Then Ruth nudges ABC with an oar.
“Wake up,” she says.
ABC wakes slowly, pushing herself up in a kind of slow-motion stretch. Her face is damp. She begins to shiver.
“ABC, push me out to sea.”
ABC groggily stands up. “Ruth!” she says. “What are you doing?”
ABC sits back down. Her eyes are closing.
“I am doing what you were going to do,” Ruth says.
ABC opens her eyes, stands again. She tries to get Ruth out of the boat. “You are gonna freeze to death.”
She is too groggy and weak from the pills.
“Exactly,” Ruth says. “Or maybe drown.”
“Ruth,” ABC says.
“I’ve been seeing fireflies all summer and they’ve given me a way out of life. They were not meant to give you a way out.”
She looks out to the lake and there are dozens of fireflies just over the water. ABC knows enough about Lake Superior to know that one doesn’t usually see that. The fireflies do not hover in blinking clusters above the open water—it is too cold and windy here. But hundreds of them blink in a weird straight line, like they are lining a path into the open water, like they are reproducing and multiplying in midair.
“See?” Ruth says. “That’s for me.”
ABC looks around the beach to see if anyone is awake, but there is no stirring anywhere. For a moment, it is as if she has heard the sound of a man singing, but she has not.
“ABC,” Ruth says. “You had the right idea, but your timing is off. It’s my time to go.”
“Jesus, Ruth.”
“Look, I’ve already taken sleeping pills. I won’t be awake for any of it. And look, I brought whiskey and morphine. Hurry. Don’t keep me here. I’ll be in worse shape than I am in now. The lake, that’s where I want to end my days, nowhere else.”
She laughs then and smiles up at ABC in a way that radiates the now obscured beauty of her youth.
“ABC,” she says, “you have to live your fucking life. It’s not over.”
ABC puts her sneaker on the edge of the canoe, standing behind Ruth, and pushes the canoe down the rocky beach a foot or two, closer to the water.
“That’s right,” Ruth says.
“Ruth,” ABC says, but she pushes the canoe farther with her foot. Her hands are in her pockets because it is cold, and she feels nauseated from the pills and the alcohol. She also keeps her hands in her pockets because it feels less real if she does not touch the boat with her hands. It might be considered a dream that way.
The wind has picked up out of the west and so the relatively still lake is blowing in ripples away from the shore.
“No,” ABC says. She starts to try to get Ruth out of the canoe.
“ABC,” Ruth says, “you know the right thing to do.”
ABC shakes her head no. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“Don’t be a coward. You get this. You understand this. It’s what you wanted, but you know now you did not want it at all.”
ABC nudges Ruth toward the lake once more, the metal canoe making a gritty sliding sound on the rocks that hurts her teeth.
“Good,” Ruth says. “Quickly now, before you wake everybody up. Before you think too much more.”
ABC is shivering now. It seems suddenly to plunge from chilly to frigid, the wind, the mist off the waves. Ruth doesn’t tremble at all, and ABC leans in and kisses her on the cheek.
Then ABC gives her one hearty push, this time with her hands, and soon the boat is drifting out into the lake. “Just live your fucking lives,” Ruth says, and then ABC smiles because she knows she will remember that, the unexpected parting words she can share with everyone, if she is able to tell them what happened. Maybe she’ll play dumb. Maybe she’ll pretend to be as shocked as everyone else.
And Ruth?
She is almost surprised but not surprised, not really, when ABC, a loyal, helpful friend in the truest sense of true, does shove her out on the lake. Ruth lies down in the canoe then so ABC cannot see her and says her last words, lacking in profundity but certainly memorable. She hopes ABC can only see the canoe from the shore. It will be easier if she says she saw nothing but a canoe. Just a boat on the water in the dark, drifting down a path lit by firefly light.
Another meteor streaks across the sky when Ruth looks up, and then another. She hopes ABC has seen it. And then some fireflies light up the grim darkness just above the canoe and then go dark and do not blink again. Now all Ruth can see is the stars, all she can feel is the cold and the swell of the undulating waves.
She knows that ABC will stay out by the fire, watching the canoe until it disappears.
How could she not? And Ruth seems to see everything then, what will happen in the moments and hours and days and years ahead on the shore behind her. Don and Claire will come running down from the river path, screaming their way toward the beach, though the bear will have long since lost interest and, as it turns out, is not behind them. Charlie, already woken up by the phone call about his father, will hear this screaming and be shaken from his weeping and he’ll come out onto the beach to find a shouting, sweating Don and a hysterically laughing Claire, this long married couple buzzing with adrenaline, half-insane with it. Charlie will ask them what is the matter, what is happening, and when they finally stop laughing and swearing, they will all finally notice ABC, crying by the fire, and they will go to her, and sit on either side of her, and ask what is wrong.
