If she let her parents know that, she might be stuck at Camp Death all summer. Sitting on her balcony, using a towel to create a canopy over the screen of her laptop, she reminded herself again to think of the place as Camp Boreal so that she didn’t accidentally call it Camp Death in front of her parents or some weekend camper.
Camp Boreal was born the year after Ryan died. It was twenty-five years since his death. It’s time, her parents had said.
Just about, Lily had thought, then felt guilty for even internally criticizing anything her parents did. They had suffered the loss from which no one can really heal.
And it was her fault.
But I can’t think about it, definitely can’t dwell on it, or I’ll go crazy.
She’d been living with her own guilt since she was fifteen. Her parents had never blamed her. Not in words, at any rate. They’d blamed Colin Gardner. Lily had no idea if he blamed himself, not having seen him or spoken with him for twenty-five years.
She’d been in therapy most of her adult life and had come to certain conclusions.
One: Therapy could not absolve her of her own sense of guilt in Ryan’s death.
Two: She could feel compassion for her parents and work toward what she thought would make them happy without actually liking them.
Three: She was under no obligation whatsoever to subvert her experience of losing a brother, of having failed to prevent his death, to her parents’ way of dealing with their loss. In other words, she never had to visit Camp Boreal, never had to return to Swan Lake.
Except that now, twenty-five years after the death of their ten-year-old son, Patrick and Marie Moran had decided to scatter Ryan’s ashes on Swan Lake. And Helen’s going to come, they’d added. In the years since Ryan’s death, Helen, Lily’s perfect—to her parents’ mind—cousin had become the daughter the Morans wished they’d had.
Lily had never really figured out how to like Helen—or why her parents did.
It was at such times that she most wished Ryan had lived. She didn’t believe for a moment that if he had, her parents would have become sensible or anything less than thoroughly strange. But if he’d lived, she would’ve had someone to talk to about her dysfunctional family, someone who could understand as only another family member could.
As it was, her parents were united—not against her but rather in some fierce possessiveness and protectiveness and censure toward her.
Yet she had not lived with them since the summer when she was fifteen, and they had neither protested her choice nor opted to go where she was. What would she have done, Lily had sometimes wondered, if she’d been them?
Her mother’s hysteria had taught her, as no later wisdom would, what the loss of a child was to a parent. No later wisdom would teach her because she had chosen never to have children and never to have them in her life—other people’s children, for instance—for a whole scope of reasons she could not articulate. Maybe, her therapist had suggested, it was because Lily had witnessed the intensity with which a mother could love her child and had consciously decided never to risk loving—or losing—so much.
Lily had decided to drive to Minnesota. Her therapist had been stunned by this news, saying, Alone? That was, of course, the point. Part of the point. The main idea was to be able to escape—from Camp Boreal, from Swan Lake, from her parents.
She called the textbook’s contributors to let them know she’d be in Minnesota. They could leave messages on her cell phone. If there was no service at the lake, she could retrieve her messages from her parents’ phone, with a calling card. Her car was a used two-year-old BMW she’d gotten cheap from a dealership who couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Lily thought it was a silly car. She was herself a practical person, and she thought any car that required expensive or difficult-to-obtain parts was ridiculous. However, it was a two-seater, and she enjoyed that. No station wagons with three children in the back seat for her.
And it was reliable. Predictably so.
The drive took her two long days. As she headed east, particularly after crossing the Rockies, she found herself running the air-conditioning, closing the windows to fight off midwest humidity, running the windshield wipers full blast against downpours like she never saw in California. When Minnesota’s rolling hills of wheat appeared before her, she felt the first thread of disquiet. Her CD player was blaring Led Zeppelin. She’d never outgrown what Drake had called “music that wasn’t good the first time around.” But it was music Lily liked nearly as much as she loved differential equations. In some real sense, she understood it. “Black Dog” and “Stairway to Heaven” provided unchanging insulation against an unpredictable world.
And this world, the world into which she had returned, seemed increasingly impossible to predict.
She drove up between fields, into the trees, among lakes, into the north woods that were her parents’ home.
Twenty-five years since she’d been to Minnesota.
Twenty-five years ago, they were a half-dozen families enjoying the same Minnesota lake for the summer months. On music nights, Lily had played an out-of-tune upright piano; her mother had played a Celtic harp, her father—to Lily’s shame—the accordion, and Ryan had played the violin from the time he was five. For drama nights, they’d planned puppet shows, told ghost stories, memorized poems, made up skits or dances.
She’d loved those childhood summers till the summer she’d arrived to find that her childhood friend Colin Gardner, whose music-night instruments had been made from discarded coffee cans or fallen tree branches, whose most beautiful instrument was always his voice, had sprung broad shoulders and his voice had deepened. Suddenly, she was willing to do nearly anything to have his attention. Unfortunately, Lily had not been blond, beautiful and free of teenage awkwardness like Megan Wright or Samantha Cole. She had been—and still was—fair-skinned, red-haired and brown-eyed. Ballet lessons and a tiny “willowy” figure had not compensated for what she saw as an underdeveloped body and a total inability to tan.
