“Why was she driving, anyway?” I already half knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it straight from Mom. I was angry at her for treating Grandma the way she had, for leading her to do this.
She sighed again. “She was mad that I’d challenged her independence. She wanted to prove to me that she could drive that old car. I know I shouldn’t have spoken to her the way I did. I was just so frustrated.”
I didn’t say anything.
“After you left, I went back to my room to sort clothes and cool off a little. The next thing I knew, I heard the Taurus starting up. By the time I got outside, she was driving down the drive. And then there was that terrible crash . . .”
Mom’s voice cracked, and I could tell she was crying. I held the phone without speaking while she recovered.
“Anyway, have you called the Jensens yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “I can’t go over there now anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s pouring . . . can’t you see?”
“You can’t hear or see anything in this place,” she said, meaning the emergency room, I guessed. “It’s like a tomb.”
I’m sure she regretted the choice of words. Before she got all emotional again, I broke in. “Don’t worry about me, OK? I’ll be fine on my own till the storm passes over. Just take care of Grandma.”
“Thanks, Adam. You really are a great kid, you know that?”
It was a nice thing to say, but for some reason it didn’t feel like the right time for compliments.
“Bye, Mom,” I said in reply.
The drama of the day was complete when a full-fledged midwestern thunderstorm arrived. Lightning illuminated the dark clouds in surprise bursts, and thunder boomed and echoed so loudly, it sounded as if someone were rolling giant barrels across the sky. I reminded myself that the cabin had stood here unharmed for decades. But for once, being surrounded by tall trees wasn’t comforting. I backed myself up against the fireplace, figuring it had to be the sturdiest thing in the cabin. The power went out, just as I’d expected, and I lost the pleasant chatter of the ball game.
The strange part, though, was that I didn’t feel afraid. Not about the storm. And not about being alone. It had been terrible seeing Grandma’s car smashed against a tree, but even that wasn’t what I was dwelling on. Instead, my thoughts kept turning back to the encounter with Alice. The fancy tennis outfit. The guy across the net.
I hugged my knees to my chest and gazed around at the shadows of chairs and tables and lamps. I felt like the Alice I knew was gone, like she’d disappeared. Maybe this was what Grandma felt like so many years ago when her mysterious G went away. Where did he go? Why did he leave her? I wondered if she felt as empty as I did now.
When the storm ended, I could have called the Jensens. But I didn’t need to. And frankly I didn’t want to. Besides, it was late by then. I turned off the light switches in case the power returned in the night, and went to bed.
MOM MAY HAVE LIKED a fresh-scrubbed cabin — the way a space felt open and shiny after she did her work with the vacuums and mops. But for me, nothing beat the feeling of the world after a storm. The clouds had dumped buckets of water over everything, the wind had scoured and polished, and then the sun emerged to make it dry and welcoming again. That’s how it felt when I woke up and went outside. The wind was still blowing, curling up little whitecaps on the surface of the lake, but the sun was bright enough to set it all sparkling. I stood on the dock, shivering in air that had turned suddenly cool. We were up north, after all, and by the end of summer, we always felt the first hints of autumn in the chilly air that pushed across the border from Canada.
I decided to make pancakes. Back in the cabin, I rifled through the cupboards looking for Grandma’s recipe until I realized that of course she didn’t have one. At least not written down. Luckily, she did have an old cookbook called the Joy of Cooking, and I followed the directions for their basic pancakes. After I’d mixed in the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, milk, egg, and oil, it occurred to me to add my own touch. I squeezed in a ripe banana and stirred in a handful of blueberries. Grandma had never put anything like that in her pancakes.
The burner clicked and clicked before finally lighting, sending a burst of orange and blue flames up under Grandma’s griddle. I waved the gas smell out of the air, then dropped a spoonful of batter on top of the hot metal. One circle. Then another. My very first pancakes. I was tempted to throw them high into the air when it came time for flipping, but I chickened out. Good thing, because even with the spatula they each landed sideways, sending frothy little batter dribbles onto the pan, which cooked faster than the pancakes they were connected to. I started to scrape the thin parts off with my fingernail, but I burned my finger. Then, while I was running my finger under cold water, the pancakes started to burn. This wasn’t going as smoothly as I’d hoped.
