Summer Light: A Novel

by Rice, Luanne

  May stared at him. “I think you’ve got it wrong,” she said, suddenly furious. “It’s connected now, not separate at all.”

  He banged through the screen door, and May watched him start running down to the lake and disappear around a bend. Her heart was pounding. She needed someone to talk to. She knew marriage was private, that a couple should solve their own problems, but suddenly she grabbed the phone and dialed Tobin’s number.

  “It’s me,” she said when Tobin answered.

  “How’s the honeymoon?”

  “Over before it began,” May said. “I’m so mad, I swear I feel like—”

  “Whoa, tell me what happened.”

  “Martin just ran out of here.” She took a huge breath.

  “What happened?”

  May told her about Kylie asking about Natalie and Martin’s reaction. “He told me he’d like to bury the past. He doesn’t want to talk about his daughter, and Kylie keeps dreaming about her.”

  “That sounds like Kylie,” Tobin said. “Her imagination has been piqued, and her dreams take shape.”

  “You know her so well,” May said, feeling grateful to Tobin, outraged at Martin. “I should have married you, goddamn it.”

  “We’ve known that all along. But, listen—Martin will know her soon. You’re going to hate to hear this, but give him time. That’s the best marriage advice I know. You have to get used to each other.”

  “He took off at a dead run, just to get away from me.”

  “So run in the opposite direction. Remember when John and I were first married? How much overtime I put in at the Barn?”

  “I thought you were saving for a down payment.”

  “That, too. But we needed space so we wouldn’t fight all the time.”

  “You were each other’s first real loves,” May said, wishing that was true for her and Martin. “Neither of you had ever been married before, you didn’t have kids with other people. You were right about the book being half written.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We both have so much baggage,” May told her. “Even though I wasn’t married to Gordon—”

  “You have the scars to show for it.”

  “It drives me crazy that he won’t talk to his father,” May said, thinking of real scars.

  “Because you wish you could talk to yours.”

  “And that he won’t tell me about Natalie.”

  “Give him time,” Tobin repeated, lowering her voice to sound old and wise.

  May laughed.

  “I’m glad you called me. I’ve been afraid you’re bonding too much with Genny Gardner. She’s nice, isn’t she?”

  “Very,” May said.

  “Is she becoming your best friend?”

  “I already have one of those,” May said.

  “Try to talk to him alone,” Tobin advised. “When running in the opposite direction fails, try coming together. One way or the other, I know he loves you and deep down wants to talk.”

  “How do you know?” May asked.

  “It’s John’s best-kept secret,” Tobin said. “But he wants me to know everything.”

  That night, Martin slept on the couch. By dawn, when he hadn’t come to bed, May felt hollow inside. She went about her day, trying to concentrate on the jobs in front of her. After Martin stayed up late again, watching TV and falling asleep, May knew they were in trouble. Calling Genny, she asked if Charlotte could watch Kylie so she could have some time alone with Martin.

  When she got back from taking Kylie to Genny’s, she found him sitting out in the backyard, hands gripping the arms of the old birchwood chair, staring at the lake. He didn’t look up at her approach, even though her shadow fell right across his face. May stared down at him, her heart pounding. She saw the veins pulsing in his temples. He was scowling, and she hadn’t even spoken yet.

  He had been running: He wore shorts and a T-shirt, and he was soaked with sweat. His arms and legs gleamed with it, and his hair was pushed back from his eyes. Ever since the fight, all Martin had done was run and row and pummel the punching bag hanging in the barn. She had heard him last night, pounding the bag as if he wanted to kill it. The sound had filled May with fear, and she had lain awake until he had stopped.

  “You’re leaving me,” he said. It wasn’t a question, and it brought May up short.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked.

  “I’m acting like an animal, I know it,” he said.

  “If you know it, then I don’t have to tell you,” she replied.

  “Leave me alone, eh?” he asked.

  She didn’t say a word, but she looked down at his face. Martin stared out over her head; his jaw and eyes had grown hard over the last two days. Crickets hummed in the tall grass behind the barn. The sky was purple over the lake and blue-gold above the mountains. Swallows dipped in and out of the shadows, catching bugs. Fish rose to the surface of the lake, snapping at low-cruising flies.

  May’s gaze fell on Martin’s hands. They were grasping the chair arms, each finger tense and digging in. The veins on his hands and wrists were blue, raised and surrounded by golden hair. His knuckles were bruised from punching the bag. Leaning forward, she kissed the purple knuckle of the index finger of Martin’s right hand. Then the middle finger, then the ring finger.

  “May,” he growled. “Stop.”

  She didn’t. She kissed the knuckle of the little finger of his right hand and then the thumb. Shifting around Martin’s sweaty knees, she started on his left hand. She sensed the tension draining out of his fingers, out of his arms.

  “Leave me alone,” he repeated.

  “I can’t,” May said, because now she had gotten to the ring finger of his left hand, to his wedding ring. Kissing his knuckle, she licked the gold band. She thought she heard him groan, and then she felt his right hand on the back of her head.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We have baggage,” she said. “That’s the whole problem.”

  “Baggage?”

