Rusty Summer

by Mary McKinley

  “No, Miss Smartass, and for your information I think I might even vote for it someday, if they ask Alaskans if it’s okay for two men to get hitched. Why should I give a good goddam’? Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me—or ladies too,” he adds equitably. “Hell, why not?”

  I feel myself warming to him. I nod but don’t answer right away.

  I feel SO happy—and a tiny bit guilty—about how much more evolved he is than I gave him credit for. Why should I be so surprised? I try to keep the ball rolling and hear what else he might say that will surprise me. I nod encouragingly.

  “It’s a concept whose time has come, right, Dad? ‘A few fly bites can’t stop a spirited horse,’ isn’t that how it goes?”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. Your grandma says it.”

  “Mark Twain probably said it first.”

  “Probably.”

  “Also, ‘the dogs bark but the caravan passes on.’ My teacher told me that one.”

  “You know, I’ve never been exactly sure what that one meant. I just figured something like: mind your own business.” He says this sincerely, in a way that is kind of endearing, for a knucklehead.

  I start to explain—and then just smile at him, and nod. Close enough.

  It’s too much effort to be such a pain-in-the-ass expert, all the damn time. Too exhausting.

  We sit in our own little worlds for a bit. Finally he clears his throat and looks at me.

  “Well . . . like I said, I guess it might not be so bad. Couldn’t be worse than a pack of damn dogs barking at camels, all night, right?” His eyes plead. He’s trying to joke us back together.

  I don’t say anything. He’s trying so hard to make it up to me.

  The poor old thing . . . the steady drumbeat sounds. Empathy, Rylee.

  He smiles at me hopefully while I’m quiet.

  And so I smile at him too.

  “Yep,” I say, kindly, and mean it. “Keep up the good work, Dad.”

  “Rusty! Come here! I need you!” I hear Leonie hissing like a flyweight teapot.

  “What?” Her urgency makes me hurry. I’m intrigued.

  I enter the bedroom and she has her hand over the speaker. She mouths “Shane!” and points to her phone. “Help me!” she says silently. I cover my mouth so I don’t laugh.

  “Are you there?” Shane is on speaker.

  “Yeah.” Leo says, looking at me pitifully.

  “Are you okay? Are you mad? Say something! You’re so funny when you text, but now you’re being so quiet!” His voice is tinny and tiny through her phone. I sit beside Leo on the bed.

  She looks at me with wide, wild eyes. I cup my hands around her ear.

  “Tell him—‘well, the days do seem longer since you left,’ ” I whisper directly into her ear.

  “Well, the days do seem longer since you left.”

  Shane cracks up. Leo looks at me like, “why is that funny?”

  (Derp, because the days are getting longer.)

  “Really? Does that mean you’ll get over me the twenty-first of June?” Shane asks, mad flirting.

  Leo looks at me and shrugs in bewilderment.

  “No,” she answers on her own, “that’s graduation day.”

  “Sweet! Hey, that’s a good omen—to graduate on the solstice.”

  “What’s a solstice?” Leo mouths to me. I shake my head—tell you later—and whisper again.

  “It’s the only day long enough to miss you suspiciously,” Leo repeats like a robot.

  “Sorry?” asks Shane, puzzled. I furiously whisper into Leo’s ear again.

  “Sufficiently, I mean!” she corrects herself in weird triumph.

  “Ohhh . . . yeah. Well, I already miss you sufficiently. Hey, maybe I should come watch you graduate.” His velvety voice is tentative. My heart suddenly bangs so loud I wonder if Leo can hear.

  “Okay!” she says, without help. “You can have one of my tickets! We each get three!” She’s so pleased. I look at her, totally dumbstruck. I don’t even know what I’m thinking, except:

  Omg . . . Shane at graduation.

  GramMer and Raven come home soon after. Bommy gets up to greet them. Raven is sniveling.

  “I got three!” she tells Dad heartbrokenly. She hiccups.

  “You got three?” he repeats helplessly. He looks like he might cry too.

  “Shots! On my arrrrrrmmm! And on my leg!” she howls, soggily. “And it huuurrt!”

