Lakeside Cottage (13 page)

“Something funny?” JD asked.

“I tend to overthink things,” she admitted.

“Like what?”

“Like us.” She laughed aloud at the expression on his face. “It appears you aren’t even aware that there’s an ‘us.’” She waited for him to respond, but he didn’t. Unlike her, he seemed perfectly content to sit in silence. Too bad, she thought. She had questions. “When you were in the military, what did you do?”

“I was a medic.”

“And you worked with Sam?”

“Sometimes. We started off in different units but crossed paths a lot.”

A medic, she thought. So he already had a medical background. His interest in medical school made more sense than ever.

“Dishes are done,” Aaron yelled through the screen door. “Can I have dessert?”

They had ice cream with caramel syrup, and afterward, Kate noticed Aaron rooting around in a cupboard for board games.

“You should escape while you can,” she murmured to JD. “Otherwise you’ll get roped into Chutes and Ladders.”

Despite the music from the radio, Aaron overheard. “No way,” he said. “We’ll play Scrabble.”

“What’s Scrabble?” asked Callie.

Aaron rolled his eyes. “Duh.” He set up the board for three players—Kate, JD, and for himself and Callie as
a team. “She’s new and I’m a kid,” he explained, “so we get to work together.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Kate said to JD.

“I’ll stay,” he replied.

Covering an inner thrill at that, Kate started with “gamble,” not exactly inspired, but at least it used her three best letters. After a whispered consultation, Callie and Aaron attached “gas” to that. In a stunning move, JD added “adenoma” to that. “Time to open a can of whup-ass on the Scrabble board,” he said, very nearly smiling.

“Whup-ass,” Aaron said under his breath.

“Adenoma,” Kate said, frowning. “I’ve never heard of it. Are you sure it’s a word?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “It’s a word. And give me my thirty-nine points.”

“Thirty,” said Kate.

“Look again. The M gets a triple-letter score.”

He was right. One of his tiles occupied the coveted square.

Kate refused to give up without a fight. “I’m looking it up.” She grabbed the old yellowed paperback dictionary and flipped through the well-thumbed pages. “A noncancerous tumor,” she conceded. “I didn’t know that.”

“Thirty-nine points,” he reminded her.

It was only the beginning of her humiliation. For someone who made a living with words, she should have done better. The tiles were cruel, though. She drew a Q, but no U. She even had the sought-after X, though the board offered no place to attach it. She took so long deliberating over each move that both Callie and Aaron started yawning, their eyelids drooping. They both seemed relieved when the tiles ran out and the game ended. The final tally added up to victory for JD.

“I’d better get going,” he said. “Quit while I’m ahead.”

“JD, wait,” Aaron said, sounding a little desperate. “How are you at fixing things?”

“What things? Like raccoons?”

“Bikes. We got the tires all pumped up, but the chain on mine keeps falling off.”

“I’ll help you fix it,” Kate said, mortified by her son’s obvious ploy.

“Nope. I want JD.”

Me, too, she thought.

“I don’t mind,” JD said. “I’ll have a look at it one of these days.”

Kate walked outside with him. “You don’t have to, you know,” she said. “I know how to fix a bike.”

“Then that makes one of us.”

“Aaron…um, he does this. He looks for father figures in guys we meet.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It is when he gets his heart broken.” Kate bit her lip. She’d said too much. He probably knew perfectly well that Aaron wasn’t the only one who got his heart broken. “Look, I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t worry about it, Kate.”

And just like that, she didn’t. He had a weirdly soothing way about him. Most men had the opposite effect on her, bothering and unsettling her.

The sun was gone at last, though its light would linger in the sky until well past ten o’clock. This was the most beautiful time of day at the lake. The water, a vast flat mirror, reflected the mountains. Along the shore, a few lights and campfires flickered like a necklace of gold. Crickets and frogs sang from their hiding places in the shadows.

