arranged; we would drive north, ahead of the weather, and reach the border in late afternoon, where a man named Marcel would be waiting to take me the rest of the way. My father had money for me, two thousand dollars in American cash, and another thousand Canadian. Upstairs in my room I stuffed my belongings into a duffel bag: warm clothing, a few pictures, my high school yearbook, some old letters Lucy had written me on a trip she had taken with her family to Yosemite that I didn’t want anyone finding, though they contained nothing shocking or even terribly personal. It seemed meager. Hanging from my shoulder, my bag weighed less than twenty pounds. How did you pack to become a fugitive? Atop my bureau was a framed black-and-white photo of my mother: a young woman with high cheekbones and hair the color of onyx, sitting at a great, gleaming piano, wearing a dark dress and smiling. It had been taken by a professional photographer, some kind of publicity shot, when she was a student at the conservatory. She couldn’t have been nineteen years old. A scoop of pearls gleamed across the white skin of her breastbone; she wore a huge corsage. Her eyes, bright and full of pleasure, seemed to shine with all the hopeful reflection of an entire life waiting to unfold. Though, of course, this was an illusion: she had no idea what lay ahead, how little time she had left. I hadn’t really looked at the photo in years, and in fact, my memories of my mother bore almost no resemblance to the girl in the picture. She seemed a different woman entirely. When I remembered her, it wasn’t even a picture I saw, but more a feeling my mind seemed to wrap around: the heat and sound and smell of her, like a pillow I had slept on for years; the close air of the bedroom where she was sick so long; her quiet, milky voice. But not even these. If I closed my eyes, as I did that snowy November morning, and asked myself to think about her, what I remembered most was a song she used to play: Debussy, the Children’s Corner, an airy thing with notes that floated like fireflies on a summer lawn, a thousand of them winking here and there, but never quite where you looked. I think she used to play it for me when I was small, and fussing; at least that’s what I remembered her telling me. She would place me on her lap and play, giving me a song to listen to but also her hands to watch: her long white fingers and the long white piano keys moving together like dancers in a dream, to make the music that would quiet me. Her piano, a Steinway baby grand that her parents had bought her for her eighteenth birthday, was still in the lodge, in a room we called the library, where we kept old books and magazines for guests to read. From time to time someone would open the keys and try to play it but would quickly discover how badly out of tune it was. The felts were all moth-eaten; one of the pedals was permanently jammed in the down position. Once in a while I’d thought about getting it fixed, with the idea that I might learn to play. But it had been silent so long, its music sealed away in its coffinlike bulk, that even to open the cabinet seemed impossible.

The truth was, my mother hadn’t lived long enough to ever become a person to me, real and distinct; like all small children, I had absorbed her presence as a force of nature, and the day she died this feeling had frozen in me, a piece of stopped time. Looking at her picture now, I realized it meant nothing; my mother was inside that piano, and inside me. For a moment I considered leaving the photo behind, but this seemed foolish, something I might regret later, so I removed it from the frame and tucked it between the pages of an English-French dictionary I still had from high school, thinking this might come in handy, too, and tucked that into my duffel bag as well.

Outside, my father was warming up the truck. The air was damp and still; the low gray sky seemed to bulge with snow, like a river about to overflow its banks. I heaved my bag into the bed and joined him in the cab.

He gently touched my sleeve. The gesture was so surprising I actually looked at it, his hand on my arm. The realization hit me like a fist: this winter he would be alone.

“Did you call her?”

The answer was I hadn’t. Lucy would be in the sawmill office at this hour; they would probably be sending everyone home early, due to the snow. How could I explain something I didn’t understand myself? I couldn’t have said why I was going, only that I was, and that this made me feel ashamed but also relieved, as if some unseen hand had lifted a burden I didn’t even know I was carrying. I wondered if this was how cowards felt, or men lost at sea who had given up their struggles and agreed to let the waves take them. In fact, these were the very words I used when, a week later, I wrote to Lucy to tell her what had happened, how instantly sorry I had felt about leaving.

“That’s all right,” he said when I failed to answer, and with this, one more burden was taken from me. He put the truck in gear. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t. They have phones up there. It’s not like you’re going to the moon.”

By the time we reached the border it was past three and snowing hard. Marcel was waiting at the roadside, parked in a rusted Jeep with Quebec plates and a huge rack of lights over the roll bar. He was a slender man, strong across the chest, with a neatly trimmed beard and half-glasses he removed to regard me; I thought of him at once as a kind of skinny Santa Claus. He and my father greeted one another with a grave handshake, which I understood was meant for me. My father had brought many men over, but I was his son, his flesh and blood.

I put my duffel bag in the Jeep. Then, in the falling snow, my father hugged me, hard. “Be good now, Joey.” Before I could answer he turned and walked to the truck without looking back, got in, and drove away. I watched him until the image was swallowed in the whirling white and silence. A feeling of cold loneliness doused me like water. I had no idea how or even if we would see each other again. The moment had passed so quickly I hadn’t even said good-bye.

I got into the Jeep’s cab. On the passenger seat lay the Montreal newspaper that Marcel had been reading, and the remains of his lunch, a bacon sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a thermos of coffee.

“You think he’ll get back okay?” I asked.

“It’s not him I’m worried about,” Marcel said, but when he saw my face he smiled encouragingly. “I’ve known your father since the war. We served together in Italy. Not many men could go through what he did. A little snow won’t slow him down any.”