“Okay, it’s a deal.”
Eve shut her eyes and presented her smiling face to the sky. Since last evening Abbie had been too embarrassed to take more than a furtive glance at the woman. She was probably in her mid- to late thirties, tall and long-necked, and tonight she had her long, dark, wavy hair all bundled up in a silk scarf, the same sage green as her dress. There was something unusual about her face, with its slightly overlong nose and wide mouth. If not exactly beautiful, she was certainly striking, especially now when she opened her eyes again. There was a stillness, a directness, about the way she looked at you that Abbie found a little unnerving.
“Did you make your wish?”
“Not yet. I’ve got so many I don’t know which one to go for.”
“How wonderful to be young. As you get older they sort of whittle down and you end up wishing for the same thing every time.”
“You mean, all the others come true?”
“No. Some do. But I think you just focus on the one that matters.”
“The one that can never come true.”
Eve laughed. “Maybe that’s it.”
Neither of them spoke for a few moments, just stared at the sky, waiting for another star to fall. Tom Bradstock’s laugh boomed out from the deck behind them.
“You’re from New York, right?” Eve said.
“Yes. Long Island.”
“Are you at college?”
“Next year.”
“Do you know where yet?”
“My mom and dad are all set on Harvard.”
“But you’re not.”
“No. I want to come to college out here.”
“You mean here in Montana?”
“Maybe. Somewhere in the West anyhow. I so love it out here. Colorado, Oregon, maybe. I don’t know. Thing is, I’m really interested in wildlife and the environment and that kind of stuff. And I want to be somewhere it hasn’t all been destroyed. By the way, my mom and dad don’t know about this yet, okay?”
“Don’t worry.”
“And they don’t know about, well . . .”
“Abbie, I’m so sorry about what happened. We were just taking a look around. We had no idea—”
“It wasn’t your fault. Only I’d be really grateful if you—”
“I promise, neither Lori nor I have breathed a word to anyone. It’s none of our business. I’m just sorry we embarrassed you.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Well, why don’t we both stop being sorry and forget it.”
“Okay.”
Because of what had happened, Abbie had been ready to dislike the woman and was surprised to find how nice she was. Ryan Delroy and Katie’s brother, Will, had started a ridiculous rumor that she and her friend Lori must be lesbians—or, as Will would have it, with all his father’s political correctness, “beaver bumpers”—simply because they were on vacation together.
“You’re from Santa Fe, right?”
“That’s right. At least, that’s where I live now. I grew up in California.”
“And you’re the painter and Lori owns the gallery, right?”
“Right. Kind of handy, huh?”
“What sort of stuff do you paint?”
“Hmm. Well, it’s mostly figurative but not what you’d call realistic. More psychological, exploratory. I guess you could say I paint what’s going on in my life. It’s like therapy, but cheaper. Lately I’ve done a lot of paintings that are about my son.”
“You have a son?”
“Yes. He’s called Pablo and he’s nearly two and, of course, the most wonderful child that ever was born.”
“So where is he now?”
“With his father. We don’t live together.”
“Oh. You must miss him—Pablo, I mean.”
“I do. But it’s only a week and they always have a lot of fun together. Look, another star! Did you see it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s yours. I’m already sorted.”
“I bet I know what you wished.”
“Oh, really? You’re a mind reader too?”
“No. It’s just that my dad says, when you’ve got kids, all you ever wish for is that they’ll be healthy and happy. And now I know you’ve got a son. So, I bet that’s what you wished.”
“Healthy and happy sounds like two wishes.”
“Okay, well, you’d better have this one too.”
Ben was leaning against the wooden rail of the deck where Tom Bradstock was entertaining a small crowd with one of his stories. Ben had gone to get some more drinks, so hadn’t been there at the start, but it was about a rat that had taken up residence in a house Tom and Karen lived in when their kids were little. The exterminator had put poison down and a few days later, in the middle of the night, they heard strange splashing noises coming from the kids’ bathroom.
“So I go in and look around and listen. Nothing. Then I lift up the lid of the john and there he is, looking up at me. The rat. And he’s big, you know, the size of a small dog. I’m not kidding. Well, okay, a very small dog. Apparently the poison makes them thirsty and that’s where he’d gone for a drink. Anyway, I shut the lid and try to flush him away, but when I open it again, there he is, still staring at me, all wet but clinging on for all he’s got.”
He twitched his nose in an impression of the rat and everyone laughed. Almost everyone. Ben was standing next to Karen and he heard her sigh and when he looked at her she gave him a wry smile and shook her head.
“God,” she said quietly. “If I had ten dollars for every time I’ve had to listen to this story, I’d be a wealthy woman.”
“By now Karen has come to see what’s going on. So I tell her . . .”
Karen mouthed to Ben: “Karen, go get my toolbox.”
“. . . Karen, go get my toolbox.”
