by Nora Carroll
“What, what is it?”
“Come down and take a look.”
Jess knelt down beside him, feeling the damp soak through the knees of her jeans. Tenderly, Daniel held up the low heart-shaped leaves. Underneath, she saw clusters of wild raspberries, each one beaded with a gossamer of moisture: perfect rose-colored globes.
“They’re dwarf raspberries,” Daniel said. “It’s an endangered plant. You almost never find them.” Carefully, he disengaged his hand and left the berries to rest hidden under their leaf canopy. “The whitetails will certainly eat them soon, if the squirrels don’t get to them first.” He reached over and plucked a single berry from the plant, then, gently pressing on her chin, he dropped one sweet starburst into her mouth.
Daniel led her farther down the path. “Here,” he said. “Tell me, what do you see?”
Jess looked around and saw nothing but trees and more trees.
“Lie flat on your back,” he said.
They lay on their backs staring up at the canopy of leaves above them, dampness seeping through the back of her jeans. Jess noticed that there were a number of trees with long, straight trunks that appeared to leave the forest entirely and rise up into the sky.
“This is it,” Daniel said. “The last stand of giant white pine hereabouts. The lake used to be ringed by them, but these are the only ones to survive.”
“Survive?”
“Lumbering. They chopped them all down to make planks from them. You know all that wood in our cottages? Number one white pine planks. Just lie here for a minute and get the feel for it.”
Jess and Daniel lay side by side on the wet, mossy ground in silence. Jess felt uncomfortable and vaguely foolish. The ground was wet, and there were sticks poking into the small of her back. She really did not know what she was supposed to be looking for. She just kept staring upward at the ever-shifting patterns of branches and leaves. She stared until the long, straight shafts of the trees seemed to converge overhead.
“Do you see it?” Daniel asked.
“See what?”
“If you look long enough, it looks like a vaulted ceiling.”
Jess shivered as she murmured assent.
“I call it the Cathedral of the Pines.”
Cutting through the woods, they got to Daniel’s cottage in just a matter of moments. It was surprisingly close, straight through the forest, just on the other side.
Daniel and Jess walked up the worn wooden steps of the small cottage; its weathered green shingles were just slightly paler than the surrounding woods. A cottage sign, TREETOPS, hung over the porch.
“Is anybody home?” Jess asked, suddenly shy.
“Nobody’s here but me,” Daniel said. “I’m staying here alone for the summer. I’m doing an independent project, photographing birds.”
When Daniel pushed the warped cottage door open, the interior looked warm and inviting. Treetops, the Painter cottage, was cozy, decorated in dark reds and greens, with soft woolen Hudson’s Bay point blankets draped over corduroy sofas.
Even inside, Jess was still shivering.
“I’ll make a fire,” Daniel said. He took some logs from the hearth and stacked them on the grate in the large fieldstone fireplace that took up most of one wall. Jess curled up in the corner of one of the overstuffed sofas. She pulled a multicolored woolen blanket around her shoulders.
“He should be arrested,” Daniel said. “You should press charges.”
This was Daniel’s first reference to the events of the previous night. Lying in the woods, looking at the trees had calmed her. Now, her stomach started to churn. Jess did not disagree with him, but it had not occurred to her to do something like that. Already, Jess sensed that she would not know what to say the next time she saw Judge Whitmire, a tall, slightly stooped man with white hair, always elegant and courtly in a navy-blue blazer and white pants. Things came up at Wequetona from time to time. To call the police would be to turn it into a “townie” matter. Mamie would never want to handle it like that.
“I just, I just don’t think I could . . . ” Jess pulled the soft blanket around her shoulders and moved a little closer to the fireplace as the flames began to shoot up. “You think I’m chicken, don’t you?”
“I think you’re brave,” he said. And he said it in a voice so grave and so serious that Jess could feel tears pricking her eyes.
Daniel went into the kitchen and came out with a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup and some saltines. Jess took the plate and balanced it on her knees, letting her salty tears stream freely down in the bowl as she took sips of the steamy broth. Daniel didn’t say anything about her tears, just came over and brushed them off her cheeks ever so lightly with his callused yet gentle fingers.
