The Summer We Lost Her Read online

  A soft breeze brought in the smell of lake water and the sweet musk of the wet forest floor. He glanced outside. The stars fully claimed the night sky. It was bright enough now to see that the rain had reduced Cass’s bonfire to a sodden, pulpy mess.

  * * *

  HE’D THOUGHT HE’D never see the girl who took his virginity again. Decades ago, she’d gone off to see the world, and her parents had sold the place to their best friends and moved to the city. Last night, with Gracie on his back, Matt had picked his way through the cedars into her yard, a bottle of red from Nate’s cellar and two good wineglasses in his hands. After hugs and introductions, he’d left his daughter by the fire to make s’mores with Cass’s son, nine-year-old River, a polite, long-haired character who offered Gracie a deep bow, extended his hand, and said, in a fake British accent, “The pleasure is mine.”

  Matt followed the boy’s mother into the house.

  The summer he was seventeen, he returned to Lake Placid with his new, beefed-up physicality. Cass had changed as well, all leggy and sensual. She’d circled around him like a lioness one night, before curling her finger and sashaying down to her boathouse to light a joint, pull off his shirt, and change his world. He couldn’t believe it. This was a girl about to be homecoming queen at Lake Placid High. As far back as Matt could remember, there’d been a succession of boys on dirt bikes and in pickup trucks pulling into the Urquhart driveway, hoping to bask in her glow. And now she wanted him.

  If that wasn’t enough, she was also Nate-approved. “Think about Cass,” Nate would say. “Now there’s a girl who’s even a little wild. Don’t have a lot of money, the Urquharts, but they’re our kind of people. They’re from the lake. Cassidy doesn’t have to spend her time reinventing herself. She knows who she is. More to the point, she likes who she is.”

  They passed through the family room, a room that had clearly been renovated over the years. The back wall was now all windows, with a sliding glass door that was wide open. Gone was the woodstove that used to sit in the corner; now a two-sided fireplace divided the television room from the kitchen. On another wall was a haunting black-and-white portrait of River at about four, big-eyed and shirtless, hair freshly shorn from what was quite possibly his last haircut.

  “You take that?” Matt asked.

  “Guilty.”

  “Jesus. You’ve got talent.”

  The family room was open to the kitchen, where Matt set the glasses on the counter, then glanced back to satisfy himself that Gracie was keeping a safe distance from the heat and that River wasn’t a demon child waiting for the right moment to push her into the flames. All was well. They seemed to be chatting shyly in the firelight.

  “Relax. We can watch them from here the whole time.” His concern hadn’t escaped Cass. She glanced at the glasses now. “What’s with this BYO stemware?”

  “Case you tried to serve my grandfather’s Caymus from a mug,” he said. It was as though no time had passed. As ever, her kitchen smelled of bourbon and patchouli and wet dog. The appliances were new—stainless and hulking—but the cupboards and counters were still the southern yellow pine he remembered. “Wine like this deserves a proper glass.”

  “Snob.” As she handed him a corkscrew, he tried to ignore the slice of tanned belly showing between her oxblood tank and white jeans, the long curls knotted at the nape of her neck, that same unapologetic gap between the whitest teeth he’d ever seen. He couldn’t believe they were back in the same room together. “You think I don’t have wineglasses?”

  Matt opened the cupboard that had always held the Urquhart dishes and mugs. Nothing matched, and any glassware came in the form of chipped juice cups and mugs. He filled the wineglasses to the widest point. “The prosecution rests.” They clinked crystal and he sat at the table, still nestled beneath the front window. “I figured I’d never see you again after you left for your ‘degree in life.’ ”

  She trapped her tongue between her teeth for a moment and smiled teasingly. “Hey, somewhere between hand-rolling tea leaves in Kyoto and mopping up vomit in a bar in Haight-Ashbury, I wound up with a doctorate, baby.”

  He laughed. “And . . . happy to be back?”

