“You have a car?” I asked.
“My friend’s car,” Jake said.
“Your friend who owns the cabin?” I asked.
Jake hesitated and then he nodded as if I’d caught him in a lie, though I didn’t care whose car it was, whose cabin it was. Only that David and I were here. That we had escaped our life in the city with Ed, if only for a few days.
THE SQUARE WOODEN CABIN sat at the end of an unmarked dirt road. It was far in the woods, at the edge of an expanse of water so clear and so blue that I felt as if I were dreaming even as I got out of the car and stood on its banks. I dipped my hand in the water just to feel if it was real, and it was colder than I’d expected. “Esopus Creek,” Jake said as David clutched my hand and stared, too. His eyes followed the ducks that waltzed on the muddy shores and hopped into the water. It appeared much too big to be a creek, more like how I would imagine a lake to be, and much more blue and clear than the Hudson.
So much beauty that my son had never seen or even imagined rendered him completely still. Maybe Jake was right. Maybe by just coming here David would change and grow. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it, darling?” I leaned down and said to him, and for a moment I thought he might even answer but he simply continued to stare.
“Let’s go inside,” Jake said gently, though David resisted, wanting more of the water, the fresh air, the beautiful yellow ducklings. David yanked back on my arm hard enough so it hurt, and I let out a little cry.
“David.” Jake leaned down, and he gently extricated David’s hand from my arm. “We’ll come back outside in a little while, I promise. I need to set your suitcase down inside. It’s heavy.” He paused to give David a chance to react. “Okay, son?”
Jake was so good with him, so kind, and so patient. I smiled at him, grateful, as David listened and followed us inside the cabin without any more resistance.
On the inside, the cabin was small and sparse, but not as much as Jake’s bare apartment in the city. There was a couch and a table in the living area/kitchen. And there were two beds in the bedroom in back. Jake put my suitcase down next to the larger one. “You can sleep here,” he said. “David can take the other bed, and I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Of course.” I tried to ignore a feeling of disappointment. What else had I been expecting him to say—that he would share this bed with me? It was such a wildly inappropriate thought that I felt my cheeks begin to turn red. “Where’s the telephone?” I asked quickly. “I’ll need to check in with Ed.”
“The telephone?” Jake thought for a moment, and then said, “I’m afraid there isn’t one.” It seemed every place had a telephone these days, and for some reason I’d not been expecting this cabin to be so far out in the middle of nowhere. I’d promised Ed a phone call. If not every day, then at least most days, and if I didn’t call him at all for the few days until I got to Ethel’s, surely he would figure out something was off. “Hey.” Jake put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I can take you into town tomorrow. You can call him from there, okay?”
I nodded, and I found myself biting back tears I didn’t quite understand. I had an intrinsic nervousness that I’d become so accustomed to that I remembered it again, only now, when Jake rested his hand on my shoulder and it began to disappear into an unfamiliar calm.
“How about we have some lunch,” Jake offered, “and then we can go out on the creek in a boat.” He let go of my shoulder and leaned down and spoke softly to David. I knew that David probably didn’t understand what Jake meant about going out on the creek in a boat, but, like me, suddenly David seemed to have achieved a sense of calm at last. His shoulders relaxed and he leaned into Jake—he trusted him.
WE SPENT THE AFTERNOON in a small rowboat on the creek. I closed my eyes in the glorious sunshine, falling in and out of a half sleep, while Jake showed David how to catch fish, how to be very still so as not to rock the boat or scare them away. I opened my eyes occasionally and watched them, their bodies glowing in the overexposure of the intense sunlight. David didn’t say anything. But he was smiling.
He was so tired from the day that he fell asleep back at the cabin before Jake finished cooking us the fish they’d caught. Had I stepped back and looked, thought about it, I might’ve thought how very strange it was to see a man, a doctor like Jake, preparing dinner for us. But he cleaned the fish in the kitchen and then roasted it over the fire with ease as if he’d done it many times before. And it felt right, like we had been doing this together for ages. I just sat there on the couch and watched, and I took the drink Jake handed me, a tumbler of gin—all the cabin had. I drank the clear liquid, even though it made me grimace, because it also made me feel warm and safe and that I had done the right thing by coming here.
