Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  She wanted to respond, to remind Arlene that she was a country girl from a family of dedicated hunters, intimate with back roads littered spring and fall with fat, soggy possums and capsized raccoons. And really, she’d gotten used to death. There were as many dead things as living in the world. More. Everywhere you looked there was a cemetery, a dried leaf, a husk of a fly. And yet the world rolled on, green and busy as ever.

  The thing that secretly moved her to tears now was not death but parting. Watching TV, she would be reduced to sniffling and wiping her eyes by soldiers waving from trains, mothers putting children onto school buses, confetti snowing over the decks of cruise ships. It didn’t have to be some sweeping movie she was caught up in. A long-distance commercial could do it. And the quality didn’t matter—it could be the most obvious, manipulative, sepia-toned slow motion, it still hit her like a brick. It was funny, because in real life she had no trouble saying good-bye, simply did it and walked away (a trait she credited to her mother’s stringent Lutheranism). She and Henry had had a year to tell each other good-bye, and she thought she was happy with the job they’d done. There was nothing lingering, nothing left to say between them. Then why did these clichéd scenes tear at her?

  “I brought paper plates,” Arlene said.

  “So did I. How about napkins?”

  They would need to stop at the Golden Dawn after they got there.

  “We should make a list,” Emily said, and dug in her purse. “Paper towels, film … what else?”

  Pie from a roadside stand. Blackberry was in season for another week. They could wait till tomorrow for corn, and get two of those rotisserie chickens from the Lighthouse. Did they have to call and reserve those? Probably, on the weekend. Peaches. Tomatoes. They would have to make a separate trip to the cheese place and pick up a block of the extra-sharp cheddar the children liked.

  Miles in the car, the air-conditioning growing too cold. Forest, crows, police. She had made this drive so many times, yet parts of it still surprised her. She’d forgotten the barn they pointed out to the children when they were little, the faded advertisement dull but legible: CHEW MAIL POUCH TREAT YOURSELF TO THE BEST. A rest area was barricaded, a customized van with back windows faceted like diamonds inexplicably sitting in the middle of the empty lot. Clouds repeated in the sky to the horizon, a fleet steaming out of harbor. The woods gave way to dairy land, slouching red barns and fields overgrown with burdock and Queen Anne’s lace. Outside Mercer they ran into a thundershower, the rain so heavy that Arlene braked and Emily braced for a collision. A mile later it was sunny, a rainbow rising from the hills.

  “Make a wish,” Emily said, then cleared a space in her mind and thought, slowly, as if speaking to God, I wish: that they will all understand.

  They left 79 and headed east along Lake Erie, Arlene tentatively joining the four lanes of I-90. In back, Rufus gulped for air, huffed and swallowed hard, and to placate Arlene, Emily twisted in her seat and sweet-talked him.

  “You’re all right,” she said, but Rufus didn’t look convinced. He lifted his head, woozy and confused.

  “No!” Emily said. “Down!”

  He did, his muzzle jumping with a hiccup.

  “Should I pull over?” Arlene asked.

  “He’s fine. It’s not far.”

  “It’s another hour.”

  “Forty minutes,” Emily said. “Just drive. He’s not going to throw up on your precious seats, and if he does I’ll clean it up.”

  “I was just trying to help,” Arlene said.

  “I’m sorry. I know you don’t like him.”

  “I like him, I just don’t want him throwing up in my car.”

  “Well, that’s just what dogs do, I can’t do anything about that.” Emily sighed at the pettiness of the argument and the needling fact that she was in the wrong. “Listen, I appreciate you driving, and I’m sorry he’s not the best passenger. I don’t mean to be rude, I just want us to get there.”

  “I don’t mind him, really,” Arlene said, as if she’d already accepted her apology.

  The sign welcoming them to New York was pocked with yellow paintball splotches, the one panel with the new governor’s name a darker green. Crossing the border, Kenneth and Margaret used to lift their feet off the floor and hold their hands in the air, something they’d learned on the bus to church camp. She thought of doing it now but knew Arlene would be baffled.

