Summer Lies (11 page)

And also to their New York friends, whom they finally wanted to invite once winter came. Their real friends, Peter and Liz and Steve and Susan, not the rabble of agents and publishing and media people. Peter and Liz wrote, Steve was a teacher, and Susan made jewelry—they were the only ones he and Kate had talked to seriously about the reasons for their moving to the country. They were also the only ones to whom they had given their new address.

Yes, they had their new address. What if they came? Because they’d read the
New York Times
and concluded that the good news hadn’t yet reached Kate and because they wanted to be the bearers of it?

He took another swallow. He mustn’t get drunk. He must keep a clear head and think about what he should do. Call their friends? Tell them that Kate knew about the award but hadn’t wanted to get involved in all the fuss? Their friends knew Kate, knew how much she loved being celebrated, wouldn’t believe him, and would really come.

Panic rose in him. If their friends were outside their door tomorrow, Kate would be in New York the day after, and it would all begin again. If he didn’t want that, he had to think of something. What lies did he need to keep their friends at bay?

He got out of the car, drank the last of the bottle, and threw it in a high arc into the forest. This was the way his life had always been: when he had to choose, it was always between
two bad alternatives. Between life with his mother or his father when they finally separated. Between attending university, which cost him more money than he had and all his free time, or taking a job he hated, which would, however, give him time to write. Between Germany, where he had always felt a stranger, and America, where he remained just as much so. He wanted once and for all to have things be good, the way they were for other people. He wanted to be able to choose between good alternatives.

He didn’t call their friends. He drove home, recounted his fruitless visit to the technician, said he wanted to try again tomorrow, if necessary with another technician in the next town over and with the phone company. Kate was irritated, not at him, but at life in the country, where the infrastructure couldn’t hold a candle to New York. When she noticed this was upsetting him, she yielded. “Let’s invest in our own infrastructure and put up a mast on the hill behind the house. We can afford it. Then we’ll really be less dependent on technicians and phone companies.”

He woke up in the middle of the night. It was a little before two a.m. He got up quietly and looked out the window through the curtains. The sky was clear and even without the moon, meadow, forest, and road were perfectly visible. In a single movement he picked up his clothes from the chair and tiptoed out of the room and down the creaking staircase. He got dressed in the kitchen, pulling a padded jacket over jeans and sweatshirt, a woolen cap over his head, and boots on his feet. It was cold outside; he’d seen the hoarfrost on the meadow.

The front door opened and closed quietly. He took the few steps to the car on tiptoe again. He put the key in the ignition and unlocked the steering wheel, then propped himself in the open door and pushed and steered the car from the meadow out onto the road. It was hard work, and he sighed and sweated. The car was soundless as it rolled across the grass. On the road the gravel crunched under the wheels and it seemed to him that the noise was deafening. But soon the road curved downward and the car began to move. He jumped in; after a few more curves he was out of earshot and turned on the engine.

On the trip to town, a few cars passed him in the opposite direction, but none, as far as he could see, that he recognized. In town, few windows were lit up, and he imagined a mother by the bed of a sick child or a father worrying about his business, or an old man who no longer needed his sleep.

All the windows were dark along the main street. He drove down it and didn’t see a single person, no drunk on one of the benches, no lovers in one of the doorways. He drove past the sheriff’s office; it was dark too, and there was a chain across the parking spaces for the two police cars. He switched off his headlights, drove slowly back, and stopped next to the blue sawhorses and police barricades. He waited to see if anything moved, then got out quietly and carefully lifted three sawhorses and two barricades into the flatbed. He got back in quietly, waited for a while again, then drove with his headlights off until he was clear of the town.

He turned on the radio. “We Are the Champions”—he had loved the song when he was a boy, and hadn’t heard it for a long time. He sang along. Again he was filled with a sense of triumph. Once again he’d done it. There was more to him than other people realized. Than Kate realized. Than he himself believed most of the time. Once again he’d set things up so
cleverly that nobody would be able to hang anything on him. An error, a prank—who was to know how the barrier had appeared on the road? Who wanted to know?

