The Goodbye Summer (9 page)

“What was the band called?”

“Oh, different things. They never got famous. Red Sky, that was one of their names. My grandmother went to see them once. She said they were pretty good.” Nana had met a guitar player named Bobby, a drummer named Patrick, a handsome, sweet boy—she said she wished it was him, but Caddie didn’t look a thing like him—and another boy, the bass player, but she said it couldn’t be him because he was black.

“Why do you think she didn’t tell you about Chick Buckman before?” Magill wondered.

“I don’t know. She said she never got around to it, but that’s…”

“It couldn’t have been much fun being pregnant with no husband in Michaelstown in the 1940s.”

“No,” Caddie agreed.

“So she invents a dead one, and there he is. Years go by, he’s not doing any harm. She was a teacher, right? It’s the conservative fifties, she’s Mrs. Buchanan, respectable widow—”

“Until my mother died. Right after that, Nana told me our name was going to be Winger,” she remembered.

“No reason to keep pretending.”

“Except she
did
keep pretending, even to
me.
”

“How old were you when your mother died?”

“Nine.”

“Well.”

“I know, but—why not tell me later? When I was older?”

Magill shook his head. “Must’ve been complicated.”

Very complicated. A lot of things had changed, not just Caddie’s last name, when her mother died. Nana only had six years to go before she could retire from teaching art, but suddenly she’d given it up and started making her own strange art. She’d turned into a sort of bohemian, a look that blue-collar Early Street didn’t exactly embrace. Neither did Caddie, who, as always, only wanted to blend in.

“My mother and my grandmother didn’t get along,” she told Magill. “I think Nana was too strict. Believe it or not. They fought all the time and my mother rebelled, and finally she left home for good.”

“Joined a rock-and-roll band.”

“I guess after she died, Nana decided she could stop being this super-respectable person she thought she needed to be to set a good example for her daughter.”

“Where were you all this time? When you were little. Where’d you grow up?”

“Here. I grew up here. With Nana.”

Magill waited for the explanation.

There wasn’t much of one. “My mother—I guess she couldn’t take care of me and be a singer, too. She had to move around a lot. So, that’s how that worked. Why don’t you ever use your first name? I still don’t even know what it is.”

He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes on her, processing the change of subject. She hadn’t managed that very smoothly, but she didn’t like talking about her mother, it was like approaching a hole in the ground loosely covered with camouflaging brush and sticks. Some things you just knew better than to go near.

“Henry,” Magill said. “That answer your question?” With two loud zips, he unfastened the knee pads from around his legs.

“Henry. That’s all right, it’s a good name. What’s wrong with it?”

He picked up a stick that had been leaning against the table and began to peel the bark off, squinting his eyes against smoke from his cigarette.

“But you always just use one name. ‘One’s enough for me,’ you said that day in the parlor. Remember? You were lifting weights.”

“Was I drinking?”

“What?”

“Sounds like something I’d say if I was drunk. Get some cheap sympathy.”

“No, you were drinking Ensure. I think.” Maybe he’d spiked it, though. Bourbon and Ensure, like an eggnog. “Do you always…nothing. Never mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Ask.”

“Do you always drink during the day?”

He kept his eyes down, intent on the stick. “Only if I’ve been to see my therapist in the morning. That always drives me to drink by afternoon.”

“Oh. I guess you went this morning, then.”

“No, last Wednesday.”

“But…”

He was kidding. He kept a straight face but let his blue eyes go sly, and finally he smiled, confirming the joke. She hadn’t quite known how to take Magill at first, but now it was simple: You just kept in mind that everything was a joke to him. And if he happened to say something bitter or serious, he
pretended
it was a joke, and you had to play along.

“Lieberman,” he said. “Isn’t that a great name for a shrink? Dr. Lieberman. He hates it when I call him Fred.”

“So of course you do.”

“Yeah, but only when he gets on his favorite subject.”

“Which is?” A personal question, but she could tell he wanted her to ask.

“How much of what ails me is in my head.”

Well, that was certainly getting to the heart of it. She wanted to know the answer to that question, too. She imagined everybody did, especially Magill.

