The Color of Water in July

by Nora Carroll

  PRAISE FOR NORA CARROLL

  “Nora Carroll’s story of hidden family secrets is a tale beautifully woven through time. This elegant novel about a life-changing discovery by a woman returning to the lakeside cottage of her youth will transport you into a warm Michigan summer and keep you there until the very last secret is revealed. Carroll’s talent shines brightly in this mysterious, romantic, and mesmerizing debut.”

  —Darcie Chan, New York Times bestselling author of The Mill River Recluse and The Mill River Redemption

  “The love that burned between characters in the book was very deep and emotional. So much so that it left me longing, hoping and wishing for the loves to be united.”

  —Melissa, 1000+ Books to Read

  “You will be amazed at the ability of Nora Carroll’s writing.”

  —Albert Robbins III, Free Book Reviews

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2012 Nora Carroll. Previously published as Hemingway Point.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503945630

  ISBN-10: 1503945634

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  In memory of ZWL, who appointed me family historian, and CWC, who haunted my imagination.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  JESS, AGE THIRTY-THREE

  There must be a precise moment when wet cement turns dry, when it no longer accepts footprints or scratched-in declarations of love; an ordinary moment, unnoticed, just like any. But in that moment, the facts of a life can change.

  At the age of thirty-three, Jess thought she knew everything there was to know about leaving places: getting on a plane or stepping into a car, and moving forward, on to the next thing.

  She had not yet learned the art of going back.

  July.

  Normally, she didn’t go away in July. She usually stayed in the city—a form of atonement. No, that was silly. What did she have to atone for? It was just that she got more work done when the university was mostly empty—found it easier to concentrate on the eighteenth century in France when the marble library was an appealing respite from the New York heat.

  She looked through the window grating. If you stood at just the right angle, you could see a sliver of the Hudson—today it was blue. Not a brilliant blue, but still a summer blue, the color of water in July.

  “I’m going away for a few days,” Jess said.

  From where she stood in the living room, she could see through the door into the kitchen where Russ stood at the stove, stirring hot oil with a wooden spoon, his wiry body taut and athletic, his gestures precise. It was warm in the kitchen. From time to time, he reached up to brush his longish brown hair out of his face, to push his wire-rimmed glasses farther up the bridge of his nose.

  “Where to?” Russ asked.

  “Oh, nowhere. Michigan.”

  “Conference? Ann Arbor?”

  “Well, no.” She paused, weighing whether she could end her sentence there. “Actually, my grandmother left me some property that I need to take care of.”

  She couldn’t even say it without feeling an odd squeeze in her chest, a faint flush in her cheeks. Even the expression—that I need to take care of—rang oddly in her ears, echoing like a kind of accusation.

  Jess remembered the brief conversation with the real-estate agent.

  “I see no need to actually be there,” she had told the agent.

  “Of course you want to be there. I’m sure there are items in the cottage that have sentimental value.”

  Since then, she had stayed in a keyed-up state of expectation. At night, lying in bed, she could feel her heart thumping in her rib cage, louder, more insistent than usual. The night before, she had pushed away her damp, sweaty sheets, got up to splash water on her face, and stared at herself, wan and surprised-looking in the bathroom mirror.

  This could not properly be called returning. There was no call to feel like this. She was imputing qualities—breath, flesh, blood—to a structure made of pine board, shingle, and stone.

  Jess truly believed that you could put the past behind you. She had not been back to the cottage in sixteen years.

  “Your grandmother left you some property? I thought your grandmother was still alive.” Russ was chopping mushrooms now, using a cleaver so that the halves fell neatly apart.

  “No, she died . . . last month.” Jess paused, momentarily flustered that she had never mentioned it to Russ.

  “I’m sorry,” Russ said. “Had she been sick?”

  “She was old . . . ” Jess realized she didn’t know exactly how old her grandmother had been. She was born in 1902. Jess did the math her in head. If she were still alive, she would have just turned ninety-four.

  “She lived in a nursing home,” Jess said. “They told me she died in her sleep.”

  “So tell me about the house,” Russ said.

  “It’s just a summer cottage. It’s been in the family for a long time. I guess she thought my mother didn’t want it, so she left it to me.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Sell it.”

  Russ turned back to the cutting board, starting to chop the green and red peppers, seeming to let the subject drop.

  Had she really gotten off so easily? She was feeling guilty that she hadn’t invited him, especially since Russ was always on the scout for new locales for the magazine. Jess knew they were getting to that point, where it was almost expected that they would include each other in their plans—that was the point when Jess, in the past, had tended to bolt.

