Last Summer

by Holly Chamberlin

  In front of the toasted couple there was a young family. There was a mom, a dad, a toddler in a bright blue bathing suit, and a baby wearing an enormous sun hat, propped up well under the family’s umbrella. The mom and dad seemed to be really enjoying their day at the beach. They laughed a lot and the dad had already kissed the mom on the cheek twice since Rosie and Meg had arrived. Meg frowned. Like that would ever have been her family.

  Not far from the family, two middle-aged men were camped out with chairs, a cooler, and a big wicker picnic basket. Meg squinted. There was something familiar about them. She thought that she knew them from somewhere ... And then it hit her. She didn’t really know the men, but she had seen them in Ogunquit and Yorktide a few times. She thought they might be a couple. She remembered once ... Meg winced. She had been with her father for some reason, shopping in Hannaford. Maybe her mom had been sick. Anyway, those two men were ahead of them in the soup aisle. She remembered her father poking her with his bony elbow. “Look,” he’d hissed loudly. And then he’d pointed at the two men and said something too awful for Meg to repeat to herself, even silently. One of the men must have heard Mr. Giroux because he had turned around and frowned at them. She had been so embarrassed she thought she would die right there by the canned soups. Hopefully, she had changed enough in the three or four years since then that neither of the men would recognize her. She didn’t know if she would have the nerve to apologize on behalf of her idiot father.

  Meg deliberately looked away from the men and was mercifully distracted by a new group of sun worshippers who were beginning to unload their beach gear not far from where Meg and Rosie were planted. There were three girls about eighteen or nineteen, none of whom Meg recognized. Probably on vacation, Meg thought idly. Maybe up from Massachusetts or New Hampshire for the day. The tallest one, the one with long blondish hair, began to take off her cover-up, and Meg silently gasped. The girl was wearing a skimpy neon yellow two-piece. If I looked like that, Meg thought, I would die before wearing that out in public. What was she thinking! That girl so didn’t have the body for that bathing suit!

  Meg reached across to Rosie and tapped her arm. “Look over there,” she said softly. “Those three girls. Can you believe the tall one is wearing that bikini! She’s way too fat for it. She’s enormous. She’s like, Fatty McFatster. Ugh.”

  Rosie snatched her arm away. “You shouldn’t make fun of people, ever!” she hissed. “You, of all people, should know that!”

  Meg cringed. “Okay, you’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. Really. I don’t know why I said that. It was stupid.”

  “Yeah. It was.”

  “At least I didn’t say it to her face.”

  “The point is that you said it,” Rosie argued. “Everyone has critical thoughts sometimes, but you’re not supposed to say them aloud, to anyone. It’s cruel.”

  Rosie was right, Meg thought with a sigh. And here I was condemning my father for being cruel. She glanced again at the tall girl. Actually, she really didn’t look so bad in that bikini. And she seemed to be having a good time, laughing with her friends. Meg wondered. Maybe she had reacted so meanly and so critically because she was always complaining about her own body. How often had she called herself Thunder Thighs? Making fun of that girl, Meg realized, was a way to make me feel better about myself. A really stupid way. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her father had insulted those men in the grocery store simply because they were better dressed and in far better physical condition than he was. And, oh. They had all their teeth.

  Meg gathered her courage and looked over to Rosie. “Are you always going to be kind of mad at me?” she asked.

  Rosie sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”

  “Oh.” It wasn’t the answer Meg wanted or expected to hear. She was glad she was wearing the dorky clip-on sunglasses because that way Rosie couldn’t see the tears stinging her eyes.

  “I mean, I hope not, but I guess I can’t promise anything yet.”

  “Okay,” Meg said. “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  Meg managed a smile. “Yeah. I think I do.”

  “Anyway,” Rosie said, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I’m sorry. Maybe I overreacted.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I mean, to be honest, I was just looking at those people over there, the ones in the fancy chairs, and thinking about how bad they looked, all leathery and wrinkled. They kind of look like lizards. No offense to lizards.”

  “I was thinking the same thing!”

  Rosie smiled. “I guess neither of us is perfect.”

  Rosie picked up her book, some huge, hardcover novel, and seemed instantly engrossed. Meg, pretending to be interested in the latest issue of Elle, let her mind wander.

  Her mother had warned her there might be bumps in the road to a complete reconciliation with Rosie. She had told her that if she really wanted the friendship, she would have to be patient and let Rosie forgive fully on her own schedule, whatever that might be. You couldn’t compel a person to get over her pain. You could only hope for it. And maybe pray for it.

  Meg watched a father and his daughter, maybe about nine or ten years old, walking down to the water. The father laughed at something his daughter said and put his arm around her shoulder. Meg thought of her own father. She wondered—again—if he cared at all about her. And then she wondered when she would stop caring what he felt or didn’t feel. She wondered if he would ever apologize to her for being a lousy dad, for never taking her to the beach, for forgetting her birthday year after year. And if he did apologize, she wondered if she would be able to forgive him and mean it. At that point in her life, she wasn’t at all sure that she could.

  Meg sighed. She was really beginning to understand what her mother meant about reconciliation being hard. Even when you really wanted to forgive and forget, you sometimes just couldn’t, not right away.