  “She was very brave!” GramMer strokes her hair. “I am so proud of you!” she adds.

  Raven starts wailing louder and climbs on my dad. I notice how their heads fit together; his chin cupping her forehead as she sits on his lap, bawling from recent memories. It makes me remember . . .

  I recall when I was very small, sitting on him just like that, with my forehead fitting under his chin perfectly. The smell of aftershave. My dad throwing me way up into the air, singing “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah! I love you! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” and me shrieking with delight. I was flying.

  Hazy, faded memories. I haven’t been small enough to throw around in millennia.

  Uncle Oscar wants to go see bears. Why, I have no idea, but there you have it. He has always heard about Kodiak bears, and now here he is in Kodiak! It’s Bear Viewin’ Time!

  It’s salmon season so we can see the bears catching the fish as they return to spawn. It always seemed awful, the salmon get all the way back, almost . . . and then the bears eat so many of them! They just take one bite and toss them as they pull out the next one for half-assed chomping. Wasteful! What jerks!

  We need a motor boat. My dad is all over this. He loves to go out on the boats of his buddies and somebody loans him theirs with no problem. A nice one too. Fiberglass. Fast!

  We strap life jackets over our layers of other jackets. A motorboat ride in Alaska, even in June, can get pretty nippy.

  My grandma stays home with Raven this time. She says she’s seen enough bears for one lifetime and Raven has plenty of time to see them. GramMer’s not keen on bears. She says they get way too close for comfort sometimes.

  It’s cloudy again, but not misting, and it’s pretty thrilling when we all pile into the boat and Dad cranks it. I love to speed! This is almost as much fun as flying! The nose of the boat, the bow, goes up in the air and I look back—and we are whippin’! Ahh! I love to fly, even on the water! Whee!

  As we flit along, I am reminded of another time and another boat, when I was tiny, maybe seven, with my dad.

  We were on the waters of La Push, on the Washington coast for a week, to go salmon fishing, something he liked to do a lot. Like I said, he always had a buddy with a boat who would loan it to him.

  Just he and I were on the boat this time. It was quiet and peaceful.

  I remember looking out into the flat distance and thinking it was like a field, but you couldn’t walk across it, when all of a sudden my dad comes up from behind the wheel with his binocs, which he trains on the water beside us. And then he whistles, long and low, before heading up to the bow.

  I can’t see anything going on so I just keep sitting where I am, on this little perch, and then he points.

  “Looky there, Rylee Marie! A gray whale! Can you see it? Look right there!”

  I remember looking to where he was pointing, and what I had thought was part of the field of water beneath the boat was, in fact, a gray whale, so vast and speckled that I’d thought it was ocean.

  When I realized there was a whale floating around us checking us out, I lost it. I was only seven and I was positive it was going to rise up from twenty thousand leagues under the sea—with eyes the size of trampolines—to eat and rend and chomp!

  “Make it go,” I remember quietly nattering in terror to my dad, but he wasn’t listening.

  He walked out to the starboard bow and lay down flat, to see closer, and as I watched, frozen silent with panic, in complete certainty that the end was here, the whale rose to the surface and looked back at my dad, its huge eye calm
and considering.

  At least that’s how I remember it now—this giant Yoda-looking eyeball, eyeing us mildly, like an oversize Einstein. Regardless, I was petrified.

  Not my dad. As I darted my gaze to him, he let his breath out in a reverent gasp.

  “Oh my God,” my dad breathed. “You are so beautiful.”

  The whale stayed near for a while, gentle and slow, and then eventually submerged. My dad smiled at me in this exalted way I had never seen him smile, before or since.

  We felt we had been given a rare gift.

  After about fifteen minutes, as we were preparing to start back to shore and discussing how whales had once lived on land millions of years ago, we heard a giant slap. And then another.

  It was our whale, maybe half a mile away, whacking the water with its fluke.

  “Look—it’s over there!” My dad pointed and as we watched, the gray whale came up and breached the water, crashing massively down and creating a tidal wave on reentry—but far enough away so that I wasn’t afraid.