  Well, it was barely worth mentioning. Such a short trip. She would be there and back over a long weekend and the place would be sold.

  “How’s the piece on the Connecticut farmhouse coming?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Country kitsch in Connecticut,” he said. “Would you believe they collect hand-painted duckies?”

  “That hardly sounds like Architectural Home . . . duckies . . . ”

&nb
sp; “Very expensive, very tasteful duckies. But they have a ten-million-dollar view of the Long Island Sound. Makes for a great photo shoot.”

  Russ was passionate about his work at Architectural Home.

  “Okay, so now tell me all about this cottage in Michigan,” Russ said. “I didn’t know people did cottages in Michigan. Isn’t that a Maine kind of thing?”

  Jess pictured the big old gabled cottage, perched up on a bluff above a clear blue Michigan lake. It had been her grandmother’s summer home for over ninety years. At one time in her life, it had been Jess’s favorite place on the face of the earth.

  “It looks out over a spot called Hemingway Point. They say Hemingway used to fish there when he was young.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “Every summer,” she said. “Until my mother couldn’t make me go anymore. Then, you know, I just . . . ”

  “Just what?”

  “Just, you know . . . didn’t want to go there anymore.” She hoped Russ couldn’t hear the catch in her throat, but he was concentrating on stirring the sauce and seemed to let the subject drop.

  A few minutes later, they were seated across from one another at Jess’s battered kitchen table, the aroma of Russ’s fresh marinara sauce filling the room. Russ stabbed a forkful of spaghetti, expertly wrapping it around his fork so that it neatly tucked into his mouth. “It’s, like, a little cabin . . . ?”

  Jess should have known he wouldn’t let it go that easily.

  “It’s actually kind of big,” she said.

  “Big?”

  “Nine bedrooms?” She could feel the faint heat of embarrassment rising along her cheekbones. Her apartment in Fort Washington was a ratty sixth-floor walk-up in a marginal neighborhood—its only redeeming feature was the tiny sliver of a view.

  “You’ve just inherited a nine-bedroom cottage on a lake across from Hemingway Point . . . and you didn’t even tell me?”

  Jess nodded miserably, sorry that she had piqued his interest.

  “So what’s it like anyway?”

  Jess could hear a note of professional interest creep into his voice. Russ was a house junkie—always on the lookout for new locales for the magazine.

  “It’s very old—probably falling apart by now,” Jess said. She looked away from Russ, out the window.

  “I’d love to see it,” Russ said. He was smiling at her, eager, interested. She should be happy—she had been telling herself recently that she might be in love with him.

  “Do you want to come with me?” she said, regretting it as soon as she had opened her mouth.

  Russ’s eyes lit up and he smiled.

  “I was waiting for you to ask.”

  Jess felt a thud of guilt when she realized that she had been trying to avoid asking him.

  The road into the Wequetona Club was unprepossessing. Over the years, M-66 had been built up a bit, and so, where Jess had remembered only farms, they drove past the Jiffy Mart, Gail’s Nails, and the County Farm and Post. Pine Lake was not visible at all from the road. The gently rolling woods and meadows were unremarkable, except perhaps for a particular clarity of the light. At the crest of a hill, there was a turnoff onto a gravel lane.

  “Here,” Jess said. Russ wheeled the rental car onto the dirt road, the tires crunching on gravel. Dense woods lined both sides of the road. As the car rounded a bend and the entrance came into view, Jess felt her stomach tighten. Two simple stone pillars flanked the road; a line of stately hemlocks lined up behind them. On one pillar hung a small black sign inscribed WEQUETONA CLUB.

  Just beyond, Jess saw the white wooden clubhouse, crisply painted and with red geraniums in the window boxes, surrounded by green Adirondack chairs. Off to the left were two lawn tennis courts, and, directly ahead, she caught her first glimpse of the lake. On this sunny July day, it was a fierce and glittery blue.

  “Think Martha Stewart,” Russ crooned into a handheld voice recorder. “Think Ralph Lauren.”

  Jess wasn’t really listening anyway. She was just looking as the car crunched along, barely at a crawl. The lake, the trees, the prim row of cottages. Close her eyes and she could still see it, so deeply was this scene engraved in her mind, and so little did it change over time. Almost impossibly little. And yet didn’t it change? Because she herself had certainly changed. The last time she’d been here, she’d been full of dreams. Now, she liked to hide herself in libraries and study the forgotten dreams of others.

  She reached over to clasp Russ’s hand, but she jarred his voice recorder, and he pulled his hand away, so she turned to look at the lake, so bright it almost blinded her.

