A Summer to Die (13 page)

"Molly," I said. She opened her eyes, found me there, and smiled. She waited for me to talk to her.

"Molly, the baby is born."

She smiled again, very sleepily.

"It's a boy. He was born in the brass bed, the way they wanted. He came very quickly. Ben was all set to wait for hours, but Maria kept laughing and saying, 'No, Ben, it's coming right away!' And it did. Ben picked him up and put him on Maria's stomach, and he curled up and went to sleep."

She was watching me, listening. For a moment it was as if we were home again, in our beds, talking in the dark.

"Then Ben gave him to me, and I carried him to the doorway and showed him that the sun was coming up. I told him the birds were singing to him.

"Will came over later and brought them a big bouquet of wild flowers. I don't know the names—you would, though. All yellow and white.

"Ben and Maria and Will all said to tell you they love you."

She reached out and took my hand and squeezed it. Her hand was not as strong as Happy's.

"Ben and Maria asked me if I would make another copy of the picture of you holding the Queen Anne's lace. They want to hang it on the wall in the living room."

But she wasn't listening anymore. She had turned her head to one side and closed her eyes. Her hand slipped gently out of mine and she was asleep again. I put the little vase of pussy willows on the table beside her bed, where she would see it when she woke up. Then I left her there alone.

On the drive home, I told my father, "Will Banks said a line from a poem to me once. He said, 'It is Margaret you mourn for,' and I told him I never mourn for myself. But I think he was right. So much of my sadness is because I miss Molly. I even miss fighting with her."

My father pulled me over close to him on the seat of the car and put his arm around me. "You've been great through all of this, Meg," he said. "I'm sorry I haven't told you that before. I've been busy mourning for myself too."

Then we sang the rest of the way home. We sang
"Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore," mostly off-key, and we made up verses for everybody. We sang "Dad's boat is a Book boat," "Mom's boat is a Quilt boat," "Meg's boat is a Camera boat," "Ben and Maria's boat is a Happy boat," and "Will's boat is a House boat," which struck us both as much funnier than it really was. Finally, we sang "Molly's boat is a Flower boat," and when we finished that verse, we were turning down the dirt road to home.

Two weeks later she was gone. She just closed her eyes one afternoon and didn't ever open them again. Mom and Dad brought the pussy willows back for me to keep.

Time goes on, and your life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories.

Nothing will be the same, ever, without Molly. But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.

It was September, and time to leave the little
house that had begun to seem like home.

I answered the knock at the front door and then went upstairs to the study. Dad was sitting at his desk, just staring gloomily at the piles of paperclipped pages that he had arranged in some order on the floor.

"Dad, Clarice Callaway is at the door with some man. She says she hates to bother you at such a bad time, but."

"But she is going to do it anyway, right?" He sighed and got up. At the front door I heard Clarice introducing him to the man who was standing there holding a briefcase and looking impatient and annoyed. Dad brought them inside, asked Mom to make some coffee, and the three of them sat down in the living room.

I went back to the darkroom where I was trying to pack. I was going to have a darkroom in town; Dad had already hired a couple of his students to build the shelves and do the plumbing and wiring in what had been a maid's room, many years ago, on the third floor of the house there. It would, in fact, be a larger, better equipped darkroom than the one I'd had all summer, so it wasn't that that was making me depressed. And Will Banks had almost completed work on the darkroom that he was building for himself, in what had been a pantry of his little house. So my going away wasn't going to
mean the end of Will's interest and enthusiasm or skill, and it couldn't have been that that was making me feel sad as I packed up my negatives and chemicals and tools. I guess it was just that we wouldn't be doing it together anymore, Will and I.

It is hard to give up the being together with someone.

I sealed the packing boxes with tape, wrote "Darkroom" on them, and carried them to a corner of the kitchen. There were other boxes there already; Mom had been packing for several days. There were boxes marked "Dishes," "Cooking Utensils," and "Linens." We'd been living like campers all week, eating from paper plates, finishing up the odds and ends in the refrigerator, making meals from the last few things in Mom's little garden.

There was a box marked "Quilt." Two nights before, my mother had snapped off a thread, looked at the quilt in surprise, and said, "I think it's finished. How can it be finished?" She turned it all around, looking for some corner or spot that she'd forgotten, but every inch was covered with the neat, close-together tows of her tiny stitches. She stood up and laid it out on the big kitchen table. There they were, all those orderly, geometric patterns of our past, Molly's and mine. All those bright squares of color: in the center, the pale pinks and yellows of
our baby dresses; farther out, in carefully organized rows, the little flowery prints and the bright plaids of the years when we were little girls; and at the edges, the more subdued and faded denims and corduroys of our growing up.

"It really is," she said slowly. "It's all done." Then she folded it and put it in the box.

Now I could hear her serving coffee in the living room. There was an argument going on. I could hear the quick, angry voices of the visitors, and suddenly I heard my mother's soft voice say, "That's not
fair
" the way I had so often said the same thing to Molly.

There was silence in the living room for a moment after Mom said that. Then I heard my father say, "There's no point in our continuing to discuss this. Let's go down the road to see Will. You should have gone to see him first, Mr. Huntington."

Dad came into the kitchen to use the phone. "Will?" he said. "Your nephew is here. Can we come down?"

Dad grinned as he listened to the reply. I could imagine what Will was saying; I had never heard him say a good word about his sister's son.

"Will," said Dad on the phone. "
You
know that, and
I
know that. Nevertheless, we have to be civilized. Now calm down. We'll be there in a few minutes."