“He’s improving,” Jake said to me, handing me a plate with some fish. He kept his voice low, presumably so as not to wake David. “I think I’ll have him talking soon. I feel it. He’s so close. His nonverbal cues are so much better.” He finished off his gin before pouring himself another, which surprised me. I would not have expected Jake to drink anywhere close to as much as Ed did, to allow himself to become out of control. “I’m so glad you came here.”
“Me too,” I said. My entire body felt warm from the gin, the fire, the sound of Jake’s voice. And I let myself think what I’d been wanting to this whole time. Was that the only reason? Was David the only reason that Jake was glad we’d come up here?
I felt Jake was thinking the same thing because he looked down, put his drink on the coffee table, and then looked back up at me. His eyes appeared a softer color, almost golden, in the reflection of the fire. He moved closer to me. Slowly, almost hesitantly at first, he put his arm around me, but then without even thinking I lay back and leaned my head against his chest as if we were always this way, the two of us, as if we fit together. “You don’t do this with all your patients,” I heard myself saying, and as the words escaped my lips I thought maybe I should’ve stopped them. But the gin had made me feel warm and safe, my words suddenly easy.
“I don’t,” Jake said quietly, and I could hear my heart beating in my ears, as if it were loud enough to shake the room. But Jake didn’t seem to notice. His fingertips stroked my arm gently, and neither one of us said anything for a moment. I just felt the rise and fall of his chest against my cheek.
“I want to know more about you,” I said after a little while, both surprised and somewhat delighted in my new boldness from the gin. “You told me you had a brother once. What’s his name?”
“Henry,” Jake said. “We were twins. But he died a few years ago.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” I tilted my head up to look at him and his eyes looked faraway. “Did Henry die in the war?”
“Yeah.” Jake put his hand on my head and stroked back my curls—almost absently, almost as if this were what we did all the time. I leaned back against him and closed my eyes, inhaling the faded smell of creek water and pipe smoke.
“And you were in the war?” I asked him. I tried to picture Jake as a soldier, in a soldier’s uniform. Young and with his twin brother Henry. I wondered if they’d looked exactly alike.
“No,” Jake said. “Because of my . . . Well, I was here. I was lucky enough to be able to stay here.”
“But now you’re all alone in the world,” I said. “No family.”
“I’m not alone,” he said, and he shifted, sat up a little, and turned me gently so my chin was on his chest and our faces were close. “Millie,” he said. “Ed is not—”
“Shhh,” I interrupted him, putting my hand gently to his mouth to stop him from saying whatever it was he was going to say about Ed. “Please, let’s not talk about Ed anymore.”
“But I . . . Maybe we should . . .” He let his voice trail off, and he sat up, so we were no longer touching at all but just sitting close together on the couch. I thought he was going to tell me it was time for me to go ba
ck to the bedroom, to go to bed, before we both did anything we might regret. I could picture him saying it just that way, in his calm and even psychotherapist tone. He opened his mouth to speak, but then he suddenly seemed to change his mind and instead of finishing his sentence his thumb landed on my collarbone as if it were drawn there by magnetic force. His thumb traced it slowly, catching on the top button of my dress, before he pulled back a little. “I just don’t want you to hate me . . . in the end,” he finally said.
I put my hand in his arm. His skin was warm. “I could never hate you,” I said firmly, and Jake reached up and caught my fingers as if to move them so he could continue speaking, but then his face softened and he kissed my palm instead before moving my hand to his cheek. It was rougher than I would’ve expected—he was in need of a shave—and I wasn’t familiar with the feel of a man’s face. With Jake’s face. “Let’s not talk anymore,” I said, afraid if we continued that I would lose my nerve, or that Jake would. That David would wake up, or the world would choose to end, right at this very moment.
