Summer at Willow Lake

by Susan Wiggs

  “I already told you. Pamela and I are done.” He felt sick to his stomach. “I know what it is—you’re mad because we had to sneak around all summer.”

  “I’m not mad. You and I are from two completely different worlds, and we need to quit pretending that doesn’t matter.” She gave a harsh, humorless laugh. “Can you picture our families together? My people are Polish immigrants. Yours are Bellamys, for heaven’s sake.”

  “God, Mariska. Where is this stuff coming from?” A revelation hit him, and he slapped his forehead. “This is all rehearsed, as if you’re reciting it from a script you memorized. None of this is coming from you. Someone put you up to it.”

  “Do you see me talking? Do you hear my voice? I’m finally saying what should have been said long ago. The thing I’ve been lying about all summer is us. I managed to convince myself that I wanted to be with you even though, deep down, I knew it would never work out between us. I’m done now. I don’t want to pretend anymore.”

  He didn’t even know this girl. She was some stranger.

  She stood up, holding her purse in front of her like a shield. “I’m sorry for whatever pain this causes you, but I promise, it’s only temporary. Goodbye, Philip.”

  “Don’t go.” He couldn’t help himself. He got up and grabbed her arm, pulled her close. “I won’t let you go. Not now, not ever.”

  “Enough,” she said, making a cutting motion with her hand. “I’m breaking up with you, okay? It happens in every relationship except one. The one.”

  “This is the one,” he said, growing furious with desperation.

  “We both know better than that.” She regarded him with cold, empty eyes. Her expression was one he’d never seen before. “I don’t want this to turn ugly, Philip. I swear, I don’t. But if you don’t take your hands off me and let me go, I’ll call for help.”

  He heard the sound of cold steel in her voice. He backed off, dropping his hold on her. “I’ll come back for you.”

  “I won’t be here.” She turned sharply and walked away from him on the platform.

  He hurried after her, reaching out again. “Come on, Mariska. Don’t throw this away.”

  She stopped walking, jerked her arm out of reach as her eyes narrowed. “You know, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to be mean about this, but you’re getting on my nerves now. We’re done, period. I’m leaving now, and if you try to follow me, I’ll accuse you of harassment. If you try to contact me, I won’t take your calls or read your letters. Nothing, Philip. Swear to God.” Pivoting, she strode with a curious stiff dignity to the concrete exit stairs.

  He took a few steps toward her as though propelled by an invisible force. We’re done, period. Her words rang in his head and he stopped. He couldn’t call out to her because his throat was closing up with tears of shock and devastation. He felt himself going numb as she grew smaller and smaller, not hurrying but not looking back, descending the stairs and heading into the pedestrian tunnel that went under Main Street and disappearing without a trace.

  The scream of the train’s whistle split the air, making him jump. The engine approached with a hiss of steam and a grinding of brakes. With jerky, mechanical movements, Philip picked up his bag and waited for the train to stop. At the other end of the platform, Matthew Alger was kissing the Barnard girl. People picked up their bags and parcels, shuffled toward the edge of the platform. Philip hesitated, poised to flee. He had to go after Mariska, tell her she was making a mistake, convince her they belonged together.

  A chic couple emerged from the station lobby and joined the passengers outside.

  The Lightseys, Philip realized, with a dull thud of recognition. What completely lousy timing.

  Gwen Lightsey spotted him immediately. “Why, Philip,” she said, “there you are. Your mother told me you’d be on the train today.”

  “Hello, ma’am,” he said with a slight inclination of his head. Manners bubbling up like a thermal spring, he shook hands with Samuel Lightsey. “How are you, sir?”

  “Excellent, Philip.”

  The brakes of the train hissed, drowning out all conversation momentarily. Philip stood aside as Mrs. Lightsey boarded, followed by her husband with their bags.

  “Join us, dear,” Mrs. Lightsey called through a half-open window of the train. “I’ve saved you a seat. We’ll have a nice visit on the way back to the city, and we’ll be there in no time.”

  Mariska’s words echoed inside his head. It’s over. I have other plans for my life.

  The conductor’s whistle shrilled down the platform.

  “Philip, do sit down, son.” Mr. Lightsey frowned. “Did you forget something?”

  My people are Polish immigrants. Yours are Bellamys, for heaven’s sake.

  The whistle sounded again. He curled his fist around the safety railing. Forcing one foot in front of the other, he went to the banquette seat facing the Lightseys. He stowed his bag overhead and took his seat.

  Pamela’s parents were the last people he wanted to see. The truth was, he didn’t want to see anybody. Like a wounded wild animal, he wanted to curl up in the dark alone somewhere and try to heal.

  Instead, he found himself facing his parents’ best friends. Mr. and Mrs. Lightsey were earnest and kind, people who had every reason to believe they would become his in-laws one day soon.

  He was operating on autopilot, and doing a pretty good job of it, because they didn’t seem to notice anything different about him. Apparently, having your heart stomped on and all your hopes and dreams shattered into a million pieces did not necessarily have any physical symptoms.

