Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  Except, a pocket can’t converse with you. A shampoo bottle can’t trade its thoughts on the latest Spike Jonze flick. And Thad needs people. When he’s not with Jake, he’s high or he’s asleep. He’s never been good at being alone.

  He could get serious about his writing. How does Jake do it, stand for hours, painting the same canvas day after day? Locked in a room alone, Thad would lose his mind. Plus, ten lines into a poem, he loses focus. Jake blames Thad’s habit, and maybe he’s right. Jake never smokes.

  Thad should flush his system, go a week un-stoned. Except, without weed, he isn’t sure how best to wrestle with the world. He isn’t like the rest of them. He doesn’t have his father’s brilliance, Jake’s talent, Diane’s grace. He doesn’t have Michael’s cynicism to keep him warm at night, or his mother’s faith to fold into when things get rough. He wants to be happy. But how to get there without a joint in his hand? How to live without the love of someone else? How to be happy sober and alone?

  The bucket under Thad has grown uncomfortable, the back room hot, but what’s in Teddy’s box is beautiful. Each compartment holds a canister, each canister a bud, each bud a promise: The world would miss you if you went. Thad needs to believe this.

  His ice cream is softening fast, but he’s not really here for ice cream, so he lets it melt in the bowl.

  “This Blueberry’s new,” Teddy says. He holds a canister at eye level, gives it a gentle shake. Through the glass lid, Thad glimpses the blue-green-purple plant matter inside. “It’s an indica, so we’re talking relaxi-taxi. There’s Northern Lights—classic—but you’ve had that before. On the sativa side, I’ve got a K2 and some pretty decent Kiwi Green. Then there are the blends: I’ve got Kushes, OG and Kandy. Some other hybrids over here.”

  Teddy touches each canister as he talks. His fingers are long. His hands are huge.

  “Now, this,” Teddy says, “this is Blue Cross. Enough sativa to keep you sharp, but not so much you’re checking your back for ghosts.”

  “That one,” Thad says.

  “Good choice. You want, I’ll roll you one right here.”

  “Thanks, but, you know.” Thad hooks a thumb in the direction of the doors. By now, his family’s wondering where he is. Then again, maybe a big fat joint is just what his family needs. He can picture it, his mother laughing, Dad doing a box step with Diane across the deck. Michael snuck hits with Thad in high school, so who knows? He might be down.

  Thad produces two hundred-dollar bills from the wallet he holds for Jake, and Teddy drops two baggies in his palm, plus rolling papers and a lighter.

  “You run out, you know where to find me.” Teddy smiles, and his teeth are yellow. He shuts the mahogany chest, then fixes the front with a combination lock.

  Thad studies the bags. There’s more weed here than he can burn up before heading through airport security. Which means he won’t be back for more. Which means he may never see Teddy again. He should say something, but he’s bad at goodbyes. Easier to let Teddy believe, next summer, he’ll be back. Easier, but not kinder.

  Shaking Teddy’s hand, he knows this week will be long and filled with lasts: Last swim in the lake. Last game of horseshoes on the lawn. Last night on the dock, watching the moon climb, star by star, into the sky.

  He pockets the lighter, the papers and the bags. He picks up his ice cream dish. Then he’s through the saloon doors, past the counter, and out the door onto the deck.

  Michael and his father stand at the rail, ice cream cones in hand, river below. Diane sits in a high-backed patio chair, knees pulled to her chin. His mother stands beside her. Jake is nowhere to be seen.

  “I just want to know what’s happening,” Michael says. “I have a right to know. We have a right to know.” He casts a glance that says, Back me up here, bro, but whatever Thad’s walked into, he wants no part of this.

  Plus, in any disagreement, Thad’s rarely on Michael’s side. For years, his brother’s been a stranger to him. He couldn’t say why Michael threw away his free ride at Cornell to follow Diane to Georgia, why he turned Republican, why he and Diane relocated to Texas, of all places.

  “How long have you two been planning this?” Michael asks.

  Their father chuckles. “There’s no conspiracy, Son. Your mother and I never promised we’d retire to the lake.”

