Moonlight on Butternut Lake

by Mary McNear

She came over to the window then, and stood, for a moment, watching the sunset with him. “Did she, did she say what time she was getting here?” she asked.

  “She said she’d be here about”—he glanced at his watch—“fifteen minutes ago. She probably ran into some traffic. I’m sure she would have called if she was going to be much later than this,” he added.

  “Of course,” Lonnie said. “But when you spoke to her, how did she sound?”

  “She sounded tired, but otherwise all right.”

  Lonnie nodded, relieved. “Well, she’ll have plenty of rest once she gets back here, and plenty of good food, too. I’ve been cooking all day.”

  Reid smiled. In Lonnie’s opinion, there were very few problems in the world that couldn’t be solved by a home-cooked meal.

  “Well, I’ll be heading home now,” she said. “Do you want me to turn the lights on in here before I go?” The living room was filling with a faint pink light, its corners retreating into shadows.

  “No, it’s fine,” Reid said. “And Lonnie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For everything you’ve done this summer.”

  “Oh, no need to thank me,” she said, pleased, but at the same time a little flustered, too.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and then she was gone, leaving Reid alone to watch the sun sink a little farther beneath the horizon and to think back over the last week. The morning after Brandon’s death, he woke up alone. Mila, who’d spent most of the night crying in his arms, was already gone. He cursed himself for falling asleep, then got out of bed and dressed hurriedly. When he came into the kitchen, Lonnie was scrambling eggs at the stove, and Mila was sipping coffee at the kitchen table. And he knew, from the subdued atmosphere in the room, that Mila had already given Lonnie a rough outline of what had happened the night before.

  Reid declined Lonnie’s offer of breakfast, then sat down at the table with Mila. When he looked up again, Lonnie had disappeared. That was when Mila—pale and puffy eyed but otherwise calm—had told him that Allie had come over earlier and offered to drive her to Ely and then Duluth that morning. She needed to give a statement to the police in Ely, and, as Brandon’s next of kin—he was, not surprisingly, estranged from his parents—she needed to identify his body at the Duluth coroner’s office and then arrange to have a funeral home transport the body back to Minneapolis. Reid was shocked. It had never occurred to him she would feel any responsibility for Brandon now, but on this point she was adamant. She was equally adamant about renting a car in Duluth afterward and driving back down to the city that night. There, she would make arrangements for Brandon’s burial, pack up their former apartment, and visit her friend, Ms. Thompson, in the hospital.

  Reid had suggested he come with her to do all of this. They could take the van, he’d pointed out, and once they’d gotten to the city they could stay at his condominium. But Mila had politely refused his offer. This was something she needed to do alone, she explained. And Reid had known, from the set of her jaw, that it was useless to argue with her. Still, he’d been relieved when she’d promised to come back to the cabin as soon as possible. In a week, she hoped, or maybe less. So Reid had said good-bye to her and watched Allie’s car pull out of the driveway, and then he’d gone back inside a cabin that, even with Lonnie’s cheerful presence in it, felt utterly empty.

  The next seven days of his life had crawled by. And the nights? The nights were longer than the days, each one of them its own separate eternity. Thanks to Mila and Dr. Immerman, he’d been sleeping again recently, but with Mila gone, his insomnia returned with a vengeance. He tried everything to fill the sleepless hours. Reading, watching television, playing solitaire on his iPad. But nothing he did made the time go by any faster or made the cabin feel any less deserted. How had he ever lived alone all these years? he wondered. But that wasn’t the real question. The real question was, how had he ever lived without Mila?

  Missing someone was new to Reid. So, it turned out, was worrying about someone. But he worried about Mila. He worried about her all week. He worried about her being alone. He worried about her being lonely. He worried about whether she was eating enough, or sleeping enough. And he worried about something happening to her, worried about her becoming ill or, God forbid, getting in a car accident.

  When he wasn’t worrying about her, he was wishing he could be with her. Wishing he could help make her life at least a little easier right now. But as it was, at odd moments of the day or night, he’d imagine her alone in her old apartment, packing away the contents of an unhappy marriage into cardboard boxes, and he’d feel a rush of pity for her. Or he’d picture her meeting with a funeral director, and uncomplainingly choosing a coffin for a man who had very nearly ruined her life, and he’d feel a surge of anger at the unfairness of it all.

  “Reid?” He started as Mila’s voice called to him from the front door. He’d been so deep in thought, he hadn’t heard her drive up to the cabin or let herself into the kitchen.

  “I’m in the living room,” he called, turning on his crutches. He saw her silhouette in the doorway.

  “Why are you in the dark?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, surprised to see that the last of the day’s light had already drained from the room. The sun had set, leaving only a blush of pink on the horizon, and a pale moon was etched above it. He started to come to her, but she was already coming to him, switching on lamps as she did so. He stopped and watched her. She was wearing a very pretty cotton print dress that he didn’t recognize, and her hair was pulled up in a loose twist that managed to look both casual and elegant at the same time. As she came closer to him, he saw, too, that she looked thinner than she had when she’d left, and paler too, and that her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. For all that, though, she looked lovely to him. Lovelier than he ever remembered her looking before.

