Chapter 3 Susan
Chapter 3
Susan
They drove north to Maine with George Conover packed in the trunk.
Susan thought it more than a little disrespectful having her late father-in-law’s cremated remains wedged in alongside their suitcases, but no one else in the family had objected, so why should she be bothered? She had scarcely known the man, had met him only three years ago, when Ethan first introduced Susan and her daughter, Zoe, to his parents. George had been polite enough, but he’d also been coolly distant, a blazer-and-boat-shoes Bostonian who seemed to be reserving judgment on these two new additions to his family until they could prove themselves worthy of the Conover name. When he’d died of a stroke three months ago, Susan felt no particular sense of grief. It might as well have been a stranger’s burned bones and ashes in the urn—that’s how little she’d known the man. Still, it struck her as unseemly to treat him like the rest of the luggage.
A sentiment that George’s widow didn’t seem to share. When they’d stopped in Brookline to pick up Ethan’s mother, it was Elizabeth herself who wedged her late husband’s remains in with her suitcase, Elizabeth who matter-of-factly closed the trunk. When Elizabeth decided an issue was settled, no discussion was needed.
Susan glanced over her shoulder at Zoe and Elizabeth in the back seat. Although they sat side by side, the two were not at all engaged with each other. Fifteen-year-old Zoe was focused on her smartphone, just a typical teenage girl isolated in her own virtual bubble where conversations consisted of clicks and swipes. Elizabeth, too, seemed to be in her own bubble, staring out the window at the scenery as they drove north up the Maine coast, through a chain of oddly named villages. Wiscasset. Damariscotta. Waldoboro. Thinking, perhaps, of past summers when she and George had driven this same highway to their summer home on Maiden Pond. After fifty-five years of marriage, this would be their last journey to Maine together, yet her face betrayed no grief. She sat ramrod straight, a silver-haired stoic of a woman. That was Elizabeth, practical and unsentimental.
“Hey, Ethan?” Zoe said. “You told me the house is on Maiden Pond. Why is it called that?” Ethan, she still called him. How long would it take for Zoe to finally think of him as Dad ? Susan looked at her husband, wondering if it bothered him, but Ethan seemed unperturbed, calmly gazing through his glasses at the traffic ahead.
“It’s called Maiden Pond because some girl drowned there ages ago,” Ethan said.
“Really? How long ago was that?”
“Um, Mom? Do you know?”
Elizabeth stirred from her reverie. “It was at least a hundred years ago. There was a group of schoolgirls who went out on a rowboat, and it capsized. That’s what I was told, anyway.”
“And the girl couldn’t swim?”
Susan glanced back at her daughter. “Not everyone’s a mermaid like you, sweetie.”
“And girls wore a lot more clothes back then,” said Elizabeth. “Petticoats, long dresses. Maybe boots. That may have dragged her down.”
“This website says Maiden Pond has a maximum depth of forty-two feet,” said Zoe, scrolling through her phone. “Does that sound right?”
“I have no idea,” Ethan said.
“But doesn’t your family go there every summer?”
“Mom and Colin do. I haven’t been back in a long time.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Mom, how deep is the pond?”
Elizabeth sighed. “Does it really matter?”
“As long as it’s deep enough,” said Zoe. “Is there anything in the water that bites?”
“Absolutely,” said Ethan. “You might get nibbled to death by ducks.”
“ Ethan. ”
“Seriously, there’s nothing in the pond that will hurt you, Zoe. Maine doesn’t even have any poisonous snakes.”
“That’s good, ’cause snakes are the one thing that would freak me out.”
“But I warn you, the water’s going to be cold. The lakes up here don’t really heat up till August.”
“Cold water doesn’t bother me. I want to do a polar bear plunge someday.”
“Better you than me.”
“I’m going to go swimming ten times a day here. I can’t wait to jump in!”
Ethan laughed. “And I can’t wait to hear you screech when you hit that cold water.”
It was good to hear Ethan laugh again. Susan hadn’t heard him laugh very much these last few months as he’d sat staring at his computer screen, waiting for inspiration. If only inspiration were something a novelist could just conjure up, he’d told her. If only there were a magic pill or an incantation that would make words appear on the page. Five years after his first novel was published, he had yet to deliver his second, and as the months passed, he’d grown more and more afraid that there never would be a second novel, that the words would never flow again. That he was merely an impostor, someone with the audacity to call himself an author. How could he tell his writing students at Boston College that he was any sort of authority on the craft when he himself could not produce a single satisfactory page? She’d watched defeat reshape his face, had watched the shadows deepen under his eyes and a perpetual frown etch its way into permanence. At night, she’d feel him tossing beside her, and she knew that it was the book keeping him awake. The book that refused to be written. She had no idea how a writer’s mind worked, but she imagined it was like a dozen different voices shouting in your head, demanding you tell their story their way. It seemed like a form of madness.
Maybe this would be good for him, being dragged away from his computer to attend his father’s memorial service, away from those constantly clamoring characters in his head. Even now, as Boston fell farther and farther behind them, she could see his neck muscles relax and his mouth tilt up as, mile by mile, he was shedding the layers of tension. He needed this trip to Maine. They both did. Two weeks of vacation in a house on the water is exactly what we need.
She turned to look at her mother-in-law, who was once again staring out the car window. “Everything okay back there, Elizabeth?”
“I’m just thinking about how much I’ll need to do when we get there.”