  She could almost hear Henry tell her to simmer down, could almost see the sideways look he’d give her that meant please take it easy on Arlene—or, more often, on Margaret, whose whole personality seemed designed to drive Emily to violence. She still could not get over the way Margaret had treated Jeff. Neither could Jeff, apparently, because he’d left her. That it had likely been the one trait they shared that finally drove him away seemed fitting to Emily. For Margaret, it was all the proof she needed that once again her mother had ruined her life. They’d been officially separated less than a year, but from Margaret’s scattered calls and what Kenneth let slip, divorce seemed more probable than reconciliation.

  Wouldn’t her own mother feel justified now, always telling her to calm down and hold her tongue? “Why can’t you be nice?” her mother once said, gripping her forearm hard, and what answer could Emily give her? She saw the same helpless anger in her daughter and was just as powerless to save her. And who would save Emily when everything piled up?

  Henry had, his placid heart the perfect balm for hers. Now that he was gone, she feared she would turn sour, take it out on those around her. Sometimes it seemed that was exactly what was happening. It was hard to tell. It was like menopause all over again, the crazy swings—or like being pregnant. Half the time she had no idea why she felt the way she did, except the overall excuse that Henry was dead.

  “Here,” Arlene said of a sign coming up. “Nineteen miles.”

  Route 17 was so new through here the bridges were still under construction. Orange-and-white-striped pylons funneled the two lanes into a chute between concrete barriers. Arlene brought her face closer over the wheel, and Emily sat up straight, as if lending her attention. No one was working, but a state trooper had tucked his cruiser in behind a dusty water truck.

  Arlene was going slow enough that it didn’t matter, but from reflex Emily stiffened as if caught, a jagged spasm shooting through her. Henry had been a fast driver, a great believer in the Olds V-8.

  “Tricky tricky,” Emily said.

  “And it’s a work zone, so the fines are doubled.”

  “Even if no one’s working. What a racket.”

  A sign for Panama came, and then, off in a disused field, a billboard for Panama Rocks, where they’d taken Kenneth and Margaret as children. Margaret had been pudgy then, and refused to even try Fat Man’s Misery, standing outside while the rest of them squeezed through, the lichened walls cold against their bellies. She’d always stood apart from them somehow, and Emily had failed to bring her in.

  Rufus had settled back into his tuck, a thread of slobber dried over his nose. “We’re almost there,” Emily promised.

  They got off at the exit for the Institute, tracking a balding blacktop past lopsided Greek Revivals with washing machines on the porches and horses grazing in with cows. The road dissolved in spots, cinders clinking beneath them, wildflowers in the ditches. It reminded her of Kersey, the roller-coaster shortcuts through the state forest full of dips and switchbacks. The old homesteads were the same, the gingerbread Gothics on hilltops safe inside windbreaks of oaks and willows, mailboxes jutting from whitewashed milk cans, ponds with stubby docks for the kids to swim off, ducks sunning on an overturned rowboat. She could live here, give up the house in the city and watch the mist settle in the trees at dusk, the cows come lowing home.

  Another billboard loomed over a slight rise: RUNNING ON EMPTY? FILL UP WITH JESUS.

  Well, that would be nice, she thought.

  “Corn’s high,” Arlene noted.

  “They’re north enough to get the l
ake effect.”

  “I hope it doesn’t rain like last year.”

  Emily had not been up last summer because of Henry, but she’d heard the horror stories—the children playing video games all day and fighting. She could see Arlene abandoning the house, throwing on a poncho and going for her walk by the fishery, cupping her Luckies against the drops.

  “It won’t,” Emily said. “And if it does, we’ll find something to do. There’s always cards.”

  “Justin was big into chess, I remember.”

  “And Ella’s pretty good about the TV. It’s Sam who gets weird.”

  “Maybe if we set a time limit. Who’s going to get there first?”

  “Kenneth.”

  “Maybe if you talk with Lisa.”

  “I can try,” Emily said.

  “The two of you make up yet?”

  “We’re civil. Let me put it that way.”

  “Oh my,” Arlene said, slowing to take in a massive Victorian painted garish shades of mustard and raspberry. PLUMBUSH BED AND BREAKFAST, proclaimed a fussy placard hung pub-style out front. The wraparound porch commanded a view of a makeshift hay wagon across the road, and farther down the sloping field, the browned shell of a pickup.

