The Summer Guest Read online

  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, Darr
yl 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.

  Bill didn’t die either, though by all rights he should have. My father was right: Bill didn’t have much time left. Apart from the hypothermia, the fall in the riverbed that had started it all had ruptured the middle meningeal artery—the cavity behind his right eye was slowly filling with blood—and at some point on his trip through the dam, either in the tube or when he and my father popped out into the rocky riverbed below, he suffered a compound fracture of the left tibia, a dislocated shoulder, a ruptured spleen, and a hammer blow to the face that knocked out all his front teeth. Pete and my father managed to pull him out of the river, just about the time that Mike and Carl, who had taken the wrong trail and emerged on the county road two miles from my father’s truck, flagged down the passing logger who put in the radio call that sent Darryl Tanner and the EMTs streaming pell-mell out of town. A helicopter airlifted Bill straight from the site to Farmington General, where he spent the night in the first of three surgeries, and in the morning he was wheeled into the same intensive care ward where, just a few yards away—adding one more symmetry to the day’s events—Harry Wainwright lay dying. My parents took a room at a motel across the highway from the hospital, my mother keeping watch at Harry’s bedside, my father shuttling back and forth between the two men, and when Harry died two days later, my father stayed on another week, until Bill was out of danger.

  For a few months, my father’s trip through the dam made him famous. A story in the Portland Press Herald went out on the wires the next morning, and the first call from the networks came by breakfast the following day. The caller introduced herself as a producer from the Today show—was I the daughter of the man everyone was calling the Hero of the Dam? I said I guessed I was, told her how to reach my father at the hospital, and stood with him the next morning in the parking lot as he held the little earpiece against the side of his head and awkwardly answered the questions I couldn’t hear. After that, CBS and ABC both jumped on the bandwagon; once Bill was out of the hospital, both he and my father were flown down to New York to do their morning shows, and by the end of the week they had posed for pictures in magazines from People to Sports Illustrated and inked deals for both a segment on 48 Hours and a television movie-of-the-week, with Richard Dean Anderson attached to star. The movie was never made, of course, much to my father’s relief; he was embarrassed by the whole thing and maintained every step of the way that he’d really done nothing. But well into the following summer and even for a time after that, the buzz in town was all about locations and shooting schedules and whether or not they’d be casting locals as extras, and to this day, rumors of Richard Dean Anderson sightings—like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and little green men from Mars—will occasionally make the rounds and set the whole thing going again.

  Was my father a hero? Absolutely. But in my book, it wasn’t his trip through the dam that made him so, no matter how the media played it. What he did was brave, and completely crazy, and if you didn’t know the man, it might surprise you plenty. But he’d done far braver things in his life—all his life—not the least of which was warming another man’s child against his skin while outside the snow poured down, and loving that child so fiercely she became his own. Your daddy. I’ve never thought differently, not for a second, and in a world darkened by secrets, where one true light is still enough to guide you home, that’s mine.

  Once the hubbub died down and my parents returned to Big Pine, I thought things would return to normal, and for a while they did. My father bought Frank DeMizio’s Chris-Craft, just as he’d planned, and in the spring my parents moved into a new two-story house down the road from their condo. They rented out their old place to Bill, who had quit his job in Worcester and was waiting for his divorce to come through; when Bill decided to stay on permanently, my father took him on as a partner. A year later, he got a call from Frank DeMizio, the naked gangster himself, fresh from eighteen months in the federal pen for tax evasion, and the three of them—a lawyer and two federal ex-cons—decided to go into business together, fixing up and selling vintage wooden powerboats, with Hal bankrolling them as a silent partner. Frank, just as my father had always assured me, really was a nice guy underneath all the rough stuff; he also turned out to be something of a genius at restoration. So, while Frank oversaw the shop on Big Pine, Bill and my father scoured the country, the two of them gone for weeks at a time hunting down forgotten classics moldering in barns and boatyards, from tiny lake runabouts to big oceangoing fifty-footers they shipped south on the back of a semi.