This truly was a world apart, Kate conceded. That was the magic of summer at the lake, she thought. This place was a world apart, and you could be anyone you wanted to be out here.

She couldn’t fathom why it worked that way and why it always had. An exhausted single mother could be Susie Homemaker. A boy who struggled in school could be Tom Sawyer, skipping stones, running barefoot through the grass and learning to swim. A homeless girl could have a family.

“Overthinking again?” JD asked her.

She realized she’d let her silence go on too long. “Just…thinking. I love it at the lake. I can be a different person here.”

“Why would you want that?”

“Doesn’t everybody? When I was a kid in Seattle, I was always being teased about having red hair and freckles, and for knowing all the answers in class. Each summer, I’d come to the lake and metamorphose into an Indian princess, a pirate queen, an Olympic swimmer, a legendary mermaid. Anything but my true self.”

“I’m glad you got over that phase,” he murmured.

When she grew older, she used to let Sammy Schroeder steal kisses behind the boathouse. Later on, when they were in high school, he used to take her to the drive-in movie in Port Angeles, and there would be more kissing in the musty-smelling cab of his El Camino.

She wondered if Sam remembered those times. She wondered if he had mentioned them to JD. She could ask him, certainly, but she didn’t. That would seem presumptuous, as if she was sure of his interest. They weren’t yet at the point of discussing their friends of the past or future in any detail. They only existed right now, in this moment. Both seemed to understand that going
beyond that would be a mistake. At the moment. There was plenty of summer left for getting to know him.

“Thanks for having me,” he said, apparently not interested in pursuing the conversation.

“It was no trouble at all.”

“I didn’t mean to make you invite me, but I’m glad you did.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I’m glad you stayed.”

“Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

“Maybe.”

“Thanks, Kate.” He lingered. The last light of day burnished his hair, the squared-off jaw and big shoulders, the sculpted lips.

“You’re welcome,” she said softly, and took a step forward. This was the lake, after all. She was allowed to be different here, bolder, romantic. It had been so long since she’d had a summer romance—or any romance for that matter—that she was amazed to find that the flirting came so naturally. She focused on his lips. Brushed her hand against his arm accidentally-on-purpose.

He leaned down, his lips nearly touching hers, so close she could almost feel him, taste him.

“See you around, Kate,” he said softly, his breath warm in her ear.

She realized then that he was reaching for the handle of the car, not putting his arm around her. He got in the truck and drove away, leaving her bemused and frustrated on the driveway.

She shouldn’t have let him get away. She should have made him either kiss her good-night or flat out reject her. As things stood, she didn’t know what sort of goodbye that was.

She went into the house. The Scrabble board lay as they had left it on the kitchen table. Before putting it
away, she studied JD’s words: target, bivouac, gamer, pet, adenoma. Did the words a person spelled in Scrabble give any insight into his state of mind? Probably not. He was just going for the big score, every time. Her own words—gamble, elate, not, nip, lonesome—said nothing about her, gave no hint as to what made her tick.

Except for “lonesome.” That was a little too revealing, but she couldn’t help herself. It was a chance to land on a double-word-score square.

She picked up both sides of the board and poured the tiles into the old blue Crown Royal bag, a convenience provided by her father years ago. As she put the game away, she reflected that this evening had been a good one, maybe too good to be true. They were like the family in that old television show,
The Waltons.
Except this family was made up of an unemployed single mother, a runaway teenager, a nine-year-old boy and a mysterious mountain man.

Other than that, they were just like the Waltons.

JD
was supposed to be dealing with an unavoidable stack of mail this morning, but thoughts of Kate made him restless. He constantly reminded himself that he’d come here for the isolation, the solitude, the chance to get his life back. The last thing he needed was to fall for June Cleaver and little Beaver. But against all common sense, he felt drawn to her simple human decency.