  So that’s what this is about. Michael, who can barely afford his home in Dallas, wants the house. That, or he’s pissed he wasn’t consulted first. Thad gets it. He shares Michael’s disappointment. Still, how can they ask their parents to maintain a place their sons visit, at most, two weeks a year? Their father’s turning seventy. Why shouldn’t they keep upkeep to a minimum, start over somewhere things are cared for, property managed, home warrantied?

  “It may not be a conspiracy,” Michael says, “but it sure feels like an awfully big fuck you.” His face bulges, forehead swollen, bandage huge.

  Thad wishes he were home, safe under Jake’s Egyptian cotton sheets. Popcorn, a bong, a bad movie on TV. Someone get him back to Bushwick. Someone deliver him from the South.

  “Just promise me no one’s dying,” Diane says. Feet in her chair, chin soldered to her knees, she looks as though she might cry.

  “Dying?” Thad’s mother says. “Oh, honey, no.” She kneels beside the chair, takes Diane’s hand. “No one’s dying. No one’s going anywhere.”

  “It seemed sudden, that’s all,” Diane says. “I worried someone might be sick.”

  Thad’s mother stands. She turns to them. Her forehead’s lined, and there are age spots on her face Thad hasn’t seen before. How strange to look upon a parent and recognize that, in the short time since you saw her last, she’s grown old.

  “Clearly, your father and I went about this the wrong way,” she says. “This decision has been in the works for years. We could have given you more notice. We should have, and I apologize. You’re sweet to worry, but there’s no secret. We’re just ready for a change.” She frowns, as though she hasn’t gotten what she means to say quite right, but she goes on. “The lake house sells next week, I’ll put in my last year at the lab, then we’ll find a place to settle down.”

  “What about the Ithaca house?” Michael asks.

  “There are any number of newly tenured professors who will gladly take that off our hands.”

  Michael looks away.

  Thad’s father takes the last bite of his ice cream cone and crosses his arms. “If it’s your inheritance you’re worried about—”

  “Dad,” Thad says, “please, we don’t care about that.”

  “I care about that,” Michael says.

  A breeze whips the limbs of trees along the riverbank. Somewhere in all of this, the nighttime crickets have turned on.

  Michael leans against the rail. Thad waits for more, some accusation from Michael of mismanaged funds or a request for proof he’s still executor of their will, but Michael’s quiet. Whatever’s on his mind is intercepted only by the river. Maybe none of this is about money. Maybe Michael’s just sad. That thought opens Thad’s heart a little, but not enough to go to the railing, to be at his brother’s side.

  Diane rises from her chair and hugs Thad’s parents. Thad moves to a nearby trash barrel and drops his ice cream in.

  Where is Jake? He descends the staircase to the deck below, but Jake’s not there. A trail of fieldstones leads to the river, and he follows it.

  He’s ready to get high, ready for the hand that readjusts the rabbit ears, clears the reception in his head and knocks the laugh track down a dozen decibels. He does some of his best thinking high, unless he only thinks that because he’s high so much. Already he can taste the paper on his tongue, feel the sweet, hot inhalation in his chest.

  The river rushes by. He follows the path downstream to where the river widens and the trout congregate too deep to see. Ahead, a light glows between trees. He follows the light into a clearing, and there’s Jake on the riverbank, hair moussed, pants tight, teeth electric in his cell phone�
�s glow.

  “I can’t get a signal,” he says.

  Who’s Jake wanting to call, Marco? Thad dislikes Marco. He’s never met the man, but he dislikes the idea of him. Your first lingers, love-wet and memory-heavy, and Thad is sure that Marco lingers just that way for Jake.

  Just lunch, Jake’s said, but what lunch of Jake’s is ever only lunch?

  “About tomorrow,” Thad says.

  “You don’t have to come,” Jake says, but his eyes are on his phone.

  “And if I don’t come?”

  “If you don’t, you don’t. I’m fine with that.”

  “And what if I’m not fine with it?”

  Jake lowers the phone.

  “I don’t like it,” Thad says. “I don’t want this lunch.”

  He pulls the weed and papers from his pocket, rolls a joint, lights it, and takes a drag. His brain un-fogs. The static clears. The sound gets crisp.