  He heard a stranger talking about Yale, and his plan to work on the paper this year, and his hopes for the future. And then he realized that stranger was himself.

  Mrs. Lightsey—“Do call me Gwen,” she insisted—beamed at him, her trim, elegantly dressed figure swaying with the rhythm of the southbound train. Her jewelry was discreet and tasteful. A slender gold watch. A simple, brilliant diamond ring, a string of pearls, no more. Pamela had once told him that, given the Lightsey jewel fortune, her mother could drape herself in diamonds and gold. But of course, that would be vulgar. Just because you could didn’t mean you should.

  He leaned back and arranged his face into a pleasant expression as they spoke to him.

  “We couldn’t be happier with the way things are turning out,” she declared.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  “Pamela is going to be so excited to see you,” Mrs. Lightsey concluded.

  Philip smiled because he didn’t know what else to do. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, one final time.

  I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.

  I awoke—and found that life was duty.

  —Ellen Sturgis Hooper, American poet

  Twenty-Three

  “That was the last I saw of Mariska,” Olivia’s dad explained in a tired, distraught voice. “She walked away from me that day and I never saw her again, never spoke to her.”

  “Unbelievable,” Olivia said, trying to picture her father, young and desperate as the girl he loved left him. “If you loved her that much, why didn’t you try getting in touch with her? Why didn’t you just miss your train that day?”

  He rubbed his forehead as though it ached. “Shock, I suppose. And something about her…she convinced me that she was done. Of course, once I got back to school, I called her again and again. I wrote letters, sent a telegram, even took the train back to Avalon one weekend. Finally her mother said Mariska was gone, told me to quit trying to get in touch with her.”

  “So Mariska’s mother knew what was going on?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I suppose I’ll never even know if Mariska realized by then that she was pregnant, or if she was really done with me.” He shook his head. “I should never have believed the things she said to me that day. I should have believed the things she didn’t say. Her body language, her nervousness, the way she’d chewed off all her fingernails.”


  Olivia’s head was spinning. She knew he was only giving her the bare bones of the story, glossing over the details. But the fact was, he had been in love with Mariska Majesky.

  “So did you keep that engagement with Mother just to hedge your bets?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” He stared at the sky out the window of his apartment. “I’m not proud of the way I handled the situation, and being young was no excuse for being stupid.”

  “What did you tell Mother when you saw her again?”

  “I said we should end the engagement. That I didn’t think my heart was still in it.”

  “You didn’t think?” Olivia demanded, furious now. “You had the whole summer to think about it. By the time you discussed it with my mother, you should’ve known.”

  “I did know,” he admitted.

  She glanced at the photo on the table and winced. What hurt her the most was not that he had been with someone else while engaged to her mother. What hurt the most was how happy he had been with Mariska. Olivia had never, ever seen him that happy.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. There are already too many secrets.”

  “Fine,” she said. “If you want to know, it’s that when I look at this picture, I feel envious. I wish you could have been this happy with Mom.”

  “You’re reading too much into a snapshot,” he said. “Everybody looks that way when they’re young, with their whole life in front of them.” He put his hand over hers. “I tried—your mother and I both tried—for a long time to make it work.”

  She drew her hand away. Despite the warmth of the summer day, his fingers felt cold. “After you told Mother the engagement was off, did she…what? Force you to marry her anyway? I don’t get it, Dad. You’re leaving something out here.”

  He looked out the window again. “Your mother was not…amenable to ending the engagement. At her request, we went back to school and still acted like a couple. Just for a few days, she told me. But then things changed between us. They got better. I remembered why I started dating your mother in the first place, why I proposed to her. She was—still is—beautiful and intelligent and thoughtful.”

  “And she was conveniently available, don’t forget,” Olivia said.

  “I wasn’t much for being alone those days.”

  “It’s better than being with the wrong person.”

  “You’re smarter than I was.” He looked her in the eye. “Listen. I’m sorry those engagements didn’t work out. I’m sorry you got hurt. But I’m proud of you, proud that you knew enough to stop things. And that you have the courage to wait for something real, something deep enough to last a lifetime.”

  Despite her anger at him, Olivia felt a flash of understanding. The day she and Rand had broken up, her father had spoken with surprising insight: There’s a kind of love that has the power to save you, to get you through life. It’s like breathing. You have to do it or you’ll die. And when it’s over, your soul starts to bleed, Livvy. There’s no pain in the world like it, I swear.

  Now, finally, she knew exactly where that insight had come from. Her father had been there. These words were not just platitudes. He was speaking from personal experience. He had once loved like that. Only, the object of that love had been a stranger. Mariska Majesky.

  “I wanted to make your mother happy,” he said. “I wanted to deserve her. I wanted it more than anything. Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you make it happen through sheer force of will.”

  “God. Hadn’t you learned anything?” she asked in frustration. “Hadn’t Mother? You married in December 1977. Why the rush? You were both so young, you had law school ahead of you—” She broke off, seeing his gaze shift toward the ceiling. “You have to tell me, Dad. I know too much already.”

