Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  She reached the broad ell of the dock and stepped around Rufus to sit on the bench. He got up and flopped down at her feet. She bent and petted him, absently scratched behind his ears.

  “You’re glad to be out of the car, I bet. Yes.”

  He looked up at her as if she’d said something vitally important. His eyes were misted with cataracts; lately he’d been bumping into doorways. She didn’t know what she would do if he became incontinent.

  “You’re fine,” she said. “You’re all right.”

  On the next dock a wooden duck caught the wind, its wings slowly spinning in opposite directions like a deranged clock. She leaned back and looked off to the far shore. It had been so dry that some of the trees had already started to turn, not a brilliant red but a muted, diseased shade. She wondered if they would die or come back next year, then realized she would never know. She remembered a toppled redwood they’d seen out in California, ages ago, on some more ambitious trip when the children were little. The rings were different sizes; the thinnest indicated drought years. Maybe this year would be like that, next year a better one.

  She looked out at the waves as if they might provide an answer. Rufus sat up and pushed his wet muzzle under her hand. He’d missed his breakfast, and now that he was out of the car, he was hungry.

  “I know,” she said, “you’ve been very patient.”

  Next year had to be better. Practically.

  In all her concentration she had stopped petting Rufus. He’d turned away from her to face the lake, so when he tipped his head up to question her, he looked cross-eyed. His tongue flopped out to one side, and she wondered how it was possible to be that open to the world, that willing, still.

  “You are a doofus,” she said.

  She felt his ridged skull under her nails, the grain of his hair. The sun was out but the wind was up, making the duck’s wings pinwheel and slice like propellers. Her own hair stabbed at her cheeks.

  “Come on,” she said, and got up, and together they walked back toward the cottage. Arlene would need help with lunch.

  2

  “There it is!” Lise said for the kids’ benefit. As if obeying, Ken glanced away from the road.

  Below, a mile away, the water spread wide and silver beside them in the long afternoon light, a boat cutting a black fantailed wake. Trees flashed up to block the view, a wall then a gap, a gap. They caught another opening, a vineyard letting them see all the way across, a fat calendar shot.

  “Wake up,” Lise said, “you’re missing it!”

  Ken checked them in the mirror. They were groggy with sleep. Ella’s new braces made her pout. She stretched her arms above her head and groaned. “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Yippee Skippy,” Sam deadpanned.

  “Start getting your shoes on,” Lise said, though they had another twenty minutes in the car.

  Ken marveled at how calm she could be. It wasn’t just his mother (his father, the cottage, the whole trip), and it wasn’t the job, though he was prepared to hear his mother laugh at the irony of him processing other people’s pictures all day, say it served him right for leaving Merck. That would set Lise off, and then forget it.

  It was everything. While he knew it was temporary, all the way from Boston he’d been thinking of money. On their way out of town they’d stopped at an ATM and he discovered their checking account had a negative balance. He didn’t understand. He’d been keeping a close eye on their bills. He was sure he’d left a good cushion.

  “I use the card for food shopping,” Lise told him. “That’s probably it.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that would do it.”

  “We have to eat.”

  “I know,” he said, controlled, “it’s fine,” aware of Sam and Ella listening in the backseat, his failures apparent.

  It wasn’t the way he wanted to start the trip. He’d had to transfer five hundred from savings, and now he couldn’t get the current balance out of his head. His next check from the lab wasn’t due till the first of the month.

  Part of it was the cottage, obviously. All July he’d been thinking of his father, the confines of his life, whether he’d been happy or not. The hardest part was understanding why he was with his mother, the two of them were such complete opposites.

  “I don’t know how he did it,” he said. “How many years?”

  Lise laughed but did the math. “Forty-eight?”

  “I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with her.”

  The irony of it was that he and his father were so much alike, a fact Ken had fought off as long as he could and that, privately, Meg never tired of citing. Once, stoned over the phone, she’d teased him with it—“God, you turned into him!” Only his sense of how hurt she would be prevented him from coming back, not at all joking, “And you turned into her.”

  Lise could have had a week at the cape with her family but agreed to come this one last time. Now, as they crossed the Veterans Bridge, trying to spot the Stow Ferry—there, loading cars on the Bemus Point side by the old casino—she was making gentle disclaimers. She knew how important this week was to his mother.

  “Listen,” Lise said, “I know you’re going to disappear when we get there.”

  “I will not.”

  “Yes you will, you’ll go off looking for shots.”

  He shook his head because he knew it was true. Not that he’d find any.

  “Just don’t leave me alone with her, all right?”

  “Arlene’ll be there.”

  “What about Meg?”

  “She probably won’t get in till around dinnertime.”

  “Interesting how she’s always the last one to show up and we’re always the first.”

  “What can I say,” he said. “I’m the good son.”

  “You’d never know it from the way she treats you.”

  “I can take it.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  He shrugged. She wasn’t so bad. She was his mother, it wasn’t like he had a choice.

