The Summer We Lost Her

by Tish Cohen

  * * *

  NOW, MATT STOOD in the doorway of his grandfather’s office and let the room soothe him. The big wooden desk. The creased leather chair Matt used to spin in until he couldn’t walk a straight line. The legal books and thrillers on the bookshelves. And the smell! Ancient books, lemony furniture polish, and the spicy sweetness of a half-century of cigar smoke. Jesus, it brought him back.

  And there, on the wall. Framed newspaper photos and articles about his grandfather’s legendary kindness.

  Nate’s love for the area was as widely known as his generosity. When cash-strapped local farmers or business owners were turned down by the bank, they knew to come to Nate for loans. He worked tirelessly on the Olympic bids. And, because of his love of dogs, he willed a quarter million to the North Country Animal Shelter to completely rebuild their facilities. Not that Matt hadn’t taken pause with that choice—what a difference it would have made to his life with Elise if they’d had that cash these past couple of years.

  If there was a king of Lake Placid, Nate had been it. By association, Matt grew up feeling respected, revered even. A cashier in the village had once joked to young Matt that the Sorensons were the First Family of the Adirondacks. Right away, he’d thought: yes. That’s how it feels.

  “Hey!” Gracie’s face was deep inside a bureau drawer in the living room. “Mouse poop.”

  “Don’t inhale that!”

  “I want to know if it smells the same as a llama’s.”

  Was it worth asking where on earth she’d ever smelled llama excrement? “You can get a disease called hantavirus from mouse feces.”

  She slammed the drawer shut.

  Matt moved to the wall of framed photos behind the desk to examine a black-and-white shot from the local paper. It was 1966 and Nate stood proud in suit and tie with an arm around the shoulders of one of his farmers. Matt’s father, George, still stringy as a young father, was at Nate’s side. Behind them, the grainy outline of a barn and the sweet spoon faces of the dairy cows. Matt had always loved these pictures. Loved imagining George and Nate walking around the barns, offering advice with gentle lowing in the background. It seemed a peaceful, satisfying existence. A good life.

  From the other room, a piercing, needle-in-the-eardrum scream. Then, “A dead dog!”

  Matt raced out of the office to find Gracie holding a big white sheet that she must have taken off a huge, lumpy, furred—and yes, dead—dog.

  Jesus Christ. It was Gunner, Nate’s ancient German shepherd. Nate had had the old boy stuffed? Matt and his family had all been there the week after Nate died, but they’d been too preoccupied to poke around the place much, so this was the first Matt knew of it. He stared a moment, then knelt down to inspect withered and leathery nostrils, Gunner’s once gleaming black head now grizzled, dry, and scurfy, oddly solid and cool to the touch.

  As far back as Matt could remember, his grandparents had bred Alsatians. His grandmother kept them in the big kitchen, in a caged area to the side of the enamel AGA, a cobalt blue beast of a range that helped heat the main floor during the cold months. With every litter of what looked like tiny black bear cubs, the family sold off all but one. Until Matt married Elise, who was allergic to dogs, he’d never been without a German shepherd in his life.

  Of all of them, Gunner had been a standout. He was so protective he’d slow Gracie’s descent on a slide by holding the back of her T-shirt in his teeth. He was known to trot into town Saturday mornings before anyone was up to wait for a cheese scone from Torte Reform, the bakery owned by the second wife of the town court judge. The dog’s one vice was his daily marking at the base of the front steps. Nate didn’t mind; he considered it a sign of devotion. This most glorious of animals now sat glassy-eyed and stilled for eternity, his aged body forced into a widened stance that looked vaguely painful, his head cocked so far to one side it appeared detachable.

  Matt tipped the dog sideways to read a label stitched into the animal’s belly: PETS IN PERPETUITY: NEVER SAY GOODBYE. Patented freeze-dry technology.

  “What’s wrong with him, Daddy?”

  “Well, he’s dead, for one.”

