Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

I was fretting about this when I heard a car outside, and then, below me, Paul Kagan’s heavy steps in the main room.

“Lucy?”

I went to the top of the stairs and called down. “Up here!”

He met me on the landing. Paul Kagan was probably close to retirement, but like many fixtures of small town life, he seemed ageless, a permanent fifty-five. He appeared a little flustered at the sight of me, not certain if he should kiss me hello or not, and we settled on an awkward hug.

“How’s the patient?” He was carrying an instrument bag, old leather so crinkled it looked chewed.

“His temperature’s 101. And he won’t eat a thing. The cough’s gotten a little better though.”

We entered the room together. Joe was sitting up against a pile of pillows, his face white as paper. I realized for the first time that he was afraid, though I didn’t know how much of this was caused by his illness, and how much by the prospect of being examined by a doctor.

“How we doing, Joe?” Paul said loudly. He sat on the bed and opened the bag at his feet, removing a thermometer, which he began to shake down.

Joe stifled a cough. “Been better.”

“Oh, you don’t look so bad to me. Don’t know what Lucy’s so worried about. Let’s see about that temperature.”

He nimbly popped the thermometer into Joe’s mouth, then took his wrist and counted off his pulse. Paul had unusually large, long-fingered hands, which I knew he kept soft with a bottle of moisturizer stationed on his desk.

“You’ve been taking your pills?”

“Hm-mm-hmm.”

“No need to talk, just nod.”

Joe nodded. Paul released his wrist and bent at the waist to take out his stethoscope and blood pressure kit from the bag. He placed the head of his stethoscope in the crook of Joe’s elbow and listened as he pumped the little bulb, his eyes turned up to the ceiling, away. The cuff gave a little hiss of gas as he released the pressure. He pulled the thermometer from Joe’s mouth and peeked at it quickly, frowning.

“All right, handsome, off with the shirt so we can hear those lungs.”

With slow fingers Joe undid his pajama top and leaned forward from the pillows for Paul to reach behind him.

“Deep breath now. That’s it.” Paul padded the stethoscope up and down his back. “So Lucy tells me you were staying with Hank Rogue.”

“For a bit.”

Paul paused to listen, then moved the stethoscope again. “Funny thing. I suppose you could call it a coincidence, but guess who came in yesterday afternoon with a nasty cut on his head?”

My whole body clenched with alarm. “God. Was he all right?”

Paul’s mouth dipped in a frown. “Light concussion. Took a few stitches, but no permanent damage.” He pulled the stethoscope from his ears and gave me a dark, knowing look. “Just between us, couldn’t have happened to a nastier son of a bitch. You do what I do, you learn a few things about people.”

I thought of Hank’s hand groping downward, his eyes gone soft where he stood in the door, and about his daughter, gone to Texas without a trace. Little girl. A cold shudder of revulsion snaked through me.

“Okay, all set here. You can button up, Joe.” Paul gave Joe’s leg a solid pat, rose from the bed, and tipped his head toward the door. “Lucy?”

We stepped into the low-ceilinged hallway, sealing Joe’s room behind us with a muffled snap.

“Well, I think you’re right,” Paul said quietly. “I’m hearing some fluid, mostly on the left side. The temperature has me worried. We really should get films.”

“Films?”

“I’m sorry.” He circled his hand over his chest. “An X ray, to see what’s going on in there.” He shrugged. “As for the rest, it’s hard to say. He’s got a touch of malnutrition. You see this in stroke patients. It’s hard to eat, so they just give up on it.”

“I really don’t think he’ll go.”

Paul nodded gravely. “I figured that. Okay, let’s run a course of antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. It’s a question of whether he improves in the next twenty-four hours. He could turn a corner, or this could all gather fast into a real emergency. Keep him warm, give him lots of fluids, and watch his temperature. Any signs of trouble, any, and I want you to get him down to Farmington.”

Downstairs, he wrote out a prescription for penicillin and gave me a bottle he kept in his bag to get Joe started.

“Like I said, mind that temperature. And try to get him to eat something. I know it won’t be easy, but do your best.” He cleared his throat. “His boy’s still away?”

I took the prescription from his hand and nodded.

“You’ll be all right out here by yourself?”

“Have to be, I guess.”

He frowned with concern, holding my eyes with his. “Well, you’ve got the number. Don’t be afraid to use it.”

I walked him to the door. I hadn’t been out of the house all day, and as I stepped onto the porch, a wave of shockingly warm, dense air washed over me, prickling my skin. While Joe and I had been locked away, the weather had turned like a clock with a too-tight spring, leaping straight into midsummer.

Paul trotted down the steps into the ricocheting sunlight and opened the door to his car. “One other thing, Lucy.”

I was looking at the prescription in my hand. How I’d get into town to fill it I hadn’t a guess, though I kept this worry to myself. There was barely anything left in the house to eat. I looked at him and tried to smile. “What’s that?”

“Next time, skip the whiskey bottle and hit that bastard with a hammer.”

He reached into the car to put his bag on the floor by the driver’s seat, then stopped abruptly, his attention directed out over the lake. He placed a flat hand over his eyes.

“I thought you said the camp was closed.”

“It is. The place was all shut up until yesterday.”

Paul pointed. “Then who’s that?”

Alarmed, I stepped quickly off the porch to investigate, cupping my brow as Paul had done. The lake’s face shimmered like pounded tin in the misty heat, a blinding brightness. Someone, a stranger, was standing on the dock, his hands in his pants pockets, facing away.

“What the hell…”

The stranger turned then, and I saw. Those blue searchlight eyes hit me where I stood. He turned, and as he turned, his face and form and all that he was opened to me, like the pages of a book, one I’d read years ago and had forgotten. Somebody had come, after all. Somebody was already here.

“Lucy?”

“It’s all right, Paul,” I said, calling back to him, for I had already begun making my way down the hill. “It’s all right. I know him.”

It was Harry Wainwright.

These goddamn lawyers: if I had ten cents for every one I’ve watched splashing around in the shallows, his fly rod snarling in the trees above, I wouldn’t have sold the camp, to Harry Wainwright or anyone else. I’d let the place rot under the pines and retire to Florida on my gangster Chris-Craft like the rich man I’d be, and if anybody asked me what I wanted on my headstone, when that day came, I’d tell them to write: “Here lies a man who earned it, every dime.”

None of them, not just Crybaby Pete (I couldn’t help it: the name had stuck in my mind like Velcro) was much of a fisherman; the Atlantics were everywhere, piling up below the aqueducts, but a sharp breeze had blown up just past noon, and even Bill, who seemed to know best what he was doing, was having trouble reaching them.

“Punch it!” I called out from the bank. I stood and mimed the motion. “Don’t let your backcast drop-shove that sucker out there.”

“Goddamn, this wind.” He pulled in his line and set to cast again. For a moment the breeze stilled, and he managed a solid cast, straight and clean. The instant his pattern hit the roiling water his rod bent like a twig and I heard the whiz of line running out.