The Painter cottage was not part of the Wequetona Club. It was a little farther down the lakeshore, on the far side of the south woods. Though the cottage was not more than a quarter mile from Journey’s End, if that, it looked out at the lake at a different angle, out toward Five Mile Point. At the end of the lawn, there was the lake, light green-blue close to shore and then a vivid midnight blue out farther, where Jess knew the water was deep. Though the wind had died down on shore, Jess could see that in the middle of the lake, the surface of the water was still troubled.
She looked around the interior of the cottage. Someone in the family must have been a fly fisherman; there were several trophies of rainbow trout on the wall, mouths gaping in perpetual surprise. There were also old black-and-white photographs of Ironton, back when it had been a poor lumbering town; one showed some Indians in logger clothes standing next to a sawed-off stump, and another showed giant logs loaded onto a tiny flatbed railroad car.
“Can I have some tea?” Jess asked.
Daniel stood up and walked toward the kitchen, smooth on the balls of his feet. From where she sat, she could see him filling the kettle with water, his hair falling over his eyes. He was barefoot and wearing a pair of frayed khaki shorts, with a soft dungaree shirt hanging out, rolled up at the sleeves. His skin was quite brown, and she noticed that his calves were exceptionally well muscled, like a runner’s. The sight of him making tea in the kitchen unnerved her, made her go soft around the middle.
Jess and Daniel spent days like that, inside the cottage, sitting apart, sipping tea, and talking or listening to music. As long as she was home by dinnertime, Mamie never asked where Jess had been. She was probably relieved that her granddaughter was gone somewhere so that she could avoid awkward opportunities to discuss what had happened with Phelps.
With Daniel, Jess sat, mostly, arms buckled around her drawn-up knees. Her brain felt cottony, her muscles stiff, every painful shift of her limbs a reminder of what she had been through. Daniel alternately lounged and padded around in bare feet, now fixing some food for them, now changing the record album. On occasion, he took out his camera and stood on the front lawn, almost motionless, for what seemed to Jess to be an eternity. He spent a lot of time in his darkroom, down in the basement, with the red lightbulb on, making black-and-white prints of birds. To Jess they looked indistinguishable, but patiently he showed her: See the two black wingtip feathers? See the white around the eyes? Daniel seemed to take it as a matter of course that Jess rarely moved, that he would disappear for an hour or two and she would still be sitting there, curled up like a walnut, staring at the water.
Sometimes, he sat next to her and named the birds flying near shore.
“How’d you learn so much about birds?”
“Before my mom remarried, she used to bring me up here on weekends, with her boyfriends.”
Daniel was lounging on one of the sofas, his arm flung over the end and his brown hair cascading over the side. Joni Mitchell was playing softly on the stereo. “Always by sometime Saturday afternoon, the boyfriend would start giving me the look.”
“The look that said ‘I’d be screwing your m
other if it weren’t for your presence’?”
Daniel rolled on his side and looked at her. “Yeah, exactly, that’s the one. Anyway, my mom would always say, ‘Daniel, why don’t you go outside for a while and take a walk in the woods.’ I used to think, is she crazy or what? There’s nothing to do alone in the woods.”
“My grandmother never let me set foot in the woods . . . ”
“Well, my mother thought the woods was just the place for me. Anyway, I spent so much time out there . . . I used to play this game I called The Last Man on Earth, and after a while, in spite of myself, I did like the woods, and I started watching the birds.”
“Are you in college?” Jess asked.
“Yeah, Ann Arbor. I’m majoring in environmental sciences and art.”
“What are you going to do with it?” Jess asked, hating the question, the one that grown-ups always asked.
He looked hesitant before he answered, raising his eyebrows a little, as though wondering if she really wanted to know. “I take pictures and then . . . write poems about them, and essays too . . . about the outdoors. At least that’s what I really like to do. What about you?”