But Colin had said, on one memorable evening, that she reminded him of a fairy princess. He’d said some other things, too, over the next thirty-six hours, right up until that July third afternoon.
Now it was twenty-five years since she and Colin Gardner and Ryan had crossed Swan Lake and tied up the canoe on the other side. Lily had accepted Colin’s suggestion that they “look inside” the ice-fishing house stuck back in the woods. He had given Ryan a kazoo to play, and she, Lily, had said Ryan could take off his lifejacket as long as he didn’t go near the water. She had said this because of her knowledge that at any moment the little fiend might lapse into a spontaneous Yoda impression: Grow your breasts won’t. Ugly are you, Lily.
It was the last time she’d seen her brother alive.
Her life had changed forever that day.
She had learned, the next morning, what the body of a person submerged in the lake for an afternoon and a night looked like. She had heard her own mother’s voice keening for her drowned child. It was a time of horror she would never forget or get over.
And it had been her fault.
How could her parents bear to live here?
It was just before 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday when she drove beneath the stockade sign reading CAMP BOREAL. It was recognizable, barely, as the driveway she and Ryan and her parents had used to get to her folks’ house on Swan Lake all those years ago. Stands of white and black spruce, paper birch, so many other trees she couldn’t name but recognized from her past. She didn’t know the first cabin she saw along the road nor the second. Her parents had sent her pictures over the years, but she hadn’t spent much time studying them. She’d been annoyed that her parents always seemed intent on reminding her of Swan Lake, which she would never forget.
Their house looked unfamiliar. When Lily had stayed there during the summers, it had been one story, with just three bedrooms. But her parents had added on. Now the first floor had sprawled out along the lakeshore and a second sat atop it. It was ju
st short of vulgar, but her parents would love telling anyone, interested or not, how they had salvaged every bit of material. A railing from a Second Empire Victorian in Minneapolis, a roof from a shed in Bemidji. The thought of listening to the litany made Lily tired. Both of her parents were from moneyed backgrounds—old money in her father’s case, new food industries money in her mother’s, all now duly inherited. Lily supposed that pathological thrift was her parents’ signature form of rebellion against their affluent roots.
She parked behind a truly ancient Toyota Land Cruiser in the carport beside the house. Heading around to the front porch, she caught her first glimpse of the lake. Some people were out in a canoe. A woman and child walked along a new dock to the south. There were several new docks.
Was it this obvious evidence of change that had finally inspired her parents to scatter the ashes of their only son, twenty-five years after his death?
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she felt ashamed—and guilty.
Who was she to say what was the right way for a couple to mourn the loss of a ten-year-old child?
My fault. My fault.
“Lily!”
Her mother ran down the porch steps, her blue-gray hair in two braids. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off; her earrings were beaded, her feet bare and calloused, with the nail of one big toe badly cracked.
Again, Lily felt ashamed of her own thoughts.
“Well, look at that sporty new car.” Marie Moran embraced her. “Fancy.”
Lily felt her molars grind and attempted to stop the grinding, which she knew would cause her gums to recede.
“I’m surprised you can afford that on a teacher’s salary,” her father said before he’d said hello. He’d appeared almost soundlessly, melting out of the side of the house. His hug seemed almost an afterthought, but he exclaimed, “It is wonderful to have you here.”
“The car was used and a bargain,” Lily felt compelled to say and wondered why she was justifying herself to them.
“Oh, I meant the upkeep,” he said.
“A fair point.” Lily attempted grace as her self-esteem plummeted. It’s not about me. It’s about them.
Her father wore the kind of knit sports shirt with a collar that often had an alligator on it. But his was some generic brand and came with a sailboat instead. His shorts were denim cutoffs, and he’d gathered his thick white hair in a short ponytail.
In her childhood, she had visited Swan Lake every summer, but the rest of the year she’d lived with her family in a conservative suburb where having wealthy vegetarian academic parents who dressed like hippies, a mother who was so tight she squeaked when she walked and who’d sooner slit her own throat than buy either of her children clothing anywhere but at a thrift store, not to mention a father who played the accordion, was—well—weird. Lily frequently told herself that at the age of forty she was over her childhood stuff.
So why did she feel an old sting of resentment that her mother and father had both criticized her car? She glanced at her watch, deciding to count the minutes until they took issue with her clothes, the silver clasp binding her long red hair, her computer, her luggage—and everything else she’d brought with her. Her parents had spent their lives together pursuing an existence they termed “real,” they had lost a child, and yet, as far as Lily was concerned, they were still completely immersed in a very external reality.
A reality made up of judging everyone who wasn’t like them—which was practically everybody.
I can’t stand these people. They make me insane.
“Can we help carry up your bags?”
“No, I’ll take them. And let’s not worry about them now.”
“But don’t you want to see your room?”
She wanted to climb back in her BMW and drive away. “Oh, whenever. There’s no hurry.”
“We’re dying to show you.”
This filled her with trepidation. It would be a lesson in economy, she was sure.
The inside of the house smelled as she always remembered her parents’ homes smelling, whether in Illinois or here at Swan Lake. A faint whiff of patchouli, fresh-baked bread, herbs, wholesome cleanliness.
