Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

I closed my eyes, let the next contraction take me, felt my knees rising to meet my hands like the ends of a circle joining. She is coming, I thought, she is practically here. We would call her Josephine, our little baby Joe. There would be blood, a lot of blood. I’m sorry for the blood, Jordan. I bore down and time stopped.

“Oh, God, Kate. I can see her.”

I released my knees, felt the baby creep back up inside me. The pain was so vast it had become something else, a pain too large for one life, one person. It filled me like a kind of love. I’d barely caught a breath before the next contraction came.

Seconds passed, minutes, hours. I pushed and pushed and pushed. Like love, I thought, and that’s what I was thinking when I heard it: the sound of Jordan’s happy weeping, and the sharp music of a child’s first cry.

Many individuals offered their expertise in the research and writing of this book. My thanks to: Tom Barbash, James Sullivan, Paul Molyneaux, Annette O’Connor, Craig Pendelton, John Baky, Anthony Kurtz, Tisha Bridge, Andrea McGeary, Anne Marie Risavy, Margo Lipschultz, and Skip Graffam.

The battlefield events described in the prologue are loosely based on the experiences of my wife’s grandfather, Herbert William Mauritz (1916-2002), who served as a technical sergeant with Baker Company of the 612 thTank Destroyer Battalion and was wounded by sniper fire at the Battle of Normandy. His eulogy, written by my father-in-law, Gary Kurtzahn, was instrumental.

For financial support during the writing of this manuscript, I am indebted to the College of Arts and Sciences of La Salle University, the Pew Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

Special thanks, now and always, are owed to the two heroic women of my writing life: my agent, Ellen Levine, a tireless advocate and true friend; and my editor at The Dial Press, Susan Kamil, whose brilliance with the page is matched only by the warmth and generosity of her spirit.

This is a love story, and it’s a story about fathers and daughters. This is stuff you can’t make up, and I’m the luckiest man alive, because I didn’t have to. From the bottom of my heart, I thank my wife, Leslie, for all the nights of talk when we figured out this book together, and Iris, for teaching me what it means to be the father of a daughter. This book is theirs.

Born and raised in New England, Justin Cronin is the author of the novel-in-stories Mary and O’Neil, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize. Other awards for his fiction include a Whiting Writer’s Award, an NEA fellowship, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his family in Houston, Texas.