“Well, my mom is a reporter. She goes to places where all this awful stuff is happening, and then writes about it, without actually . . . doing anything, you know what I mean? I would like to be able to actually do something practical, and . . . you know . . . helpful.” Jess felt her cheeks flush slightly even saying it. That wasn’t the kind of thing you could say around Margaret and her crowd—that you wanted to “help.” The expat crowd her mother hung around with would chuck her under the chin and snicker if they ever heard her say a thing like that. It was okay to want to do things “just for the hell of it.” Seeming sincere though, now that was a cardinal sin.
“So I’m planning to go to medical school.”
They both sat silently for a moment, listening to Joni Mitchell’s voice glide and plunge as she sang “Little Green.”
“Just be careful. Don’t sell out.”
“I won’t.” She looked at Daniel. “I mean, I don’t think I will. Do you think you can really know . . . if you’re gonna sell out, I mean?” She paused again, listening to a saxophone riff through a plangent solo; she was studying the planes and contours of his face.
“I know I won’t,” Daniel said. “Where are you going anyway?”
“University of Texas.”
“Oh,” Daniel said. “Not anywhere near here.”
“No, not anywhere near anywhere, really.”
“Why there then?”
“That’s where Mamie wants me to go.”
“Is that a good reason?”
“She’s paying for it.”
It was the end of an unusual week of unremitting cold weather. Daniel was stoking the fire, trying to warm up the living room in Treetops, which had settled into a bone-rattling chill except right by the hearth. Jess was looking at Daniel as he tended the fire. The stiffness had eased out of her muscles, and she felt a little less raw, less bruised, every day. She watched the careful way he handled the fire tools, the orange flames casting light upon his face.
He turned his head away from the fire, looked at her, and smiled—a crooked smile over even white teeth. Jess had to smile back at him. And she smiled him a smile that was an invitation, and the distance between them melted away.
He was warm sand. He was the smoke from a campfire. He was the soft wool of a Shetland sweater, scented gently of wind and sweat. She was lying back on the sofa, and he knelt beside her on the floor, his rough hand gently stroking the hair off her forehead. Jess looked up at his face, the brown cheeks, the pink at the end of his nose where the skin had peeled off, with pale hints of freckles. She looked at his brown eyes, dark pools in the low light. She slipped her arms along his warm, bare chest, shimmying his flannel shirt off, feeling the buttons popping off as she pulled it over his head. For a moment, she lay her cheek against the warm, firm expanse of his chest, then as she raised her chin to meet his soft lips, her own parted to taste his salty pad of tongue.
Jess did not know how long they lay like that, entangled on the sofa. They were so close to the fire that they were almost scorched on the side nearest the flames, and Jess first took off her shirt, and then unclasped her bra by its front hook, letting it slip off to the sides. She felt her breasts flatten out under the weight of his chest, their chests glued together with slick, hot sweat.
Daniel slipped down on the floor beside the couch and gently, gently reached for the button at the fly of her jeans. But feeling the hands on her jeans, she flashed on Phelps’s face in front of her. Jess felt herself go rigid, and she curled up, knees to her chest, and said, “No. No, I can’t.”
Daniel laid his head, soft with fine brown hair, gently on her sternum between her breasts, then he stood and turned away, banging his forehead rhythmically against the wall, muttering, “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . . ” so softly that Jess could barely hear.
She stood, scooping up her bra and pulling her shirt closed to cover herself, and walked into the bathroom, feeling at the same time weak-kneed with desire, cold with fear, and burning with shame.
When Jess came out of the bathroom, with her hair combed, shirt buttoned, and face damp with cold water, Daniel was in the kitchen making Kraft Macaroni & Cheese out of the box. Jess had never seen cheese made out of powder, and she giggled as he poured in the bright-orange powder and mixed it with butter and milk. “I’ve never seen mac and cheese come out of a box,” she said.
Daniel looked at her. “Seriously? That’s impossible.”
“We mostly eat out,” Jess said. “I’m sure my mom would love mac and cheese in a box,” Jess said. “She hates to cook.”
Outside, the sky was darker than ever, almost purple, and the rain was coming down in sheets, not the usual brief downpour with thunder and lightning, more like a winter storm, cold, steady, and relentless. In no way did it seem like early July.