He drove, working out where to set up the roadblock. The road to his house branched off from the main road at a ninety-degree angle, made a sharp curve, and then ran almost parallel to the main road at first. It would be too noticeable to set up the barrier right where the road forked off, but it would work just as well along the curve.

It went quickly. He stopped after the curve, set up the sawhorses, and set up the barricades on the sawhorses. The road was blocked.

Before he’d reached the top of the rise that led to the house, he switched off the engine and the headlights. The car’s momentum sufficed. Almost noiselessly and dark, the car rolled off the road and into the meadow. It was half past four.

He stayed sitting there and listened. He heard the wind in the trees and the occasional noise of an animal or a breaking twig. No sound came from the house. The first gray of dawn was not far off.

Kate asked, “Where were you?” But she wasn’t fully awake. When she said to him the next morning that she’d thought he’d gone and then come back during the night, he shrugged his shoulders. “I was on the john.”

In the days that followed he was happy. The happiness was tinged with anxiety. What if the sheriff found the barrier, what if a neighbor saw it and called it in, what if their friends refused to be blocked from reaching her? But no one came.

Once a day he removed one of the barricades, pushed a sawhorse aside, and drove the car through. He drove to the closed workshop again. He drove to the neighboring town and found a technician, whom, however, he didn’t engage. He didn’t call the phone company. Each time it felt good to remove the barricade and set it back again, push the sawhorse aside and then reposition it. Like being the lord of a castle, opening and closing the big gate.

He came back from his trips as fast as he could. Kate wanted to get to her desk, and he wanted to enjoy his world: the certain knowledge that Kate was upstairs writing, the joy of Rita being around him, the familiarity of their household routines. Because Thanksgiving was coming soon, he told Rita stories about the Pilgrim fathers and the Indians, and they painted a big picture in which everyone was celebrating together, the Pilgrims, the Indians, Kate, Rita, and himself.

“Are they coming to us? The fathers and the Indians?”

“No, Rita, they’ve been dead for a long time.”

“But I want someone to come!”

“Me too.” Kate was standing in the doorway. “I’m almost finished.”

“With the book?”

She nodded. “With the book. And when I’m done, we’ll celebrate. And invite our friends. And my agent and my editor. And the neighbors.”

“Almost finished—what does that mean?”

“By the end of the week. Aren’t you pleased?”

He went to her and took her in his arms. “Of course I’m pleased. It’s a fantastic book. It will get wonderful reviews, it’ll be in great piles at Barnes & Noble on the best-seller tables, and it’ll make an amazing movie.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder, leaned back, and
smiled at him. “You’re so sweet. You’ve been so patient. You’ve taken care of me and Rita and the house and the garden, and it was the same thing day in, day out, and you never complained. Life’s going to start up again now, I promise you.”

He looked out the window at the kitchen garden, the woodpile, and the compost heap. The edge of the pond was beginning to ice up; soon they’d be able to go skating. Wasn’t that a life? What was she talking about?

“I’m going to drive into town on Monday—I have to go to the Internet café and also make some calls. Shall we have Thanksgiving here with our friends?”

“We can’t invite them at such short notice. And how would Rita cope with so many grown-ups?”

“Everyone will love being allowed to read to Rita or play with her. She’s every bit as sweet as you are.”

What was she saying? He was as sweet as his daughter?

“I can also ask Peter and Liz if they want to bring their nephews. Probably her parents want to have them at Thanksgiving, but it can’t hurt to ask. And my editor has a son who’s the same age as Rita.”

He was no longer listening to her. She’d betrayed him. She’d promised winter or spring, and instead she wanted to finish up now. In another few months her agent would have handed her the award at home over a glass of champagne, without any extravagance. Now the whole rumpus over the prize would let loose, merely a little late. Could he do anything to stop it? What would he have done until the end of winter or the beginning of spring? Could he have persuaded Kate to wait that long for the connection to be repaired and that he’d collect her e-mails from the Internet café in town? She trusted him with the mail, so why not with the e-mails too? Perhaps it would have begun to snow and never stopped, like in 1876, and they would have
written and read and played and cooked and slept their way through the winter without any thought for the world outside.