  I was in medical school by then—Dartmouth Hitchcock, after all—sleeping four hours a night or less, and my father would sometimes telephone me at odd hours, telling me about a boat he and Bill had found in someplace weird, a garage in Goose Bay or a cornfield in Kalamazoo. You should see this thing, Kats, he always said, his voice crackly with distance, and always some odd sound in the background, the airy whoosh of traffic on an interstate, or music coming from a roadhouse jukebox. Christ, Kats, it’s like finding the Mona Lisa at a garage sale, we couldn’t whip out the checkbook fast enough. Sitting in the kitchen of my tiny third-floor apartment with a pot of black coffee warming on the stove and Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy propped on the table in front of me, or lying in my dark bedroom with the phone pressed to my ear, I would listen to his voice and the sounds around it, trying to send my mind down the miles of wire to where he was. You studying hard? he always asked. You don’t mind me calling so late, do you, Kats? Not at all, I said, you know I don’t, and smiled, thinking how strange it was, and nice too, that in the end it was my father, not I, who had flown the nest. We’d talk awhile about the boat he’d found, and about school, and what my mother was up to and when I’d next be coming down to Florida; when the time came to end our call, he’d clear his throat and say, Well. Better go. I miss you, Kats. I know you do, Daddy, I always said, and told him I missed him, too, and after a moment of silence the two of us would hang up the phone together, never saying the word good-bye.

  In the summer of ’99, a month after I’d started my residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, my father flew with Bill to Salt Lake City to look at a boat he had seen advertised in WoodenBoat magazine, and at the last minute they decided to add a side trip to Lake Tahoe. They could have flown but decided to drive instead, eight hours across the dry mountains and sagebrush bowls of northern Nevada on Interstate 80. They were thirty miles east of the town of Elko when my father, in the passenger seat, asked Bill to stop the car.

  Here, you mean? Bill asked. What for?

  Just stop, please.

  Bill pulled to the side of the road, and without another word, my father got out. What Bill told me later was that he thought my father simply wanted to take a leak and was too polite to say so. He stepped away from the car, mounted the metal guardrail, and made his way down the sandy embankment. Except for the highway, there was nothing around for miles; it was noon, not a cloud in the sky, and probably over a hundred degrees. To the north, a line of mountains shifted in the wavy haze. Perplexed, Bill got out of the car and watched my father from the guardrail. About a hundred feet from the road, my father stopped in his tracks, put his hands on his hips, and tipped his face to the empty, sun-bleached sky. Bill said he seemed almost frozen, like a statue. My father stayed that way ten seconds: ten tiny seconds to leave his life. Kats, he thought, and two thousand miles away, I heard; I hear him still, in the smallest things, in the shifting wind and jostling leaves, and the sound snow makes when it falls. Kats, something is happening. Kats, you’re my one, remember that. Then he collaps
ed, probably already dead, onto the desert floor.

  I live here now, where I always did and always will, the lake and woods and mountains unchangeable, as much a part of me as my own fingerprints.

  I married Jordan, of course. The night after he and Harry returned from their last trip together on the lake, and everybody had gone off to the hospital, we were left alone, and that was all it took. We stayed up most of the night, talking in his cabin—talking and kissing—both of us too wired, too relieved, too happy to sleep, and when dawn came, that was where it found me. Two weeks later when I left for school, it was Jordan who drove me in the truck. It wasn’t easy, the months of shuttling back and forth, the weird looks I sometimes got from my friends over this man who was, in every way, completely unlike them. Yet we managed to stay together, through that year and then all through my time in med school. When I moved down to Boston to start my residency, Jordan shut up the camp and came with me; I confess it surprised me, how easily he took to city life, eating in restaurants and going to movies and riding the T to his job managing an Orvis store in Back Bay. For a while I even thought we might stay on after my residency, buy a condo in Brookline or a little house in Needham, shop for food and furniture and preschools when that day came, and generally merge ourselves into the flow of ordinary life. It was an attractive fantasy, the sort of thing a person could easily fall for, but in my heart I knew it was somebody else’s, and not where I really belonged. At the start of my third and final year, we returned to Maine and opened up the camp for a week, and were married on the dock; Paul Kagan gave me away, and after the ceremony he asked me if I’d be interested in taking over his practice. He’d been trying to retire for close to twenty years, but no one wanted the job; if I was willing, he could probably rig it so the state of Maine would pick up my loan payments. He’d sell it for a dollar, he said, and my solemn oath to feed the fish. I jumped at it.