They sat close together, knees and thighs pressed against each other’s, at the chipped Formica table, forking the small cylindrical noodles into their mouth. They tasted, Jess thought, disgusting—but she was starving and so she shoveled the little orange noodles into her mouth, and then they would lean over the plates and kiss each other, the powdery, salty orangeness mixing up in their mouths. Joni Mitchell’s Blue was playing in the background while Jess filled Daniel in on some of the crazy details of her life.
“What’s it like over there anyway? In France. Do you like it?” Daniel asked.
Jess shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. She thought of their small, messy apartment, her walk to school under gray skies. She and her mother moved around a lot. Michigan always felt more like home.
“We’ll go there sometime,” Daniel said. “You can introduce me to your mom who doesn’t like to cook. I’ll bring her a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese as a present.”
“I would like that,” Jess said.
Daniel kept hopping up every couple of minutes, saying, “I like this part,” thumbing the needle up off the vinyl and letting another Joni Mitchell riff repeat.
“Listen to this!” and he would close his eyes, chin tipped up, legs lightly flexed, and rock back and forth in time with the music.
And then Jess would have to stand up and go over to him, embracing him tightly, and kiss him again, pressing up against him, cheek to cheek, and they would both let the bright risings and fallings of the music pour through them.
Finally, Jess reached down to unbutton her own pants, letting them drop to her ankles, and then she stepped out of them. Without a word, Daniel led her by the hand up the staircase and down a narrow hall. Compared to downstairs near the fire, it was freezing up there, and she felt gooseflesh rise on her naked legs. Then, flannel sheets, dark green, warm, and smelling like the warm earthy woods themselves. She brought him to her, unfolding to him, and they rock
ed and rocked, deeper and deeper, and then down, down, into a heavy, dark-green sleep.
When they woke up, Jess imagined for a moment that she heard the clubhouse bells, clanging out the first bell, the fifteen minutes to dinner warning. But fully awake, she heard only silence and the sound of Daniel’s even breath. The rain seemed to have stopped. Glancing at the bedside clock, she saw that it was a quarter to six. She sprang out of bed and pulled her jeans on, calling over her shoulder that she had to be home for dinner with Mamie. She ran the quick way, down the path through the woods, and managed to skid into her seat right at six.
“I thought I heard the clubhouse bells,” Jess said, slightly breathless, as she sat down across from Mamie in the kitchen, “the warning bell for dinner. Isn’t that funny?”
“I still hear them too, Jess. After all these years, I still swear I hear them on occasion.”
The next morning, the rain cleared and the sun came out. It was summer again, only now it seemed like a brand-new summer, no problems with Phelps Whitmire, no lonely vigils at the beach. This summer, she was with Daniel, and she was in love. He took her out in the canoe across to Hemingway Point so that she could see the tops of the giant white pines. He taught her the names of birds, what their markings looked like, and how to recognize their calls. They spent hours down in the basement, elbow deep in chemicals while he showed her how to process photos, and they kissed under the red darkroom light. They ate ramen noodles and Cup-a-Soup, and listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue over and over and over again, each time the record ending with a scratch-scritch and then the automatic arm lifting up, moving over, and setting itself back down with a scritch again.
CHAPTER TEN
JESS, AGE THIRTY-THREE
Poison, Jess thought. This is pure poison. I quit smoking ages ago.
She sat out on the porch, feet tucked underneath her in one of the wicker rockers, smoking a Marlboro Light; a pile of dusty old novels she’d pulled down from the shelf was sitting on the table in front of her. One was open on her lap, except that she realized she had been reading the same phrase over and over again. Every time Jess let her eyes lift from the page to look out over the lake, she would drift back into her memories of the summer she had spent in love with Daniel Painter. The summer she had learned the names of trees that she had never even distinguished before: tulip poplar, black walnut, blue spruce, paper birch. And she had looked at birds for the first time, looked at birds doing anything besides strutting around dirty in city streets, pecking at bits of garbage.