  “For sure. I think the place you grew up, no matter how shitty or how stunning, it’s just in your blood, you know? You’ve absorbed it. The minuscule toxins from every spider bite, every mouthful of lake water, the dirt embedded when you skinned your knee—it’s all part of your DNA. So you can go live elsewhere and love it. But no place is going to make you come alive in the same way.” Her voice was raspier than he remembered. She reached down to rub the side of a foot with an etched silver ring on one toe. “Anyway, whatever. My brilliant new theory.”

  He tipped his head to one side and said nothing. She’d rounded out more as well. Gone were the concave belly and narrow hips he’d known by heart when he was young. Now her hips had an easy curve, her stomach a sexy swell. She smelled like cilantro and still had that smoky sort of indifference that used to drive him crazy.

  “What?”

  “Come on, Urquhart. You were never that poetic. . . .”

  “You’re such a prick. I bare my soul . . .” Grinning, she grabbed the washcloth hanging on the tap and threw it at him. The rag splatted on the floor, leaving a wet mark on his shirt. “Anyway. Look at you all grown up.” Cass glanced at his wedding band. “Married and everything.”

  “You’re not?”

  “So not.”

  “A little emphatic.”

  “Yeah, well. Long, ugly story with a beautiful child at the end. Trust me, you don’t want to hear it.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  She studied him, pushing a strand of curls off her face. “Okay. Short version. I’d been living between New York and San Francisco. Met this guy from Sonoma one night, seemed pretty cool at first. Charles Coyne. He was launching his own vineyard. Bit of a trust fund baby, but whatever. We had a good thing for a while. Then I got pregnant and Charles wasn’t as thrilled as I was about the “accident” that is our son and pretty much went AWOL. Never gave us a dime—every excuse under the sky. So I bolted for my parents’ place in Hoboken. Didn’t really like the city vibe for Riv, so when Mom’s friend Jeannie put this place back on the market to open a summer camp . . . here I am.” She grew quiet. “You remember my mom?”

  Of course he remembered Ruth, mannish feet forever in ancient Birkenstocks. She’d always been baking. The Urquharts’ old black Lab mix, Garcia, and Matt’s childhood shepherd, Elsa, fur slick and spiked from the lake, would wait patiently—tails thwacking against the kitchen cupboards—to lick the bowls. As tweens, Matt and Cass would sit at the bar in bathing suits, arms and legs cold and pimply from having just climbed out of the lake. Her father, Edward, would be strumming his guitar in the family room. And when the buzzer went off, he’d join them in the kitchen. Ruth would pull zucchini bread from the oven, slice it up, and set it on their plates like it was double-chocolate birthday cake loaded with candles. Tasted terrible—like she’d pulled it out of the compost heap, pressed it into a metal pan, and left it in the sun to dry out for a few days, but that didn’t matter. Matt wolfed it down just to watch Ruth beam, to hear her say, “See? Now that is what real food tastes like.”

  Cass’s parents were card-carrying Deadheads. They ran a business called Castle Care, a property management company offering first-class service for grand Adirondack chalets, cabins, and lake houses: everything from mail pickup to snowplowing before homeowners made the trek out from the city. The business was somewhat seasonal, so in the shoulder months Ruth and Ed were free to follow the Grateful Dead, young daughter in tow.

  “You had the greatest mother on earth.”

  “Not sure she was much of a mother. I never knew where my shoes were, and she’d get stoned out of her mind and spend all weekend swiveling her hips, topless, on the road. I would literally wander barefoot around Soldier Field, an orphan of LSD.” Cass grinned. “Thank god for Jeannie. She was the one who’d
take me back to the camper and put me to bed, right? You know she and Brice never even watched the concerts? They went from show to show selling tie-dye shirts and vegetarian burritos in the parking lot.”

  “I still see the photo sometimes,” Matt said. He conjured the famous image: in a field in Bethel, New York, surrounded by glassy-eyed concertgoers, with one shirtless teenage boy dancing behind her, was a three-year-old girl with wild, tawny hair. In her flowered dress, she danced barefoot, eyes closed, face tilted to the sky. No parents in sight. The picture had appeared on the cover of Life magazine with the credit “Anonymous.” The accompanying article described it as emblematic of “the final labor pains of the American Dream as the baby boomers redefined it.”