  They made it across the bridge and he got off 17 and waited at the stop sign for traffic to clear (the sign was bent and scratched as if brushed by a truck, the gouges rusted; he’d need his wide angle to get it, but already he could see how dull the print would look, how sixties). Behind him, Ella and Sam sat peering out the window at Hogan’s Hut, the combination gas station, general store and ice-cream place they sometimes stopped at on the way in. He’d wanted to give them a special treat after nine hours in the car, had planned on it since Binghamton, but it was just too late. He turned and gunned the 4Runner, paying attention to his shifts, checking the bikes through the sunroof, watching Hogan’s Hut dwindle in the mirror, and, bless them, the kids let him off the hook.

  This was the easy part. Once Meg arrived with her kids it would be bedlam, and their mother wasn’t used to the noise. All week he would be stuck in the middle of them just as he had been as a child, trying to defuse or at least delay the inevitable, and then he would be accused of taking the wrong side, when all he wanted was peace. He couldn’t see how his father had managed an entire life of this. He would just have to make it through the week, counting down the hours like he did when he was a boy.

  When Meg was at camp one year, he spent every Tuesday and Thursday at the Putt-Putt, his father dropping him off and picking him up. All day they gave out prizes; his pockets were thick with discount tickets. For lunch he ate Milky Ways. The time flew by, the speakers playing “Hold Your Head Up” and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” #1 and 2 week after week. Between songs, notes from the practice cabins drifted across the road, squealy reeds and the dark farts of horns. By summer’s end he’d mastered the course, pared his score down to the low thirties, even won a tournament. His mother had a faded picture of him smiling in front of the windmill with his trophy (still in Pittsburgh, in the attic room he’d moved to). He’d been so proud, felt so lucky. “I wouldn’t have known it was you,” Lise said when she saw it. He could have said the same thing. The boy hol
ding up the trophy was gone.

  He wondered if he would ever be happy like that again. Happy for Ella and Sam perhaps, but that was a different kind of happiness.

  At B.U. he’d been thrilled to lose himself again in studies of light and long conversations about art and the photographers he loved, but the work he’d done there embarrassed him now, seemed sterile and over-composed, just an extension of his technical skill. The eye Morgan tried to help him find had eluded him. His new stuff wasn’t much better, and the setbacks of the last few years had forced him to admit that maybe he didn’t have what it took. Love had done it once, his happiness with Lise. Could that come back and surprise him again? And if it didn’t, what then? Would he be like his father, quietly dedicated to getting along, so steady and stoic that he seemed inscrutable, disconnected from everything except what was in his head and the newest project on his workbench?

  He’d only brought one camera along—the Nikon. The Holga was just plastic, it wasn’t real. It was supposed to teach him to rely on his eye or, better, as Morgan said, his gut. By its very simplicity it was supposed to make him see.

  What he would see was the cottage. The screenporch, the lake. He’d made it his assignment, as if he were back in grad school. Twenty rolls of black and white, twenty rolls of color. One week of light, weather permitting. At one time that would have been enough to fill him.

  “Does everyone have their shoes on?” Lise asked.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Mom?” Sam asked.

  “What?”

  “Does a Game Boy count as a video game?”

  “Yes,” Lise said.

  “Ella said it doesn’t.”

  “I did not,” Ella said.

  “For this trip it does,” Lise said.

  Sam sighed heavily in protest.

  “Listen,” Lise said, turning around and warning each of them with a finger. “We’re here to visit Grandma, not to play video games. I expect you to be polite and help out. And Sam, I don’t want to hear any more sighing out of you. When someone asks you to do something, you do it. All right?”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Thank you,” Lise said, looking forward again. “That goes for you too, buster.”

  “Aye-aye,” Ken said.

  A farm stand slid by on their right, flocked with minivans. PIES, a handmade sign said. He suspected there might be a shot in it—the cars parked cockeyed, the cut orchids in a white bucket—but couldn’t find it, and he wondered if all vacation spots were the same, numbingly familiar.

  “Are we going to have pie for dessert?” Sam asked.

  “Would you like pie for dessert?” Lise asked.

  “Yes.”

  “There’s another one up here,” Ken said, seizing on her mood.

  “How about we surprise Grandma with a pie?” Lise said. “What kind should we get?”

  “Apple!” Sam volunteered.

  “Ella-bella?” Lise said.

  “I don’t care. Anything but peach.”

  He pulled in behind another 4Runner, this one from Virginia. Ella stayed in the car and read while the three of them split up among the tables. Sam went straight for the pies, ranked in the slots of an old-fashioned high-rise safe, each wrapped in a plastic bag with a twist tie, a slip of paper like a Chinese fortune listing the ingredients. Sam had to stand on his toes. They seemed expensive to Ken, but after the fiasco at the ATM he didn’t want to make an issue of it. His favorite was there, cherry with a lattice crust. Lise had made one for him at Christmas.

  “What’s peck-tin?” Sam asked.

  Ken had to admit he didn’t know. Maybe Mom did. Sam looked the apple pies over before grabbing the biggest one with both hands.

  They found Lise checking out the produce. Pectin was like jelly; it was the stuff that kept pie filling together, like a thickener. “Are you guys all set?”

