Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

By July my plants were too big for the porch, and my father helped me dig a garden patch under the kitchen window. By this time we’d all gotten used to having Jordan around, though this wasn’t hard; he barely said anything more than “pass the butter,” though sometimes in the afternoon, if there was a gap in the schedule, he and my father went off together to fish, returning after dark smelling of trout and cigar smoke. This aroused in me a brand-new jealousy, a feeling of sibling rivalry that actually magnified my heart-twisting crush, and as the summer wore on, I did anything I could to interfere with these outings: inventing small but urgent errands I needed done in town, or else parading around from dawn till dusk in a bikini top and skimpy shorts with the hope that Jordan would notice-ridiculous, as I had nearly nothing to show, and Jordan was far too gentlemanly even to glance in my direction.

Forty-five days after germination, I extracted the seeds and replanted. With luck, by the time school resumed and we moved back into town, leaving Jordan to close the place down for the season, I would have a full set of data to present to the handsome, and no doubt flabbergasted, Mr. Weld: how many seeds were wrinkled and how many smooth, how many pods full and how many constricted, how many flowers purple and how many white, my findings all laid out on blue-lined graph paper with hand-drawn illustrations. My immersion was total; even my dreams were full of peas, weeding peas, collecting peas, eating peas. One night, I swear this is true, I even dreamed of a wedding where the guests threw not rice but peas.

Labor Day weeked arrived. My second crop was in, and I spent Sunday afternoon locked away in my bedroom, completing my report. My results for the most part conformed to Mendel’s ratios, but then I found a problem. Too many of my second generation had short stems, a recessive trait. The explanation was obvious-some of my peas had pollinated on their own behind my back. But I had devoted so much time to my experiment, an entire summer, that the thought of failure was impossible. Sitting at my desk, close to tears, I made a quick decision: I would fudge my data. I recalculated, rewrote my first page with the new numbers, and closed up my notebook.

Downstairs, I found my mother at the sink. She was paring red delicious apples, taking them from a bushel basket on the kitchen table. The skin curled away under her knife like a skater’s figure eight. I took one from the basket and polished it on my sleeve. For a few minutes I sat and watched her.

“So, how did it go?” she asked me finally.

I didn’t answer. I was looking at her ears, and remembering something I’d learned in class. Dominant and recessive traits: if both parents had a recessive feature, say, long fingers or a straight hairline, it meant the dominant gene wasn’t present, and their child would have to be the same. “Go look at your parents’ ears,” Mr. Weld had said, and drew our attention to a photo in the textbook: the side of a woman’s face, her earlobe a dangling peninsula of flesh below the ear’s point of attachment with the jawline. “If your earlobes are unattached, like this, it means you carry a dominant gene. One of your parents would have to have it too.”

“Always?” a kid asked. I turned in my chair and saw that it was Bobby Devry. Even in our school, where no one had very much money, there were kids who were known to be flat-out poor, and Bobby was one. He seemed to be sick most of the time, always with a runny nose at the very least, and bore the sallow complexion and bulging eyes of the chronically malnourished. His family lived out in a trailer in the woods east of town; the story I always heard was that his parents were first cousins.

“One hundred percent,” Mr. Weld said confidently. “It’s a law of nature.”

“Maybe you should look at your uncles’ ears, Bobby,” someone snickered, and got a good, nasty laugh at that.

That same afternoon my father picked me up from school, and in the cab of his truck, remembering what Mr. Weld had said, I looked at his earlobes: attached. One smooth line of skin from the curve of the ear to the jawline. Mine were unattached; I knew this without even looking, because over Christmas break, as a present, my mother had taken me down to the mall in Farmington and let me have them pierced. Sitting in the truck, I let my hand drift up to my right ear, felt the soft fold of skin and the little gold stud that had shot from the jeweler’s gun. So, one of my parents had to have ears like mine, but it wasn’t my father, so it had to be my mother. I noted this, thinking how nice it was that the two of us girls should be the same, and then I didn’t think about it at all, until, sitting in the kitchen on Labor Day weekend, I looked at my mother’s ears.

Hers were attached too.

“Kate, you’re staring.”

I didn’t say anything. I was gathering data. Her straight hairline (to my pesky widow’s peak), her freckle-free complexion (mine so dotted I sometimes rubbed my face with lemon juice), her brown eyes to my twinkling blue.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say. “How did what go?”

She put her knife down on the counter and rolled her eyes impatiently. “Your report? Your peas? I’m sorry, did I miss something, or isn’t this the most important thing in your life these days?”

I felt a stab of shame. Just five minutes ago, it had seemed so easy, so obvious. Just rewrite the numbers; no one would ever check. But that was wrong: somebody would check, somebody would figure it out. A law of nature. “All right, I guess.”

“Just all right?” Her face was incredulous. “You worked all summer on it.”

We looked at each other another moment, and then the guilt and confusion burst open inside me, and I erupted in tears. I was not a crier, and my mother looked at me with alarm.

“Kate, what is it?” She came to where I was sitting and knelt before me. “Tell me, sweetheart.”

“I’m adopted,” I said.

She smoothed my hair with her fingers. “Of course you’re not adopted. What’s gotten into you?” Her eyes darkened, searching my face. “Did someone say something to you?”

I tried to explain but couldn’t. Ears, peas, hairlines, my hopeless love for Jordan and the shame at having cheated: it was all gibberish, twisted up like tangled line and half drowned by tears. All summer I had been trying to prove something, something about myself, and all I had to show for it was the knowledge that I wasn’t who I thought I was at all. I was a liar, and adopted, the adopted liar of parents who were also liars, because they’d never told me.

My mother finally got me calmed down and led me upstairs. Though it was only five o’clock, I cried myself to sleep, and when I awoke the room was rinsed by moonlight. My mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a thin nightgown that moved in the same breeze that shifted the curtains of the open window.

“Mom?” I sat up on my elbows. “What time is it?”

“It’s late,” she said softly. Her gaze was pointed not at me but away, out where the moon lay its golden, tremulous path across the lake. “I’m going to tell you something, sweetheart. I’m going to tell you something, and you must promise that you will never tell your daddy that you know.”

“My daddy?”

She gave a pale smile-a smile, I understand now, of pure relief, joy even, at finally telling someone, and not just someone: telling me.

“Yes, sweetheart. Your daddy.”

Ten years have passed since that night on the lake when Harry, despite his best efforts, did not die. He was still conscious by the time we got to him, but just barely, and I hoped for his sake that he wouldn’t make it back to camp, since that was clearly what he wanted. Hal said he wanted to move his father to his boat, but Jordan insisted he remain where he was: he was the guide, and he would bring Harry back in, as promised, though he said he didn’t want to drop the outboard and agreed to take a towline instead. We must have made a strange sight: Hal pulling Jordan, my parents running to starboard, me to port, our four separate boats in close-order formation like a flock of birds gliding home through the dark. Darryl Tanner was waiting on the dock, and once we got Harry into the packed Suburban along with Frances and the sleeping January, Darryl led them away to the hospital under the same whirling red lights that had carried my father home. Harry never woke up completely, or said a word to anyone that I knew of, and I was glad for that. The final leg of his journey must have seemed strange and sorrowful to him-this last, pressing departure from the place he loved-and by the time he got to the hospital, or so I’m told, he had lapsed into the deathlike sleep from which he never awakened.