“I’ll take care of it.”
Alone, she sat down to organize her notes into a cohesive report. She glanced over when the cat padded in, with Summerset behind him.
“Working,” she said briefly, then frowned when he set a plate with an enormous chocolate chip cookie on her desk. “What’s this?”
“A cookie, as any fool could see. It’ll spoil your dinner, but…” He shrugged, started out. He paused at the door without turning around. “He was a hero at a time when the world desperately needed them. He would be dead before the night was over if you’d taken him in. I want you to know that. To know you saved a life today.”
She sat back, staring at the empty doorway, when he’d left her. Then she scanned her notes, the report on screen, the photographs of the dead. They were the lost, weren’t they? All those lives taken. Maybe, in a way that nudged up against that line between right and wrong, she was standing for the lost.
She had to hope so.
Breaking off a hunk of cookie, she got back to work.
The Dog Days of Laurie Summer by Patricia Gaffney
For Jolene,
who’s always allowed
on the furniture
Before
I have a strange story to tell.
Too bad there’s no one to tell it to. No real way to tell it, and by now, no compelling reason to, either. Still. I feel the need to get it off my chest. Already it’s beginning to blur at the edges, fray in my mind like a dream in the morning. If I’m going to tell it at all, I’d better tell it quickly.
That’s what I’ll do, then: I’ll tell the story to myself.
Where to begin? With my childhood? When I married Sam and we had Benny? When I landed the broker job at Shanahan & Lewis? But those were all normal stages, unremarkable. They followed acceptable patterns; they were to be expected.
Better to begin when things started to go off track. Faster, more interesting. Well, that’s easy-that would be the day I drowned. The first time.
Such a nice day, too. Early June, late afternoon, our first full weekend at Sam’s cabin on the river. Our cabin, but I thought of it as Sam’s-he was the one who’d found it, dreamed of restoring it, and generally yearned for it, until I surprised him on his thirty-eighth birthday and bought it for him. Us. It needed an enormous amount of work, but it was habitable, barely, and even though it wasn’t my idea of paradise, I had to admit it did look charming that afternoon, with the windows blazing orange, the low sun casting tree shadows on the rough planks and the dirty white chinking. We were watching it from aluminum lawn chairs in the fast-m oving shallows of the Shenandoah, Benny sprawled across my lap, half asleep after the long day. “To you,” I toasted Sam with a last sip of wine. “To your project for the next ten or twenty years.”
“To us,” Sam toasted back with his beer, and I hoped that didn’t mean he thought I was going to help with the renovation. I liked the idea of him and Benny spending weekends here being handymen together while Mom stayed in town and did her job. Which was to bring home the bacon.
Sam had looked handsome the night before in his magic-act tuxedo, but he looked even better now in faded cutoffs and a holey tee. Mmm, all that tan skin and soft blond hair. I was looking forward to later, after we put Benny to bed. Our first time in the new cabin.
“But mostly to you, Laurie,” he said, “for being brilliant.”
“Thank you,” I said with mock modesty. Mock, yes. Last night I’d received the Shanahan & Lewis Mega Deal Maker of the Year award, and this morning Ronnie Lewis had promoted me to senior portfolio manager. You could say I was riding high. You could say I was proud of myself-except, of course, pride goeth before a fall, and what happened next just makes that too ridiculously literal.
Full of myself, then. I was pret-ty damn full of myself.
“Looks like somebody’s ready for bed.”
I thought Sam meant me and he’d been reading my mind, a skill he only pretends to have in his magic act. But then Benny squirmed on my lap and muttered that he wasn’t sleepy. “Mom,” he said clearly, out of the blue, “can we get a dog?”
Does that mean anything? Or my refusal-does that mean anything? I said, “No, honey, we can’t,” without hesitation, because it was completely out of the question. No way could we get a dog; we were all too busy, and besides, I had allergies.
But now I wonder. It was the last thing my sweet, five-year-old son asked me.
Then again, the last thing Sam asked me was to bring in my chair, and I didn’t come back as a chaise longue.
My cell phone rang.
“Don’t answer.”
I checked the screen. “I have to. It’s Ronnie.”
Sam made a face, one I’d seen (and ignored) many times before, and started to get up, stretching his long arms over his head, splashing his bare feet in the water. “Okay, pal,” he told Benny, and they reached for each other. He stuck his folded chair under one arm, hitched Benny onto his hip with the other. “What’s this? You’re drinking now?” With both arms full, somehow he’d plucked his empty beer can from behind Benny’s ear.
And Benny snickered obligingly, always glad to be the dupe. Daddy’s best audience.
“Hi, Ron,” I said at the same time Sam said to me, for a joke, “Don’t forget your chair.” I smiled, watching him pick his way through the rippling, ankle-deep river toward shore. Then Ron mentioned the new Potomac Aerie development and I stopped watching. That was my last look at my family: Sam setting Benny down on terra firma and letting him run ahead, up the weedy path to the cabin. I got caught up in a preliminary design meeting coming up, the feasibility study, finance and development applications.
Something else I wish I could go back and redo.
Ron’s a talker; our conversation went on for a good fifteen minutes. More or less-it’s about now that things begin to blur. I remember deciding not to bother putting on my water sandals to make the twenty-yard trek to the riverbank. I remember standing up and folding my chair. I must’ve had my sandals, empty wineglass, and cell phone in one hand, chair in the other. Why didn’t I put the phone in my pocket? My lifeline, my keystone, my-words fail me. The beating heart of my professional life. Why didn’t I put it in my pocket?
I didn’t, and it flipped out of my hand like a live fish.
I guess I lunged for it. Don’t remember, but that’s what I would have done. I probably threw everything else up in the air first, shoes, chair, glass. Who knows? If I’d been carrying Benny, I might’ve thrown him up in the air, too.
Okay, no.
I have one last tactile memory, quite vivid and distinct: the instant-l ong but somehow-f orever feel of my foot sliding across a slick, slimy rock. After that, zero.
During
For how long? Two months, I’ve heard since, but that’s not right. It was zero, literally nothing, for a time, but then-a week later? three weeks? five?-rips began to show in the matte black curtain, like the difference between a thick blindfold and a thin one. No, that’s not right, either, because the first sense I got back was hearing, not seeing. So-the difference between a set of Bose headphones and Benny’s flannel earmuffs.
Sound instead of silence. Such a blessing, like being saved. Word fragments at first. You know how, when you close your book, turn out the light, and prepare to go to sleep, bits of the author’s syntax and rhythm float around in your mind for a while before you drop off? But if you ever wake up enough to concentrate on one of the bits you’re remembering, it turns out to be nonsense? Like that.
Bits of music, too, jumbled, unrecognizable, like when you spin a radio dial too fast. And voices. Strangers’, and then, mercifully, Sam’s. That was the moment I began to heal. Or hope, which is the same thing. I didn’t always know what he was saying, especially in the beginning when he might as well have been speaking Italian, but it didn’t matter. Just his voice. A rope to the drowning woman.