“What I don’t get is what difference it makes,” he said, banging the stick against the top of his running shoe. “What if I’m a world-class hypochondriac? So what? Just because you’re psychosomatic doesn’t mean you’re not crippled.” He grinned, then lapsed into morose silence.

She’d heard something, an awful rumor about his accident. Secrets didn’t keep for long at Wake House. “The woman in the picture,” she said softly, “in your room, that photograph on your dresser, is she…”

He lifted his head and looked at her.

“She’s very pretty,” she finished, losing her courage.

He put his elbows on his knees and his hands over his ears.

She looked like she was funny, the girl in the picture. Like she would enjoy making you laugh. She was wearing pajama tops and leaning against a magnet-spattered refrigerator with a quart of milk in her hand. She had tousled brown hair and a wide, toothy mouth, squinty, dancing eyes. How could he bear to look at that picture? Caddie would’ve kept another one on her dresser if she were Magill. A soberer one, not smiling. Not so alive.

“She was a schoolteacher,” he said, still with his head in his hands. He had a funny way of speaking sometimes, as if he had to take care with every word or it might come out garbled. Everything was clear, but it sounded like an effort. “Second-grade teacher. The kids used to hang on her like…balls on a Christmas tree. You couldn’t pry them off.”

He straightened up to take a long pull from his drink. “She used to do accents, German, French, Yiddish. She’d crack the kids up telling these long, silly stories. Sometimes I’d drive over, try to see her when she was outside, supervising recess. But I couldn’t get near her, the kids wouldn’t leave her alone. They just, you know. They loved her.”

Caddie smiled, but Magill wasn’t looking at her; he didn’t see. “What was her name?” she asked.

“Holly.”

“Pretty.”

“She didn’t want to go up with me. I wouldn’t let it go. I kept telling her about the rush, how she’d never know anything so intense, if she did it once she’d be hooked for life. Do you want to know how it happened? It was her birthday.”

“No. I’m sorry. I don’t.”

“Sure? Lieberman does. His mouth is watering.” He kept his eyes on her in a fixed stare, smiling a small, not nice smile. His gaze seemed to shift back and forth between her and a scene playing inside his head.

“Don’t tell me.” With all her heart, she didn’t want to hear how Holly had died, not the way he would tell it to her now, in this mean mood she’d never seen him in before. “Why do people skydive?” she asked. “I would never, I mean, I don’t understand it. Why in the—”

“I’m so
fucking
sick of that question.” He ripped a strip of bark from the stick in one violent pull and stood up. She was afraid he’d stumble, but he was steady on his legs, glaring off to the side while he clenched and unclenched his jaws. He punched his thumb against the end of the stick, gouging the pad of it with the sharp point.

“What was your life like before?”

He cupped his ear. “What?”

“What was your life like before the accident?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I bet you can.” But then she had a thought. “Oh—you mean you have amnesia?”

He peered at her, his eyes incredulous. Then he burst out laughing. She was so relieved, and his laughter sounded so
real,
just pure, tickled mirth, she had to laugh with him. Soap opera organ music soared through the open door from his room just then, and they looked at each other and doubled over. Amnesia! Magill had to drop back down on the table to keep his balance. He had a rolling, carbonated kind of laugh she’d never heard before and couldn’t resist. When they finally groaned to a stop, he wiping moisture from his eyelashes, they were their old friendly selves again. No, much better.

“What was my life like. I was an engineer, I told you. I had a little company. Employees.”

“That’s right. Orthotic devices. How did you get started doing that?” It seemed so strange, like choosing to be an undertaker. But Caddie had always had a secret horror of amputation, people’s missing limbs, stumps, stubs. It shamed her, how much revulsion she would feel at the sight of some poor person’s artificial leg or mechanical claw of a hand. She counted it one of her pettiest failings.

“My father stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and lost his leg from the knee down. He walked around on a clumsy, painful prosthesis for years, then he invented a better one. Eventually he designed the prototype
for the first Full Speed Feet foot. He wasn’t even an engineer, he was a cabinetmaker.”

“Full Speed Feet.”

