Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

The light was almost gone; full-on dark was maybe thirty minutes away, but the sun had dipped below the mountain ridge, etching the jagged line of its peaks into the deepening sky. The water around us was fantastically still.

“I’ve got some dinner packed here,” I told him. “You never know when we might have some risers. You should keep your strength up.”

Harry eyed the basket, then shook his head. “You know what I’d really like, Jordan?” A smile crept over his face. “A cigarette. I’m dying of lung cancer, and all I want is a cigarette. I haven’t smoked for thirty years, not since that surgeon general thing.”

“It couldn’t hurt now, I guess. I don’t have one, though.”

“It’s just as well. Franny would smell it,” he said. “Franny would smell it, and there’d be hell to pay.”

“I have some whiskey, if you want. I mixed it in with the coffee.”

I removed the thermos from the basket and poured the coffee into two aluminum mugs. I handed one to Harry and guided his finger through the handle. The coffee was bitter and old, but with the Scotch and the cream and sugar it was at least drinkable, and its warmth filled my chest. I wondered how long it would be before someone came to find us.

“It’s good,” Harry said. He took another sip, struggling to swallow. “But I don’t think I can drink. You go ahead, though.”

“I brought some nymphs and streamers along. It might be worthwhile, drifting something in the current.”

“Not just yet,” Harry said. “Something may rise.” He gave me a wink. “We may get lucky yet.”

“There’s always a chance.”

“I hope that’s true,” Harry said. “I believe it’s true. How many times have we fished together, Jordan?”

I sipped my coffee and tried to count. “A lot. Thirty or forty, anyway.”

“Was it your father who taught you?”

“My father died when I was small.”

“Of course,” Harry said. “Forgive me, Jordan. I knew that. He was a pilot, wasn’t he?”

I nodded. “I had a stepfather, though. I learned a lot from him. And from Joe.”

“There’s no one better,” Harry said. “You know, I don’t think I can fish, Jordan. I thought I might feel up to it, but I was wrong.” A deeper exhaustion suddenly came into his face; it was like nothing I had ever seen, or wanted to. He breathed deeply, holding each gulp of air in his chest as if to keep it there as long as he could; as if it weren’t just oxygen, but something marvelous-a beautiful memory of air. He closed his eyes and let his head rock forward. I thought he was going to sleep, but then he looked up, letting his eyes rove across the lake before lighting them on me again.

“ Jordan, I have something to ask you. Would you help me into the lake?”

“You want to fish from shore, you mean?”

We looked at one another, and then I understood.

“Dying hurts, Jordan, but that’s not the reason. Pain is nothing, really. I’m afraid I won’t die here. They’ll take me back, and I couldn’t stand that.”

I sat and thought awhile. I didn’t doubt that it was sincerely what he wanted, but in the end, I knew what I was going to say.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wainwright. I just can’t. I more or less told Hal I wouldn’t, too.”

Harry nodded, considering. “Well. You’re perfectly right. I hope you can forgive me for asking.”

“It’s not something to forgive,” I said. “I would if I could. It’s just not something I’m capable of. I’m truly sorry.” And I was, too. “Hal expects me to bring you back. Franny too.”

“I could climb out of the boat on my own,” he said. “It wouldn’t be easy, but I could manage it somehow.”

I nodded. “You could,” I said.

“What would you do then?”

I tossed the rest of my coffee over the side. “I’d have to say I’d probably go in after you, Mr. Wainwright. Then we’d both be wet and cold, and the fish would be spooked. No use wrecking our evening like that.”

He smiled then, and so did I, and I realized that the moment I had feared was now behind me. The lake had turned a deep black-blue, the same color as the sky, and all around and above us the stars were poking through the twilight, their pinpoints of light doubled in the lake’s still surface. Harry’s shivering had returned, but I didn’t think it was the falling temperature that was doing it. I poured myself another cup of coffee and sipped it slowly. Harry’s arms and neck grew loose, and for a while I watched him, his thin chest rising and falling under the blanket. When the coffee was gone I rose from the bench, negotiated my way across the boat, and wedged myself in behind him. Straddling his back, I crept my weight forward until he was leaning against me. It was cold, and I had begun to shiver too; I wished I’d thought to put on my sweater before I’d moved, but there was no way to get it now. I wrapped my arms around him. We are adrift in the heavens, I thought.

Sometime later, Harry awoke. “Franny?201D

“It’s Jordan,” I said. “I came behind you, to keep you warm.”

“Oh,” he said. “Not Franny?”

“No, sir,” I said. “She’s back on shore, waiting for you.”

“Lucy?”

“Her too. Everyone,” I said.

Once again, he slept. Night fell, and fell some more. It was time to head home, I knew. Harry’s head lay against my chest, a ghostly halo of white, and I thought, touching his hair, what dreams are these? What last sweet dreams of life on earth?

And then it happened; all around us, suddenly, a great swarm, as if the stars had freed themselves from gravity’s pull and ascended from the waters. A hatch. And everywhere, breaking the stillness, the sound of trout rising, the bright splash of their tails as they slapped the water to feed on the insects that spun on the surface. The rods lay on the benches before us, out of reach, forgotten. It didn’t matter. We floated among them. I closed my eyes and listened until the splashing faded, feeling only pure happiness that I had been there to witness it.

And then, sometime later, I saw the light, then heard the motor that churned behind it. It blinked around the point, tangled in the trees, rounded the corner again; it raked across us, making me blink against its brightness. Hal and Franny. The light split-a second boat, I realized, Joe and Lucy running beside them-and then peeled off again: Kate. They floated toward us in the darkness.

“ Jordan?” I felt Harry stir. “ Jordan, should we go to them?”

I watched the lights come on. “Whenever you’re ready, Harry.”

The thing is, I knew it, knew it all.

I was thirteen the summer I learned that Harry was my father. This was Jordan’s first summer at the camp, and though the timing was pure coincidence, these two events remain twined together in my mind: figuring out, bit by bit, then all at once, that I wasn’t who I thought I was, and at the same time feeling every cell in my body come alive at the slightest glance from this charmingly mopey man who called me “miss” for a month before he actually used my name.

Fartface Weld and eighth-grade bio, and the summer I will forever think of as the Summer of Peas: it was the first year we spent the winter in town, leaving the camp to Jordan, and returned to the camp in June, where I busied myself with the kind of project that could only interest a thirteen-year-old with a moody brew of sex and science on her mind. That spring we’d studied genetics in school, and at the end of the semester, Mr. Weld gave us instructions for reproducing-he said the word with a wink-Gregor Mendel’s famous experiment with garden peas. Phil Weld’s nickname was pure adolescent spite; a gifted teacher, he was the kind of troublesome adult who could make you actually want to do something you knew would be boring, and standing six foot two beneath a curly crown of salt-and-pepper hair, there wasn’t the slightest thing fart-facey about him. Whether it was the budding scientist lumbering to life inside me, or the persuasive power of Mr. Weld’s twinkling, sex-filled smile, I can’t say. But as soon as he handed me the sheet of instructions, still warm and smelling of ink from the ditto machine, along with four little packets of fast-growing seeds, the idea of spending my summer retracing the steps of a nineteenth-century Czechoslovakian monk seemed like just the ticket. The temperature still skimmed the freezing mark at night, so I planted my crop on a trestle table on the back porch with a plug-in heater for warmth: a dozen rows square of dwarf pea plants germinating in egg cartons that I fussed over like pets, waiting for the day when I could extract the seeds, replant the offspring, and see what I’d discovered.