Jake moved in closer, and then all at once his lips were on mine, moving so slowly and filling me with a sense of warmth I had never felt before. I once had thought that Ed buying me a couch at Macy’s was love, but no, this feeling, this sublime tingling that arose from my toes and traveled up my legs, my stomach, my shoulders, my neck, the length of my entire body, this was something entirely new and different and wonderful.
Jake’s fingers caught on the top button of my dress again and this time he undid the button, then the next one and the next, and he lifted the dress over my head so that I was sitting there in only my underthings. “You’re so beautiful,” Jake said. And suddenly, without warning, I began to cry.
Jake pulled back. “Millie, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No.” I pulled him closer to me, close enough so I could feel his ragged breathing against my cheek. “It’s just that no one has ever said that to me before.”
Jake put his fingers through my curls, and then lay back, pulling me on top of him. I heard him unzip his pants, and this seemed to register from somewhere very far away, outside my body. I seemed to understand there, from across the room, what it was we were about to do, but from my spot on the couch, on top of Jake, looking down at him, I couldn’t think rationally anymore, I couldn’t understand anymore. All I could do was feel, follow Jake’s lead, and do what my body wanted to, what our bodies wanted to do together.
I AWOKE TO AN ALARM—a steady, ringing sound. Ed’s clock, I thought. But then I opened my eyes and saw the embers still glowing in the fireplace.
Jake. The cabin, I remembered.
I sat up. I was entirely naked, my legs tangled with Jake’s, who was also trying to sit up underneath me. My skin warmed again as Jake touched my shoulders to move me over, and he pulled an afghan from atop the couch and threw it over me.
“What is that noise?” I asked.
Jake stood, pulled his pants on quickly, and then he ran to the back of the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and pulled something out. The noise suddenly stopped. “Yes,” I heard Jake saying. Then: “The Russians . . . Jesus . . . Tonight?”
It occurred to me what he was doing, talking on the telephone. The ringing sound had been a telephone? Yes, that’s exactly what it was. But Jake said the cabin didn’t have a telephone . . . He’d lied to me.
Jake finished his conversation, and he walked back to the couch and sat down next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder, but I pulled away. “Why did you lie about the telephone?” I asked. I realized how naked I was underneath the afghan. How much Jake and I had done last night. How I had felt his body and he had felt mine, and, for the first time, I had enjoyed every second of it. But if he’d lied to me about the silly telephone, what else had he been lying about?
“We have to get dressed,” Jake said brusquely, ignoring my question, and me, as if last night had never happened. “I have to leave.”
“Now? Tonight?” I wasn’t sure if it was still night. I looked around the cabin, and darkness still seeped in through the windows. The tiny red embers in the fireplace still glowed, but only dimly.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, his voice softening a little.
“I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
“Millie,” Jake said, “I can’t tell you. But I just need you to trust me.”
“Trust you?” I pulled the afghan tighter and moved farther down the couch. “You lied to me about the cabin having a telephone. What’s going on here? Why should I trust you about anything?” I suddenly wanted to cry or scream, I couldn’t decide which. But I could hear myself breathing very hard, ragged, uneven breaths.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, “it was just . . .”
“The Russians?” I spit back at him what I’d heard him say, and as I said it I suddenly thought of Ed. Had Ed had found us out? Had the friends Ed spoke of on the telephone the other night followed me here and told Ed everything? “Is it Ed?” I asked. “Did he find out we’re here?”
“No,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about that. No one knows you’re here.” Jake reached for his shirt, which hung over the back of the couch. He threw it on and began doing up the buttons quickly, his fingers certain. He handed me my dress, and in a stupor, I took it, unsure for a moment what he wanted me to do with it. “Get dressed,” he said. “I’ll drive you to the train station. You and David can go visit with Ethel a few days early.”
“And where are you going?” I asked.
But he didn’t answer.
Outside, it was dawning slowly, and the light began to filter in through the cabin’s windows, a soft and surreal pink. The world, the beauty and calm perfectness of the nature that surrounded us, none of that matched Jake’s mood, what was happening here inside the cabin.