“The foot line we make. We do the full range of lower-extremity orthotics, but feet are our specialty.”

“Do you have a…a factory?” She was trying to picture the work environment of a company that made feet.

“Sure. It’s small. Ever heard of Kinesthetics, Inc.?”

“No. I don’t think so. Maybe,” she added thoughtfully when she saw he was disappointed.

“Hold on.” He got up and went inside, came back with a folded brochure. “Here. By the way, your grandmother’s asleep.”

She was expecting a picture of a flesh-colored artificial foot made out of rubber or plastic or something, but this…it looked more like a pair of grass clippers. It was a dark gray metal contraption with bolts and springy, odd-shaped parts at the base and two long, arching prongs at the end. Toes?

“This is our basic model, the Pacesetter. We also have a child’s foot called the Running Start, another for athletes, the Mach Run. They’re all patented FSF feet.”

They could be customized, she read, to fit almost anyone’s weight or activity needs. Their polycentric design and multiaxial function provided outstanding durability, comfort, and a more natural, noiseless gait.

Noiseless.
She couldn’t help it, that gave her a queer feeling. “It’s so high tech. This is what you put in your shoe? Don’t some people want something a little more…I know they never really
look
real, but—”

“This is the innards, Caddie, the part that’s engineered for locomotion and joint alignment, weight distribution, functional foot drop, equilibrium. It goes—” He flipped open the brochure. “It goes inside a foot shell. Like this.”

“Oh!” Here was the kind of fake foot she’d had in mind. “Oh, I see, it goes
inside.
And this is flexible, the shell thing? All right, I get it. Well, this isn’t…it’s really…it’s interesting.”
This isn’t as creepy as I thought it would be,
she’d almost said.

She turned to the back page, which had a photograph of “Our R&D Team,” four smiling, friendly looking young people, three men and a woman. “Your staff looks—” She peered more closely. She put her fingertip under the chin of one of the men. “Is that
you?
”

Magill rubbed his whiskery cheek, raised his eyebrows.

“Is it? Gosh, you look really…” Healthy, with color in cheeks that weren’t sunken and flesh on a neck that wasn’t stalky. Confidence in shoulders that weren’t so bony they poked through his shirt like coat hangers. He was smiling the same slightly sly, off-center smile as always, but without the self-mockery in his eyes to make it suspect.

“The point is, we make some of the most progressive lower-limb orthotics in the world. The Running Start is a hell of a foot, I wish I had a picture of it. It’s the first time some of these kids have ever walked on anything halfway approaching a real foot. Now all of a sudden they can run and play and jump, they can rotate, they’re stable, they don’t get exhausted. Their parents write us letters, Billy played soccer for the first time in his life, Katie’s gait looks completely natural, nobody even knows she’s wearing a prosthesis.”

He kept talking, the longest she’d ever heard him at one time, speaking with animation and no irony, telling her why the Running Start was revolutionary and explaining the biomechanics of something new, a foot he’d been working on before his accident; he wanted to call it Roughshod, it would be super-tough, athlete amputees would wear it for long-distance and rough-terrain hiking.

“Is your father still working?” she asked when he paused. “Still inventing things?”

“He died about four years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. And now you run the company?”

“What’s left of it.” He tilted his head and closed one eye to stare at her.

“Do you have a mother?”

“Sure. What do you think, I hatched?”

“I meant, is she living?”

“She lives in Phoenix with her new husband. Which is fine with me, I have no
issues
with it.” He smiled, but he sounded tired; he and Dr.
Lieberman must’ve gone into that pretty thoroughly. “She’s got a new life and I’m glad for her,” he said, rubbing his forehead hard. “Nothing but glad.”

“Okay,” Caddie said, and they lapsed into silence. “She must worry about you, though.”

“This is how you get ’em to tell you all the gory details. Right? You just keep chipping away.”

“Who?”

“Your subjects. I hear old man Lorton wants you to write
his
life story next.”

“My subjects.” She laughed. “Actually, I don’t say much of anything, I just write down what people tell me.”

“You’re good at it.”

“Thanks.”

“You were probably good in English. I was terrible. Twelve years of lit classes and I only remember two things.”