“Very funny, loser,” said Libby, stepping over the boots and fallen rackets.
“Poor Danny Boy, always last,” said Gwen, patting his cheek as she stepped from the closet. Tom gestured for Melissa to go ahead. She moved to the doorway and reached back for his hand. He took it. I’m sorry, he mouthed. The others had gone toward the bay window, out of sight. He pulled her back into the closet. Kissed her.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “I wish I did.” She made a fist around a lock of his hair, shook it gently, and rested her other hand on his side. Then she let go, went to join the game. They were already counting.
FIVE
ANOTHER SUMMER
From the porch, the Willoughby children can hear the water. The tide turned now, coming in, slapping and gulping at the drums of the float, a sloshing in its belly, and a soft kissing of the rocks down on the beach. The wind is slack now. Not like this morning, when the blue twilight, the birds’ usual hour, was overtaken by wind funneling the oak leaves white and flattening the long grass of the meadow. So loud it woke them, lying in their beds, the nursery facing east away from the water, and still too loud in the trees. Now the wind is slow, the flag hangs loose on its pole, a handkerchief about to be dropped. Out in the thoroughfare the jammers are floating in on a breeze. Five sails and a streamer off the bow mast.
“Cattle boats,” their father says. So full of tourists, they line the deck. Their motor is on too, maybe the sails are just for show, but that’s fine. It’s a good show.
The pine has overtaken the smell of seaweed as the tide covers the rocks’ slippery skirt. When the wind is gone, they hear the white-throated sparrow calling, Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody. All sleepy and melancholy in his minor key, summer is short, he sings, it is already fading, even as fireworks bloom and motors buzz and lobsters head to warmer waters. Honeysuckle snakes up the steps, making them think their mother is wearing perfume.
The thunder of the jammer loosing its anchor to the harbor floor comes across the water fast and jumbled.
“Must rattle the ice in the tourists’ cocktails,” says their father.
Then there are big motorboats, all tinted windows and gleaming plastic, white and black like office buildings or getaway cars.
“Fornicatoriums,” their father says. The children laugh, though they don’t know what he means. They watch him scratch his back on the porch posts, like a bear, a bear with a beer in his paw. To them he is as strong, as furry. They wonder when they will have summertime lunchtime beers. Their mother shoos it away.
“Will put me to sleep,” she says.
“Exactly,” their father says.
He lays low in the Adirondack chair, feet on the wide rail, a crumb-strewn plate at his heels. He pulls his hat down to his nose, holds his beer on his belly, listens to the jammer’s anchor tumble up, done with their lunch too.
The children saw a rabbit out by the pump house yesterday. They want to catch it, not catch it, but see it again, lure it to them, just to be close to it. Tom says they could stuff it, add it to the collection of heads in the great room. The other two look incredulous for a moment, then disregard him. He is pulling their leg, telling tales. He is no bunny killer. Libby decides she’ll take no chance, though. If necessary, she is ready to step between brother and bunny, take a slingshot’s rock to the chest, tell on him, on everything she has ever seen him do that could be considered suspect. Gwen sees her sister’s thought, sees her defiance spread across her face like so much fire on a dry California hillside she has seen only on the television. She pats her sister on the head, gives her a smirk, a he-can’t-fight-us-both face. The forest sizzles and pops its last, and Libby’s face is black trunks and blue sky, a frown and a hopeful furrow.
The thoroughfare changes color nine times while they stand in the trees behind the pump house, shushing each other. Their mother sits on the wide white railing and watches the water, having already removed the half-finished beer from her husband’s sleeping hand. She drinks the rest and watches—slate, violet, ashen, smoky, smudged, mossy, white, silver. The sun glares from the other side of storm clouds, and, for a moment, the town and the water go white. The wind picks up.
“Southwesterly,” she whispers. And the water in the cove goes black, the pebbles of the cove’s beach washed-out gray as the boathouse beside them.
She heads through the house, the dining room, the kitchen, pushes open the screen door from the top where it sticks, calls them. No response. Whistles sharply, once, a short burst so as to not wake her husband. With waving hair and knobbed, scuffed knees, they tromp high-kneed through the long grass, still humped and curved from a morning storm.
“It’s blowing up out there,” she says. “The rain’s coming.” They nod, Libby keeping an eye on her feet; a twisted ankle last summer makes her wary. Tom looks out to the water at the side of the house.
“Southwesterly,” he says. Gwen stays behind, walking arms out, like a mother duck, hustling her bairns along, stay together, head to the porch, say her wiggling fingers.
“We should wake your father.”
“The rain will wake him.” Gwen giggles, a streak of the devil in her always. The beer is still unfinished in their mother’s hand; she leaves it just inside the soapstone sink and doddles Libby off to wake their father.
He will hold her over his belly, saying, “You’ll do for an umbrella, a bit wiggly, but dry enough.”
She hates this. Feels his hands sink into her flesh too hard, holding her up above him; it hurts, but she laughs, and he doesn’t understand and she can’t say. He doesn’t know his strength or her weakness, her softness. He can’t balance her right.
The storm is almost upon them now. The water goes from slate to a deep viridian that makes the trees seem brighter, more yellow in them, and the sky goes dark and steely, gunmetal, twilight hours early. They pull the cushions off the wicker porch furniture, their father doles out pillow after pillow to tiny waiting arms. Their mother holds open the door, motions for her husband to move the chairs under cover, annoyed that he drags the old wicker chairs, doesn’t lift them the way she would.
The children tear around the rug room, cards out, the window seat lifted to reveal piles of board games. Tom, at the fire, carefully crumples newspaper, builds a teepee of kindling on top of it.
“Get me a log, Bibs.” He waves Libby toward the woodpile.