“How’s Nat?” Kate asked as I took a seat beside her.
“She’s okay, I think. Tired.”
“Right,” Diane said with a gentle laugh. “If I’d been in a helicopter crash, I think I’d be pretty tired too.”
“Yes!” Alec said, dropping back into his seat. “The helicopter crash. They tell me you were fleeing the Path!”
“Alec,” Kate said. “Seriously?”
“What? Expressing curiosity about your guests is a virtue, Kate.” Alec turned to me. “Now, what was it like? They were shooting at you and stuff?”
Alec was leaning across the table, his green eyes wide, almost hungry. I looked down at the silverware by my plate. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“That is. So. Awesome.”
“Uh, I don’t think it was for their pilot, Alec.” Diane said.
“Yes!” Alec said. “Sorry. Thoughtless.”
“Obnoxious,” Reese chimed in.
“Ha! Yes, that’s true too. Sorry, Cal. Humble apologies. But that happens in war, right? Noble sacrifices? Dulce et decorum est and all that? The valiant private throws himself in front of a bullet to save the life of the general who will go forth and turn the tide of battle.”
“He wasn’t Army,” I said quietly, pushing at the heavy silver knife. “He was just a pilot.”
“Dinner has arrived!”
Christos came out from the house, bearing a massive plate that was overflowing with slabs of meat. Everyone pushed the debris on the table away so he could set it down. The array of food was mesmerizing — hamburgers and sausages and two-inch-thick steaks that were charred and dripping blood. Reese dashed inside and brought out bowls filled with potato chips, cut fruit, and a green salad studded with garnet-colored berries. A silver tray held a teetering pile of butter-slick corn.
“Gruyère?”
Christos had materialized beside me with a wooden board in his hands. It was covered with six overlapping piles of cheese.
Dumbfounded, I sat there with my mouth hanging open.
“On your burger?” He counted down the piles on the plate. “We have Gruyère, white cheddar, Brie, Havarti, a Danish blue, and… Diane, what is this one?”
Diane looked up from her sketch pad. “Gouda.”
“Gouda! Any preference?”
“Go with the Gruyère!” Alec said. “When in doubt always go with Gruyère!”
“Gruyère it is!” Christos loaded a thick slice onto a bun, along with lettuce and tomato and a half-inch burger. He paused, thought again, and added another slab of meat and three mahogany-colored strips of bacon. “You look like you could stand to put on a little weight.”
Everyone fell to their food. My body, used to canned tuna and desert reeds, was desperate to take in as much as it could. My stomach seemed to be bottomless.
“So are you from Wyoming too?” Diane asked, once most everyone had cleared their plates.
“New York,” I said. “I’m on my way back.”
“Alec!” Diane called. “Did you hear? Cal’s from New York.”
“That’s great!” he said. “I love the Plaza. Do you go to the Plaza?”
“God, you are such a ridiculous snob,” Kate said. “You’re like a New Yorker cartoon.”
“What? It’s a nice place.”
“Yes, it is, but I think what Diane was saying is that Cal here is from—”
Alec slapped the table, rattling the plates. “Hey! I just had an idea. It’s going to be a beautiful night and I think it’s time we got this party moving! Who’s up for a swim?”
“Yes!” Reese agreed, leaping up from the table.
“Aren’t we supposed to wait a half hour or something?” Diane asked.
Alec lifted a scholarly finger into the air. “Society,” he declared, “has convinced us that the universe is a place of rules and regulations when, in fact, it is a… what?”
Alec leaned over Diane, palms planted on the tabletop, a ravenous look in his eye.
“Don’t leave me hanging here, D.”
Diane sighed. “Life is a cabaret.”
“Yes!” Alec shot a fist into the air and led Reese and Christos from the table and down a hill leading away from the house. His voice rose up into the night, loud and off-key.
“Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!”
Kate and Diane rolled their eyes as one and pushed back from the table.
“Come on, Cal,” Kate said. “It’s time to join the cabaret, ol’ chum. You want to get your guitar, Diane? You might be able to drown out Alec’s singing.”
“Maybe we should just drown Alec.”
Diane went back into the house as Kate gathered up some of the trays from the table. She stacked a loaf of bread and the board of cheese awkwardly in my arms and we left the porch, moving across a patch of lush grass that surrounded the house.
“Sorry about Alec,” she said. “I mean, he’s always been a handful, but he’s been unusually intense ever since we got here. I think he flipped out when Daddy Dearest sent him away. Probably thought he was indispensible to the empire or something.”
“What empire?”
“La-La Land? Hollyweird?” Kate laughed when she saw my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take this one step at a time.”
As Kate led me down the hill, I felt like I was moving through a dream. Below the house, there was a shallow valley with a small lake fixed in its center like a jewel. The sun was slipping below the treetops, spreading a rich orange light across the grass and the peaks of ripples out on the water.
Kate led me down to a wood-plank dock that reached out halfway across the water. We set our things down and took a spot at the edge. Kate slipped her sandals off and dangled her feet in the water. At the end of the dock, Alec and Reese were stripping their shirts off and getting ready to dive. Christos was lying stretched out on the deck, his skin almost bronze in the twilight sun.
“One! Two! Three! CANNONBALL!”
Alec and Reese leapt up into the air, tucking their legs in and slamming into the lake. A fountain of water exploded over the dock, soaking us all in icy water.
“Hey!” Kate yelled, laughing. I found myself laughing too, shocked by the water’s chill. Christos didn’t even move; he just closed his eyes and smiled up into the sky. Alec and Reese raced across the lake, their arms slicing into the steely water.
I looked back over my shoulder at the house. From the dock I could see how sprawling it really was. It stretched from one end of the hilltop to the other, a rustic brown expanse, more like a resort or a hotel than a house. The entire property was surrounded by towering pines that blocked out any trace of the world outside. I searched for bomb craters or scorch marks, anything that might suggest that this place existed in the same world I came from, but found nothing. A dreamy vertigo washed over me. For a second it was easy to believe there was nothing in the world but this.
“Camembert?”
“What?”
Kate was holding out a crust of bread with a slice of cheese on it.
“Oh. Thanks. Sure.” I took the bread and sat with it in my hand, too thrown to even eat. “How long have you all been here?”
“Uh… about six weeks now, I think. I don’t know. The days are kinda running together.”
“You haven’t had any problems with the Path?”
Kate bumped her shoulder into mine. “Forget about the Path. Life’s a cabaret, remember?”
“Right. Sorry.”
Kate smiled. “I was just kidding. We haven’t had any problems. We’re pretty well hidden, and besides, Alec’s dad was nice enough to hire a small army to look after us.”
Kate tossed a bit of potato chip into the water, and a duck paddled over to nibble at it. The pier wobbled as Diane returned from the house, her guitar in hand. She sat cross-legged between us and began to tune it. When she was done, she played a song I didn’t recognize. Her British accent disappeared within a lilting melody.