I hope she was. All these years later, with those old fevers and deliriums long in my past, I still hope she was.
Love leaves scars.
I never produced the books I dreamed of, those well-reviewed almost-bestsellers, but I do make a pretty good living as a writer, and I count my blessings; thousands are not so lucky. I’ve moved steadily up the income ladder to where I am now, working at Commercial Flight, a periodical you’ve probably never heard of.
A year after I took over as editor-in-chief, I found myself back on the UNH campus. I was there to attend a two-day symposium on the future of trade magazines in the twenty-first century. During a break on the second day, I strolled over to Hamilton Smith Hall on a whim and peeked under the basement stairs. The themes, celebrity-studded seating charts, and Albanian artwork were gone. So were the chairs, the sofa, and the standing ashtrays. And yet someone remembered. Scotch-taped to the underside of the stairs, where there had once been a sign proclaiming that the smoking lamp was always lit, I saw a sheet of paper with a single typed line in print so small I had to lean close and stand on tiptoe in order to read it:
Professor Nako now teaches at the Hogwarts Sohool of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Well, why not?
Why the fuck not?
As for Wendy, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I could use Google, that twenty-first century Magic 8-Ball, to chase her down and find out if she ever realized her dream, the one of owning the exclusive little boutique, but to what purpose? Gone is gone. Over is over. And after my stint in Joyland (just down the beach from a town called Heaven’s Bay, let’s not forget that), my broken heart seemed a lot less important. Mike and Annie Ross had a lot to do with that.
My dad and I ended up eating his famous chicken casserole with no third party in attendance, which was probably all right with Timothy Jones; although he tried to hide it out of respect for me, I knew his feelings about Wendy were about the same as mine about Wendy’s friend Renee. At the time, I thought it was because he was a bit jealous of Wendy’s place in my life. Now I think he saw her more clearly than I could. I can’t say for sure; we never talked about it. I’m not sure men know how to talk about women in any meaningful way.
After the meal was eaten and the dishes washed, we sat on the couch, drinking beer, eating popcorn, and watching a movie starring Gene Hackman as a tough cop with a foot fetish. I missed Wendy—probably at that moment listening to the Pippin company sing “Spread a Little Sunshine”—but there are advantages to the two-guy scenario, such as being able to belch and fart without trying to cover it up.
The next day—my last at home—we went for a walk along the disused railroad tracks that passed through the woods behind the house where I grew up. Mom’s hard and fast rule had been that my friends and I had to stay away from those tracks. The last GS&WM freight had passed along them ten years before, and weeds were growing up between the rusty ties, but that made no difference to Mom. She was convinced that if we played there, one last train (call it the Kid-Eating Special) would go bulleting through and turn us all to paste. Only she was the one who got hit by an unscheduled train—metastatic breast cancer at the age of forty-seven. One mean fucking express.
“I’ll miss having you around this summer,” my dad said.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“Oh! Before I forget.” He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a check. “Be sure to open an account and deposit it first thing. Ask them to speed the clearance, if they can.”
I looked at the amount: not the five hundred I’d asked for, but a thousand. “Dad, can you afford this?”
“Yes. Mostly because you held onto your Commons job, and that saved me having to try and make up the difference. Think of it as a bonus.”
I kissed his cheek, which was scratchy. He hadn’t shaved that morning. “Thanks.”
“Kid, you’re more welcome than you know.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes matter-of-factly, without embarrassment. “Sorry about the waterworks. It’s hard when your kids go away. Someday you’ll find that out for yourself, but hopefully you’ll have a good woman to keep you company after they’re gone.”
I thought of Mrs. Shoplaw saying Kids are such a risk. “Dad, are you going to be okay?”
He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and gave me a grin, sunny and unforced. “Call me once in a while, and I will be. Also, don’t let them put you to work climbing all over one of their damned roller coasters.”
That actually sounded sort of exciting, but I told him I wouldn’t.
“And—” But I never heard what he meant to say next, advice or admonition. He pointed. “Will you look at that!”
Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she’d have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn’t in years.
I gave my father a quick, fierce hug. “I love you, Dad.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
When I looked back, the deer was gone. A day later, so was I.
When I got back to the big gray house at the end of Main Street in Heavens Bay, the sign made of shells had been taken down and put in storage, because Mrs. Shoplaw had a full house for the summer. I blessed Lane Hardy for telling me to nail down a place to live. Joyland’s summer troops had arrived, and every rooming house in town was full.
I shared the second floor with Tina Ackerley, the librarian. Mrs. Shoplaw had rented the accommodations on the third floor to a willowy redheaded art major named Erin Cook and a stocky undergrad from Rutgers named Tom Kennedy. Erin, who had taken photography courses both in high school and at Bard, had been hired as a Hollywood Girl. As for Tom and me…
“Happy Helpers,” he said. “General employment, in other words. That’s what that guy Fred Dean checked on my application. You?”
“The same,” I said. “I think it means we’re janitors.”
“I doubt it.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because we’re white,” he said, and although we did our share of clean-up chores, he turned out to be largely correct. The custodial crew—twenty men and over thirty women who dressed in coveralls with Howie the Happy Hound patches sewn on the breast pockets—were all Haitians and Dominicans, and almost surely undocumented. They lived in their own little village ten miles inland and were shuttled back and forth in a pair of retired school buses. Tom and I were making four dollars an hour; Erin a little more. God knows what the cleaners were making. They were exploited, of course, and saying that there were undocumented workers all over the south who had it far worse doesn’t excuse it, nor does pointing out that it was forty years ago. Although there was this: they never had to put on the fur. Neither did Erin.
Tom and I did.
On the night before our first day at work, the three of us were sitting in the parlor of Maison Shoplaw, getting to know each other and speculating on the summer ahead. As we talked, the moon rose over the Atlantic, as calmly beautiful as the doe my father and I had seen standing on the old railroad tracks.