  “Over here,” she said to Russ. “We’re the last cottage on the south side. Just next to the woods.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MAMIE

  In those long summer seasons before the war, when the chill of spring and fall wrapped around the languid warmth of endless midsummer days, the only way to get to Wequetona was by water. We arrived in mid-May, coming across Pine Lake on the little steamship Jefferson; it stopped right at the Wequetona dock on the way to Horton Bay. In the sheltered circle of the harbor, the water was always calm. But as we steamed out farther into the lake, the water deepened to a menacing indigo, and the brisk wind that blew across Five Mile Point carried the knifelike reminder of a Great Lakes desolation. No matter that the weather was fair, Pine Lake always hinted at her wildness, even on the mildest, most even-tempered summer day.

  Every summer, Lila got seasick on the crossing and was peevish. I can still see her clear as day, leaning up against the bulwark, its paint gray and blistered from the lashings of a thousand northern storms. Her blond hair whipped around her face, golden strands catching in the corners of her mouth. With one hand she shielded her eyes, and with the other she pressed against her sash, a queasy greenish look on her pale, angular face.

  Nowadays, the area around Pine Lake is heavily wooded, but when Lila and I were girls, the lakeshores were mostly bare. There were still loggers around in those days, unsavory characters, Indians mostly, and some sharp-tongued bearded Scotsmen who appeared never to bathe. They lived in wretched camps in the woods: you used to see the squaws with babies tied to their backs, walking barefoot along the railroad tracks. I remember Daddy saying it was mostly logged out by then. Still, sometimes you’d see patches of smoke from the burning stumps pluming up around the lakeshore in the spots where they were still logging.

  The steep canted roof of our cottage was the highest point on the north shore. Its roofline, like a church spire, cut a sharp outline against the sky, mirroring the dark-green points of the few remaining giant pines. Lila and I strained our eyes from the moment we came into Loeb Bay, wanting to be the first to catch sight of our beloved summer destination. Lila usually saw it first; I always suspected that the sheer strength of her impatience made her eyes so keen.

  The SS Jefferson docked at Wequetona on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Old Joe McKawber would ring the clubhouse bell, and all the Wequetonans would gather down at the dock to collect their mail and to see the new arrivals to the Club. A couple of Indians milled about, ready to heft our many steamer trunks onto their backs and carry them up the steep stairs to the cottage walk. Lila and I stood with arms linked, waiting to feel the boat bump up against the dock—our signal that another summer had begun.

  During the war, the Jefferson stopped its resort runs. It was converted to a Coast Guard patrol boat, and after the war, I guess nobody thought to bring it back. The roads were slowly starting to improve. Eventually, we began to take the train, and then later to drive.

  But I still remember the approach by water: the slant of gables against the blue sky, the sound of the clubhouse bells clanging out over the water, the sight of our dear friend May Lewis, the hem of her white organdy drenched in water, waving a gay summer welcome with her upstretched, white-gloved hand.

  Up in M
ichigan, the summer is brief, crowded between two ends of a desolate northern winter. And yet somehow when you are young, it seems to last forever. A whole lifetime can be hastened to fit between the giddy green leaves of May and the chastened red and yellow of September.

  During my long life, I’ve seen the world constantly changing, spinning around, until the next thing you know, it becomes a place you don’t even recognize anymore. But Wequetona doesn’t change that much. Summer after summer, it has a way, perhaps an illusion, of seeming much the same. As it was in the beginning. The pine trees.

  Is now and ever shall be. The lake. World without end.

  But then there’s no such place as that now, is there? Not on this earth anyway.

  I’ve just come home from the lawyer’s office, where I signed the papers about the cottage. Tomorrow, I move into Coventry Manor. I was born in the year of our Lord 1902, and in two months, I will turn ninety-four, if it is the Lord’s will.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JESS, AGE THIRTY-THREE

  Jess got out of the car and walked down the grassy slope. The back of the wooden-framed cottage loomed in front of her, painted white, with green-shingled gables and dormer windows. To her right were dense woods where white trunks of birch trees shone through like slender ghosts. The gravel road ran along the back of the cottages. The cottage, with its wide porches and tall windows, faced the lake.

  Remembering that it had once squeaked, she grasped the green-painted screen door tentatively. Sure enough, the door protested with a raspy squawk. The air inside was a stale combination of mildew and mothballs. The back hallway to the kitchen had always smelled like that, as long as she could remember. She paused before stepping all the way through the doorway, sensing the oddness of the quiet inside. There was no brisk clicking of pumps across the wood floor; no waft of Chanel No. 5. The cavernous cottage was dark and still. Russ let the screen door slam shut with a thud.