Keep your distance, he cautioned himself. Yet a woman like Kate made it hard for him to follow his own advice. He had brought her an offering of food, a gesture as telling and transparent as the first caveman bringing home the hunt.

He had almost kissed her. He had leaned down so close he could smell her hair. He had felt a tug of recognition, and all his instincts had urged him to press closer and explore.

Thanks to what had happened to him last Christmas, he could not allow himself to do this. Not now, not for a very long time, maybe never. He doggedly barred the
door to further thoughts of Kate Livingston and tried to concentrate on the mail he had brought from the post-office box in town. Sam was adept at filtering out the flood of letters and packages from the loonies of America. Who knew the Land of the Free was Home of the Brave as well as Home of the Crazies? And dozens of them seemed compelled to send him things, week in and week out.

Thanks to Sam, JD received only the legitimate bills and normal correspondence.

If getting a large, flat envelope from a Hollywood agent could be considered normal.

JD stared at the envelope. He drummed his fingers on it. He wished he had never heard of Maurice Williams, LLC. “Taking control at this stage is for your own protection,” Williams had assured him. “Nobody needs your permission to do the film. An unauthorized version can pop up any minute, like that god-awful book. Is that what you want?” Williams had handed him the contract. “This is your chance to be in charge. You’ll thank me, Jordan. I swear you will.”

JD hadn’t thanked him. Taking control meant agreeing to be a consultant on the biopic. It meant agreeing to promote the film. It even meant attending its premiere at the end of it all.

In exchange, JD would be paid a fortune, all of it going to benefit the foundation. That was his only consolation. All he really wanted was a normal life again, to go and buy a bag of Fritos or a three-pack of Jockey shorts without being stalked by paparazzi, accosted by loonies or asked for his autograph. To have an uninterrupted meal in a restaurant or, God willing, to have sex with a woman, any woman, who wouldn’t turn around and sell the whole story to the tabloids. It didn’t seem
like so much to ask, yet it seemed impossible from where he was now.

Along with the mailing from Williams, Sam had sent a copy of
Shout
magazine, quite possibly JD’s least favorite of the celebrity rags. On a Post-it note, Sam had scrawled, “Ha ha. You and Anna Nicole.” The tabloids certainly gave him a more interesting life than he’d ever actually had. People he’d never met before came out of the woodwork to describe encounters they’d had with him, all fictional. The cover of the magazine featured an old photograph of JD as a Green Beret medic in combat gear. The headline read TV’s Next Reality Star?

Apparently there was speculation that JD’s disappearance was due to the fact that he was off taping some sort of bachelor or makeover show.

The idea made his gut churn. This was saying a lot, because he had a stomach of iron. In his everyday work, he saw people filleted like brook trout, burned, bruised and battered beyond recognition, shot and stabbed. He had removed week-old corpses from overheated apartments, having to pour them into a body bag. He had seen maggots at work in places most people dared not imagine.

These things did not make him feel like puking.

Seeing himself in a gossip magazine—that made him feel like puking.

A footstep on the porch outside startled him. Callie.

He stuffed the magazine into the wood-burning stove. There was no fire going because the summer nights were warm, but he knew he’d be lighting one tonight.

“Hey, Callie,” he said, holding open the door. “Thanks for coming.”

“I don’t mind a bit. I can always use the extra money.”

He knew she had her pride. She also had secrets, and he hoped, in time, she might open up about that. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was not right. He suspected the two of them had a few things in common. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“How…what?” She tucked her hair behind her ear and eyed him in confusion.

“I mean, how are you doing?” he amended.

“Fine,” she said. “Great. Ready to get started.”

He wondered if it was a mistake to have Callie working at his place. In all honesty, it wasn’t that hard to clean the cabin, especially for someone programmed by the army to keep things neat. Yet he felt compelled to help her. She didn’t seem like a normal, healthy teenager. She was lethargic today, and he wondered if the shadowy patches on her skin might be acanthosis nigricans. He didn’t want to scare her off by prying, though. If he dug too deep, she might bolt. Still, maybe she would open up to him, though he doubted it. If she hadn’t come clean with Kate, it was unlikely she’d do so with him.