  He lifted a pint of Grade-A maple syrup to read the price on the bottom.

  “I think it’s called stalling,” she said.

  “I think you would be right.”

  As they waited for the girl to ring up the pie, Lise laid a bouquet of wildflowers on the counter. “For the house.”

  “A peace offering.”

  “It can’t hurt,” she said.

  “We got apple,” Sam announced in the car, holding the pie in his lap.

  “Big whoop,” Ella said, but the mood had shifted and they all laughed at her, poked fun at her gloom.

  “I guess you don’t want a piece,” Lise said.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Mmmm,” Ken said, “pectin!”

  They got going again, a wraith of dust leaping up and then vanishing behind them as they pulled out, as if it had given up chasing them.

  It was only another mile, not enough time to bother asking for a new CD. He’d had five hundred miles to get used to the idea of visiting his mother, but only now, speeding toward her, did it become real, something he would have to deal with, and while he knew he had no choice but to come, he felt tricked and trapped, the past closing around him, thick as humidity. This would be the first time they’d all been together since the funeral.

  He didn’t have time to process his thoughts. The used-book store floated by on their left like a warning (NEW $2 HARDBACK BARN), and the campgrounds with their plywood cutouts of Yogi Bear welcoming RVs, and the Willow Run Golf Club, a failed farm turned into a par three where his father had taught him not only to make contact but the etiquette of the game before he was allowed on the Chautauqua course. Around the bend squatted the Snug Harbor Lounge, a local dive with a portable sign advertising that night’s band, a vintage Firebird for sale gleaming beside it. And then they were spinning alongside the fishery, its complex of square ponds ranked neatly as an ice tray, and from habit he was searching the far edge for herons, stealing glances from the road.

  He would take the Holga over there, he thought, shoot the fish in the pump-house well, dark shapes in the water. The expectation of something to do soothed him, making the sign for Manor Drive less of a shock.

  “Here we are,” he said, and turned in, rolling the 4Runner through the slow curve by habit, the action of his hands practiced.

  How well he knew this place, even the trees—the gnarled crab apple in the Nevilles’ yard with its contortions he and Meg had been sure sprung from some underground evil; the two big oaks that pinched the road, lifted one lip of asphalt like carpet. He knew every cottage and even the big houses now, how each held that family’s unguarded hours, the damp, casual passing of the summer. When they left, those long days would still be here, waiting the winter beneath the snow, the lake beneath its ice like the pike and muskie huddled in the mud, heartbeats slowed to a discrete thump. All the gin-and-tonic card games and chicken-salad sandwiches on the dock would be waiting for them, the arms of the willows swinging in the breeze, but they would not return, and wherever they went next year he would miss this place, would always miss it.

  He realized he was panicking and caught his breath.

  “Are you all right?” Lise asked.

  “I just had this big nostalgia attack all of a sudden.”

  “Think it’s your father, maybe?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Again he was aware of Ella and Sam listening in. They learned more about their parents on one long car trip than all year at home.

  There was the cottage, tucked under the big chestnut, and the mailbox with his mother’s daylilies. They’d brought Arlene’s car. He aimed the 4Runner off to one side, under the chestnut, so they could both get out. The top of the car rattled the branches.

  “The bikes!” Lise cried, and he stood on the brakes and the car stalled, rubbery chestnut pods bonking the roof.

  “Goddammit,” he said, because he’d been careful with them all day, estimating their height from his own, checking the clearance before hitting the ATM and the gas plazas.

  Lise opened her door and stood on the running board.
>
  “What’s it look like?”

  “I think if you back up you’ll be all right.”

  He started the car with a roar.

  “Wait till I get in,” she said.

  He was aware of the anger that made him clench his entire face to maintain control. This was exactly the kind of shit he hated. He hadn’t even wanted to bring the bikes. The kids barely rode them.

  His mother and Aunt Arlene came out of the house, Rufus bounding around them. His mother was laughing, saying something.

  He rolled down his window.

  “Having a little tree trouble, I see,” she said.

  “I just need to back it up. If you could keep Rufus out of the way.”

  She stepped back again, displeased with him not seeing it as a joke. “Go ahead,” she said, “he’s fine.”

  He looked over his shoulder to find Ella frowning, her head down, as if mortified by his driving.

  He eased the clutch up. Branches plucked the spokes, thumped against the roof, then let go with a swish and a sprinkle of leaves.

  “All clear?” he called.

  “All clear,” his mother said, and he turned off the car.

  “All right,” Lise said for the benefit of the kids, “everyone help bring stuff in.”

  They set after the task in a squad, Lise doling out the bags, glad to have something to do, leaving him the job of saying hello to his mother.

  She came toward him, smiling, and from habit he bent down and wrapped his arms about her bony shoulders. He could not say she looked good, since each time he saw her now her scrawniness shocked him. Instead, he gave her a quick hug and asked, too sincerely, “How are you?”

  “A little overwhelmed but hanging in there. How about you?”

  “The same.”