“You should go see for yourself. Down the path, four cabins, take a right. You can’t miss it.”
“I’m a little tied up here, honey.”
“I have a friend at school who has an expression for these things.” She raised a finger for emphasis. “She says, Kate, that’s the denial talking.”
I felt myself smile. “What a clever friend.”
“Well, her parents are both shrinks, so you have to consider the source. She’s also completely bulimic. She thinks nobody knows, but of course we all do.” Kate polished off the last of her orange and wiped her hands on her jeans. “God, I’m starving. Isn’t there anything to eat around this place?”
“We could feed an army. Boil yourself a lobster if you like.”
She shook her head. “Tourist food. I was thinking something more along the lines of a peanut butter and bacon sandwich.”
“You know where the kitchen is.” I paused, then said something I hadn’t planned on. “Kate, are you… involved with Jordan?”
I could tell I had embarrassed her. Her eyes traveled the room, then found me again. “Speaking of denial.” She gave a little laugh. “No, really, Mom, I think you should be more direct.”
“Sorry. It’s just a strange day. Mothers blurt things out like that. I saw you two on the dock last night.”
“I forgive you for spying. What did you think you saw?”
“Just… something. Boy-girl stuff. I really wasn’t spying. I was just taking some food to Harry’s cabin. You can tell me if you want. It’s okay if you are.”
“Too soon to tell.” A kind of happy light was in her face. “He is a good kisser, I will say that. The boy’s been saving up.”
Now I was the one who was embarrassed. “Maybe I shouldn’t be asking.”
“Too much information? Okay, something is. A little something. Will Daddy mind?”
“Only if you do.”
She wrinkled her brow. “It doesn’t seem a little… incestuous?”
“God, Kate, where do you get these ideas?”
“Just considering the angles.” She made quotation marks with her fingers in the air. “Jordan-the-son-he-never-had, that sort of thing.”
“No, I don’t think it seems that way.”
“Good. Because it doesn’t to me at all.” She unwound her lanky limbs from the sofa. “One last thing before I go stuff myself. Could we, like, not talk about this anymore? Girl to mother? At least for the time being?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Because I’m trying not to jinx it, if something is. Or count my chickens, if it isn’t. Because the truth is, I really sort of really, really like him, if you know what I mean.”
“Me too.” I smiled to tell her this was so. “Just, you know. Be careful? That’s what the moms say.”
She gave me a little two-fingered salute. “World’s careful-est girl, reporting, ma’am. Asking for permission to stop talking about her love life and go eat lunch.”
“Granted.”
She stepped to the door but paused before opening it. “I said one last thing, but there’s another.”
“Okay.”
She came around behind me and, leaning over my shoulder, kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Go see Harry, Mom. Okay? Just go see him.”
If I had my life to do over again, if it were possible to go back and reenter a moment of time and do it differently, and yet have nothing else change, all outcomes the same, I would have done one thing: I would have stayed at the party and danced with Harry Wainwright.
A single dance, nothing more: a dance to tell him I wanted to. I would dance with Harry Wainwright, the two of us laughing at everyone lurching around with too much champagne, our bodies close but not too close for talking. A dance to that first song, whatever it was-I heard it from cabin number six, where I was waiting for Joe-slow and sort of loopy, with a woman’s voice, Ella or Sarah, skimming over and around the music like a single bee in flight; the kind of song you can spin a little to or just kind of move your feet in the current. I would dance with him, say thank you when the music ended; I might yawn, putting my hand to my mouth, then say something like, well, it’s late. Thank you, Harry. I really have to go. And he would say, you’re right, me, too, though I think I might just hang around a few more minutes. It’s a nice night to be out. Right, right, of course, well, see you tomorrow, we’d say, each of us speaking over the other, and off I’d go, feeling his eyes still on me as I made my way up the dock to the lodge and then stepped into the shadows, thinking: well, look at you, Lucy-girl. You’ve danced with Harry Wainwright.
Why Joe thought cabin nine I’ll never know; part of me still thinks he simply turned the number upside down in his head. He’d called early that evening from a pay phone in Machias; he’d already crossed the border. A lot of people think Vietnam draft evaders never came home, but the truth is a lot did, and Joe was one. He’d either hitch a ride in the trunk of a friend’s car, as he had that night, or else work his passage on a coastal trawler and jump ship at Portland or Grand Manan and thumb the rest of the way. No one in town could see him, of course, and after that night on the porch when Harry caught us, we agreed it was far too risky for him to set foot anywhere near the place. We’d meet at a friend’s house, or else rendezvous at the motel in Twining, thirty miles away. Three or four days, though it always felt like less: we’d barely set foot from the room, eating take-out food from the diner up the street and playing cards in our underwear, like a pair of criminals.
Once we even spent a week together in Boston. It was December, close to Christmas, all the stores dressed with lights, though the weather was mild and most days it rained. That is how I remember that week, the constant rain, and the two of us eating in restaurants and going to movies, like regular people. We were staying in somebody’s apartment in Central Square: I was never exactly clear on the arrangement. It belonged to a friend of a friend who knew somebody, who knew somebody else-somehow it had made its way into our possession. I took a bus down from Augusta and met Joe at the depot. A single room in an old frame house webbed with fire escapes, with books in towering piles and a mattress on the dusty floor. The books pleased me: I thought we might pass some time reading to one another. But when I looked closer, I saw they were all in German.
The work had made him strong; he became a grown man in those years, my Joe. I could feel this strength in him just by holding his arm as we walked, the two of us close under an umbrella, or waiting for the T, or standing in line for tickets in the never-ending rain. More than the firmness of muscle and bone: the strength in him held a deeper hardness, geological, like cooled steel. His beard was full, with flecks of red. We sat on the bed in our coats and exchanged Christmas presents. I had knitted him a scarf, dark blue, with snowflakes; in his letters he always complained of the cold.
“When did you learn to knit?” He had barely paused to examine it, but wrapped it at once around his neck.
“Don’t look too closely, there are lots of mistakes.”
“I’m never taking it off.” He kissed me quickly and removed a small cardboard box from his rucksack. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to wrap it.”
It was a charm bracelet, braided silver strands strung with multi-colored chips of polished sea glass.
“Do you like it?”
I held it up to the window so the glass could catch the light. Little bits of refracted color fell on the floor at our feet. “It’s beautiful, Joe. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure. You’re a hard girl to shop for, Luce. There’s a woman in town who does these.”
I undid the tiny clasp and slipped it on my wrist. Had my face given me away? Just for a second, as he’d taken the box from his bag, I’d thought it was a ring. Though that was impossible: we’d agreed to do nothing until, somehow, Joe was able to come home-when the war ended, or else some kind of amnesty was declared. It was 1971; that fall, Joe’s father had testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of a group called WWII Veterans Against the War. I’d read about it in the Portland Press Herald. “Look at my face,” he’d said. “I know what it means to sacrifice for my country. Gentlemen, this war isn’t worth a hangnail.” An editorial in the local paper had described him as “our very own Benedict Arnold,” and “a known abettor to deserters, hippies, and other undesirables, whose own son is a wanted criminal.” But there were others in town who felt differently. Nobody believed that things could go on as they had much longer.