He showed her where everything was, including snacks and drinks. He also invited her to take a break whenever she wished.

She tilted her head a little to one side. “Are you, like, this big worrywart or something?”

“Or something,” he said.

“Do you mind if I listen to the radio?” she asked, folding a stick of gum into her mouth.

“Not at all. There’s a CD collection.”

She leaped right on that. “Anything good?”

“Depends on what you like.” He gestured at a shelf.

“
The Best of the Eagles.
Not too promising.”

“Keep looking.”

“Oh! The Mothers of Invention.” She pulled out the
disc. “That’s a little more like it.” She rejected Elton John, the Grateful Dead and Queen, but happily gathered in Eric Clapton, the Cars and the Talking Heads.

“You have interesting taste in music,” said JD.

“I’ve loved it all my life, and I almost never forget a song. My dream job is to be a disc jockey who’s allowed to play pretty much anything.”

“Ever thought about going for the dream job?” JD couldn’t help himself. Her comment caused his attention to flick to the shelf above the writing table. The medical-school application was still there. Still untouched.

“Sure,” she said, taking a bottle of Windex from under the sink. “It’s a long shot, though. I’m lacking in a few areas, such as an education. A permanent address. A birth certificate, for that matter.”

“Have you thought about what you’ll do once…when summer’s over?”

“Sure. I’ll get a place of my own. Find work somewhere. I might not have a diploma but I’m not stupid.”

“What about the dream job?”

She popped her gum. “It’s a dream, you know? It’s not real. That’s why it’s called a dream.”

“I don’t think that it’s that far-fetched, you being a disc jockey.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Anyway, I’ll be out in the workshop if you need anything.”

She gave him a dismissive nod.

She was an okay kid, all things considered. Kate had expressed surprise that someone with Callie’s background had turned out relatively normal. JD understood, though. When a kid’s home life was a nightmare, being normal was a willful act of survival.

He ought to know. By the time he was a first-grader,
standing in the unwelcome spotlight of show-and-tell, he had learned it was best to make up a family of his own, just so people wouldn’t ask why his mother never attended school plays or PTA meetings. His father was in the foreign service, he told his teacher and classmates, and his mother worked during the day and also went to night school, studying to be a linguist. At six, he had no idea what a linguist or the foreign service were. He’d heard about them from the only constant source of information in his life—the TV.

With the diligence of an anthropologist, he studied other families on TV and modeled his life on them. The family in JD’s imagination cared for each other like the Huxtables. They had the cleverness of the people on
Family Ties,
and the sense of humor of the
Growing Pains
family. Those endless programs taught him things that had never crossed his mother’s mind or heart—the value of affection and compassion. The healing power of a child’s imagination was one of the most potent tools in his arsenal. That, and the EMS substation down the block from his apartment.

Some kids grew up with one father or stepfather. JD grew up with a firehouse full of men who helped raise him. He never asked them to do this. But soon after he discovered the nearby station and started hanging around it, the personnel there took an interest in him. He ate more meals there than at home, found more acceptance and guidance with the EMTs than he ever had with his mother.

Now that he was a paramedic, he understood. In this profession, you developed a sense about people, the way he had about Callie Evans. Under Kate Livingston’s roof this summer, the girl was probably experiencing more stability and compassion than she had her whole life.

That was Kate. He barely knew her, but she seemed genuine, as warm and devoted as the mothers he had observed on TV, as loving and generous as the one he had fabricated for show-and-tell when he was a boy. And even in an old T-shirt and cutoffs, she looked like a lingerie model.

He headed out to work on Sam’s wooden boat. JD had heard about the wooden cosine wherry for years. It was part of the mythology of the lake. Sam had told stories, shown pictures of his father’s handmade rowboat, had practically begged JD to take it out on the water.