“I’m going upstairs. The three of us will celebrate on Sunday, okay?”

Should he give up? But Kate had never been so much at peace, nor had she ever written so easily as in the last six months. She needed life here. So did Rita. He wasn’t going to expose his little angel to the city traffic and the crime and the drugs. If he succeeded in giving Kate another child, or better, two, he would homeschool them. With just one child he thought it questionable, pedagogically speaking, but with two or three it was okay. And perhaps it was okay with one child too. Wasn’t Rita being raised better by him and without any problems than she would be in some bad school?

On Sunday, Kate got up early; by late afternoon she was finished. “I’ve finished,” she called, ran down the stairs, picked up Rita in one arm and took him in the other, and danced around the wooden pillars with them. Then she put on an apron. “Shall we cook? What have we got in the house? What would you like?”

Kate and Rita overflowed with boisterousness as they cooked and ate, laughing over the least little thing. “It’ll end in tears,” his grandmother had warned when her grandchildren’s laughter became overexcited, and he wanted to warn Kate and Rita too. Then he felt he would be a sourpuss and let it be. But his mood got steadily darker. Their high spirits upset him.

“A story, a story,” Rita begged after supper. Kate and he hadn’t worked one out while they were cooking, but actually
it was usually enough for one of them to start and then the other one took over while they listened to each other carefully. Today he hemmed and hawed until he’d spoiled Kate and Rita’s pleasure in the story. While he felt bad about this, he wasn’t able to rescue the mood again. And besides, it was time for Rita to go to bed.

“I’ll take her,” said Kate. He heard Rita laughing in the bathroom and jumping around in bed. When it quieted down, he waited for her to call him for her good-night kiss. But she didn’t.

“She went straight to sleep,” said Kate when she came to sit down with him. She didn’t waste a word on his black mood. She was still elated, and the thought that she didn’t even notice how he was feeling bad made him feel even worse. She was beaming, in a way she hadn’t for a long time, her cheeks were glowing and her eyes shone. And she was holding herself and moving so self-confidently! She knows how beautiful she is and that she’s too beautiful to be living in the country and belongs in New York, he thought, and his courage failed him.

“I’m driving to town after breakfast tomorrow—is there anything I can get you?”

“That’s not going to work. I promised Jonathan to help repair the roof of the barn, and I need the car. You’d said you’d finish this weekend, and I thought you could stay with Rita tomorrow.”

“But I said I want to go to town tomorrow.”

“What I want doesn’t count?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s what it sounded like.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t want a fight, she wanted a solution. “I’ll drop you off at Jonathan’s and drive on to town.”

“And Rita?”

“I’ll take her with me.”

“You know she gets sick in the car.”

“Then I’ll let her out with you—it’s only twenty minutes to Jonathan’s.”

“Twenty minutes in the car for Rita are twenty minutes too many.”

“Rita has got carsick twice, that’s all. She had no problem in taxis in New York or in the car when we came here from New York. You have this fixed idea that she can’t be in a car. Let’s just try …”

“You want to do an experiment on Rita? Will she get sick or will she manage fine? No, Kate, you’re not going to do an experiment on my daughter.”

“Your daughter, your daughter … Rita is just as much my daughter as yours. Talk about Rita or about our daughter, but don’t play the concerned father who has to protect his daughter against the bad mother.”

“I’m not playing. I take care of Rita more than you do—that’s all. If I say she’s not going in the car, she’s not going in the car.”

“Why don’t we ask her in the morning? She’s pretty clear about what she wants.”

“She’s a little child, Kate. What if she wants to go in the car but can’t cope with it?”

“Then I’ll take her in my arms and carry her home.”

He just shook his head. What she was saying was so idiotic that he felt he must actually go repair the barn roof with Jonathan. He stood up. “How about the half bottle of champagne that’s in the fridge?” He kissed her on the head, brought the bottle and two glasses, and poured. “To you and your book!”