  Meg mindlessly flipped to a new page of the magazine. At church the Sunday before, Father William had talked about compassion. On some days Meg found her mind wandering during the sermon, but this time, she had paid close attention. Father William said that to be compassionate toward a person was to think about him as someone independent of your feelings about him. It was to realize that his reality was separate from what you in your reality thought him to be. The priest’s words had struck Meg, especially when he had said that being compassionate wasn’t about being cowardly or about being naïve. It was about being fearless and powerful and about using your imagination. That last part had really intrigued Meg. Imagination. So it wasn’t just something you used in writing or art class. Imagination was a tool you could use in the real world to understand differences and to mend rifts between people.

  Meg glanced across at her friend. She wished Rosie could use her imagination and put herself in Meg’s shoes for a moment. It might help her to understand why Meg had acted the way she had, why she had turned on her best friend. But Rosie didn’t seem to want to do that. Or maybe she wasn’t able to do that. Not yet, anyway. And Meg had no real idea what Dr. Lowe was telling—well, advising—Rosie to do as far as her friendship with Meg was concerned. For all Meg knew, Dr. Lowe was advising Rosie to stay far, far away from her.

  Rosie’s voice brought Meg back to the moment. “Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, closing the huge novel around a bookmark with the picture of a yellow Lab puppy printed on it.

  “Oh, nothing much,” Meg lied. “Except that maybe it’s time for ice cream.”

  “In your world, it’s always time for dessert.”

  “I know.”

  “But I wonder if they sell Fudgsicles up at Fancy That. I could definitely go for a Fudgsicle.”

  Meg smiled and got to her feet. “That would be awesome. I’ll go and find out.”

  35

  Frannie sat at her desk in her cubicle at Le Roi Lumber and Homes. She might as well have been at the zoo or at home in bed, she thought, for all the attention she wa
s paying to the numbers on the computer screen before her. The surface of her desk was cluttered with loose papers, thick file folders, and the usual paraphernalia of an office desk—stapler, tape dispenser, an old green mug that held pencils and pens. To the right of her computer sat a framed photo of Meg and Petey taken by Mike Patterson at last year’s Christmas by the Sea event in Ogunquit. Or maybe it had been taken the year before. Lately, Frannie couldn’t remember such trivia. Next to that photo sat the small box Petey had made her earlier that summer at day camp. Paper clips probably didn’t count as treasures, but they were as close as she could come. Petey’s last class picture was in a small frame on the other side of the box. She knew for sure it was last year’s picture because the date was printed across the bottom. Reminders like that were helpful to an aging and stressed-out mind.

  All day Frannie had been thinking about Jane’s small favor, which had seemed genuinely given, and then about the appalling news Jane had blurted just after giving her the quarters. Poor Rosie. To have suffered a bout with cutting seemed too awful to even contemplate. All afternoon memories of Rosie as a little girl had bombarded Frannie, so vivid that they had actually caused her to wince. Rosie with her two bright blond braids and old-fashioned pinafore dresses. Rosie clutching her rag doll and watching as Meg climbed halfway up a pine tree in the Giroux backyard. Rosie on her last birthday, when Meg had given her that heart-shaped rose quartz pendant. She had been so happy and cheerful that day. She had been so innocent.

  Frannie absentmindedly fiddled with a stray paper clip. Jane had seemed almost stunned after telling her about the cutting. Frannie hadn’t been able to see her eyes behind her dark sunglasses, but she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Jane had been working furiously to hold back tears.

  She wondered if Meg knew about Rosie’s cutting, but it was certainly not her place to tell. Besides, she would rather that Meg not know that awful detail of Rosie’s experience. She suspected that knowing her friend had resorted to self-harming behavior would only make Meg feel even guiltier than she already did. And that would negatively affect the girls’ friendship. And so far, that renewed friendship seemed like a good thing. At least, Frannie hadn’t heard about any major explosions between them, and Meg hadn’t been stomping around the house or hiding in her room crying.

  Abandoning the paper clip, Frannie picked up a pencil and idly tapped it against the edge of the desk. She strongly suspected that Jane was having a harder time recovering from the events of the past months than Rosie was, and in a way, that wasn’t surprising. Rosie might be what Peter would sarcastically call a delicate flower, but she was resilient in a way that Jane, over the course of the years, had proved not to be. Like that time when one of Jane’s clients, a woman everyone in town knew was unhinged, had threatened to sue Jane over some bogus mix-up involving a pair of capri pants. There was no possible way that Wacko Millie Murphy had had a real case, and Mike had dealt quickly and efficiently with the situation, but the minor bump in the road had left Jane literally prostrate for days. Frannie couldn’t help but imagine what would have happened if she had reacted so hugely to a minor crisis. She could hear her mother’s voice in her head, telling her to “Snap out of it!” and her father’s voice telling her to “Stop dwelling on your own problems and pay attention to the problems of other people!” And what would Peter say? Something to the effect of, “Jeez, Fran, get a freakin’ life.”

