PAIGE DIDN’T WANT me hovering while she swam her laps at the college pool that afternoon, and so I considered stopping by my father’s office and saying hello, but I didn’t want to disturb him if he had student conferences. And so I watched her bring her fingers to her toes at the edge of the water, compacting that small, athletic frame of hers, and then explode like a torpedo, elongating, flying, and finally plunging into the water and leaving a wake of bubbles and froth behind her. She was alone in the pool and I was alone on the tile. Her splash echoed inside the massive natatorium. I waved at her, aware that she wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t have stopped to wave back if she had, and wandered to the snack bar, where I thought I would have a cup of coffee and read the student newspaper. When I got there, instead I thought mostly about Rikert. Gavin. Even in my head I wasn’t sure what I should call him.
When we had left the bakery in Burlington, it was still sprinkling, but only slightly. Rikert had walked me to the car, which—just like the sweater—he had recognized instantly as my mother’s SUV. He had apologized again for making fun of the cardigan and then asked me if I had any plans that Saturday night. There was a comedy club in Montreal that actually had a magician that evening, and it might be fun to go see him. Montreal was a long drive from Bartlett—three hours—and so I wasn’t entirely sure what he had in mind. Did he expect we’d spend the night there? And so I had agreed that I’d think about it, figuring if I said yes I could decide then on the ground rules: whether he had to drive me home or whether we could stay in Montreal. I’d also have to decide what, if anything, I told my father, and that might be the deal breaker for me right there. I wasn’t sure I was prepared to fess up. I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Just before I had climbed into the car, while we were standing on the sidewalk, he took my hands in his and gave me a very chaste kiss on the cheek. “A kiss in the rain is one of the few romantic fantasies that lives up to the hype—at least for me,” he said softly. Now, in the snack bar at the college, I found myself running two fingers over the spot on my face where his lips had been.
Driving home from the college, I recalled the woman in the khaki-colored raincoat with hair so reminiscent of my mother’s, and thought of all the women I had seen that month who had inadvertently toyed with me. Given me brief, explosive bursts of possibility—That’s her! There she is! She’s alive!—and then left me only with longing and a dreamlike confusion. How many more times in my life would I glimpse women on buses, in the general store, or along the pathways of my father’s campus who would tease me like that, and then leave my hopes scotched? If I lived to be fifty, sixty, or seventy years old, would I still see her, forever unchanged, racing through airport concourses or along the corridors of skyscrapers as the elevator doors slid shut and separated us once again?
“And how was your day?” my father asked Paige over dinner.
Paige held the Mexican wrap from the Bartlett General Store in her hands and stared at it. “It was unbelievable,” she said, “but Kenny picked up Jennifer’s plate at lunchtime and licked some of her macaroni and cheese off it with his tongue. It was disgusting. So gross. And he was already on bubble three.” At the nearby middle school, where children from four different villages assembled, discipline was meted out via something called the Bubble System. When students misbehaved, they were placed on the bubble. When they reached bubble level four, they were sent to the principal, and a note would go home to their parents. They were guaranteed detention. Kenny Sheldon—Elliot and Vangie’s little boy—lived on the bubble. I actually liked the kid—everyone liked him, even Paige, though she would never admit it—but he was a hellion.
“Did he wind up in Donna’s office?” I asked, referring to the school principal.
“Not then, but only because Jennifer didn’t tell on him. But he had to go when we started talking about the Shakespeare play.” Every year, the sixth and seventh graders at the school performed a different Shakespeare play in the spring. It was dramatically abridged, but still impressive. They worked on it for months, and my father on occasion brought some of his college students to Bartlett to watch a performance. “You really haven’t seen Shakespeare until you’ve seen it performed by twelve-year-olds,” he once said.
“How come?” I asked. “What did he do this time?”
“He kept using a pointer as a sword. He said Shakespeare always needs swords.” She swallowed the last of her milk and made a face: “I think the milk is just about to go bad.”
“Oh, Shakespeare does not always need swords,” my father corrected Paige. He sniffed her glass and shrugged. “But sometimes swords help. As You Like It this year, correct?” He smiled at my sister, his hands in his lap. His shoulders were sagging. I wondered how long it would be until his smiles weren’t so beaten and sad.
“Uh-huh.”
“There is at least one lovely reference to a sword—‘I remember when I was in love I broke my sword upon a stone’—but, alas, there is no sword fighting. Kenny will have to soldier on without brandishing whatever sword he has as a prop.” He turned his attention upon me: “And you, my dear?”
“Me?”
“What did you do today?”