  “You’re here,” he said, and he reached for her as best he could on his crutches.

  “I’m here,” she agreed, with a tired smile, and as he drew her into his arms and kissed her there was a shyness about her that disarmed him slightly. Still, he was savoring the nearness of her, when he asked, “How was it?”

  “It’s . . . it’s over,” she said, and there was something about the way she said it that told him she didn’t want to talk about it anymore now. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she added, “but I decided to make a last-minute stop.”

  “Where?” he asked, brushing a strand of hair off her face.

  “Well, on the drive up I realized I was still, technically, your home health aide. So I stopped in at the boatyard and told your brother that I was resigning.”

  He smiled. “How’d he take it?”

  “Pretty well,” she said, stepping closer and nuzzling his neck with her lips. “He took it pretty well. What about you, Reid? How’ve you been?” she asked.

  “Um, okay,” Reid said, and her lips on his neck felt so good that he wondered, momentarily, if the dress she was wearing had buttons on it or a zipper. But there was something he needed to do now, before . . . well, before he answered the button/zipper question.

  “I’ve actually been thinking, a lot,” he said, and Mila, sensing his change of direction, stopped kissing his neck and took a step back from him.

  “What have you been thinking about?”

  “About you. About us, actually. About our future, and about where we go from here.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted in amusement. “You’ve never been one for small talk, have you, Reid?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No. Is that a problem?”

  “Not even a little bit of one,” she said, her eyes gentle.

  “Good. Because, as I said, I’ve been thinking, and while I don’t really know how to say this the right way, the romantic way, I mean, I’m going to say it anyway. I want you in my life, Mila. I need you in my life. And I think you need me in your life, too. Or at leas
t I hope you do.” He stopped, unsure of how to continue.

  “Go on,” she said encouragingly.

  “So . . . I want you to come back to Minneapolis with me,” he said. “God knows, I’ve loved being here with you this summer. In this cabin. On this lake. It was like being in our own little world. And part of me wants us to stay here like this, forever, but part of me knows we can’t. I mean, for starters, my brother and his family need their house back. There isn’t even enough room for Wyatt’s Legos in the cabin they’re staying in, let alone enough room for the four of them. But there’s something else, too. We need to start the rest of our lives. And we can’t do it here. Not all of it. I need to get back to work, and for the first time in a long time, I actually want to get back to work. And not just work work, either, as in work for my company. But other work, too. You know, physical therapy, and the other kind of therapy, if I still need it. And you’re going to be applying to nursing school, aren’t you?”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything. He pressed on. “Anyway, what I thought was, if we’re both moving back to Minneapolis, why don’t we do it together. Live together, I mean. I have a condominium there, as you know. It’s not much to look at, really. The building it’s in is nice. It has a gym in it, and a pool. But the condo itself . . .” He shrugged. “It’s a little . . . impersonal, I guess. There’s not much in it. Just some furniture that I rent. I never took the time to decorate it. I didn’t see the point, to be honest. But we can decorate it now, if you like. Buy some house plants, or pillows for the couch or whatever it is people do . . .” He trailed off. Interior design was well outside his area of expertise. “Then again,” he said, “if you really hate my condo, and you might, we can buy something else. A house even, if you think that would make you happy. Something we could both call home.” He stopped. Home. Until recently, home was not a concept he had ever associated with himself.

  He waited now for Mila to say something about the two of them living together, or buying a house together, but when she did say something, it wasn’t about either of those things.

  “You rent your furniture?” she asked, perplexed.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “It just seemed simpler somehow. But we don’t have to keep renting it. We could buy it. Not that same furniture, of course, because it’s all kind of beige and corporate looking. But we could buy different furniture. I’m getting off track, though.” He fought back an unfamiliar nervousness over what he was going to say next. “And, uh, another thing. If you don’t want us to live together—just live together—if you want us to do more than that, we could get married. It’s not something I ever thought I’d do. Not before I met you, anyway. But if it’s important to you, Mila, we’ll do it. We’ll do it right away, if you want us to.”

  And then, realizing how his words must have sounded to her, he stopped abruptly. Had he actually just proposed to her by saying, among other things, It’s not something I thought I’d ever do? Christ, what was wrong with him? He’d had a week to work on that. A week. And that was the best he could do? He studied her expression now, looking for some clue as to how she felt about what he’d said, and he saw her face had colored slightly, probably with embarrassment, though maybe with disappointment.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, quickly. “That wasn’t a great proposal. I’m sorry. I guess I should have planned it better. You know, done something with rose petals. Made a trail out of them, or scattered them around somewhere, or whatever it is people do with them.”

  Mila laughed, surprising him. “I don’t know what people do with rose petals, Reid. But I don’t need them. I need you,” she said, stepping closer to him. “I love you.” Reid leaned down and kissed her then, a long, lingering kiss on the lips, and he felt the rest of what he needed to say to her slipping away. But he couldn’t let it, he decided. It was too important.

  “Mila, one more thing, all right?” he said, pulling away from her. “I know how much you want to be a nurse. And I want you to know that if that’s your dream, it’s my dream, too. If there’s anything I can do—anything—to help you realize it, I’ll do it. The admissions process, the studying, anything I can help you with, I will. I won’t make you go it alone. I mean, obviously, to a point, you’ll have to, but I’ll still be there with you, from beginning to end. Every step of the way.”