  Jake crosses the clearing, and Thad offers the joint, knowing he won’t take it. Jake was raised religious, and religion left a mark on him. For an artist in an open relationship with another man, it’s surprising the number of things that, to Jake, still feel like sin.

  Jake pulls him close. “I love you. Do you believe that?”

  Thad nods. He’d like to believe it.

  “Marco’s a friend. He used to be more. Now he’s not. It’s lunch. That’s all.”

  Jake’s hand finds Thad’s face, but Thad steps back. He takes another drag, exhales.

  “Michael doesn’t want my parents to sell the house.”

  Jake checks his phone. “That’s dumb. Your parents can do better than that house. They have pensions, right?”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Jake says. “I understand the feeling of attachment. You think I want to sell everything I paint? But your parents, they need to think long-term. Sometimes you have to let go of what you love to love what you have.”

  Thad swears he’s heard Frank utter these same words. That, or they’re from a movie, some scene where the music swells and the lead utters the kind of truth that only sounds profound when accompanied by violins.

  “I get that the house has sentimental value,” Jake says. “But value? If I found some sucker to take that trailer off my hands, I’d take the money and run. Your dad gets it. I don’t know why Michael’s arguing with him. Who argues with a genius?”

  Thad shakes his head. “Dad’s not a genius.”

  “He won that grant.”

  “A MacArthur,” Thad says. “Genius Grant’s a nickname. That doesn’t mean he’s actually—”

  “You sound threatened.”

  “I’m not.”

  Thad takes a hit. Teddy’s stuff is stronger than it used to be, and for a second the world goes wobbly. He wants to sit, but he doesn’t trust himself to stand back up. Plus, nature makes him anxious. Leaf litter and worms, ants and grass. Plants are for smoking, not sitting on.

  Overhead, ten thousand stars turn on. Fuck it. He sits.

  “Anyway,” he says, “this isn’t Dad’s decision. The way they’re talking, I’d guess this is all Mom.”

  He takes a last drag and grinds the joint into the ground.

  “Whoever’s choice it is,” Jake says, “it’s the smart choice. They’re better off someplace nicer, someplace warm, someplace with no state income tax. Florida’s cheesy, sure, but there’s a reason people flock to it. It’s, like, old-person paradise.”

  Thad wants to cry. Maybe it’s the weed. Maybe it’s the boy, maybe the long day. Maybe it’s his fear of Marco and what tomorrow brings. But, more than he wants to cry, he wants Jake to understand. He wants him to have seen the house thirty years ago. How bright it was. How clean. How you pulled off your shoes, and the carpet rose to meet your feet. How the kitchen filled with the smell of fish and potatoes fried in the same cast-iron pan. How, after a year away, your throat would tighten walking through the door.

  He wants Jake to see that you can’t hang an asking price on memories like that, that time is a fickle thing, and any way to slow its passing, to hold on to the past, is worth a hundred Florida beachfront condos.

  But mostly he wants to remind Jake that none of this has anything to do with him.

  “Just lunch?” he says. Beneath him, the earth turns. Beside him, the river cuts a corridor to the sea.

  Jake sighs. He pockets his phone. He says nothing, and Thad says nothing in return. Instead, Jake turns and walks upriver, and Thad is left alone.

  On the riverbank is a rock, a big one, and he crawls to it. The rock is wet and weathered, lichen-rough. He sits. He takes a breath. And finally, he cries.

  11.

  Lisa’s story is sad, but her story’s not unique. Over three thousand families a year lose babies just by putting them to bed. Sudden infant death syndrome: a death mis-monikered. There’s nothing sudden about smothering. Suffocation can take up to seven minutes. Nowadays, there are distinctions: SIDS, suffocation, death by unknown cause. Back then, everything was SIDS, a catchall when you couldn’t bring yourself to tell the parents, Hey, we said no bumpers, no blankets, no stuffed duck in the crib. We told you, lay the baby on her back. Today, people know better, the deaths a third what they were the year June died. This reduction should bring Lisa comfort. She had something to do with it. Fund-raisers and research, awareness, telethons. She’s walked so many miles. She has so many shirts to show for it. But, losing a child, there’s no real comfort to be found.