  “Don’t you hate the word? It sounds like something you’d hear on a talk show. Like two big suitcases filled with the past. You have one and I have one.”

  “I’d like to kick mine off a cliff,” he said, staring across the lake.

  “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think that would work. It would find you. You can’t ditch it just because you want to.”

  “So what do I do?”

  Purple shadows had spread all the way up the mountains, into the sky. This far north the summer sky stayed light long into the night, clear and radiant with particles of gold dust. The evening star appeared in the luminous sky, and up the lake a loon screamed.

  “I want to help you,” May told him.

  “When it comes to this, to her, no one can,” Martin murmured into her neck.

  “Natalie,” May said, because Martin hadn’t said her name.

  May pushed back slightly, leaving just enough space between them so she could look clearly into his eyes. They were bruised and troubled, almost to the point of panic. But they weren’t angry anymore.

  “I’m sorry for how I’ve acted,” he said. “It’s been bad, and I know it. But I’ve never gotten this close to anyone before, at least not since she died. When I think about her, when her name comes up, I go crazy. When it’s during the season, I just take it out on the other team. On the ice, that’s easy.”

  “But it’s summer,” May said. “And there’s no ice.”

  “No, there’s not. And there’s you and Kylie.”

  “Yep.”

  “In summer, usually I do what I did today, yesterday, the day before. Work out till it’s time to sleep. I’m tired, May. Can we—” He sounded better, as if his old spirit was coming back, and May knew he was going to suggest going inside, eating dinner, heading upstairs.

  “Let’s stay out here,” she said.

  The sky was bright and dark at the same time, and May could feel Martin shaking. Dragging the other chair closer, she sa
t.

  “We were divorced, her mother and I,” Martin began. “Trisha lived—lives—in California, Santa Monica, and Natalie came up to spend the summer with me. Trisha was glad. She never gave me any trouble about having Nat. She liked the freedom, but it wasn’t only that. She knew Nat and I weren’t about to do without each other just because she had another thing going.”

  May listened, staring up into the endless sky.

  “It was seven years ago, July, hot and muggy. Natalie was six then. I’d screwed up my knee that season, really bad, and I’d had surgery in Detroit before coming up here. One day I was riding bikes with Natalie, stupid the doctor told me, and I don’t know—my knee just went out. So I was back in the hospital, the so-called one right down the lake in LaSalle.”

  “Natalie was with you?” May asked, knowing how scared the little girl must have been, remembering how upset Kylie had felt the time May had cut herself on a broken glass and had to get stitches at the Coastline Clinic.

  “Wouldn’t leave my side.” Martin grinned.

  “Loyal daughter.”

  “To the point of stubbornness. They took me to Toronto, to a better hospital and a top knee guy.”

  “At Twigg University?” May asked, picturing the familiar brick buildings.

  “Near there,” Martin said. “Hockey players are his specialty. Trisha wanted Nat to come right home, but we said forget it. I’d be laid up for a week at the most, and she’d be reading to me when I got bored just sitting still.”

  A fish jumped in the lake, and the rings spread out collecting starlight and the strange golden shine spreading down from the darkening sky. May listened to the splash recede and waited for Martin to go on.

  “My father lived in Toronto,” Martin continued. “Pretty near the hospital. We weren’t on great terms back then, but it was better than when I was a kid. Took me a long time to forgive him enough to let him come watch me play, when that’s all I ever wanted anyway. He was a bastard to my mother, and what the hell—I took myself seriously as man of the family. But he never stopped trying. Kept sending those cards and letters, and when he found out he had a granddaughter, he was relentless. Doted on Natalie like mad. Went to visit her every chance he got.”

  “All the way to Santa Monica?” May asked.

  “Yep. And she loved him. Gave him the benefit of the doubt I never could. He was her grandpa, the guy who built her a life-size playhouse with a real doorbell and a refrigerator for her snacks. To Nat, he could do no wrong.”

  “She brought you back together? You and your father?” May asked, thinking that was how family was supposed to be: love and different generations building over and healing the rifts of the past.

  “For a little while.” Martin’s voice sounded dangerous.

  “He took care of her while you were in the hospital?”

  Martin nodded. A mosquito buzzed close to his head, and he caught it in one hand. The loon called again, but when Martin slammed his hand down on the arm of his chair, the entire lake fell silent. “He took care of her, and he killed her.”

  The blood in May’s body began to burn, and she felt every hair on her skin stand up. “No,” she heard herself say.

  “He’s a gambler,” Martin said. “You know that, right? That he’s in prison for betting against his own team, for hiding assets so he didn’t have to pay taxes?”

  “He didn’t kill Natalie,” May whispered, because the idea was so unthinkable, so much worse than anything she had imagined.

  Martin began to take off his T-shirt.

  The sky glowed, as if somewhere deep inside the night there was a candle giving forth rich blue light. It bounced off the mountain walls, turning the pine trees golden green, making every rock surface shine. Martin’s chest was bare now, and every muscle seemed defined by the strange light. The hairs glistened, and underneath them May saw the bizarre pattern of crisscrossed scars.