  Whoever took the photo never went public.

  “I saw it in a diner in Chicago about five years ago,” she said. “Hanging on the wall beside the cash register, just above a sign that said WORLD’S BEST PIE.”

  “How was it?”

  “The photo?”

  “The pie.”

  “Worst goddamned pie I’ve ever tasted.” Cass had aged in a way that made it hard to look away. Fine wrinkles fanned out from her eyes when she smiled. She wore a braided string around her neck, likely made by her son. “Always the way with world’s best anything. I told the waitress I knew who the girl was. She said ‘Yeah? You and everyone I’ve ever met.’ So I kept quiet.”

  Matt laughed. “And where are your parents nowadays?”

  “You didn’t hear? Dad died about ten years ago.”

  “Oh no. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Mom’s alive and kicking. Mostly kicking. Remember Pat and Lulu Geary across the street—in that little stone place?” Matt nodded, and she continued. “They were selling, so I bought it for Mom with Dad’s insurance money. This place too, actually. I needed to keep an eye on her. She’s not all there anymore. Not that shocking, I guess.” Cass hoisted herself onto the counter and bounced her heels against the cupboard doors.

  He shook his head, wistful. “They were all so damned sure they were going to change the world.”

  “No joke. They thought it all mattered—the length of their hair, the tie-dyed shirts, the free love. Like each little statement was taking us all somewhere. Every time they had sex with a stranger or called a cop a pig, it was going to make a difference.”

  Matt glanced outside to see the kids holding long sticks over the fire, roasting marshmallows now. They’d graduated from nervous chitchat to full-on laughter.

  “So . . .” Cass moved to the table, tucked herself close to the window, and lit a cigarette. She blew smoke rings through the screen and watched them break apart and fade to nothing outside. “Why are you not talking about wifey?”

  “Elise. And I’m not ‘not talking about’ her.”

  “Give me her best quality. Then her worst.”

  To discuss Elise behind her back struck him as disloyal. Come to think of it, he really didn’t share details of his marriage with anyone. Of course, Cass wasn’t just anybody. She was his oldest friend. Someone who’d known him before his parents died.

  “Come on . . .”

  Best quality. Had to be her bizarre ability to deal with any sort of emergency, especially if it involved a total stranger. Their first date Matt had planned to the tiniest detail. She was a beautiful girl with elegance and boots that didn’t fit and a funny little dimple next to her mouth. This date mattered. He’d booked a cozy Italian place near the Carlyle Hotel and splurged on a new cologne—Hermès Eau d’Orange Verte—because the saleswoman at Bloomingdale’s said, along with citrus and patchouli and soap, it hinted of leather. Matt hoped a rider might be subliminally entranced. Anyway, his Mastercard wasn’t quite at its limit.

  There she was, sitting on the low wall at the park’s edge at East Seventy-Sixth. Wind billowed her dress around her knees and she fought to keep it down.

  A shy hello, a double-cheeked kiss as he greeted her, and they turned to the street, waited to cross Fifth Avenue. A helmetless couple on Segways came bumping along the brick sidewalk, their vehicles unwieldy as they navigated tree roots that swelled the sidewalk in places. As the pair drew close, the woman, wiry russet braids lying on her shoulders like fox pelts, pitched forward to strike her head on the bricks with enough force you could hear the fleshy thunk.

  By the time Matt realized what had happened, Elise was down on her knees, helping the woman. She had someone nearby calling 911. Another giving up his blazer, which she laid over the woman as if she were tucking in a treasured child.

  Never, in all his years, had Matt seen a more sweetly generous or more nurturing gesture—to a total stranger. This horseback rider with the too-tight boots was one of a kind. When the ambulance arrived and they left for the restaurant, Matt curled an arm around Elise’s neck and kissed the top of her head. He was never going to let this superhero go.

  “She has this insane ability to handle emergencies. Like once we were in a hotel room in Chicago and someone tried to get into our room in the middle of the night. I’ve got my hand on the phone, dialing the front desk like a good coward does. She’s at the door, banging on the inside of it, scaring the guy off. She says she doesn’t even decide to jump into action. Her body just takes over.”