  I remember my dad cheering, joyous and childlike, as our boat bobbed like a seagull on the swells. Clearer than anything, I remember the elation on his face. He had tears in his eyes.

  I had never seen a transcendent expression before.

  “Didja see that, Riley? Omg! Riley! Didja see that?!”

  I looked over at my dad in surprise. He’d dropped the Marie and was just calling me Rylee. His voice sounded so different. So young and glad.

  I think he was telling his brother Riley. I think in his mind they were both kids again.

  Young as I was, I was well aware I had seen a rare glimpse of Ovid’s bright spirit when the whale waved to us.

  That was the whale’s real gift to me.

  I smile as I remember all this stuff, but my nose stings too, for this strange, dear guy; my dad.

  Lilly Lake is long and narrow. We zoom along for miles in our boat.

  After a while Dad slows the engine and it gets much quieter and slower. We are in the wilderness. He gets his binoculars out.

  “There they are!” He gives the binoculars to Oscar, who takes them eagerly.

  We slowly approach the shore and look. The feasting bears pause and stare back.

  “Oooohh! A mama bear, with twins! How cute is that?!” Oscar whispers. He gives the binocs to Beau. Uncle Frankie takes pictures with his camera with a big ol’ lens.

  “Do you want to get out and pose with them, honey?” he asks jokingly. Uncle Oscar tried to get wild horses to hang out for a photo op once. Uncle Frankie loves to tell that story.

  “You are very funny!” Oscar informs him.

  My dad just stands there, looking at them with a little smile on his face and confusion in his eyes. He kind of spasms when Frank calls Oscar “honey.”

  But he’s trying, God bless his pointy lil’ head.

  That night GramMer makes her famous fried chicken. I’m not sure what all she does, but she shakes it and fries it and bakes it and forget about it!! It’s so good!

  She is very interested in our day and the bears and the boat, and Raven is jumping on the furniture babbling to Leo about her Berenstain Bears book, and my dad is talking to Uncle Frank about how big this fish he almost caught once was, and Uncle Oscar is looking at pics Beau took on his phone, and all of a sudden it all seems okay. It feels cozy.

  For the first time since I found out about Raven I don’t feel like running out the door.

  However, later that night, we are sacked out in our respective beds and I’m tossing and turning.

  I can’t sleep.

  Everyone says that’s pretty common when it’s summer up here, you get “midnight madness” and start mowing the grass at two in the morning, stuff like that, but I haven’t experienced it at all yet.

  What is keeping me up tonight is the question of fairness. Right versus Wrong.

  And why is that?

  Because tonight I met Ruth when she came over to get Raven.

  We shook hands. She seemed really nice . . . and very pretty, just like GramMer said. Raven favors her mom in looks. “Two peas in a pod,” as GramMer called them.

  Raven’s mom knew about us, but we didn’t know about them. Ruth was nervous when she came in; she kept looking at me and smiling in a way like, “don’t be mad.” Finally I smiled back at her.

  I don’t know if I am mad or not anymore. I think I am . . . and yet . . .

  It was a very pleasant evening. As my dad, Raven, and Ruth were leaving to go to Ruth’s house for the night, I found myself standing beside her, a little distance from the others, while Dad was buttoning up Raven’s coat.

  We just sort of swayed awkwardly, trying to think up something neutral and nice to say . . . but what? Finally she goes first.

  “I know it must be awful to have all of this thrown in your face all of a sudden.”

  I just snort and nod. I don’t have words to express my feelings. Ruth goes on.

  “I try to put myself in your mom’s place and I think I would be really upset.”

  “Um . . . yeah, I think that’s gonna be a safe bet.” I laugh mirthlessly.

  “I dread that. She’s already been hurt enough.” Ruth’s likable face is sincere.

  “We all have.” I am surly, thinking of future conversations.

  “I know . . . it’s terrible for a child when you have no control over a situation. That’s one reason I’m getting my degree in sociology. My dad was an absentee parent too. Maybe I can figure out this childhood baggage, you know? Maybe even help someone else, someday.”