Ben grinned. The story went on and, though a little long, it was good and Tom told it well. Just as he was trying to kill the rat with a claw hammer and it was squealing and squirming around, little Katie, four years old, came to the door all sleepy-eyed and said she wanted to go pee-pee. She asked what her daddy was doing and he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be standing there stark naked with a bloody hammer in his hand at three o’clock in the morning, that the john was broken and he was just fixing it so she’d have to use Mommy and Daddy’s bathroom instead.
“I mean, if the poor kid had found a rat down the toilet or seen it all bloody and writhing, she’d never have wanted to go again, would she? Anorexic for the rest of her life. So. Karen takes her to do pee-pee and puts her back to bed while I finish the job. Then I take the body downstairs and wrap it in newspaper and put it in the garbage, then wash all the blood off my hands and the hammer in the sink. Like a murderer, which, of course, is exactly what I now am. Then I go back upstairs and get into bed. And I’m lying there for the rest of the night, wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling . . .”
Karen turned to Ben again and wearily mouthed the punch line: “Feeling like Anthony Perkins in Psycho.”
“. . . like Anthony Perkins in Psycho.”
The story went down well. Then Maya Delroy started telling one about a close encounter she had once had with a scorpion but she didn’t have Tom’s gift and Ben didn’t bother to listen.
“Is it just men or do women tell the same stories over and over?” he asked Karen.
“You tell me.”
“I don’t think Sarah does it.”
“I don’t either.”
“But I probably do. Every guy has his party-piece stories.”
“Well, there you go.”
“So why don’t women?”
“They don’t feel they have to impress everyone with how witty and clever they are.”
“And men do?”
“Of course. All the time.”
“So, there’s Maya telling a story. Isn’t she trying to impress?”
“No. She’s just telling a story.”
Ben shook his head and s
miled and took a swig from his bottle of beer. He’d always liked Karen, her subversive humor, the way anything and anyone were apparently legitimate targets.
“How long have you two been married?” he asked.
“Two hundred years this fall.”
“Go on. You guys seem great together.”
“We are. Basically. But isn’t marriage hell? I mean, who invented it? Two people having to put up with each other year in, year out, slowly boring each other to death. The snoring, the farting. I mean, really, we’re supposed to be this highly evolved, supersmart species, and that’s the best deal we can come up with?”
“I think it’s supposed to free the mind for higher things.”
“What, marriage?”
“Yeah. Otherwise, we’d spend all our creative energy chasing each other around.”
“Sounds okay to me.”
Ben laughed.
“No, but seriously,” Karen went on. “What’s the point of marriage nowadays? I mean, the original idea was that it kept men around longer. You know, to provide meat for their kids and chase off the saber-toothed tigers. But women can handle pretty much everything on their own now, even the tigers. Then there’s sex, I guess. Which was why our parents’ generation got married. But then the pill came along, so that’s that reason gone.”
“This sounds suspiciously more like an argument against men than marriage.”
“Hell, no. Men are fine. Though now you come to mention it, maybe we don’t need quite so many of you. You know, we could keep a few prime specimens in cages. To keep the species going and satisfy our carnal needs.”
“Sounds great.”
“You figure you’d qualify?”
“Shall I impress you with one of my stories?”
Karen touched his arm and laughed. Delroy was coming up the steps from the lawn and joined the little crowd listening to his wife’s scorpion story. He was all pink-eyed and smiley. One of the few things about which he made no secret was his fondness for grass. Most evenings, after supper, he would slip quietly away into the trees for a smoke. The standing joke was that he was bird-spotting. Ben, who hadn’t smoked pot or even a cigarette since college, had lately felt an unaccountable urge to accompany him but had as yet been too shy to ask.
“Hey, Del,” Tom Bradstock called quietly. “See any three-toed woodpeckers out there tonight?”
Delroy smiled. “A whole damn flock of them.”
Maya was winding up her story. It didn’t seem to have anything resembling a punch line but no doubt there was some deeper, more karmic message that Ben had missed. He hadn’t really been listening. He had been thinking about what Karen had said and watching Sarah. She was farther along the deck, talking and laughing with Lane and Katie and a couple of the boys from the band. He had always admired, even faintly envied, the easy rapport she had with kids their age. Elegant as ever in her cream linen shift, her hair tucked neatly behind ears each studded with a single pearl, she looked like she’d stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Amused yet slightly aloof. Perfectly unattainable. Watching her, he felt curiously detached, almost as if he was studying a stranger. He became aware that Karen was studying him.
“So, how are you?” she said.
“Me? Terrific. Why?”
“Because you’re so obviously not terrific.”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s something different about you this year. You seem . . . I don’t know. Preoccupied. A little sad, maybe.”
Ben lifted his eyebrows and gave her a wary smile.
“I’m sorry,” Karen said. “It’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s okay. But really, I’m fine. I guess work hasn’t been that great for a couple of months. And I seem to have forgotten how to sleep.”
“What’s that all about?”
“Nothing. Listen, honestly, I’m good. Hell, it’s my birthday. I’m having a great time.”
“Well, Ben, that’s just . . . great.”