And ABC will pull out her flashlight and shine it onto the water, where a swarm of fireflies will be moving again, in a long, speckled beam of light pointed due north, and Charlie will say, “Jesus, look at that, what do you suppose that is?” and Claire will say, “Fireflies?” and Don will say the reflection of a meteor, and ABC will say, “Yes, it’s all of those things; also, that’s Ruth.”
Ruth begins to shiver with cold or happiness and she is not sure which it is, but it feels like the latter. She is not sure what any of them will say. Maybe they’ll finally be quiet. That will be a good start. How much of the story will ABC tell and how much of it will she keep to herself? And if she tells the story exactly as it happened, they’ll have to come up with next steps. Whom will they call? How will they tell the story of the summer? And will they call for help right away, or wait until morning? Will they call 911? The Coast Guard? Would they call Ruth’s estranged kids or her nieces and nephews in Davenport who want her money, or will they call Mendez, her lawyer back in Grinnell, who will be trying to reach Charlie about the estate of Gill Gulliver, whom Ruth, at that moment, somehow, suddenly, knows is dead.
A cloud drifts up past the moon and the stars grow dimmer. She’s long since stopped seeing the meteors above her, and the fireflies have also gone dim, have blown off into the wind like small clouds of ash. On her knees now, she prepares to collapse into the lap of the waves, the unseeable, unsayable truths beneath them.
There will be logistics. Ruth knows this. She thinks of the foursome gathered on the shore. She can almost feel them looking out at the water, paralyzed by what has just occurred. What will they do next?
She doesn’t know, but she does know, with some certainty, one simple truth: they’ll find some way through. They’ll figure it out.
This is, more or less, true of everybody.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship that facilitated the early drafting of this novel, as well as the Mark Gates Memorial Foundation for Wayward Writers. I’m grateful to the incredibly supportive administration, bright colleagues, and wonderful students I have at Grinnell College as well as the inspiring, warm community I find each winter teaching in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, especially Ellen Bryant Voigt, Charles Baxter, Maurice Manning, Alix Ohlin, Megan Staffel, James Longenbach, and Stacey D’Erasmo, whose lectures and readings directly influenced this novel.
Big love to my family, especially my kids, Lydia and Amos, artists and storytellers both, for the sustaining
joy, patience, humor, and beauty that help me through each day.
Many individuals contributed to the writing of this book with their friendship, creative influence, or both: Christina Campbell, Ralph Savarese, Kim Steele, Coleman, William Jasper, Lee Boudreaux, Ryan Willard, Tina and Caleb Elfenbien, Tim and Jennifer Dobe, Lee Running, Jeremy Chen, Amy Martin, Michael Perry, Natalie Bakopoulos, Justin Vernon, Mere Martinez, Benjamin Percy, Brian Bartels, Marta Rose, Daleth Hall, Patrick Somerville, Emma Borges-Scott, Steve Myck, Steve Pett, David Wells (and the Terry Family Foundation), and Bridget McCarthy. And extra big thanks to Becky Saletan.
Thanks to the Parkington Sisters—Ariel, Sarah, and Rose—whose music, beauty, and wit lit up a dark night of the soul in Iowa City when I needed it most.
The line “Why is it all so difficult?” on page 44 is inspired by Stephen Dobyns’ poem “How To Like It.”
The conversation between Don and Claire on page 318 is influenced by a line in Charles Bukowksi’s Post Office: “This kind of life like everybody else’s kind of life: it’s killing us.”
I’d especially like to thank everyone at Ecco Books, including Daniel Halpern, Sonya Cheuse, and Eleanor Kriseman, and, especially my editor, Megan Lynch, as clear-eyed, patient, and bright as they come. When she showed up, so did the light. And finally, deepest gratitude to my agent Amy Williams, an unflappable, hard-nosed, full-hearted, deal-making, and life-changing pal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DEAN BAKOPOULOS is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon and My American Unhappiness. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and is the winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He is the writer-in-residence at Grinnell College, and lives in Iowa.
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ALSO BY DEAN BAKOPOULOS
Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon
My American Unhappiness
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY SARA WOOD
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY JOHN LUND/NEVADA WIER/AGEFOTOSTOCK
COPYRIGHT
SUMMERLONG. Copyright © 2015 by Dean Bakopoulos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-232116-9
EPub Edition June 2015 ISBN 9780062321183
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