  I look at her sharply when she says that. Hey, me too! I want to help someone else too!

  She looks at me and smiles. Looks right into my eyes, genuinely.

  “Listen, when the time comes, I’d like to be your friend. Your mom and Paul too.” She looks wistful.

  I sigh when she says that. Friends with me, maybe someday . . . but good luck with my mom.

  She is gonna trip.

  As I’m flailing around in bed thinking about all of this, I hear Leo get up and go to the bathroom. I don’t think anything of it till I hear the scales creak, then I think, Oh, great, this’ll end in tears, as my Brit friends say.

  “Goddammitmiserablesonavabitchshit!!!” Championship swears fly from the bathroom.

  Wow, Leo!! Temper!! She comes back out in her underwear and bra. She’s thrown off her nightgown to weigh herself. She is made of flimsy sticks. She is pissed.

  I pretend to be asleep. All I do all day is bust on her. Let her have a quiet moment.

  She gets in bed, then flings back the covers, and starts doing push-ups. She can only do one regulation push-up before she drops to the floor, trembling with exertion. Even though she’s panting, I continue to feign sleep. She tries to do another and fails. After lying on the floor for a while, she gets up, stomps back into the bathroom, and closes the door.

  I return to my worries.

  What is Paul going to think? He was younger than me when Dad left. Does he even have any memories? At least he is still the only boy. He’s still special!

  I kind of roll my eyes at myself when I think this. I know it’s silly and infantile, but I didn’t expect him to have a replacement daughter—a replicant, like in Blade Runner.

  I lie and try to distract myself by thinking about other old movies I’ve seen and liked, and seen and hated, and others that I want to see, when I hear a cough in the bathroom. It dawns on me that maybe Leo would like some privacy. I want a drink of water anyway so I get up and tiptoe noiselessly out to the kitchen.

  When I get there I decide I want warm milk instead of water. I look out the window. The nightlight plugged into the counter outlet is inconsequential compared to the night light outside.

  I stare out the window, waiting on the microwave. The dusk is the same golden-gray color it stays till about four a.m. Then the sun rises above the horizon, where it has loitered all night, and the sky turns blue—or more often, gray.

  I get my mil
k, which I nuked too long so now it’s like molten milk. I set it carefully on the table and then sit and consider. The clock ticks loudly; minutes go by.

  I never thought I’d say this but I like Ruth. Not Raven. Just Ruth. I feel kind of disloyal to my mom for feeling that way. I have no idea what my mom is going to say when she finds out.

  Scream and faint? Go to confession? Cry???

  Omg, I hope she doesn’t cry.

  I heave a deep sigh and rest my chin on my hand as I wait for my milk to cool. Then I hear a faint noise, a scratching. I hear it again.

  I look out the window in the direction it’s coming from and I think I see a shadow—or shadows. Moving! Then a black blob that disappears into the brush.

  What was that?!!

  Before I can figure out what I’m about to freak out about, I hear a cry. A frail little wail.

  I run into the bathroom, where Leo is lying/leaning over the toilet bowl.

  Oh my God.

  She’s gasping and crying and shaking, her hand is bloody and her nose is bloody and her face is gray and slick with sweat and slime and blood. She gags and spits into the toilet and I see nothing but pink froth and red slime and know she’s been trying to make her empty self puke.

  “Leonie, what are you doing?” I whisper in horror.

  She groans. She starts to speak, but instead, convulsively she starts to heave and gag. Bloody foam comes out, frothing red. She gags and gags, violently, and when the paroxysms are over she falls to the side of the toilet.

  I kneel down and touch her. She is icy and clammy and shaking.

  “Honey, can you get up?” I ask.

  Dazed, she weakly nods and tries but slips on the slimy tiles. Her head hits with a sickening thud as she falls hard, groaning. Frantically, I drop to my knees and try to gather her up into my arms. She’s so cold. She’s like a little bundle of icy sticks. Her eyes start to flutter and roll back in her head.

  I shake her.

  “Leo?! Wake up! I think you should stay awake right now! I think it’s important! Leo!!”