  Knowledge of Nate’s eccentricity wasn’t contained within the family—it had always been something of a local legend. The man issued loans only on a Saturday. He swam across the lake every morning it wasn’t frozen. Pulled on his fitted black swimsuit and bathing cap, dove off the dock, and settled into the clean, sharp rhythm of a front crawl so precise his strokes barely disturbed the water’s surface. In the years since the 9/11 terror attacks, he’d become a survivalist, digging out a root cellar beneath the back porch and having it wired for electricity. It was supposed to be a “safe haven,” and Nate had stocked it with seed, fertilizer, canned food, medicine, clothes, a shovel, and tools.

  “And freeze-dried, for another.”

  Still. There was something about the dog’s presence that brought his grandfather right there into the room. He could almost feel the deep timbre of Nate’s voice in the floorboards. See his shoe reaching into the fire to nudge a log farther into the embers. Smell the man’s tasteless stew.

  Gracie tapped the great horned toenails, then glanced up at her father quickly, eyes wide. “Are we going to go to jail?”

  “Reasonable question, Little Green. But stuffing your dog is as legal as it is gruesome.” Matt pulled the last sheet off his grandfather’s old leather chair by the front window and looked at it a moment. “However, your great-grandpa thought it was important to preserve him. So I think we have to live with it.”

  “Me too.” Gracie removed her tiara and climbed onto the chair to place it on the dog’s head, where it tipped over an ear, then kissed his lifeless snout.

  “Done.” Matt bundled the dusty sheets and headed through the kitchen. “We need to get you right up to bed. It’s nearly eleven thirty. Almost time to get up and make breakfast.”

  “I’m not even one bit tired.”

  Right. The downside of allowing his daughter to sleep the entire way up.

  The three-season porch was his favorite part of the house. His mother, Lynn, calling him in from the water to eat dinner at the long, battered table. Rainy days playing Monopoly with his father. Hot summer nights doing puzzles with his grandfather. Such promise life had back then. Consistency. Every autumn morning, you could count on a mirror-calm lake and a gauzy mist hanging over the mountains. The old birch tree that leaned out over the water’s edge, always threatening but never tipping over. Every night you waited for the surround-sound scritch-scratch of crickets.

  He took the linens through the screen door and onto the stone path to shake out the dust. A soft breeze ruffled his T-shirt.

  For the first time since before the play, Matt allowed himself to relax. He would let go of his anger at his wife, he decided. They’d been apart so much this year. No sense in making things ugly, not while they were all here together, reconnecting as a family.

  The sound of a fire crackling and snapping next door caught his attention. He watched as a woman in ripped jeans and a dark red tank top handed a stick to a boy—another kid up insanely late—in the firelight. She helped the child push a marshmallow onto the end, then held her own marshmallow over the flames. Her nose was short, her heart-shaped face had an ever-charmed, always-mischievous expression that said “Convince me.” He knew that face almost as well as his own.

  The woman looked up. “Matty Sorenson? No. Freaking. Way.”

  – CHAPTER 6 –

  After a few wrong turns, with the drizzle finally having stopped, Elise pulled off Seldom Seen Road and onto the long, heavily treed driveway just after 2:00 a.m. The day had been brutal—well over twelve hours of travel. After sorting out Indie and Poppins on the tarmac, she’d taken a cab to the house. While charging her phone, she took a twenty-second shower, pulled on the long, silky cobalt skirt Matt adored her in, and sprayed herself with his Hermès Eau d’Orange Verte, so she could smell him the whole way up. She filled the car with water bottles,
almonds, and fruit, as well as clothes she’d need for two weeks at the cabin, and hit the road to face rain on and off the entire way up.

  She pulled up next to Matt’s car and paused, fingers still curled around the keys. As excited as she was, she half dreaded going in. Matt hadn’t picked up when she’d called—back where she still had a cell signal that lasted more than a couple of minutes. She had no idea if her husband was too angry to speak to her, or if their respective positions on the drive up had simply meant either one phone or the other was in a dead zone.

  Also . . . was he really going to be thrilled about her news on the night she missed their daughter’s play? Part of her wanted to wait until morning to tell him about her score, because shooting for Rio meant a whole host of extra competitions over the next twelve months. Then again, given her erratic scores this season, it might be better to let him know the year hadn’t been for nothing after all.