I flicked the burnt pancakes onto the counter with a quick turn of the spatula, lowered the heat, and started over. This time the results looked pretty good. When I’d assembled a stack of six pancakes, I turned the burner off and settled down to eat.
Mom called before I was done. “You’re there!” she exclaimed. “I talked to the Jensens this morning, and they said you’d never called. What happened?”
“Nothing happened, Mom,” I said. “I just didn’t feel like going over.”
“Is everything OK?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Did you find some cereal or something?”
“Nah, I made pancakes.” I tried to sound cool about it so she wouldn’t overreact.
“Pancakes? Really? Like Grandma? Oh, Adam . . .”
“How is she?” I interrupted.
“Better. They ended up admitting her to the hospital last night. We’re meeting with her doctor in about an hour, so I’ll find out then how long she’s going to stay.”
“She has to stay?”
“Just for a little while. I spoke to Mr. Jensen, and he’s going to arrange for a tow truck to get her car out of the drive. And Mrs. Jensen offered to pick me up here — maybe around lunchtime. Will you be OK until then? Wait — of course you will.”
Her comment took me by surprise. She’d finally been paying attention, the right kind of attention. I felt like saying thank you, but instead I said, “Is there anything you need me to do around here?”
“That’s nice of you to ask, sweetie. But I think we’ll just figure out our next steps when I get home. Sound good?”
“Sounds fine.”
After breakfast I went out into the woods. The ground was damp in places, but the temperature was perfect for hiking. With jeans and a sweatshirt on, I wasn’t going to get attacked by bugs. The wind was too much for the mosquitoes anyway.
I rambled out the road past Grandma’s car, then cut into the woods to see where I’d end up. Twigs snapped under my feet, and the wind made a ruckus in the treetops. But otherwise it felt as if the voices and noises of the world had dropped away and it was just me and the woods left together. I walked east all the way to the edge of the church camp, then cut across to the bluff above the lake. Walking there gave me the best view — green trees to my left, blue water below. I thought about the mink and wondered if they were down someplace closer to the water, trotting around looking for another meal. I thought about Grandma’s treasure map, wondering where those mysterious lines were meant to be.
When I returned to the cabin, I found Alice sitting on the deck bench, her feet propped up on the wooden table in front of it. She was wearing a red plaid shirt over her jeans and had a black knitted beanie pulled down over the top of her hair.
She looked at me with a steady gaze. “Hi there,” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“My dad’s out there with the tow-truck guys,” she said, gesturing down our drive. “I thought I’d come see how you were doing.”
She waited for me to respond, but I didn’t know what to say. Was she con
cerned about me because of my grandma? Or because of what I’d seen in the park?
“I don’t really feel like talking,” I said.
“Oh.” She slid her shoes off the table as if to leave, then bit her lip. “I’m sorry about your grandmother,” she said. “My mom says it sounds like the kind of thing she ought to recover from pretty well.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see,” I said.
“Listen, about yesterday . . .”
“Never mind about that,” I said.
“It wasn’t my idea, the tennis game,” she said anyway. “The kid I was playing against, Drew, goes to my dad’s school. He’s a delinquent. But my dad bumped into Drew’s family in town the other day and said I’d play tennis with him. I think he thought it would be good for Drew.” She rolled her eyes. “As if.”
So this guy Drew wasn’t her boyfriend. I hated how relieved that made me. “I don’t care who you play tennis with, Alice,” I said to her then.
“Then why are you acting mad?” she asked.
My first reaction was to deny that I was mad, but then I’d be no better than she was. So I said what I really felt. “You lied.”
“Lied? About what?” she asked.
