Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

He roused himself and did his best to nibble at the crackers, his crooked mouth sputtering crumbs when the coughing took him, then gingerly sipped the tea. The room was clammy as a ship at sea; I’d have to look into lighting the furnace, too, or at least get a fire going. When he was done I took the tray and put it aside.

“Off to bed with you now.”

Upstairs, I stripped his bed and remade it with fresh linens, and waited outside his door while he undressed. I’d brought all his medicines upstairs, and when he was ready, I carried them in and helped him with the bottles: seven of them, each containing a different-colored pill the purpose of which I could only guess at. When he was done he lay back on the pillow, and I drew a heavy blanket over him.

“What happened to you, Lucy?”

I sat on the edge of the bed. All day I had been running on adrenaline, and just the feel of the mattress beneath me left me suddenly exhausted. I could have put my head down and instantly been asleep.

“It’s a long story.”

“Were you with Joey? It’s all right if you were. I know he comes back to see you.”

I nodded. “For a while, at Christmas. I told my parents I was visiting a girlfriend in Boston, but it was Joe. After that I was in Portland.”

“How did he look?”

For almost four years, we had never spoken of these things. I thought his question strange, but then I didn’t. The Joe he remembered was a boy, or nearly. By now his son was somebody else entirely.

“Stronger. A little sad. It’s hard for him up there. I think he wants to come home.”

“Your parents were worried, Lucy.”

I felt a familiar shiver of guilt move through me, the same one that had dogged me for months. “I know they were. I’m sorry about that. But there wasn’t any helping it.”

“What did you do in Portland?”

The rain was rattling the metal roof outside his window; I let my mind drift through the memories of my time away, listening to the sound the rain made.

“Nothing all that interesting, though I guess it felt like it at the time. I waitressed at a restaurant on Commercial. I swam a lot too. I had a little apartment.” I shrugged and made an effort to smile; already I sounded nostalgic. “It’s not important. Let’s just think about getting you well.”

As I’d spoken, a deeper stillness had enclosed him. His breathing was slow and even, and I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep. I rose and tightened the blanket around his chest. I was about to shut out the light when he spoke again, the words seeming to come from deep inside him.

“I didn’t know what I would do without you here, Lucy.”

I bent down, fingered his hair aside, and kissed him on the forehead, something I had never done before. The heat of his fever lingered on my lips and fingers, like a faint electric charge; it would be a long night, I knew.

“Well, I’m here now,” I said quietly, and shut out the light. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

I spent most of the night in a chair by his bed, finally moving down to the sofa just before dawn. A little after eight, I telephoned the doctor. Paul Kagan had been the town’s only physician as long as I could remember, the sort of cradle-to-grave practitioner you think exists only in movies: gruff, wise, and beloved, a man who on any given day might see a toddler with an earache or somebody in their eighties with enough problems to sink a battleship. He kept his office in the back of his small, shingled house by the post office, and as a child the thing I always liked best about it was the big tank of tropical fish in the waiting room.

I told him about what I’d seen at the Rogues’, the cough and fever, and my suspicion of pneumonia.

“If he’s as you say, you should take him down to Farmington.”

“I don’t think he’ll go.”

I heard Paul sigh. Given the general crustiness of his clientele, half of them holed up in trailers and shacks miles from anything you might call a respectable road, this was a conversation he probably had five times a day.

“Well, I’m seeing Sarah Rawling later this afternoon. She’s out your way, more or less. I guess I could come then. Woman’s got congestive heart failure, and she won’t go to the damn hospital either.”

“You’re an angel.”

He chuckled. “Hardly, but spread it around. Where you been keeping yourself, Lucy? Your mother said you’d gotten some great new job someplace. Sort of thought maybe we’d seen the last of you.”

“Just needed to get away for a bit, I guess.”

“Don’t we all. Course, I never will. You should come in and see the fish. I got some new ones just last month, real beauties.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Think three o’clock, maybe a little earlier. He gets any worse, though, no fooling-you get him down to Farmington, don’t wait for me. He’s not as tough as he thinks he is.”

I returned to Joe’s bedroom. He was resting quietly-the worst of the coughing had abated for the moment-and I decided not to rouse him. I was wearing the same jeans and blouse I’d put on a day ago in Portland, and would have liked a shower, but even this seemed like work. For a while I dozed in the chair. Sometime in the night the rain had blown through; a weak, unhurried sun, the sun of illness, pulsed in the drapes. For lunch I made the last of the cheese and crackers, though Joe ate just a few bites, and I finished what was left. How would I get into town for groceries? I wondered; what would become of us, stranded out here? And, a dark thought I couldn’t push away, much as I wished to: what would I do if he died?

I was in the kitchen, taking stock of the larder-not much, just a few cans of soup and some stale spaghetti I thought I might be able to do something with for dinner-when the phone rang. I hoped it might be Paul, but the voice on the other end was a woman’s.

“I know it’s probably too late, but do you think we could get a reservation for the last week in July?”

For a second I was lost. “I’m sorry. The camp’s closed.”

“Oh.” The woman seemed not to believe me. “Really? We were there last year, and my husband just loved it.”

“Like I said, we’re closed. You might want to try the Lakeland Inn.”

I gave her the number and hung up the phone. Not five minutes later it rang again. The voice this time was a man’s.

“Is this Crosby ’s?” Before I could answer he charged ahead. “I’ve been trying to get through for days. Listen, Joe said he’d hold the same week in August for us, party of four, name of Gaudio. I was wondering if we could move it up a week. We’re taking the boy off to college, and I didn’t realize he’d have to be down there before Labor Day.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gaudio. The camp’s closed. It doesn’t look like we’re going to be open this season.”

“Closed.” Like the first caller, he paused, taking this in. “Closed, like out of business?”

I didn’t really know the answer. The question seemed too large. “Why don’t I take your number?”

“And do what with it?” he huffed impatiently. “See here. We had an agreement, young lady. Are you people going to live up to it or not?”

“No,” I said, and hung up.

It went on like this. Over the next couple of hours I fielded three more phone calls, each replaying more or less the same conversation: a question about a reservation and my news that the camp was closed, followed by incredulity, various forms of bargaining (one man actually asked if we would be selling off any of the furniture), more apologies, expressions of anger and disappointment, and so on, until one of us hung up on the other. It was all perfectly understandable-who wants to hear that the rug’s been yanked from under their one week of reliable fun?-and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this before. Usually the camp opened two weeks after Memorial Day. What would happen when people who had booked the year before just started showing up?