  It didn’t take much imagination to relate Jane’s fragile nature (Frannie knew that an unkind person would say her overly dramatic nature) to her being an overprotective mother, especially once it became clear that Rosie was going to be Jane’s only child. And, in Frannie’s opinion, since then Jane had relied far too heavily on Rosie as her companion. Disturbingly, Peter shared her opinion. In his words, Jane had stifled her daughter. Well, Frannie thought, every once in a blue moon even the dumbest person was right about something.

  On the matter of Peter, she had gotten a call from him that morning before she had left for work. He had asked for money. Again. Just a loan, he said. Just for a week or maybe two. Frannie had become so bored with this ridiculous routine. Most times she couldn’t even bother to get mad at him. He was always going to ask for money and she was always going to say no.

  She couldn’t even wish him married to someone with deep pockets because to wish Peter on another woman was to betray her own sex. Besides, being married to another woman probably wouldn’t stop Peter from appealing to his ex-wife for funds. Peter was not at all acquainted with the notion of shame, let alone that of propriety.

  Frannie was distracted from her musings by a peal of feminine laughter from across the room. Marlene Gervais. She always seemed to be laughing or smiling. Frannie might have found it annoying if Marlene had been faking her sunny nature. Well, if she was faking it, she was a consummate actress. And it wasn’t as if she had such an easy life. She, too, was a single parent and her son had some form of autism. She and her two kids—the other was a girl—lived with Marlene’s mother, and everyone knew that Marlene’s meager salary supported the entire household. Still, Marlene seemed to find joy in her life. Frannie wanted to dislike her colleague but just couldn’t. What she could do was to be a little bit jealous of her ability to see the glass as half-full.

  Frannie stared at the columns of figures on the computer screen. At the moment, they made little if any sense; no more sense, she thought, than what had become of her life. How, she wondered, had her life become so—so small and joyless? She had been a relatively happy child. Her teen years had lacked a lot of the trauma some of her friends had experienced. Maybe that was due to having such strict parents. Acting out had been unthinkable. Even the years of her lousy marriage hadn’t been entirely terrible because she had met Jane Patterson and that had made up for a lot of what was lacking in her home life. Now she didn’t even have a friend with whom she could celebrate the negative results of her mammogram.

  I’m not exaggerating my isolation, Frannie told herself, as if to be sure that it was true. There was nothing in her life in which she took real pleasure. Nothing. The last time she had tried to do something just for herself was when she had joined Jane’s book group. But what with her job and the two kids and the house and yard work, she just hadn’t been able to keep up with the reading. She supposed she could have gone to the gatherings anyway and sipped wine and nibbled cheese and listened to the other women debate plot development and character motivation, but that had seemed kind of dishonest so she had dropped out of the group. Jane had been disappointed and had tried to argue her out of leaving, but in the end she had given up and accepted Frannie’s decision.

  Frannie squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them wide. The numbers on the screen were still meaningless. She wondered if she should talk to Father William about getting involved in one of the church’s social societies. She would simply have to make the time to “have fun.” Sister Pauline was nice, and she had a degree in counseling. Maybe she could give her some advice about how to jump-start her life. Maybe. Or maybe, Frannie thought, sitting up straight in her seat, she should just stop bitching and moaning, and learn to accept that this was her life and that’s all there was to it. Deal. Life’s tough, get a helmet. How many times had her father said that to her as she was growing up? Many, many times. No wonder she had never set her sights very high. She had been discouraged from the first, taught to keep her head down and her complaints to herself.

  Frannie firmly pushed away the trace of self-pity that was attempting to make a comeback and looked hard at the screen of her computer.

  “Frannie!”

  Her boss’s booming voice made her jump in her chair, which made her realize just how flimsy and non-ergonomic the chair was. So much for his promise to get her a new one. Not that she had really believed him. Trip King wasn’t known to be a man of his word. Like, for last year’s office Christmas party he had promised a platter of shrimp. Of course, there was no platter of shrimp, only a plastic plate on
which sat crumbling cubes of processed cheese food and a pile of store-brand crackers.

  “Yes, Mr. King?” she said, plastering a smile on her face.

  “Do you have those new budget figures for me?” he asked.

  “Done in ten minutes,” she said, trying not to notice the food stains dribbled down his tie. The man did not know how to use a napkin. His dry-cleaning bill, she thought, must be astronomical. Unless he made his poor wife hand-wash his ties. She wouldn’t put it past him. And what was up with that name anyway? Trip. More like Drip.

  “Nine would be better,” he said, turning and walking off in the direction of his office.

  Frannie turned back to her computer. The columns of numbers on the screen now made sense. As her parents had repeatedly told her, the devil found work for idle hands and a wandering mind didn’t pay the bills.

  36

  Dear Diary

  Thursday, I think

  I had to cut again.

  Diary

  Another day

  Still here. I don’t know why. I’m not worth anything to anybody.

  I heard somewhere once, maybe in a book or on TV, that some people can will themselves to die. I wish I could remember more, like who those people are and how they do it. But I think maybe they’re special, like shamans, or mediums, people who communicate with the spirit world, and that’s why they can will themselves to die when they know their life here is over. And I think they probably believe that they’re going somewhere else even better than Earth and the human world.