The Color of Water in July (8 page)

Later that afternoon, the sun came out, and Jess and Russ went into town. Russ wanted to see if he could find more books about local architecture, so they headed for the bookstore. When they got there, the shadowy interior didn’t look as appealing to Jess as the bright day outside, so she decided to take a walk down along the marina while Russ was looking for books, and to meet him at the coffee place in a few minutes.

The day was balmy and the air was dry, so pleasant in contrast to the humidity of the New York summer. She looked at the boats in the little city marina—big, hulking cabin cruisers with folding lawn chairs on the decks, enormous sailboats with their names painted in gold leaf: 
The Harriet Ruth
,
Tipsy Topsy
. There was an art fair going on in the park in front of the marina, artists with their wares spread out under white tents. The paintings were mostly bright watercolors with summery themes: sailing boats and lighthouses, children in striped bathing suits with sand buckets on the beach.

Jess saw families walking around, dressed in crisp vacation clothes, bright white tennis shoes and polo shirts in pastel colors. Jess saw two brothers, certainly twins, maybe about six years old, throwing pieces of bread to the ducks that swam along in the sullied water just at the marina’s edge. Both children had tousled brown ringlets. She saw one boy bending forward on chubby legs, fingers wrapped around a bit of bread he was getting ready to throw, the other hand pressed down on the blue baseball cap he was wearing. His brother, his brow furrowed in concentration, was holding the bag carefully.

Some of Jess’s colleagues at the library had children. She would sometimes see them on their way to private schools, the boys wearing blazers, the girls bare legged with knobby knees above their woolen kneesocks. That was probably how she had looked as a child—crossing city streets with her hand gripped roughly in a nanny’s hand, or climbing awkwardly into a taxi with her satchel, her violin case whacking her uncomfortably in the knee.

The boys ran out of bread and sprinted back to their mother, who was wearing black bike shorts and a white sweatshirt with pictures of sailboats on it.

“Come on, guys,” the woman said. “Let’s go meet Daddy for a Happy Meal.” And off they walked.

Jess imagined that if she and Russ ever had a child, it would be more likely to slurp sesame noodles out of a paper takeout carton than to ever eat a Happy Meal. A Happy Meal . . . Well, she and Russ hadn’t discussed having children much, except for the obvious fact that in New York City, they would never be able to afford to have more than one.

Jess walked back to the coffee place, where she saw Russ sitting at an outside table with a black coffee and a stack of books in front of him.

“What did you find?” she asked him.

“There is some pretty good small-press stuff here. Look, here’s one about the history of lumbering in this area. This one’s about the Earl Young houses, these cottages on the north shore made out of stone. This one’s even up your alley—it’s got some poetry in it.”

Russ handed Jess the slim paperback volume, bound in shiny blue paper. She turned it so that she could see the title
: Cathedral of the Pines: Musings of a Sometime Woodsman
. She didn’t even need to read the author’s name, because there was his face, on the back cover.

She opened the book slowly. The dedication caught her eye.

For J
.

CHAPTER NINE

J
ESS
,
AGE SEVENTEEN

As it does in the north part of Michigan, the weather had suddenly turned colder and stormy, and there was an almost autumnal feeling in the air. Outside the warped glass windows, the lake had gone silver, studded with scallops of whitecaps. The tree branches that hung down over the window were shaking, and the sky over the lake was gray streaked with purple: dark, menacing, and cold.

It was Thursday, the day each week when Mamie went to Petoskey with May Lewis, and this Thursday was no exception. Mamie had put on her raincoat, snapped plastic galoshes over her pumps, and tied a pink kerchief around her head; then she had left as usual, gliding her town car down the back road toward The Rafters, where she would stop and pick up May.

When Jess heard the screen door closing behind Mamie, she felt herself relax, just a little. It wasn’t until she felt her shoulders drop an inch that she realized how tightly she was holding herself. She was still stunned by what had happened at the beach picnic the night before.

Jess was wondering whether she should have called her mother. Of course, it wasn’t easy to reach Margaret in Namibia. She was following rebel camps in the South, but the AP could always get in touch with her, and, as Jess knew, she frequently flew out to Johannesburg for R&R. She might be at the Sofitel right now, and Jess could just pick up the phone and dial.

Then again, they weren’t much in the habit of speaking to each other during the summer. Jess rarely tried to get in touch with her on assignment. Just the idea of trying to reach Margaret in Namibia gave her a headache. Jess thought about Margaret and Mamie. No use to her, either one of them. She would, as she usually did, forge on alone.