  He stopped. There, he’d said it. All of it. Everything he’d been thinking about all week. It was out of his hands. Still, when he tried now to read her expression, he couldn’t. She was doing something with her hair, he saw, loosening it from the knot it was in and then shaking it out so that it came tumbling down to her shoulders. It had gotten longer this summer, and lighter, too, and it’s red and gold highlights shone in the lamplight.

  “I want to talk about this, Reid. All of this. I really do. But I don’t want to talk about it right now,” she said, slipping out of the flats she was wearing and reaching her arms gracefully behind her and unzipping her dress. So it had a zipper, Reid thought. Still, his brain felt a little slow now. A little foggy. “What . . . what are you doing?” he asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” she said, and with a little shimmying movement she worked first her shoulders and then her arms free of her dress.

  “It looks like you’re getting undressed,” he said.

  “Very good,” she said, the now familiar light dancing in her eyes. And in that moment, it struck him that if he could keep that light in her eyes all the time, it would be enough for him. He wouldn’t need to accomplish anything else. She worked her dress down now, over her waist and hips, and then let go of it and let it skim down her legs. It landed around her ankles, and she stepped out of it and gave it a graceful little kick so it wouldn’t be in their way. Her bra and panties, he saw, were a matched set, cream colored, and satiny, with delicate scalloping around the edges. They were just right for her, he decided, unmistakably lovely, but, at the same time, unmistakably modest. And he was glad he’d bought a box of condoms at Butternut Drugs.

  It was sitting on his dresser right now.

  She stepped closer to him, and he caught the faintest scent of the coconut body lotion he had come to love. The contrast of her skin tone—creamy white where her bathing suit had covered her, and pale gold where it had not—was particularly captivating. He swayed toward her on his crutches and imagined he could feel the warmth emanating off her body.

  But he didn’t touch her. Not yet. He couldn’t. He could only stare at her, mesmerized. He felt like a starving man who was being served every single course of a twelve-course meal simultaneously. Where to start. Oh God, where to start. He swallowed and reached out a hand; then, with his finger, he traced a line across her navel, from one hip to the other. She sucked in a little breath when his finger touched her, and as he drew it across her navel, she reached behind her with both hands, as if to unfasten her bra, but she hesitated and changed her mind. She’d lost her nerve, Reid saw. Her striptease was over. But he didn’t mind. He wanted to take off those last two pieces of clothing himself.

  Mila, can I ask you a question?” They were out on the deck, lying on one of the cushioned chaise lounges, their naked bodies wrapped in a sheepskin throw. They’d considered going to one of their bedrooms to make love, but, in the end, the night was so beautiful that they’d decided to come out here instead.

  “A question?” Mila murmured now. Her head was resting on his chest, and she was so blissfully relaxed, and so completely satiated, that she didn’t know if she’d be able to summon the energy to answer a question or not.

  “Yes, a question,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “There’s something I’ve always been curious about.” She lifted her head, fractionally, off his chest and looked at him, then couldn’t help smiling at him. His hair looked wonderfully rumpled after all their lovemaking.

  “Where did you go that first night you were here?” he asked. She frowned, not understanding.

  “When you left the cabin, I mean. It was around midnigh
t, I think, when you went outside. At first I thought you were leaving, for good, but then, about five minutes later, you came back inside.”

  “Oh, that,” Mila said, finding the strength to prop herself up on one elbow. “I threw my wedding ring in the lake.”

  “You did?” He was fascinated.

  “I did,” she said, and now she reached up and tenderly traced the scar that ran across his forehead. “I thought if I couldn’t end my marriage legally, I could at least end it symbolically. So I made a little speech—to myself—and I threw my ring off the end of the dock. And, as far as I know, it’s still there, sitting at the bottom of the lake. Do you think anyone will ever find it?”

  “Not unless they’re looking for it,” he said. “It’s probably under a couple of inches of silt by now.” She nodded, relieved, and put her head back down on his chest. It seemed right to her, somehow, that the ring was there. That it would always be there. And that she and Reid would always be the only two people who knew about it being there. She’d often thought about that ring over the course of the summer, but lying here now, in Reid’s arms, she knew she wouldn’t think about it anymore. And that felt right too.

  They were quiet for a little while then. Mila listened to Reid’s heartbeat and felt the rise and fall of his chest against her cheek, and Reid ran his fingertips up and down her back, from the nape of her neck to the little indentation at the small of her back. His light, caressing touch was relaxing at first, and then, gradually, it became something else, and she stirred in his arms, wanting, and then needing, him again. But Reid had another question for her.

  “How is it possible,” he asked, turning onto his side, so that they were facing each other, “that we waited the whole summer to do this?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, savoring the feel of her skin against his skin and pulling the throw more tightly around them against the cool night air. “But it was worth waiting for, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Of course it was worth waiting for,” he said, kissing her. “But part of me wishes we’d done this your first night here. And every night after that, too. And not just once a night, either, but several times a night.”