Clearly, it had been a long time since Sam had seen the boat. The wood was dry and brittle, its finish gone. The hull resembled a mound of kindling with broken ribs and rotted-out planking, its epoxy finish turning to dust. Since JD didn’t know much about boats, he was armed with books, manuals, sketches and plans and most of all, the determination to restore this one. The Schroeders had a good selection of tools and supplies, and he’d bought more in town. Boat-building was a craft requiring surgical precision and strict adherence to rules. He liked that. No iron nails could be used; wooden pegs of persimmon or black cherry were required. Waterproof sealant had to line every lap and groove. For some reason, JD felt driven to do this—repair the broken parts and smooth away the scars, make the craft seaworthy again. It was a measurable project, the results concrete. Something that wasn’t a life-or-death matter. This wasn’t a patient screaming at him or puking on him. It wasn’t going to die on him. Yeah, that was the appeal. Even if he screwed up, the thing would never die on him.

He positioned the hull bottom up on a pair of sawhorses. Time to get busy sanding, filling the cracks,
sealing the wood, bringing the craft back to life. He used more clamps than a trauma surgeon. The nearby trash can filled up with wood scraps and sawdust, the air with the smells of cedar and spruce. Music drifted from the house. Callie had found an album by Jethro Tull. Every once in a while, he could see her through the window, working away.

He lost any sense of time, though the sun tracked its slow progress over the lake, flickering and glinting on the surface. A flock of mallards lifted, trailing drops of water as they arrowed to the sky. “Thick as a Brick” played on the stereo. Sweating behind a protective face mask, arms and hands flocked by sawdust, JD felt something unexpected stirring inside him. A shift, a weird buoyancy. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling. Then he realized that for the first time since Christmas Eve, he was happy. Not in general but in this moment. Doing simple work with his hands, listening to music, feeling the sun on his back—they gave him something he hadn’t felt in a long, long while.

This was going to be a thing of beauty, he swore it.

The music changed to Eric Clapton singing “Layla,” and that made him think about Kate again. Having dinner with her had meant far too much to him. For her, it had been a simple meal. Something routine that happened all the time. She had no way of knowing that for him, sitting down as a family around the supper table was an alien concept. The undeniable pleasure of sharing a meal had been deep and sweet, painful in its intensity, yet not the sort of pain he wanted to avoid. Instead, he craved it. Her, he craved her, red hair and freckles, curves his hands wanted to outline, green eyes that fascinated him with facets that changed like the surface of the lake in the sun.

He went down on one knee to face the hull head-on and judge its symmetry, comparing it to the original published plans. The sides flared out in graceful curves that, amazingly, appeared to match. Today, he was a reconstructive surgeon.

Now “Change the World” was on the stereo. JD straightened up, stepped back to determine what the next step would be. He whistled between his teeth, matching the melody on the stereo. He didn’t hear Callie coming toward him but saw her from the corner of his eye and turned. She walked with an oddly purposeful stride, and even in the golden light of late afternoon, her skin looked pale. She had smudges of dirt and ash on her hands and face, evidence of her hard work.

“You look like Cinderella,” he said with a grin.

“Yeah, that’s me, Cinder-fucking-rella,” she said, and he noticed a blaze of anger in her eyes. She held something clutched against her chest.

When JD realized what it was, his heart sank like a cold stone. Very slowly, he put down the sander he’d been using. Then he took off the protective mask and hung it from the end of the sawhorse. He said nothing. He stood frozen, waiting. “Worried Life Blues” in the background sounded distant and tinny.

“You’re him,” she stated, slapping the magazine down on the end of the sawhorse. “You’re that guy.”

Tiny flakes of ash flew from the pages.

Damn it, he thought. He should have been more careful. Shouldn’t have let himself get so comfortable with his anonymity. “Do you make a habit of snooping in people’s woodstoves?”