Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

I was suddenly perplexed. “You’re American?”

“Half and half.” Marcel turned the key, and the Jeep’s engine sprang to life. “My mother was Quebecois. My wife’s Canadian too. She’s from Toronto originally. You’ll meet her tomorrow, this snow doesn’t get any worse.”

We stopped the night outside Quebec City, then drove north the next day up the St. Lawrence Seaway on a winding two-lane road that hugged the immense, barren coastline. The storm had passed; the day was clear and shockingly bright, though in the Jeep’s drafty cab, the cold possessed a scathing intensity that felt like the grip of permanent night. Vast, empty fields lined the road on the inland side: peat farms, Marcel explained. Freighters the size of whole city blocks plied the gray waters of the seaway, which was choked at the shoreline with huge sheets of broken ice. There were no proper towns on the route at all, but every thirty minutes or so we passed an isolated settlement of perhaps a half-dozen houses and a store or two, all staring grimly out to sea and looking so weather-beaten they seemed on the verge of collapse. A terrible emptiness opened inside me, deeper than hunger: with each passing mile, I felt myself moving farther away from everything I knew.

“Cheer up,” Marcel said, when I muttered something grim about the scenery. “It’s really not so bad, you know. You’ll get used to it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just, it all looks so… abandoned.”

Twilight fell a little after three; we arrived in LeMaitre in darkness. I felt as if we’d been traveling for weeks. A raw wind raked me as I stepped from the cab in front of Marcel’s house, my muscles stiff and heavy as iron from two days in the bouncy Jeep. The air was rich with the funk of fish. LeMaitre was a larger town than any I’d seen for hours, though still small by any measure: about five hundred people, nearly all of whom worked in one way or another for Marcel, who owned a fish-processing plant. As we crested the last rise into town I had seen it, a huge building blazing with light at the mouth of the Foché River.

“Home sweet home,” Marcel said. “Let’s get you inside.”

Marcel’s wife, Abby, was in the low-ceilinged kitchen, stirring the contents of a gigantic blackened pot. The room was like something from a fairy tale, a cottage in the woods that a lost little boy might stumble upon. A great stone hearth occupied one wall, and bundles of some kind of fragrant herb hung from the ceiling. Rich waves of heat issued from the fireplace, so intense after hours in the frigid Jeep that I could scarcely breathe.

“Abby, this is Joe Crosby’s boy.”

She stepped toward me; I offered her my hand, and she took it in both of hers. She was, like her husband, a woman of compact dimensions, with eyes the color of moss and dry gray hair that flowed away from her face as if lifted by an unseen wind. She was wearing an apron, and a long denim skirt; her nose, I saw, was rather small. All the words I might have spoken seemed to flit up and away from my mind like a flock of birds. I stood dumbly, fixed in place. Her hands felt warm as a muffler heated on the stove.

“I know your father, Joey,” she said gently.

And I began, at last-as if I’d been waiting all my life for this moment to come and take me in its grip-to weep.

I didn’t return to the camp for three years, after that night on the porch when Joe appeared. It wasn’t jealousy that kept me away. What happened to me when Lucy stepped from the darkness and into Joe’s arms-the arms she truly belonged in; anyone could have seen that-was the end of an illusion I had taken shelter in, precisely because it was an illusion: this idea of some current that flowed between the two of us, perfect in its way because it was never meant to be expressed. Lucy, the camp, my feelings of escape: none of it was my actual life. To learn this was bearable, but I also knew that if I returned, even for a day, the comfort of its memory would be taken from me too. I packed up early the next morning, offered some vague excuse to Joe Sr. about an emergency at home, and drove down the long drive. As I neared the main road, a car approached from the opposite direction: Ken and Leonie in a big fat Cadillac, returning from an errand in town-aspirin, I figured, or more booze. We slowed to pass one another, splashing through the potholes; Leonie waved gaily from the passenger seat, and I returned the wave, even gave my horn a little toot. A laugh escaped my lips, though it was a bitter sound. I thought of Lucy, speaking Joe’s name out of the gloom; and then the moment when the two of them had disappeared, leaving me alone. Well, I thought, you’re a little old to be so glum about a crush, Harry Wainwright. You got your wake-up call for sure. Live and learn, and get yourself home.

A year passed and then another, and the camp faded from my mind. I thought about Lucy from time to time, wondered what had become of her, but my curiosity was mild, for it had no purpose: I might have been wondering about any other friend who had disappeared into the world’s hurrying crowds. Each summer, and then in the week after New Year’s, I went with Hal someplace new, just the two of us: river rafting in the Grand Canyon, deep-sea fishing in the Sea of Cortez, on safari to the great game reserves of east Africa-his high school graduation present-where under the snowcapped shadow of Mount Kenya we watched elephants bathing in the Pangani River by the dewy light of an equatorial dawn. He had grown into a fine young man, strong and thoughtful, organized in his affairs, perhaps a little melancholy, though that was understandable: his mother was dying, his father seemed only to have just found him, like a book left carelessly on the patio, or a ring of keys he’d mislaid.

Hal left for Williams in the fall of ’71; by then Meredith was confined wholly to her bed. She had only the vaguest sensation in her hands and feet; the cysts had done their work. There was the surprising cruelty of pain, pain without nameable source, pain in places that otherwise could feel nothing at all. Even breathing was an effort. There was no place left for the disease to go.

When I remember that year, marked by Hal’s departure at one end and Meredith’s death at the other, I feel as if I am watching a movie, but a movie without sound. It was as if someone were turning a dial, and with each passing week the signals of ordinary life became less distinct, finally vanishing altogether and leaving the two of us alone. She might have spent her last months in the hospital, but she didn’t want this, and neither did I, though I don’t remember the two of us ever discussing it. What I do remember is the gathering quiet of the autumn months, then the brief burst of activity when Hal came home from Williamstown for Christmas-we opened our presents in the library, which we had turned into a bedroom for Meredith, all of us putting on the bravest possible show-and then, when he was gone again, sensing in his wake a deeper, final stillness, like a slowing of the blood. It was a cold winter but without snow, a kind of permanent, frozen autumn, as if the calendar had stopped when the wind had torn the last of the leaves away. I rarely set foot from the house; I left my affairs to others, my trusted lieutenants and their trusted lieutenants, an interlocking system of delegated duties I had created to prepare for this very day. Think of a children’s game in which sticks are piled high: the object is to build your tower well, to disperse its structural energies in such a manner that you may, at the crucial moment, snatch a single stick from the bottom and leave the whole thing standing. I had played such a game when I was small, and then later with Hal, when he was just a boy, the two of us sitting on the living room carpet or at the kitchen table. A clever trick, a bit of fun to pass the time, but like all such diversions, embedded within it one finds a meaning: do not build a life you cannot step out of.