Just a few minutes after Mamie left, she saw Daniel’s white pickup pull into the spot next to the garage where Mamie’s Lincoln Town Car usually sat.

Her first thought was to run upstairs in the cottage, to hide and pretend she wasn’t there. But it was too late. He had caught sight of her through the window, and his face, so serious-looking, had eased into a smile. She stood up from where she sat at the kitchen table folding clothes and walked to the back door, pushing it open.

There was an awkward moment of silence, Jess staring down at the scuffed green-and-white linoleum, unable to meet his eyes. She thought he was going to offer sympathy, and felt that the slightest kind word would send her dissolving back into sobs. She stared resolutely at her feet.

But Daniel did not offer sympathy. Instead, he grasped her arm gently and guided her out the door into the soft rain.

“If it’s okay with you, I want to show you something.” Holding his green windbreaker over their heads as they walked, he headed them toward the path into the woods.

“Where? Where are we going?” Jess was walking along beside him, close enough to bump elbows, ducking to stay under the impromptu canopy.

“Just a minute, I’ll show you.” He slowed to a walk as the path into the woods got so narrow that they had to walk in single file. He still held the windbreaker over both of them. The air underneath it was close, with a vinyl odor. Fat raindrops were falling on it occasionally, making loud splats.

Daniel stepped off the path and led Jess through the thick, wet, knee-high brambles that slapped against her pant legs as she stepped, trying to avoid the thorny vines. After a moment, he stopped, pushing the edge of the windbreaker off his head, and he knelt down on the wet forest floor, assuming a posture that looked almost like prayer. It wasn’t raining hard now, just the occasional splatter falling through the trees.

“Look, Jess. Look here.”

Gently, he held back the branches so that she could see, but she didn’t see anything special, just green leafy underbrush hugging the ground.

“What, what is it?”

“Come down and take a look.”

Jess knelt down beside him, feeling the damp soak through the knees of her jeans. Tenderly, Daniel held up the low heart-shaped leaves. Underneath, she saw clusters of wild raspberries, each one beaded with a gossamer of moisture: perfect rose-colored globes.

“They’re dwarf raspberries,” Daniel said. “It’s an endangered plant. You almost never find them.” Carefully, he disengaged his hand and left the berries to rest hidden under their leaf canopy. “The whitetails will certainly eat them soon, if the squirrels don’t get to them first.” He reached over and plucked a single berry from the plant, then, gently pressing on her chin, he dropped one sweet starburst into her mouth.

Daniel led her farther down the path. “Here,” he said. “Tell me, what do you see?”

Jess looked around and saw nothing but trees and more trees.

“Lie flat on your back,” he said.

They lay on their backs staring up at the canopy of leaves above them, dampness seeping through the back of her jeans. Jess noticed that there were a number of trees with long, straight trunks that appeared to leave the forest entirely and rise up into the sky.

“This is it,” Daniel said. “The last stand of giant white pine hereabouts. The lake used to be ringed by them, but these are the only ones to survive.”

“Survive?”

“Lumbering. They chopped them all down to make planks from them. You know all that wood in our cottages? Number one white pine planks. Just lie here for a minute and get the feel for it.”

Jess and Daniel lay side by side on the wet, mossy ground in silence. Jess felt uncomfortable and vaguely foolish. The ground was wet, and there were sticks poking into the small of her back. She really did not know what she was supposed to be looking for. She just kept staring upward at the ever-shifting patterns of branches and leaves. She stared until the long, straight shafts of the trees seemed to converge overhead.

“Do you see it?” Daniel asked.

“See what?”

“If you look long enough, it looks like a vaulted ceiling.”

Jess shivered as she murmured assent.

“I call it the Cathedral of the Pines.”

Cutting through the woods, they got to Daniel’s cottage in just a matter of moments. It was surprisingly close, straight through the forest, just on the other side.

Daniel and Jess walked up the worn wooden steps of the small cottage; its weathered green shingles were just slightly paler than the surrounding woods. A cottage sign,
T
REETOPS
, hung over the porch.

“Is anybody home?” Jess asked, suddenly shy.

“Nobody’s here but me,” Daniel said. “I’m staying here alone for the summer. I’m doing an independent project, photographing birds.”

When Daniel pushed the warped cottage door open, the interior looked warm and inviting. Treetops, the Painter cottage, was cozy, decorated in dark reds and greens, with soft woolen Hudson’s Bay point blankets draped over corduroy sofas.

Even inside, Jess was still shivering.