  He hesitated for a long, searching moment. He looked so old to her then. When had her handsome, vital, man-about-town father turned into a weary old man? Finally he took a deep breath. “This is your mother’s story, too.”

  “And it’s mine, damn it,” Olivia snapped. “I deserve to know.” She couldn’t imagine what he was protecting her mother from.

  “Your mother never thought you should know.”

  “Don’t make me call her,” Olivia said. “Don’t do that to her.”

  He paused, took a breath. “There was…a baby.”

  The words delivered a sucker punch to Olivia. “What?”

  “Your mother and I were trying for a reconciliation. We thought things would work out for us. She was, um, she was pregnant when we got married. No one knew why we moved up the wedding date. The baby would be ‘premature,’ as people said in those days, but we were happy about the news.” He pressed his fingertips together, staring at the empty space between his hands. “Then, a couple of weeks after the wedding, Pamela miscarried. It was a sad, hard time for us both.”

  Olivia could only imagine. The marriage had been an imperfect structure built on the shakiest of foundations—a guilty, heartsick young man, an ambitious woman determined to make the “right” match for the wrong reasons. They had probably pinned all their hopes on the baby they’d made, and when the baby ceased to exist, they were left trying to keep their crumbling marriage intact.

  “You know, Dad, I’m not big on karma and destiny, but I have to say, you might have interpreted the miscarriage as a sign.”

  “A sign of what? That we never should’ve married in the first place, or that we should work harder to love each other?” He let out a protracted sigh. “You wanted to know what happened, and I told you. I wish the marriage had turned out better, but I sure as hell don’t regret it, because it gave me you.”

  Despite her anger and frustration with her father, Olivia felt a twinge. She reminded herself why she was here. “And your thing with Mariska gave you Jenny Majesky.”

  His face looked gray with shock and regret.

  “What are you going to do about that?”

  “Well, first of all, I’m going to thank you for telling me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I tell you?”

  “You’re an only child. My sole heir. The fact that there might be a sibling changes that status.”

  She gave a brief laugh. She was feeling so many conflicting emotions—resentment, that both her parents had hidden so much from her. Envy, that her father had been happier with another woman. And yes, fear that the existence of another daughter was shaking her world. But not for the reasons her father thought. “Believe me, my inheritance is the last thing on my mind. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “There are a lot of things I have to do,” he said. “I need to check on some things, then come up to Avalon to meet her and verify the fact that I’m her biological father, figure out if she knows about me. Find out where Mariska is. What if Jenny was raised by a man she believes to be her father?”

  “From what I’ve found out, it seems she was raised by her grandparents.”

  “Maybe so, but she might believe someone else is her father. What would it do to that family, my just showing up to claim her? I want to do the right thing, but I don’t want to hurt any more people than I already have.”

  Olivia nodded. “Why do I feel like I need a drink?”

  He stood up and went to the bar. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”

  Twenty-Four

  “My dad’s going to be a pain in the ass about this,” Daisy muttered to Julian. The two of them had spent the morning raking load after load of pebbles onto the main path leading from the lodge to the dock. When the guests showed up for the celebration, they’d have a brand-new pathway to walk on. She wondered if anyone would appreciate that Julian had deposited at least a dozen wheelbarrows full of pebbles, while she had raked them in place. They had worked fast, wanting to finish before lunch.

  “Maybe he’ll surprise you,” Julian suggested, tossing his shovel and work glo
ves into the wheelbarrow. He took a long swig from his water bottle.

  His T-shirt was soaked with sweat and his cargo shorts slung low around his hips, the pockets loaded with Lord knew what sort of gear. Guy stuff. When guys got all grubby from hard work, they actually looked good. Not girls, though. She was damp and cranky. “God,” she said, “I’m already seventeen. I cannot wait until I can quit asking permission for every damn thing in the world.” She caught a glimpse of Julian’s face as he put the cap back on the water bottle. Oh, man. “I’m sorry, Julian.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Sorry about what?” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. He had beautiful eyes, olive colored, that looked wonderful in contrast to his creamy brown skin.

  “Complaining to you about my dad. Olivia told me what happened to your father and…God, I’m really sorry.”

  He nodded, his face unreadable. “Don’t worry about it. If my old man was still around, I’d be complaining about him, too.”

  She peeled off her work gloves and tossed them into the wheelbarrow. “You are too good to be true, do you know that?”

  He laughed. “I can honestly say no one has ever said that about me. Not even close.”

  “Then no one ever saw you the way I do,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans. She had an urge to touch him, maybe take his hand or something, but she didn’t. She and Julian were in a good place together—just friends without all the craziness of trying to hook up, and she didn’t want to mess with that. “So anyway, if you ever feel like talking about it—or anything—I’m a good listener.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “You are.”

  “Why do I hear surprise in your voice when you say that?”

  He laughed again. “Well, look at you.”