  “Plum bushed,” Arlene said. “I get it.”

  “I’m sure the neighbors are amused,” Emily said.

  Closer to the lake, they saw more new houses, all modular, trailered in from the same factory. One had a satellite dish beside it the size of a small plane, another a Bills flag in its bay window.

  “You wonder if they keep that up all year,” Arlene said.

  Finally they came to the intersection of 394, just above the Institute. Andriaccio’s was still there, its parking lot jammed with the lunchtime rush. The sudden crush of activity—a boy with a pair of canes wobbling across the lot, a tall man in shorts holding the door for an older couple leaving—seemed to invite them to join in. Or was it the Institute itself, that idea of a relaxing, high-minded summer, that appealed to her? Waiting for a break in traffic, Emily peered down the hill and over the spiked iron fence at the tiny practice cabins, plain as outhouses and spaced neatly as graves, imagining some bright teenager’s days, the chaste dedication to her instrument and the great dead. As they passed, she thumbed down her window, hoping to catch a lithe phrase of oboe or a cello’s deep sigh. There was nothing.

  “Emily, look,” Arlene said, incredulous. “The Putt-Putt.”

  Its orange-and-white fence was still there, but everything back to the concrete-block restrooms was leveled, a FOR LEASE sign out front.

  “Kenneth will be so disappointed.”

  “You’d think they could make money with the Institute right here.”

  “Obviously not,” Emily said.

  She knew everything here: the Christmas shop; the hot laundromat where they still did their sheets and towels; the grade school now used for storage. They slowed for the walkway by the brick entrance of the Institute, an empty police car left by the maintenance hut as a decoy, then cruised alongside the lush fairways of the club (apparently they were having no trouble getting water). Henry had enjoyed the course. On six there was a pond, and he would always leave his tee shot right, mucking through the reeds beside the cart path. Once he’d discovered a snake and come running out with his nine-iron. She hadn’t swung a club all last year. She and Kenneth would have to get out for their traditional round. It would be the only time they’d have alone.

  And there was the Wagon Wheel, with its rusted ladder of signs:

  DELI

  NEWSPAPERS

  ICE

  FILM

  And the We Wan Chu cottages and campground, now with its own website.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Emily said.

  “That was up last year.”

  Arlene slowed for Manor Drive, and Rufus stood, smearing his nose against the window. The turn convinced him to fold himself down again. He was well off the towel now but Emily let it go.

  The drive was entirely in shadow, barely a car wide. The association had put up a 15 MPH sign. The policeman with the trampoline and the Irish setter was home, but not the people with the ugly aboveground pool. The Nevilles were here in force, their driveway lined with minivans and SUVs, the garage open to show their old Volkswagen convertible. Two little girls she didn’t know rode their bicycles across the yard in their bathing suits and tennis shoes.

  Between the houses Emily could see the lake, a Laser heeling near shore.

  “Looks breezy out there,” she said, but Arlene had slowed for some older children on bikes—Craigs, they looked like, gripping tennis rackets. A blonde girl waved to them, and automatically they waved back, neighbors.

  Farther on, a red Cadillac with Florida plates sat in a shaded drive. “The Wisemans are here,” Emily said, happy, because last year Herb Wiseman had had a heart attack and they hadn’t come up.

  “Both of them or just Marjorie?”

  “I can’t imagine her driving that car, can you?”

  “We’ll have to go over,” Arlene said.

  The Lerners’ place was for sale, also listed with Mrs. Klinginsmith, and seeing the sign disappointed Emily. She wondered what they were asking.

  Rufus was up again, turning around to look at everything.

  “He knows,” Arlene said.

  Emily could see part of the cottage, obscured by the big chestnut next to the garage. “Well,” she said, “it hasn’t burned down.”

  Closer, she could see the orange daylilies nestled around the mailbox. Something hung from it—a flyer in a plastic wrapper—and she thought there ought to be a law against delivering them when people weren’t home. It was an open invitation.

  They turned onto the grass, running over fallen branches. The cottage was fine, even bright. She hadn’t seen the new paint job, gray with red shutters and white trim. No wonder the buyers paid their price. A pair of new steel bands held the chimney together, and the old TV antenna was gone. They’d even painted the garage, scraped the moss off the shingles. It looked better than it ever had, almost false. She wondered what Henry would have said.

