Susan Wiggs - That Summer Place - Island Time / Old Things / Private Paradise

The girl brightened suddenly. “Good, then you can take us back to the mainland.”

“Dana!” Catherine looked at him then, clearly mortified. “I’m sorry. She seems to have forgotten her manners.” She paused and took a deep breath, clearly exasperated. “Dana doesn’t like it here.”

“There’s nothing to do here.”

Michael was quiet. He looked away from Catherine and into Dana’s sharp eyes. “The engine’s not running right.”

Dana looked like she didn’t believe him. “What’s wrong with it?”

Catherine groaned and buried her face in a hand, shaking her head.

But he answered her daughter. “The plugs are bad and the points need to be replaced.” He stood up then. “I should leave.”

Catherine stood up after him and followed him to the door as if she wanted to say something but didn’t know what. He could feel Dana watching them intently and figured she would have been walking in between them if she thought she could have gotten away with it.

He took his jacket off the hook and put it on, then stepped out onto the porch, sat on the bench and pulled on his boots.

Catherine was leaning against the door jamb with her arms crossed, watching him. She had one of those wistful smiles he remembered, the kind she had just before he used to grab her and kiss the hell out of her.

“The rain’s stopped,” was all she said.

He stood and took two steps to stand near her. He looked down at her face. “I’ve got good timing.”

“I’m sorry about Dana.” She dropped her arms to her sides. “These teenage years aren’t easy.”

He nodded, thinking that she was a teenager the last time he’d seen her.

They stood there like that, not saying anything that mattered. It was as if they were both afraid to say what they were thinking.

He looked away. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Anytime.”

Neither of them spoke again for a long stretch of seconds. He felt like he was twenty again, standing on the same porch and wanting to touch her so badly he hurt with it. But knowing he couldn’t because her parents were right there on the other side of the door.

There were no parents this time; it was her children who were watching them, probably listening to them.

So he didn’t do what he wanted to. He turned and went down the steps and across the lawn. He heard the screen door slam shut.

“Michael?”

He turned around.

She was standing on the porch gripping the wooden railing in two hands and watching him. “I wrote you.

Several letters.” She waited, as if she wanted him to explain.

When he said nothing she added, “I never got any answer back from you.”

“I never got any letters, Catherine.” He turned then, and walked back into the woods.

Her father was shouting. They were in the boathouse, half-naked, their clothes askew, her hair tousled and her lips red and swollen. A foil Trojan wrapper was torn in two and carelessly thrown by their shoes.

Her father’s flashlight beam was shining on it.

Then the light went out. It was dark. So dark. He was in a VC prison camp, locked in a box with two other prisoners. He couldn’t move.

Something rattled the box. Opened it. Light pierced his eyes. His buddies rescued him. Suddenly they were half-dragging him through the jungle.

Go! Go….

Michael woke up fast and sat up in his bed in a cold sweat, panting like he’d been running from a sniper. Damn. He rubbed his face with his clammy hands. Those nightmares of Nam had stopped years ago.

Seeing Catherine tonight had brought it all back again—the scene with her father. Catherine and her mother disappearing from the island. Her father talking to his grandfather and to him.

He was not to call her. He couldn’t write to her. He was to disappear from Catherine’s life. Or he would go to jail for statutory rape.

Instead he’d gone into the Navy less than a week later and ended up in Special Forces, infiltrating into Laos or patrolling the Mekong Delta for weeks at a time. He’d been captured and spent three months in a dark box.

He drove his hand through his hair and took a few deep breaths, thinking for just a brief moment about a life he had left far behind him and never wanted to think of again, because it was like reliving hell.

He sat there for a minute, then threw back the damp sheet and pulled on his jeans. He shrugged into a jacket and shoes, grabbed a flashlight and left the cabin.

The moon had gone down and it was darker outside than his memory of the deepest jungle. There was silence, and a little rain, that misty kind that came on like soggy fog.

He walked down to the small dock where he moored his boat. He unsnapped the tarp and stepped inside, where he lifted the engine cover and shone the flashlight down into the engine compartment until he saw what he was looking for.

A few minutes later he was walking back down the dock and toward the cabin, the plugs and points jammed into his jeans pocket.

He went inside the cabin and headed straight to the refrigerator, took out a carton of juice and lifted it to his lips. He drank half of it, stuck it back inside without closing it, and took out a Mexican beer.

He grabbed something to eat from a cabinet and popped the cap off the beer as he crossed the room to sit down in front of the dwindling fire. He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, took a long drink and set the bottle down on the table next to him. The smooth flavor of the beer was on his tongue, but what he craved was egg-salad sandwiches.

There was nothing he could do about what he was feeling and wanting, so he did the only thing he could do—he ate a whole damn bag of barbecued potato chips.

At ten the next morning Catherine stood on Michael’s front porch, rocking on her feet, her hands clenched behind her back while she waited for him to answer her knock. She could hear his footsteps clumping toward the door, so she licked her lips, brushed her hair back, and took a deep breath before he opened it.

He stared at her from eyes that looked awake but tired.

“The toilet is plugged and the boiler pilot won’t light.”

He seemed startled, like he didn’t know why she was there. And he didn’t exactly look happy to see her.

“I tried to light the boiler pilot again and again and we used the plunger on the toilet. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get them to work.”

He didn’t say anything.

Perhaps she was speaking too fast. Her ex-husband used to chide her for babbling when she was nervous. And she was nervous. She tilted her head slightly and explained more slowly, “There’s no hot water in the house without the boiler.”

“I know what a boiler is, Catherine.”

What a grump.

He turned without another sarcastic word and took a tool belt off a hook near the door. Besides an annoyed look, he was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans that were worn almost white in spots and that time and wear had molded to his body. He might be a grump in the morning but he sure looked good for fifty.

What would he look like in a suit? Catherine was a sucker for a man in a suit. And if a man wore a tux, well, she got all weak-kneed. Heck, Bill Gates probably looked sexy in a tux.

Life was unfair. Here she had to hike up her bra straps and slather on alpha hydroxy creams with a trowel. Some days she had to lie down on the bed to zip up her pants. He was three years older, wearing a plain old pair of jeans, and he looked stronger and sexier than he had when he was twenty.

The faces of all the men who had aged so well flashed through her mind: Sean Connery, Nick Nolte, Robert Redford, James Garner, James Brolin, Michael Packard.

She watched him strap and buckle the tool belt low on his hips the way Paul Newman had strapped on his guns in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.