He leaned back in, closer to me, so I could hear his steady breathing. I turned back to look at him, and his shirt was on and buttoned. “Look, Millie. I’m sorry that I lied to you about the telephone. But it really had nothing to do with you . . . or us.” Us? As if we were something now. Were we? “I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“But you did anyway,” I said. “And you’ve lied to me about other things, too.” I thought about the way he claimed to know Ethel when she seemed not to know him at all.
“I can’t explain it to you now. I wish I could, but I can’t.” He put his hand on my face and traced my cheekbone with his thumb. “I have to go now. I’m sorry.”
“But I don’t want you to leave us,” I said, my anger over the silly telephone dissipating into a sense of loss.
Jake’s face softened and he put his hand on the afghan, pulling it tighter around my shoulders. “I promise you, I’ll get back to the city as soon as I can. And I’ll do everything I can to keep you and David safe.”
“Safe? From what?” None of this made sense. Why would he have to leave here now, at dawn, and where was he going? “Jake?” I could still feel what I felt last night, my body against Jake’s, my naked skin against his, a feeling and an openness I’d never felt before, a rush of pleasure I’d never experienced, and now it all seemed unreal, like a lie.
“Please, Millie, get dressed,” Jake said more sternly than he’d ever spoken to me, and I suddenly felt ashamed for everything that had happened. “We have to go.”
He stood and walked into the back room, got David up, and led him into the kitchen, where I heard him talking calmly about breakfast. Breakfast? I clung to my dress, removed the afghan, and tugged the dress down over my shoulders. I buttoned it slowly, my fingers trembling. I understood what I’d done. It was all wrong, and now it seemed I was already being punished for it in a way I didn’t even quite understand.
“Millie.” I looked up and Jake was standing there again, hovering over me, while David sat in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread.
I felt tears stinging in my eyes an
d I bit my lip to try to keep them away. “Why won’t you tell me what’s happening?” I asked him.
Jake hesitated, and then he leaned down and whispered in my ear. “No matter what else happens, I need you to remember that last night wasn’t a lie.”
Even after he stood back up, I could feel the warmth of his breath against my skin, I could feel the warmth of his words echoing in my head. I could feel them even hours later as David and I stepped off the train in Golden’s Bridge.
OUTSIDE THE CITY, everything about Ethel seemed different, more relaxed. Her curls were looser, her skin had reddened, and her posture had eased. She told me her back was feeling good out here in the country air, that she could breathe deeper away from all the noise.
A few hours after my arrival, we lay next to each other in our bathing suits, on matching lounge chairs, on a deck that led out to the lake. I supposed it was quite beautiful here, all the green of the trees, the blue of the perfect water glistening in the sunshine, but somehow I didn’t have it in me to notice.
“John has been swimming every day,” Ethel said, raising her hand up to her eyes to shield them from the sun or perhaps to get a better view of me. “It exhausts him, but in a good way. He’s seeming calmer here.” I listened but didn’t say anything. I’d been quite silent since we’d arrived. At first I said we were tired, which was true, we were. But now, in the piercing sunlight of the late afternoon, I still couldn’t understand what had happened with Jake this morning at the cabin. Why he’d lied. Why he’d left. What I’d done. What we’d done. My entire body felt numb, my bare toes incapable of soaking in the warmth of the August sun.
David sat rather calmly at the edge of the lake, stacking smooth stones, and I wondered if he had begun to feel it in his chest the way I felt now, this steadily growing hole. The absence of something . . . or someone. Or maybe he didn’t even understand it yet. Jake was gone. Somewhere. Something had happened in his worried early-morning phone call—I just didn’t know what. It seemed so strange that Jake spoke of the Russians, and that Ed had the night before we left. It made me feel that Jake was lying to me about a lot of things, that maybe he and Ed were friends, that they were connected in something somehow. And with the Russians? The mere thought made my head ache, and it made no sense why a man like Jake, or Ed, would have the need to be so secretive or urgent.
The Hours Count Page 14