“About what you were doing with your afternoon. About being a tennis star.”
“So I know how to play tennis. It’s no big deal,” she said.
“Then why didn’t you tell me when I asked?”
“Because you made it seem like a big deal. You lumped it together with all those other things, like being popular and being shallow.” She sighed and crossed her arms. “Dude, it’s just a sport.”
She’d never called me “dude” before, and in that moment it rang as falsely as everything else she’d said or done. I’d had enough. I went into the cabin and let the screen door slam behind me. Alice was decent enough not to follow.
MRS. JENSEN BROUGHT my mom home in the middle of the afternoon. Sensitive as always, she left quickly, but not before wrapping me up in an ample hug and telling us to call if there was anything else she could do.
Mom looked older. It was clear she’d hardly slept. Her hair was tousled and unwashed, and she was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing the day before. We walked up the steps to the cabin without saying anything. I expected her to tell me she was going to take a shower, maybe make some coffee, before we sat down to talk. But she didn’t. She put down her purse and took a long look around the cabin. Then without even looking at me, she said, “Let’s go canoeing.”
The wind had quieted since morning, so it wasn’t hard to paddle across the open water. Mom took the bow and let me steer wherever I felt like going. I angled the canoe across the water toward the marsh and the river.
The air was still cool, the sky cloudless and so intensely blue that the world had become a giant turquoise marble with us at its center. After we’d found our way through the marsh and onto the river, I finally broke the silence.
“Is Grandma OK?”
Mom turned around, nodded, and gave me gentle smile. “She’s OK. It wasn’t a concussion and it’s not Alzheimer’s. She had a stroke yesterday.”
“A stroke?” I asked.
Mom stopped paddling so she could talk, and I controlled the canoe just enough to keep us from drifting.
“A small one,” she explained. “We don’t even know if that’s why she hit the tree, or if the stroke came afterward. But we did learn that it wasn’t her first.”
Mom said that the tests showed that Grandma had had a series of small strokes in the past — so small they might cause momentary confusion or even a bit of slurred speech, but not necessarily any lasting symptoms. Still, there was always a risk of a big stroke following one of the small ones, which was why they wanted to keep her in the hospital for one more night.
I thought about the notes Grandma had left in my room and wondered if they were the results of some of those strokes. I felt a fresh wave of guilt about not letting Mom know about them. But hearing about the notes now — and about the mysterious G — wasn’t going to do Mom any good.
“Can they give her something so it doesn’t happen again?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “But we’ll have to monitor her closely with her home doctor.”
“But this is pretty good news, isn’t it?” I asked. “At least we know she can get better.”
My mother shook her head, then ran her hand over her rumpled hair. “She’s still not who she was. I mean, we definitely can’t leave her here alone anymore.”
I stopped paddling. “You’re going to put her into a nursing home?”
Mom pursed her lips. “I don’t know. I have a lot to work out.”
She looked around at the trees leaning in over the river. A kingfisher swooped down from a branch and glided over the water in front of us before returning to its perch.
“Maybe I’ve been unfair to Grandma,” she continued, speaking slower than she usually did. “She’s just so stubborn about things. And she acts so tough. It brings out the stubborn, tough parts of me.”
“Stubborn’s OK,” I said to make her feel better.
“In the right circumstances, I guess,” she said with a little laugh. “Anyway, after spending twenty-four hours in a windowless hospital with Mom — sealed in so tight in that white space we didn’t even know about the thunderstorm . . . and then coming home to the cabin and all this . . . air . . .” She hesitated.
“It’s really OK, Mom,” I said.
She wiped away tears. “This place is so alive, and so much of what keeps her alive. Martin’s been telling me as much for years, and I just didn’t want to see it.” She shook her head. “Gosh, Adam, it’s going to sound crazy to say this. But I think I resented her relationship with this place. I felt sometimes like she loved it more than she loved us!”