“I’ll make a fire,” Daniel said. He took some logs from the hearth and stacked them on the grate in the large fieldstone fireplace that took up most of one wall. Jess curled up in the corner of one of the overstuffed sofas. She pulled a multicolored woolen blanket around her shoulders.

“He should be arrested,” Daniel said. “You should press charges.”

This was Daniel’s first reference to the events of the previous night. Lying in the woods, looking at the trees had calmed her. Now, her stomach started to churn. Jess did not disagree with him, but it had not occurred to her to do something like that. Already, Jess sensed that she would not know what to say the next time she saw Judge Whitmire, a tall, slightly stooped man with white hair, always elegant and courtly in a navy-blue blazer and white pants. Things came up at Wequetona from time to time. To call the police would be to turn it into a “townie” matter. Mamie would never want to handle it like that.

“I just, I just don’t think I could . . . ” Jess pulled the soft blanket around her shoulders and moved a little closer to the fireplace as the flames began to shoot up. “You think I’m chicken, don’t you?”

“I think you’re brave,” he said. And he said it in a voice so grave and so serious that Jess could feel tears pricking her eyes.

Daniel went into the kitchen and came out with a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup and some saltines. Jess took the plate and balanced it on her knees, letting her salty tears stream freely down in the bowl as she took sips of the steamy broth. Daniel didn’t say anything about her tears, just came over and brushed them off her cheeks ever so lightly with his callused yet gentle fingers.

The Painter cottage was not part of the Wequetona Club. It was a little farther down the lakeshore, on the far side of the south woods. Though the cottage was not more than a quarter mile from Journey’s End, if that, it looked out at the lake at a different angle, out toward Five Mile Point. At the end of the lawn, there was the lake, light green-blue close to shore and then a vivid midnight blue out farther, where Jess knew the water was deep. Though the wind had died down on shore, Jess could see that in the middle of the lake, the surface of the water was still troubled.

She looked around the interior of the cottage. Someone in the family must have been a fly fisherman; there were several trophies of rainbow trout on the wall, mouths gaping in perpetual surprise. There were also old black-and-white photographs of Ironton, back when it had been a poor lumbering town; one showed some Indians in logger clothes standing next to a sawed-off stump, and another showed giant logs loaded onto a tiny flatbed railroad car.

“Can I have some tea?” Jess asked.

Daniel stood up and walked toward the kitchen, smooth on the balls of his feet. From where she sat, she could see him filling the kettle with water, his hair falling over his eyes. He was barefoot and wearing a pair of frayed khaki shorts, with a soft dungaree shirt hanging out, rolled up at the sleeves. His skin was quite brown, and she noticed that his calves were exceptionally well muscled, like a runner’s. The sight of him making tea in the kitchen unnerved her, made her go soft around the middle.

Jess and Daniel spent days like that, inside the cottage, sitting apart, sipping tea, and talking or listening to music. As long as she was home by dinnertime, Mamie never asked where Jess had been. She was probably relieved that her granddaughter was gone somewhere so that she could avoid awkward opportunities to discuss what had happened with Phelps.

With Daniel, Jess sat, mostly, arms buckled around her drawn-up knees. Her brain felt cottony, her muscles stiff, every painful shift of her limbs a reminder of what she had been through. Daniel alternately lounged and padded around in bare feet, now fixing some food for them, now changing the record album. On occasion, he took out his camera and stood on the front lawn, almost motionless, for what seemed to Jess to be an eternity. He spent a lot of time in his darkroom, down in the basement, with the red lightbulb on, making black-and-white prints of birds. To Jess they looked indistinguishable, but patiently he showed her: See the two black wingtip feathers? See the white around the eyes? Daniel seemed to take it as a matter of course that Jess rarely moved, that he would disappear for an hour or two and she would still be sitting there, curled up like a walnut, staring at the water.

Sometimes, he sat next to her and named the birds flying near shore.

“How’d you learn so much about birds?”

“Before my mom remarried, she used to bring me up here on weekends, with her boyfriends.”

Daniel was lounging on one of the sofas, his arm flung over the end and his brown hair cascading over the side. Joni Mitchell was playing softly on the stereo. “Always by sometime Saturday afternoon, the boyfriend would start giving me
the look
.”

“The look that said ‘I’d be screwing your mother if it weren’t for your presence’?”

Daniel rolled on his side and looked at her. “Yeah, exactly, that’s the one. Anyway, my mom would always say, ‘Daniel, why don’t you go outside for a while and take a walk in the woods.’ I used to think, is she crazy or what? There’s nothing to do alone in the woods.”

“My grandmother never let me set foot in the woods . . . ”