After he hung up, he said to me, "Meg, run over
to Ben and Maria's, would you? Tell them you'll stay with Happy if they'll meet us at Will's house to talk to his nephew from Boston."

When he went back into the living room, I heard Clarice Callaway say, "I haven't finished my coffee."

And I heard my father reply, "Clarice, I hate to inconvenience you, but." I could tell from his voice that it gave him a lot of satisfaction, saying it.

I loved taking care of Happy. That was another thing I hated about moving back to town, that I wouldn't have a chance to watch him grow bigger and learn things. Already he was holding his head up and looking around. The newborn baby part of him was already in the past, after only a month; now he was a little person, with big eyes, a loud voice, and a definite personality. Maria said he was like Ben, with a screwball sense of humor and no respect for propriety. Ben said he was like Maria: illogical, assertive, and a showoff. Maria whacked Ben with a dish towel when he said that, and Ben grinned and said, "See what I mean?"

I just thought he was Happy, not like anyone else but himself.

When Ben and Maria came back from Will's, 1 asked them what was going on. Maria rolled her eyes and said, "
I
don't know. Craziness, that's what's going on."

Ben was roaring with laughter. "Meg, I have to show you something." He went to the closet and got the box with the album of wedding pictures.

"I've already seen them, Ben. I know you're married. I told my father so. Clarice can't still be worrying about
that.
"

"No, no,
look,
dummy," said Ben. He flipped through the heavy pages of colored photographs until he found the one he wanted. It was of a crowd of wedding guests, middle-aged people, drinking champagne. In the center of the crowd, looking terribly proper and at the same time a little silly from the champagne, was Will Banks' nephew.

"It's Martin Huntington!" Ben was practically doubled up, laughing. "I couldn't believe it. I walked into Will's house, and there was this jerk with a lawyer suit on, holding a briefcase, and he looked at me with my jeans and my beard, as if he didn't want to get too close for fear of being infected with some disease. And when I realized who he was, I held out my hand—you should have been there, Meg—and said, 'Mr. Huntington, don't you remember me? I'm Ben Brady.'"

"How do you know
him?
" I asked.

"He's been a junior partner in my father's law firm for years," laughed Ben. "Oh, you should have seen it, Meg. He stood there in Will's living room with his mouth open, and then he said in that pompous way he has, 'Well, Benjamin. I, ah, of course had no idea that, ah, it was you living in my family's house. Ah, of course, this does, ah, add a certain element of, ah, awkwardness to these proceedings.'

"'Proceedings!' Can you imagine, calling a discussion in Will Banks' living room 'proceedings'? That's so typical of Martin Huntington. I can't wait to tell my father!"

"But what's going to happen?"

Ben shrugged. "I don't know. But I'm going to call my father. I know what I'd like to have happen. I'd like to buy this house from Will, if my dad will lend me the money for a down payment. I'd like Happy to grow up here. How about that, Hap? Hey, Maria, doesn't that kid ever stop eating?"

Maria was nursing Happy. She grinned at Ben. "He's gonna take after his old man," she said.

Back home, my parents were in the living room drinking the reheated coffee. The tug was rolled up, and the curtains were gone from the windows. Little by little the house was being emptied of everything that had been ours.

"Ben wants to buy the house," I told them. "And they'd live here always." I sighed, kicked off my shoes, and brushed away the pieces of dead leaves that were stuck to my socks and jeans. Everything in the field seemed to be dying.

"Well, that's terrific!" said my father. "Why are you looking so glum?"

"I'm not sure," I answered. "I guess because we're leaving. Next summer everything will be the same for
them,
but what about us?"

Mom and Dad were quiet for a minute. Finally Dad said, "Listen, Meg. This house will still be here next summer. We
could rent
it again. But Mom and I have talked about it, and we're just not sure."

"There are so many sad memories for us here, Meg," my mother said quietly.

"By next summer, though," I suggested, "maybe it would be easier. Maybe it would be fun to remember Molly in this house."

Mom smiled. "Maybe. We'll wait and see."

The three of us stood up; Mom headed for the kitchen, to finish the packing there. Dad starred up the stairs to his study.

"You know," he said, stopping halfway up the staircase. "At one point in the book, I wrote that the use of coincidence is an immature literary device. But when Ben walked into Will's living room today and said, 'Mr. Huntington, don't you remember me?,' well—"

He stood there thinking for a moment. Then he started talking to himself.

"If I rearranged the ninth chapter," he muttered, "to make it correspond to—" He walked slowly up
the rest of the stairs, muttering. At the top of the stairs he stood, looked into the study at the piles of pages, then turned and called down to us triumphantly, "Lydia! Meg! The book is
finished!
It only needs rearranging! I didn't realize it until now!"

So the manuscript was packed, too, and in great bold capital letters, Dad wrote on the box, "BOOK."

The next day, the moving van came. Will Banks, Ben, and Maria, holding Happy, stood in the driveway of the little house, and waved good-bye.

It was the end of September when my father came home after his classes one day and told me, "Meg, comb your hair. I want you to go someplace with me."

Usually he doesn't notice or care if my hair is combed, so I knew it was someplace special. I even washed my face and changed from sneakers into my school shoes. I grabbed a jacket—it was getting chilly: the kind of September air that smells of pumpkins, apples, and dead leaves—and got into the car. Dad drove me to the university museum, the big stone building with bronze statues in front of it.

"Dad," I whispered as we went up the wide steps, "I have seen the Renaissance collection a thousand
times. If you're going to make me take that guided tour
again,
I'll—"