Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

“Let it go,” Carl snapped. “For god’s sake, Bill, just shut up.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” Bill said to me.

I released his elbow and looked him over. Blink, blink, blink. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing an aspirin and a leak won’t cure.” He gave me a hollow smile, like somebody pretending to like an awful present; where this all was headed I hadn’t a guess. “You like lawyer jokes, Joe?”

I shrugged, playing along. “Sure, why not.”

“Here’s my favorite. Why’s divorce so expensive? Give up?”

I told him I did.

“Because it’s worth it!” He laughed and shook his head. “That fucking kills me. Wait here a sec, willya?”

He headed up the path, under the shadow of the dam. I checked my watch; it was a little after six. Suddenly, the only thing I wanted was just to be home, Harry or no. I would have called Lucy to tell her so, if I hadn’t left the radio in the truck, two miles away.

“What’s he doing?”

Carl had come up beside me, holding a hand over his brow. I craned my neck upward to follow his gaze. For a moment I didn’t see a thing, just the dam wall, rising imperiously against the sky. Then I found him: Bill, crossing the narrow catwalk, eighty feet above us. He removed his vest and dropped it on the ground beside him, then drew down his suspenders.

Carl said, “I think he’s… taking a piss.”

He was. At the edge of the catwalk, Bill bunched his waders to his knees, unzipped his fly, and released a stream onto the curved wall below, making a little heart-shaped stain on the stone. Mike and Pete were with me now too, the four of us with our faces angled upward, like stargazers following a comet’s path. When Bill was done, he shook it off, redid his pants, tipped his face to the sky with what I took to be a look of satisfaction. Then he stepped backward and disappeared from view.

I turned to Pete. “I think that was for you, buddy boy.”

“No, wait a second,” Pete said. His eyes were still fixed on the dam. “The catwalk is only, what, five feet wide?”

“About that.”

“So we should be able to see him. Where the hell did he go?”

I looked again. Pete was right: Bill was nowhere to be seen. I counted off five seconds, then ten. Still nothing.

Jesus Christ, I thought. Jesus, Jesus Christ.

And then I was running up the dam.

My nurse and her needles: all that day I waited for her. But it was noon, it was two, it was three o’clock, and still she did not come. I knew she wasn’t real, she was a trick the drugs had played; I knew this to be true, and still I longed for her, as one longs for sunshine after days and days of rain. Through the long hours Franny came and went, my dear friend Franny, and Hal, his strength almost pitiable, for it could accomplish nothing-everyone waiting, like me, for word to go.

Am I hungry? they inquire. Do I need help with the toilet? Is the blanket too warm, too tight? How’s the breathing, Harry, do you need the valve adjusted, the little valve right here?

I answer all their questions, complain plausibly of pain though I feel almost nothing, agree reasonably to this and that. The hours open and close. Then:

Harry?

Pure happiness fills me, traveling my body like a beam of light.

It’s you, I say. You’re here.

Seated, she leans forward at the waist; from a canvas bag at her feet she removes her yarn, her diamond-bright needles. She places the yarn in her wide lap: pure white yarn wound in a dense orb, like the insides of a baseball. A quick motion of the hands and she begins her work, pulling and tatting like a pianist at the keys, bringing forth a bolt of tightly woven fabric, white as snow, whiter even than that-a whiteness of absolute perfection. The sight is so beautiful I want to weep.

It’s a scarf, she says.

A scarf. The word seems too meager for what she has made.

Did I say that? She laughs, a gentle sound. I don’t know what it is.

I cannot see her face. Perhaps this is the drugs, or the way the light falls in the room: late afternoon light, cool and still as liquid. Perhaps my eyes are closed.

I feel my chest rise. How is Sam?

Sam?

You said you saw him. My tongue is heavy in my mouth. I wonder if I am speaking at all, or am somehow communicating these thoughts by mind alone. Before. In the hospital.

He’s fine, Harry. Everyone’s fine. Just waiting to see what you want to do.

I miss him.

Sam.

He’s a good boy. I wish he would cry more. Shouldn’t a baby cry more?

A salty wetness on my lips. Still I cannot open my eyes. I feel as if I am half inside a dream, a pleasant dream in which I am shutting all the windows of a house as the rain pours down outside. But the rain is snow, the snow is cloth, a long bolt of perfect white cloth, rolling onto the floor. A shroud, I think. A shroud to wrap my little boy in, who never cried much.

Do you believe you’ll see him, Harry?

I am nodding, full of belief. How could I have ever doubted this? Yes, yes I do. Lucy?

A pause. Her hand has found my own, resting on the sheet.

I’m going to die, Lucy.

I know, Harry.

I’m sorry.

Why are you sorry?

Because… I left you.

It’s all right, Harry. You didn’t know.

But I think I did. Isn’t that strange? I think I did know.

It’s not so strange. I’m glad it happened, Harry.

I’m glad too. I try to think of what else to say, but there is only this, this gladness. Then:

Do you remember, Lucy, that night on the porch? That strange night, when Joe came to find you. There was a woman who wanted to dance with me.

A woman?

Just some woman. She was nobody, really. And then I woke up and Joe was there, and you stepped from the bushes and hugged him. He must have had the wrong cabin.

That was quite a night, Harry.

I’m sorry I stayed away after that. It was childish.

But you came back, didn’t you. You came back, and everything was all right. Nothing would be here if you hadn’t come back.

A moment passes in silence, vaporous time swirling around us.

I planned to kill myself here, Lucy.

A pause. When was that, Harry?

With Meredith’s pills. Did you find them? I left them where I thought you would.

I think I did, Harry. A bottle of pills?

I tried once before, you know. With the car. After so much time, how wonderful finally to say these things. It is as if I have been carrying a heavy suitcase for years and years, only to discover I can simply put it down. It was the night before I found you on the dock.

When was this, Harry? You tried to crash your car?

I want to laugh. Crash the Jag! A thought so absurd, so impossible, I see at once how small, how meager my efforts.

Harry? Are you all right?

I’m sorry. It’s just… so funny. It was very odd, what happened. Almost an accident. I left it running in the garage. I sat for the longest time. The strangest thing. Lucy?

Again that pause. Is it Lucy next to me? But of course it is; it is my Lucy, come at last.

Yes, Harry?

I’m sorry, for Joe. It must have been hard for him, all these years. I wish I could have said that to him.

But now it’s she who’s laughing, a laugh that seems to come from everywhere and all around, and from the deepest caves of memory; my mother, still young, on a day we all went on a picnic and the dog got into the basket where she’d put the pie, a hound with a black nose whose name I no longer recall; Meredith, in the bar on the evening we met, laughing at something her friend had said to her, then lifting her eyes to find my own; a young girl tucking a strand of damp hair behind an ear as she tells me about the pancakes, and fresh raspberries from the farm up the road. All of these and more.