She looked away and took a drink and Ben felt mean for being so tight and defensive. But what could he have said? That he sensed his world sliding slowly away from under him? That he felt isolated and hollow and bereft and didn’t know why? There was no easy way to chat about these things. Not, anyway, with a woman who, despite the candor with which they all often talked during these two weeks each summer, was hardly a close friend. In fact, he couldn’t imagine talking to anyone about it. And this was not because he had a fear of confiding but because he wouldn’t know where to start.
Watching Abbie and Josh walk away across the meadow that morning, he had shared their palpable joy. But the image had lodged in his head all day and—in its contrast with what had followed—transmuted into something stark and symbolic. Two happy young adults, striding off on their own, strong and confident, while their parents retreated to a space that was increasingly cold and empty of all but echoes. Playing the picture over and over again, like the trailer for a movie he didn’t want to see, he’d had a premonition of profound loss.
If he was honest with himself, it was all about Abbie. Although he would never have admitted it to anyone, she had always been his favorite, just as Josh was Sarah’s. Perhaps that was how it always divided in foursome families—father teamed with daughter, mother with son. It had certainly been that way when he was growing up. And with damaging results, for his mother’s blind adoration of him had made her husband jealous, blighting their marriage and erecting a wall between father and son that neither of them had ever been able to scale.
Ben had always been determined that the same shouldn’t happen between him and Josh. And it hadn’t. They got along fine. But though he loved the boy dearly, it was a love of a different order from the love he felt for Abbie. She was the light that had for so long sustained him. And now, as its beam swung outward and began to shine forth into the world, he sensed the shadow encroaching.
There was little logic to it, for he took genuine pride in his children’s burgeoning independence. He remembered and sometimes liked to quote the words from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which Martin—his best friend and business partner and Abbie’s godfather—had read at her christening, about how parents should never feel they owned their children. Rather, they should consider themselves the bows from which their sons and daughters were sent forth as living arrows. Ben believed this and believed, moreover, that it was right and should be so. But what no one ever told you was what happened to the bow once the arrows had gone. Was that it? Was that all? Did it then just get propped in a corner of the closet to gather dust?
The selfishness of the thought shocked him now and to extinguish it he gulped the rest of his beer and put the bottle down on a table. Karen had moved away and was talking with somebody else. As he walked through the crowd along the deck, faces turning and smiling at him and wishing him a happy birthday, he saw Abbie coming up the steps. She was wearing blue jeans with a little pale pink top that showed her hips and tummy. She looked sensational. She saw him and came to him and threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.
“What’s that for?” Ben said.
“Nothing. You just looked like you needed it.”
He held her away from him by her bare arms to inspect her. She seemed to glow.
“Are you having a good time?” he said.
“The best. Are you?”
“Of course.”
“Why aren’t you wearing your hat?”
“I didn’t want to make the other guys jealous.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“Over there, flirting with the band.”
“Aren’t they amazing?”
“Not bad. Except that lead singer.”
“I know. They’ve got to get rid of him.”
She grinned and narrowed her eyes a little and he could tell she was trying to figure out how much he might know.
“Ty’s asked me if I’d like to go visit his ranch on Thursday. Would that be okay?”
“He’s got his own ranch
? Well, that changes everything.”
“It belongs to his parents. Thursday’s his day off. It’s in Wyoming, quite a long way, so we’d have to leave Wednesday evening. Would you mind?”
Ben shrugged. “I guess not. See what your mom says.”
Abbie reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
She went off to find Sarah. Ben turned to watch her go.
“You must be very proud of her.”
He turned back and saw Eve standing in front of him, smiling. She had probably been there all the time he was talking with Abbie.
“Isn’t it funny how you can always tell when they want something? Yeah, well. As daughters go, I guess she’s not too bad. You’re Eve, right?”
“And you’re Benjamin.”
“You’ve obviously been talking with my wife. Everybody else calls me Ben.”
“Ben.”
He held out his hand and she shook it with a mock solemnity, perhaps because they had already been introduced on the ride that morning. Attractive women often made him act a little gauche. Her hand felt cool.
He had noticed her the moment she walked into the dining room the previous evening. And though they hadn’t spoken on the ride, he had spent a lot of time slyly watching her. He had noted the slow, slightly sardonic smile, the low voice that wasn’t quite a drawl, the unflinching way she fixed you with those dark eyes, as if she knew more about you than you might wish—which, given that she’d been talking with Sarah, couldn’t be discounted.
“Abbie said you come here every summer.”
“Yes. This is our fourth visit. Probably time we went someplace else.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just mean it’s good to move on, do something different.”
“The kids all seem to love it.”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe the hard time Abbie gave us the first year when we said we’d booked into a dude ranch. She’s always been an outdoors kind of kid but she was going through that phase when all girls seem to want to do is hang out at the mall. All her friends were going on vacation to Europe or Hollywood or Miami and she was going to a dude ranch? I can remember her sulking in the backseat as we came up the drive, saying, Wow, look, a cow. Wow, look, another cow.”