  She looked up at the house—set so far back it was barely visible from the road. In the harsh glare of her high beams, it looked tragic. Spent. An upstairs shutter dangled like a false eyelash after a long night spent crying, tears still drip-dripping from the eaves.

  Everyone at the barn knew Elise’s code name for the cabin: Alcatraz. That ominous S shield looking down on her. From the moment she first saw the family crest, it had felt like a KEEP OUT sign on a clubhouse. This was the last place on earth she wanted their little family reunion to take place. The readjustment of being back together was tough enough without the disapproving omnipresence of Matt’s late grandfather.

  She turned off the car and a puffy silence filled the interior.

  The only thing more intimidating than the quiet was the dark. You couldn’t pick a place more terrifying. On a light-pollution map she’d found online while helping Gracie with a school project, there was a massive gap at the top of New York State, between Albany and Montreal. That black hole was the six-million-acre Adirondack Park, full of bears, wolves, coyotes, and cougars—not to mention an infinitesimal number of blackflies ready to burrow into your hairline and leave your neck swollen and bleeding and on fire with itch. And somewhere in the upper quadrant of that dark hole sat the Sorenson cabin.

  With all the costs of keeping the place after Nate died, and with all of Matt’s memories there, she’d always felt guilty that she never encouraged a visit. But how could she, with the way things had been?

  She’d never met Matt’s parents, obviously, but it was pretty clear the Sorensons were people who came into the world ready-made. Whatever they accomplished was secondary to who they were in the first place. Elise had come out of the womb fists clenched and ready to hustle—to Nate, she was a being from another planet. All he could see was that she was from less. To him, that meant she must be using Matt to climb higher in the horse world, grasping at Sorenson family money to make a name for herself in a sport she couldn’t otherwise afford.

  What bothered her most was how transparent her background had been.

  * * *

  THE SUMMER BETWEEN seventh and eighth grades, Elise had taken a part-time job that paid her under the counter: assistant custodian at the outdoor community pool. Her responsibilities—while the other teenagers flirted with each other in the shallow end or gossiped on lounge chairs, their tanned bodies slick with coconut-scented Hawaiian Tropic oil—included keeping the pool deck and women’s change room swept, and towel- and litter-free, as well as watering hedges scorched by chlorine, and, yes, scrubbing the restrooms. One evening at the end of her shift, as she made her way through the empty lobby, the open lid of the overflowing lost-and-found box caught her eye. The temptation was too strong to pass up; she dug through the jumble inside. It was staggering to see what wealthier kids lost and never bothered to look for. She’d pulled out a pale pink Polo shirt with green horse and rider embroidered on the left breast, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and stuffed it into her backpack. She’d never had a designer anything.

  The middle school Elise attended drew students from shabby clapboard houses with sagging sofas on the porches, intimidating mansions with flickering gas lanterns and circular driveways, and everything in between. But still, on the first day of school Elise wore that shirt like a new skin. In a Ralph Lauren top, she didn’t feel her family’s poverty defined her. The days she wore it were always the best of the week.

  A few months later, wearing the collar flipped up, hair in a ponytail, Elise strode through the cafeteria with her bagged lunch, looking for a safe place to eat, and felt Jillian Lucado, Franca Poole, and Carey Jubert staring at her. Her first thought was that the shirt belonged to one of them and they were about to call her out on her theft. It would be mortifying. Or maybe she’d worn it too often.

  But then Carey sang, “Hey, Bleeker. How bleak is your life?”

  You can put as many bandages as you like over the scab on your elbow, certain you’ve protected your wound. But all the while, your chipped molar is exposed, allowing everyone around to see you haven’t been to the dentist. Carey and Jillian and Franca saw right through her.

  * * *

  MOVEMENT ON THE roof caught Elise’s eye and she leaned closer to the windshield for a better look. There was a dark huddled mass, some kind of animal, atop the porch overhang. She waited a moment and the creature started to creep along the front of the house. A raccoon would make the most sense, but a raccoon would be grayish, with a striped tail. This animal was completely black, and she couldn’t make out any kind of tail.

