back to the city. That still left plenty of time, the young woman said, staring into the center of the lake.
“For what?” Kyle asked, quite seriously wondering.
The woman looked up laughing and said, “To see another bear, of course.” The boy then kicked another stone in the water, in response to which the man tugged at his arm and they all moved along.
And as they departed, walking along the shoreline, the woman’s laughter dwindled with the distance, glancing off the water between them. Kyle listened the whole time they traversed the earthen dam towards the far side of the lake until he could no longer hear her.
The following evening he made beer after his mother retired. He enjoyed the smell of the malt and hops cooking, and imagined there were recoverable nutrients in the strained residual of mash which he took still steaming outside and, by the light seeping from the kitchen across the back lawn, fed to the dogs.
The next morning, they discovered Sunny in distress. She sat on the floor with her front legs splayed, gasping and heaving for breath. As she struggled to inhale the sound reminded Kyle of the paint-encrusted vent sucking air at the side of the house when the washing machine drained. His mother made an appointment with the veterinarian for that afternoon. And as he drove, with Sunny lying nestled on the seat between them, Kyle blamed himself.
“This will pull the fluid from her lungs,” said the veterinarian, snapping the syringe with his right middle finger. He told Kyle to hold the dog’s head and bunched the skin at the back of her neck with one hand while pushing the syringe needle in with the other. Pulling the needle back out, he rubbed the puncture point briskly. “Good girl” he said brightly, and then turned to Kyle and his mother and said more sedately: “It’s serious.”
“How serious is it?” Kyle continued to look at Sunny as he waited for the answer.
“She’s not out of the woods yet, but the injection will relieve her pulmonary distress. With any luck she’ll recover nicely.”
And sure enough, on the way home Sunny seemed to improve. Her breathing evened out and Kyle relaxed. He began counting the wooly bears crossing the road, his mind now more nearly at ease, until they made a detour for a grocery store in one of the intervening towns. While his mother shopped, Kyle let Sunny down in the parking lot, recalling the vet had cautioned she would need to go rather frequently as a consequence of the injection.
While they waited behind a school bus at a train crossing when once again on their way, Sunny suddenly yelped, climbing towards Kyle’s lap.
“She’s dying, Kyle,” said his mother, her voice rising.
“No, I don’t think so” he said, petting the dog’s head. “I think she’s all right.”
And as the scene played out they continued to wait, as through the back window of the bus children looked down at them, smiling and waving.
“Kyle, she’s pooping.”
“That’s okay. The vet said that would happen.”
“No dear.”
His mother’s voice wavered at the last, so it was just possible she had said “Oh dear” instead. Kyle looked down then at Sunny and saw a sausage-like extrusion coming out from under her raised tail. When her tail went back down, her entire body relaxed too. He realized then she was truly dying, or had already in fact died. And still they waited behind the school bus for a train. He half turned in the seat and looked back through the rear window, reversing the truck enough to pull off the main road and take the secondary road running parallel to the tracks, desperate now to get back in time to the vet’s.
Later, again on the way home, he counted a half dozen green apples lying under a tree by the side of the road. Seeing them there like a premonition of what was so soon to come surprised him as much as anything else that day.
Kyle and Alison had gone out together often enough that by the time soccer season started they were considered something of an item. People were talking, though to be sure it wasn’t at all certain to him exactly what they were saying.
Even so, it felt good to have a regular girl and have people talking about that for a change, instead of talking incessantly about his chance to make the big show. It was still a vibe, though a different, more subtle and relaxed one. At any rate, his life seemed a whole lot more normal somehow.
He couldn’t articulate the difference, but he could certainly feel it, and he felt it most strongly the night they went to the game against Fairway. The grass fluoresced under the lights. The players in their uniforms passed the bleachers. The ball spun, turning from a perfect amalgamation of pure black and white into a shiny blur that lifted a line of sparkling light, and left a thin dark trail in the grass. For one faltering moment he felt again at the center of it all. He both missed it and didn’t.
Their team scored twice after halftime. When he sat back down on the aluminum bench seat the second time, Alison sat closer. After the game, they walked across the unlit practice field towards the darker woods beyond. Holding her hand, he began to hum, and she asked if he was happy.
“Yes, I think so.”
“About?”
“Just you never mind.”
“What are your intentions, Mr. Summer?”
At the far end of the field, in a last bit of clearing before the world turned back into the primordial woods it had once been, there grew a giant oak tree known locally as the “boundary tree” because it marked the boundary for this parcel of land going back to the days of the first Dutch settlers. Kyle pulled Alison around to the even darker back side of the tree and pinned her against it, feeling the bark pressing back against the palms of his hands. When they walked back they did so in complete darkness, for the lights on the main field had long been extinguished.
The next day, Saturday, they picked wild apples, gathering them into burlap bags from roadside trees along abandoned fields. They stacked the full bags upright in the truck and drove to the mill by the edge of Fire Lake Park. The scent of ripe, warm apples filled the air as they poured them into a bin to be chopped up and crushed, being careful to avoid the yellow jackets hovering about the messy remains of all the preceding pressings. Then they went for a walk to wait until their apples came back as cider. Below the road a stream cut into the earth, through layers of time revealed in the rock. Kyle told Alison of his excursion north to see the “Grand Canyon of the East.”
“Could we go see it together sometime? And stay at the Colonial Inn?”
“Sure,” Kyle perhaps too easily agreed, “Why not? And while we’re at it we can spend a night or two at the Cape Cod Inn.”
She laughed because that had become their private joke, and he laughed again to think that anyone would intentionally invite the comparison between the two places. It seemed incredibly vain, ambitious, and altogether sad.
“You know what I like about you?”
The question, ironic given his last previous thought, triggered an automatic self-deprecating impulse in Kyle’s mind.
“You mean you’ve found something?”
Alison smiled quietly as she pulled away from his hand. She bent down and picked up a stone and straightening, crooking her arm back, threw it just like a girl over the ledge into the abyss below.
“You’re almost completely natural and unpretentious” she told him, bending down for another stone. “I don’t think you even realize how special you are. I remember the first time I noticed you. It was at a town game in the park. You were walking away from the field going through the parking lot when somebody hit a long fly ball that you only half turned to see and in one motion, almost casually, reached up for and caught with a languid running leap.” She stopped and smiled to herself, quite possibly proud of the word languid. She held the new stone, weighing it in her hand, while her eyes fixed on the place where the first one had disappeared. “Kyle,” she continued softly, “you don’t know what that did to me inside when I saw you do that. And then you just threw the ball back and kept walking on, as though it were nothing at all.”
“Well,” he told
her, “it wasn’t.” He paused, considering what else to add. He wanted to find some way to include her, and did. “I’ll let you in on a little secret if you promise not to tell.” He waited until she looked at him. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Most people think a long fly ball is difficult to catch. But the truth is a ball comes down pretty much with the same force and velocity no matter how far it’s hit, whether a little pop-up to short or a long fly ball to the center field fence.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
She laughed at him. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“What do you mean, that’s what you mean?”
“You have no idea, do you?”
“Maybe if you tell me you’ll make me blush.”
“I doubt that I could.”
For a moment neither of them said anything more. Alison threw the other stone and Kyle picked up a flat one of his own and whipped it, cutting the air, so that it tailed away quite a bit farther than hers into the gorge. They both stood and listened, waiting for the sound of impact on the hidden water or rocks below. But instead they heard only the continuing, incessant chirring of the crickets all around.
“What are your intentions, Kyle?” His mother dropped a split chunk of cut cherry log on the fire, sending a flurry of red sparks up the chimney. She poked the new wood with the fireplace tongs to make sure it