The anger she felt toward them abated. They had been good parents, good people, and still were. Eccentric, yes. A bit thoughtless—definitely. Intentionally cruel to their offspring, no.
And how they’d loved Ryan.
Well, in truth, she, Lily, had always been her father’s favorite. But it was no secret that her mother preferred Ryan, smiling at him indulgently as he made fun of Lily’s nail polish, of her clothes, her body, her personality and any attempt she made to be attractive.
She still remembered the first time she’d told her therapist, He was really a little beast. Her therapist had not been shocked but had given her an empathetic smile that said it was okay to call the brother she’d let die an insufferable brat.
“Look at this couch,” said Marie. “Someone just left it by the roadside up near Lake Meredith.”
“I can’t believe it,” Lily answered, noticing that one of the lodgepole pine legs must have been missing. Someone, her parents undoubtedly, had replaced it with a smooth maple leg, which did seem to give the piece extra character.
Her eyes strayed around the room, looking for something that might contain Ryan’s ashes.
She saw no urn.
A large photo of her parents dancing in a group of people wearing kimonos sat on the woodstove—un-used at this time of year. The occasion, Lily remembered, was Obon, in Hawaii. Three years after Ryan’s death, they’d gone to the islands together, the three of them. Her parents collected grieving rituals from around the world—another way they dealt with Ryan’s death.
In the hall, her mother pointed out a mirror she’d found at the Salvation Army store in Bemidji. The frame was copper with a patina. Her father led them upstairs. The staircase banister looked like a salvage item, too, though it hadn’t been used as a railing in its previous life. It was a wooden mast from a sailboat.
“Ingenious!” she said approvingly. Charming her parents was sometimes the way to stop them from criticizing her. She could compliment their thrift and originality, and perhaps they would perceive her as thrifty and original.
Why does their approval still matter to me?
It did; that was certain.
The stairs led up to a large, open room. A piano—not the out-of-tune upright of her childhood but a different upright—stood against one wall, beside a large talking drum. She saw a violin case—Ryan’s, complete with a Darth Vader sticker. A file box containing sheet music sat beside her mother’s Celtic harp. Before the great window overlooking the lake was a makeshift stage.
“This is the music and drama room. We’ve made extra money hosting workshops.”
Since Ryan’s death, her parents had rented out cabins on the lakefront, much of which they now owned. No doubt they were still working to make the property pay even bigger dividends.
“Groups sign up,” her mother continued, “and run the whole thing themselves. It’s been very profitable.”
Imagine caring about that. Of course, they didn’t hoard their money. They gave something like twenty-five percent to Amnesty International and Sea Shepherd and the Dalai Lama and whoever else they thought deserved it.
Her room was off the music room. It, too, had a view of the lake, and French doors led onto the deck above the carport—or rather, it formed the roof of the carport. A patchwork quilt—a green and brown log cabin pattern—covered the bed. “This is beautiful. One of Grandma’s?” Marie’s mother lived in Canada with her brother; they’d gone there when his draft number came up in 1971.
Marie nodded. “She and Bobby were down this spring. She made that especially for you. It’s a surprise—for your birthday. Of course, you’re free to take it back to Santa Barbara.”
Which made Lily feel decidedly unfree to do so. What a tactful, emotionally intelligent person would have said was, Gra
ndma is really hoping you’ll take it home with you.
But her mother seemed constitutionally incapable of making that sort of statement.
“I love it,” Lily replied. “I’ll write her first thing. And maybe I’ll paint some of the trees. I brought my watercolors.”
“Did you?” exclaimed Marie. “I’m so glad. You know I’ve always hoped you’d do something with your art.”
In a moment, no doubt, she would begin holding forth on what Lily had done with her life instead of pursuing art.
What you really hope is that I’ll be someone altogether different, someone you like. “I don’t have that kind of passion for it,” Lily replied. And she’d always preferred modern art to landscape painting. “Not the kind required to make it a career.”
“I don’t understand where your fascination with math came from.”
“And philosophy,” her father chimed in. “But that’s easy, Marie. My father was, after all, an engineer by education, and his brother is a theologian, which isn’t the same as a philosopher but is related. I prefer philosophy myself to theology. And Lily’s musical because of me.”
“Or me,” Marie answered.
Lily barely heard. She was staring at a photo on the chest of drawers, her childhood chest of drawers, part of an old bedroom set that had been painted white with lilacs on it. The photo was an eight-by-ten in a wooden frame, clearly a thrift-shop find. The photo showed her and Ryan lying on their backs in a pile of newly raked fall leaves. Her hair had been and still was the burnished red of some of those leaves, while Ryan’s was quite dark, as her father’s had been when he was young.
“Thank you,” she said. It didn’t bother her to see this picture of her and Ryan together. It didn’t suffuse her with guilt. Instead, it seemed somehow just right, just the thing for her bedroom here at Swan Lake.
“Now, it’s music night this evening,” said her father, “and we do have a workshop going on here. They’re a women’s prayer group. But we’ll join them for music, and we’d love it if you would, too.”
25 Years Page 9