I thought about Grandma’s notes and about the parts of her life here that she’d never shared with the rest of us, at least not intentionally. Maybe my mom had good reason to feel a little left out of things. “I know what you mean.”
“Or maybe I’m just being silly,” Mom said, wiping away the remains of her tears and sounding more like herself. “But this place is like part of her family. And I really don’t want to be the one who rips her away from that. It’d be kind of like pulling the plug, you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“So,” she said, “I have some thinking to do. But in the meantime, we should all enjoy these last days here together. When Grandma comes home tomorrow, I want to be sure she gets out as much as she feels up for. Especially after that hospital.”
Mom turned around and we began paddling again, but not in a getting-there sort of way — more like a being-there sort of way. I almost felt as if we were soaking up every sound and sight and smell for Grandma, since she couldn’t be here herself.
My mom pointed out a pair of baby turtles warming themselves on a rock. Their shells were shiny and dark green, seeming as new to the world as the day itself.
“I love this place, too, you know,” my mom said.
“I know,” I said, although I felt it now more than I ever had before.
We talked a little bit then about the details of each of our nights, and I told her about my bold new recipe for pancakes. Mom suggested I try making them for Grandma the first morning she came back, but then we both agreed that the shock of it might just bring on another stroke. Weird as it sounds, that got us both laughing.
It was nice talking to my mom like that, but that wasn’t all I was thinking about. As we traveled, I kept remembering parts of my first canoe trip with Alice — as if the memories were stuck like pushpins to the surrounding terrain. There was the place in the marsh where we’d had to push off the bottom with our paddles, the bend where we’d seen the green heron. When we passed Duck Island, I got lost in a whole mess of memories — about our lunch and Grandma Hattie’s cookies and of course Alice’s crazy webbed toes.
It was funny to be riding behind my mom thinking abo
ut so many things that she didn’t know anything about. For the first time in my life, I had my own stories here. Mom, Dad, Grandma, my aunt and uncles and cousins — none of them had been a part of that trip with Alice, and none of them could see what I saw as we crossed these landmarks. It made me feel good for reasons I couldn’t even have explained. It also made me miss Alice.
Maybe I was stubborn, too — just like my mom and grandma. The more I thought about it, the stupider I felt about the way I’d reacted to seeing Alice play tennis. Maybe I’d blown the whole thing out of proportion. Maybe Alice was right. Was it really a big deal that she played tennis like a jock? Wasn’t Alice still Alice even when she was dressed in country-club whites?
As we approached the dock, I felt like dropping Mom off and going straight to Alice’s house to tell her I was sorry. But Mom asked if I’d mind getting started with dinner while she took a hot shower, and I could hardly tell her no. So I decided I’d just have to wait and visit Alice in the morning, when Mom was busy with other things.
AFTER DINNER, Mom said she was going to make a few phone calls, and I was still in a thinking sort of mood, so I put on my fleece jacket and headed to the dock. The sun had already set, and there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky; it was a perfect time to watch the stars. I brought down a couple of canoe cushions and lay with my head resting on them.
I took in a deep breath, savoring the crisp freshness of the air and wondering if there was a way to store it up for when we were back in suburban Chicago again. Bottled air. It could become the biggest trend since bottled water. But I didn’t really want to sell off any of this; I just wanted to hold on to it for longer.
I sat up and looked to see if maybe Alice had also come down to her dock. But no one was there, and it was growing too dark for a visit across the water anyway.
As I turned back around, I noticed a small dark shape moving toward me on the surface of the water. At first I thought it was a log, but it was too round and traveling with too much control. I realized then that it was an animal, swimming steadily along the shore, creating a V-shaped ripple in the water behind it. It wasn’t a mink — too large for that. And too large for a muskrat. As it swam under the dock, I saw the top of its head above the water: eyes and muzzle and nose. Its dark body, just visible beneath the surface, was impressively large — large enough that I felt a quick rush of adrenaline at its being so close to me, even though of course it had no interest in me. It might not even have known I was there.
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