  “Gamblers owe money,” Martin said. “They all do, one way or another. They might win for a while, but that doesn’t last forever. When I was ten, some guy my father owed money to wrote on my chest with a knife. He did this.”

  May traced the scars with her fingertips, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “My mother found out and said my father could never see me again. He moved out that night and he kept his word. Never saw me again until I was grown up, playing pro hockey.”

  “They’re so deep,” May cried, feeling the scars thick as ropes across Martin’s wide chest.

  “He said he’d changed,” Martin said. “That that stuff was in the past. He was an old man, he said, a grandfather. All he cared about was family—me and Natalie. We were all he had. He was just an old man.”

  “When you were in the hospital—” May suddenly felt the night go cold. The sky’s glow shut down, and they could have been anywhere—in Black Hall, at the beach—instead of beside a lake ringed with mountains. The sky was pitch black now, dotted with ordinary stars.

  “I knew,” Martin said. “That’s the part I can’t forget or get over. I’d experienced it myself, what my father’s greed could do. I knew he’d owed money once, and what made me think he didn’t owe it again?”

  “He owed money?”

  “Big money. A fortune. Enough to make him bet against the team he coached. Enough to make someone come after him and—”

  May blinked, suddenly glad the light was gone. She couldn’t see Martin’s scars anymore, and when she took her fingers away, she couldn’t feel them either. She was shaking, and when Martin spoke, she could tell by the sound of his voice that he was, too.

  “Hockey stars make a lot of money,” Martin said. “You wouldn’t know it from this house, but we do. Coaches, too. My father was a rich man. In ways besides money, but money was what mattered that day.”

  “What day?” May asked.

  “The day they came to collect my father’s debt,” Martin said.

  “And he had Natalie with him?”

  “He lived in an apartment by Lake Ontario. A big shiny place, where other famous people lived. It was always getting pointed out by those paddlewheel tours. Nat got such a big kick out of that. She’d be playing on the terrace, and she’d hear some garbled microphone voice saying ‘And that’s where Serge Cartier lives…’ as the boat cruised by.” He stopped, and then, as if it were an afterthought, added, “She was on the terrace that day.”

  May heard the loon cry out, far up the lake, its call throaty and insane.

  “The guy held her upside down, over the railing,” Martin said.

  “No,” May whispered.

  “She must have been scared, eh? But she didn’t show it. Even when he brought her back in, put her down safe. She ran straight to my father. Hugged him hard. With everything they put her through, she was worried about him—knew he was in big trouble.”

  May had thought Martin was going to say the man had thrown Natalie over the side, and she felt herself relax almost imperceptibly. She had been holding her breath, and she started to breathe again.

  “My father wanted her out of the way. Says he thought the guy might try to hurt her again. So he pushed her—not hard, he says. Still says. She hit her head on the corner of a table, but she jumped right back up. No harm done.”

  “Then—” May began, confused.

  “She came home with me. Stayed the last two weeks. She told me about the bad guy and the terrace railing, but she never said a thing about her grandfather shoving her. I called my father, told him he was out of my life again and this time forever, and he’s the one who mentioned Natalie hitting her head. I didn’t think anything of it—I was too busy hating his guts.”

  Martin was breathing hard, as if he had just run a race.

  “Her eyes looked a little cloudy, but I told myself that was because she was crying. She always did when we were about to say goodbye. She was scheduled to fly back to her mother that next day.”

  Martin’s groan shook the night. It sent the night birds flying, their wings sla
pping the surface of the lake. May held his hand, crying silently beside him.

  “She died that night.”

  “Oh, Martin.”

  “In her sleep.”

  “God,” May whispered.

  “They did an autopsy. She’d had a concussion, and a blood clot had formed. She had a cerebral hemorrhage. My father called that night, taking all the blame, crying that he’d never meant for it to happen.”

  “Of course he didn’t.”

  “The blame was mine,” Martin said, gripping the chair arms again. “For trusting the son of a bitch in the first place, and then for not getting her checked out.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I tried telling myself that for a long time. I hate my father so much, it’s almost possible to believe it’s all his. Sometimes I forget he’s doing time for racketeering and tax evasion, not murder.”

  “Blame never helps,” May said, thinking of how her parents had died, how for so long she had wanted to blame the truck driver, hate someone for taking her parents away.

  “It might not help,” Martin said. “But it’s there. So you can see how I couldn’t tell Kylie what she wanted to know. I couldn’t tell her how I put my own child in danger, then failed to get her help. Just hearing her say Natalie’s name, I went crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” May said. “You’re grieving.”

  They had been holding hands, and now they embraced hard, as if they had one skin between them, and she felt his heart pounding against hers. He was crying, but he didn’t want to let her know. His shoulders heaved; she held him the best she could.

  The wind picked up. Leaves rustled overhead, and pine boughs brushed the rocky sides of the mountain. More stars had come out, and now milky galaxies flowed overhead.

  “Kylie would be scared of me if she knew what happened to Natalie,” he said.

  “We tell the truth to each other, Kylie and I,” May told him. “It’s how we’ve always done things.”

  “And we will tell her the truth—together. But she’ll be scared. I worry for her, May. You think I don’t, but I worry a lot. I see you writing in that blue notebook.”