  Rufus scratched at the window.

  “Down,” Emily said, but he was too excited.

  Arlene stopped the car and Emily let him out. He shot around the side of the cottage and squatted, looking back over his shoulder. Another thing to clean up. The towel was covered with hair, one tuft caught in a blotch of drool; the seat was fine, though Arlene went through a pantomime of wiping it with a hand.

  “I will wash the towel,” Emily said, and balled it up.

  When Rufus was done, he came back, looped around the two as if calling them to follow, then raced straight for the dock. Arlene ignored him and laid down the tailgate.

  “Let’s just get the food in for now,” Emily said. She found the keys and crunched the brightest one in the kitchen door, propped the greased arm of the screen so it would stay open. The place smelled musty as a well house. Emily leafed among the keys (each taped and labeled in Henry’s neat hand) and went out back to turn the water on.

  The spiders had been busy, fat as puffballs, their webs festooned with gnats, dotted with cottony eggs. Above the controls, tacked to the wall and bleeding with humidity, was a set of directions Henry had written out for Kenneth. She flipped the switch and the pump complained. The water here was soft and stunk of sulphur. It made her remember swimming in the lake and hanging their suits on the back line, thirty, almost forty years ago, when the children were little. All those summers were gone, but how sharply—just now—she could recall them. She wanted to inhabit them again, those long August days, the croquet and wiffle-ball games and campfires, skiing behind the boat. It was why they came here every year, she supposed, this feeling of eternity and shelter.

  She locked the pump house behind her. On her way to the garage, she slipped on a mossy flagstone and barely kept her feet. “Stupid,” she said. Every year she forgot how treacherous they were. Think just once she’d remem
ber.

  No one had bothered to clean the garage. Henry’s junk was everywhere: beer cartons and bushel baskets, coolers and buckets, fishing gear, gas cans for the boat, cases piled with dusty Iron City and Genesee bottles, a steel trash can spiky with kindling. Suspended from the back wall were a saggy life raft and a trio of bare-breasted-mermaid boat bumpers that had embarrassed Kenneth as a teenager. Through the dulled rear window she could see Rufus out at the end of the dock. She wanted to go and sit with him, but Henry’s workbench drew her to it.

  His tool apron lay at one end as if waiting for him. The rest was a clutter of gnarled work gloves and plastic cups full of screws, coils of yellow nylon rope, a handheld sander, aerosol cans of spray paint and WD-40, nails in wrinkly paper bags, wood putty, a crusted caulking gun, a wasp bomb, old screw-in fuses, ripped sandpaper disks, paint stirrers from the True Value in Mayville, a bent cleat, a can of 3 IN 1 oil, a scarred Maxfli, a dark lightbulb. She resisted the urge to touch any of it, stood there breathing in the smell, enjoying the mess. She’d ask Kenneth if he wanted the tools. He’d probably take them all just so none of them got thrown away. He really was her son.

  Inside, Arlene was going through the cupboards. “Where’s that bowl we always put the fruit in?”

  “The green one.”

  “Is that the one?”

  Emily checked above the dishwasher and to the left of the stove, then the lazy Susan under the counter. “This one.”

  “I don’t remember it being this one. I thought it was orange for some reason.”

  “Is there much more?” Emily asked.

  “No, that’s it.”

  “Do you mind if I go down to the dock for a second before we eat?”

  “Go ahead. There’s not room in here for both of us anyway.”

  The wind was blowing in, raising cat’s-paws on the water. Under the chestnut it was cool, but once she stepped onto the dock her face warmed. The lake was down several feet, and weedy. Pearly clam shells winked up at her from the bottom. Rufus was lying down and raised his head to see who was coming. In its slip the Starcraft sloshed and knocked, its lines creaking. The handsome salmon cover Henry had bought was streaked with gull droppings. The buyers had their own boat, so Mrs. Klinginsmith had arranged for Smith Boys down in Ashville to buy it as salvage. At that point Emily didn’t argue. It was nearly thirty years old, and the Evinrude regularly stranded them. Funny how much she could part with now—how little, really.