  God almighty. Was it a small bear?

  She watched as the animal rose up on hind legs to inspect a wet window frame. How was she going to get into the house with a bear ready to pounce? It was too dark to see anything beyond the car’s headlights—there was no way she could get out. Chances were ridiculously high that a ferocious mama was out there in the blackness someplace, ready to rip apart anything or anyone who came between her and her offspring.

  “A mother’s protectiveness is genetically programmed,” Rosamunde used to say when she came home from the obstetrics office where she worked as a receptionist twice a week. “Nature does nothing without reason. Baby relies on mother for survival.”

  It had been their routine ever since she could remember. Elise would finish her homework at the kitchen table—Warren would be making lures in the garage or watching fishing videos on the old TV in the basement—and her mother would get her ready for bed and then cuddle her daughter so close she could almost reabsorb her. Together, they would lie in the crush of pillows and stare out the window at the night sky. “From the moment of conception”—Rosamunde would pause to kiss the top of Elise’s head—“mother and baby become a perfect little world. A tiny planet.”

  How Elise loved those nights. Rosamunde would fill her daughter in on the women who came into the doctor’s office, bellies swollen with promise. “Mrs. T. was in this morning with cramping. Turns out she’d been helping her sister move—five flights of stairs. Can you imagine? A bit of bed rest should set her straight. . . . That poor librarian had another miscarriage, but she’s determined to keep trying. . . . And would you believe Mrs. Stiletto Heels is pregnant again? I swear, that woman gets pregnant from the sound of her husband’s car in the driveway.”

  It was no surprise that Rosamunde chose to work for an obstetrician, given her past; her own mother had died giving birth to twin boys before Rosamunde turned two. Her brothers, Owen and Jones, lived. The three children were largely raised by their grandmother. Their father had no choice but to work two jobs to keep them all in winter coats and notebooks and peanut butter sandwiches.

  The tragedy created in Rosamunde an utter fascination with mothers and their infants—even before birth. College was easy for her to drop out of when Warren came along and promised her a house so big it would have an indoor waterfall, cars so fancy they’d have seats made of butter, and so many babies they’d be tripping over them. She swallowed his dreams whole—no questions asked about how he planned to get there when h
e spent more time in a rowboat, pulling lures off his hat and tying them on the end of a fishing line, than making sales calls to farmers.

  The trouble started when, in the years after Elise was born, no more babies materialized. Eventually, Dr. Nadal ran a few tests; Rosamunde had stopped ovulating. There wouldn’t be another child.

  Elise looked out into the dark again. Ridiculous to be trapped in a car after the long drive. Pretty soon, her bladder would demand relief. She leaned back in her seat and tried to distract herself by stretching her legs.

  It had been Nate who calculated the cost of training and competing at the international level, which was her ultimate goal in the early days. Up to seventy thousand a year. Nate believed if it weren’t for Matt, Elise wouldn’t be competing at all.

  Matt pointed out that there are people who own extraordinary horses who aren’t themselves talented enough to show them, so they pair up with a top rider like Elise. Without Sorenson money, Elise would have continued on that path. It was what she’d been doing all along.

  In Nate’s eyes, she’d trapped his treasured grandson, but he couldn’t have been more off base. It was Matt who’d pursued her.

  * * *

  IT WAS 2002, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave that had showed no sign of breaking. Elise was twenty-five, Matt was nearing thirty-eight. She’d been stuck in tall boots because Ronnie’s staff had left the show grounds early with the boot jack. Dark clouds had begun to gather at the sky’s edge, and the air hung heavy with rain that was desperate to fall. It didn’t help that Elise’s ancient Corolla had no air-conditioning and her legs had swelled on the long drive back to Jersey City, where she’d been renting a studio apartment in a particularly run-down part of town. But her passenger seat was scattered with first-place blue ribbons. She’d had her best show ever, competing at second level for the first time. She’d won every class on Ronnie’s excellent Dutch Warmblood, a silver-white gelding that would suffer a tendon tear in the back paddock six months later and be gifted with retirement.