  Cass nodded. “She’s tough when it counts.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Worst?”

  His gaze moved away from Cass, settling on her battered red leather sandals on the fraying mat by the door. The obvious. “Elise is a rider. Big-time, as in she could be headed for the Olympics. So she’s not around enough. Makes for a life that’s never quite right, if you know what I mean. Today there was a whole kerfuffle with the horse not boarding a plane and Elise missed Gracie’s play. So that was kind of brutal.”

  “I’ll bet.” An uncomfortable moment passed, then Cass’s face warmed. “Hey, do you remember Saturday nights at the airport? We used to score beer from Fenton’s brother and lie at the end of the runway.”

  Jesus, those nights had been perfect. “We’d stare at the stars. Solve the world’s problems.”

  She nudged his calf with her toes. “And other stuff.”

  “You never could keep your hands off me, Urquhart. Admit it.”

  “You’re so deluded. Hey, remember that time Nate climbed to the top of the big oak out front?”

  “He was going to cut it down, one dead branch at a time.”

  “I thought he’d be the one dead when he fell—what was it, like, forty feet? He hit every goddamned branch as he dropped.”

  “Right? Then limped into the house to change into a suit before calling nine-one-one.”

  “And insisted the paramedics take him to Elizabethtown because the nurses are cuter there.”

  Laughing, Matt refilled their glasses, glanced outside to see River launch a burning stick at the shoreline and jump for joy when it hit the water. Gracie watched from the big log by the fire.

  Cass stood to rinse her cigarette butt under tap water and pinch it into an empty Coke can. “So, what’s the plan? You guys staying the summer?”

  “Just here to sell.”

  “You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

  “Two weeks to prep the place and then we list.”

  “Your grandfather might climb out of his grave. Your father too.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “This town is going to freak out when they hear, that’s all I’m gonna say. Some developer will want the land to slap up another Lake Placid Lodge. But if you’re serious, my boyfriend, Garth, is with Alpine Realty. Number one, three years running. And you can trust him, which is something rare in that business.”

  “I’d thought Sotheby’s. But sure. Why not?”

  Outside, Gracie’s marshmallow fell from her hand and rolled a few feet down the slope toward the lake. As River launched another stick, she threw a quick, self-conscious glance toward her crutches, then crawled toward the marshmallow.

  “She’s a doll. I’ve always wanted a l
ittle girl. Did she injure herself?”

  “Mild cerebral palsy from an accident when Elise was pregnant.” Doctors had been batting around the possibility from the moment Gracie drew her first terrifyingly belated breath. Before that night in the hospital, Matt had thought cerebral palsy was a genetic defect—something like Down syndrome or a hole in the heart. But cerebral palsy is caused by a brain injury or malformation during pregnancy or birth. Every case is unique. Damage might impact anything from a child’s posture and reflexes to muscle tone and control to motor skills—you didn’t necessarily know for years. In Gracie’s case, Elise’s accident had caused something called hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy: acute brain injury due to asphyxia. Asphyxia due to placental abruption. “Her case is considered quite mild, and she will improve, but cerebral palsy doesn’t exactly go into remission.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “She was starting to get on her horse—just for a photo. Didn’t go well.” Before Cass could respond, he added, “At that level, it’s pretty normal to ride pregnant. There’s no jumping in dressage. Even the doctors are cool with it until the third trimester. You do what you’ve always done if the pregnancy is healthy, right?”

  Cass ignored the question. “And what about operating?”

  “The doctor we’re seeing has mentioned a series of possible surgeries to straighten the bones in her legs.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Gracie’s doctor was a marathon runner who bounced on his toes. He couldn’t keep still and spoke so fast Matt felt he missed a lot of what he told them. “Elise is more keen on it. But I . . .” One thing his grandfather taught him was: if you want to stay healthy, you stay far away from doctors. You don’t interfere. “Surgery is an option for down the road. She has a lot of growing to do.”