  What the other family’s going through, there’s not a word for it, no word to accommodate that degree of sorrow laced with rage, no word for what Lisa felt the morning her daughter stopped breathing and no one would say why.

  Lisa brushes her teeth. She combs her hair. She smooths on a cream that’s meant to melt the wrinkles from the skin around her eyes. The cream’s never worked, and it’s expensive, but she applies it anyway, just as her mother did, half out of habit, half out of vanity.

  When she met Richard, she was twenty-two. Great age, great skin. This was 1980. Great year. Gas was a dollar a gallon. Her rent was three hundred dollars a month. A Democrat was in the White House, Bowie was on the radio, and, right out of college, she was employed.

  Her first day, a man nine years her senior showed her how to use the photocopier. He was handsome, and he did not have a mustache. In those days, high school teachers were mostly women. What men there were wore mustaches. Maybe it’s still that way. She isn’t sure. She was a terrible teacher, she’s sure of that. The man with no mustache was not a terrible teacher. She’d noticed him that morning, as he was pulling into the parking spot reserved for Teacher of the Year.

  “Like this,” he said beside the copier. He poked at a panoply of buttons, and the copier whirred and churned. Soon, paper was spilling from its side.

  “I’m Richard,” the man said, and to her dismay, Lisa felt herself blush.

  She’d been with men in college, but always they’d been men her age. This man, though. She could imagine standing on tiptoe to kiss him at the altar, imagine their eyeglasses clicking as their lips touched.

  Richard waited a week to ask her out, six months to ask her to marry him. They married quietly that summer, and returned to school in August as Mr. and Mrs. Starling. She was twenty-three years old.

  “Why the rush?” they sometimes ask each other. “What were we in such a hurry for?” They can’t remember. Someone shot Ronald Reagan. Someone shot the pope. Life in the dark, early days of 1981 seemed suddenly short and fraught. A sniper’s bullet might take you out at any time, so why not love the one you’re with? Why not marry the one you love?

  Lisa caps the skin cream and returns it to the bathroom drawer. She washes her hands. She trims her nails.

  By October of ’82, she was pregnant. By July of ’83, their daughter, one month old, was dead. Over the next two years, she and Richard separated, came together, left high school teaching to pursue PhDs, and separated once more. But seeing as the chief occupat
ional hazard of separating is reuniting for sad, nostalgic sex, Lisa found herself, in time, pregnant again.

  But it wasn’t the new baby that rebooted their lives together. Once Michael was born, she considered leaving Richard for good. Too much shared anguish. Too much of June in her husband’s lips, his eyes, the delicate Ss of his ears. No, what started the marriage over was the house.

  Listen: Do you know what it’s like to fall in love, not with a person, but a place? Hill slope and dock creak. Sunlight and breeze. A V of geese reflected on the surface of a lake.

  Lisa does.

  Summer of ’86, Michael a year old, they rented a lake house. They’d hoped to summer near the Finger Lakes or on the Cape, but money was tight, and they could stay a week in the Carolinas for the cost of a weekend in New England or New York. Which was how they found themselves on Lake Christopher, a mostly undeveloped lake in the Blue Ridge Mountains an hour west of Asheville, a lake Richard had visited as a boy.

  They found they were other people at the lake. Happier people. Better people. At the lake, they were no longer the harried parents of a screaming toddler but the loving caregivers of a sometimes-fussy son. No longer were they the bored couple that bickers over sex, they were attentive lovers, generous and kind. With the last of their money, they rented the house a second week. The third week, they offered to buy the property outright.

  The purchase proved nearly impossible, the house a terrible investment that required they borrow money from both sets of parents (neither of whom had much to lend) at a time when interest rates were 10.5 percent. Not to mention that the house wasn’t for sale. The owner was an investor who maintained several rental properties and saw no reason to part with one. In the end, and against their Realtor’s advice, Lisa and Richard paid more than the house was worth. They might have picked another house on this same lake. But no. It had to be this house. This house, this bay—this was where they’d rediscovered love.