“Mom, it’s all taken care of,” said Ethan. “Colin texted me this morning. He and Brooke say the bedrooms are ready, so you won’t have to lift a finger. They’ve put Kit up in the attic, so Zoe can sleep in the bedroom next to ours. Oh, and Arthur and Hannah will join us tonight for cocktails.” He looked at Susan. “You remember my parents’ friends, Hannah Greene and Arthur Fox, right? From the wedding. They have cottages on the pond too.”
“Yes, of course,” Susan said, although her memory of them was almost lost among all the other memories from their wedding day: Ethan beaming at her as they stood at the altar. Zoe, aglow in her yellow bridesmaid dress. And then the sudden thunderstorm that sent their drenched and laughing guests fleeing inside. She remembered Arthur, a tall and patrician man in his eighties, swapping stories at the bar with his old friend George. Similarly hazy was her memory of Hannah Greene, a buxom woman in her sixties, burbling stories about her misadventures while babysitting Ethan and his older brother Colin at the pond.
“There’ll be a few people you don’t know at the memorial service,” said Ethan. “The local minister’s presiding, and some of Dad’s buddies from the yacht club said they’d be there.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Elizabeth. “It’ll be like old times, Mom!”
“Ethan, watch out!” said Susan.
Ethan suddenly slammed on the brakes, and their car screeched to a halt, jerking them all forward against their seat belts. “Jesus,” he muttered, staring at the line of cars that had abruptly stopped ahead of them. “You okay back there, Mom?”
“It’d be nice if we got there in one piece.”
“I didn’t count on all this traffic.”
“Well, you haven’t been back here in years. It’s changed.” Elizabeth sighed and said, softly: “Everything’s changed.”
The traffic was at a standstill. A long line of cars snaked ahead of them, curving around the bend and out of sight.
“There must be an accident,” said Susan.
The whine of a siren confirmed it. Susan turned and saw flashing lights moving toward them; then an ambulance swooped past the paralyzed traffic.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” said Ethan.
The flashing lights vanished over the crest of the hill, and Susan thought of smashed cars and broken bodies. She’d trained as a nurse, and even though she no longer worked in a hospital but as a school nurse, she had not forgotten the panic of trying to save a life, and all the things that could go wrong. She looked back at her daughter, who was once again staring at her phone, oblivious to anything else. Elizabeth, too, seemed lost in her own thoughts. Whatever drama was now playing out on the road ahead seemed to hold no interest for either of them.
Traffic began to move again. They crested the hill, and two crumpled cars came into view. Suitcases had been flung from a rooftop rack, and clothes were scattered across the road in a bright confetti of holiday wear. Lying in the ditch were an ice chest and a purple tennis shoe. You came to Maine on vacation, never imagining this was what awaited you, thought Susan. But who thought about such things when they were packing their shorts and sunscreen? They expected lazy days on a lake and lobster rolls on the seashore. They didn’t imagine they would instead end up in a hospital bed.
Or never go home again.
Her first glimpse of Maiden Pond was little more than flickers of gold through the tree branches, the reflection of sunlit water penetrating the smothering wall of spruce and pine. As they curved down Shoreline Road, she caught more glimpses but never a full view, only tantalizing flashes, bright as Christmas tinsel.
“Is that the pond down there?” said Zoe. At last, she’d set aside her phone and was looking out the window.
“Yep, that’s Maiden Pond,” said Ethan.
“I’m going to change straight into my bathing suit.”
“How about waiting till morning, hmm?” said Susan. “We need to spend time with Colin’s family first. You haven’t seen Kit since the wedding.”
“He didn’t want to talk to me much, then.”
“Oh, that’s just Kit,” said Ethan. “Your cousin’s shy.”
That would be one word for it, thought Susan, remembering the silent and slouching teenager who’d spent her entire wedding reception in tight orbit around his mother, Brooke. This year he’d be seventeen, old enough to start college in a few months. Maybe he’d acquired a few more social skills since then.
They bumped along a gravel road and stopped at a wooden sign nailed to a tree:
Moonview
Absolutely No Trespassing
The forbidding sign was carved in simple block letters, unadorned by any flourishes, and it offered no hint of what waited at the bottom of the driveway.
“You need to get someone to cut back these trees, Mom,” said Ethan as they descended the narrow driveway, tree branches scraping the sides of their car.
“Your father let it go for too long. We’ve had other things to think about.”
“I’ll call around town, find out if we can hire someone to—”
“I’m sure your brother will take care of it.”
There was a silence. “Of course,” Ethan muttered. “Colin will take care of it.”
Suddenly the woods opened up, and a view of Maiden Pond bloomed into sight, its surface gilded by the afternoon sun. And there, looming above the water, was Moonview, the Conovers’ summer home. Elizabeth had called it the cottage , so Susan had expected something rustic, but this was no mere cottage. It was a sprawling house with multiple gables, four chimneys, and a wide deck with steps descending to a sweeping lawn. They pulled to a stop behind Colin’s parked BMW, and as Susan stepped out of the car, she took in a deep breath, inhaling the delicious scent of pine trees and grass and damp soil. Except for a bird that chittered in a tree branch overhead, it was utterly silent here, the pond as flat as glass, its surface undisturbed by a single ripple.
A screen door squealed open and banged shut. “Well, here you are at last!” called out Ethan’s older brother, Colin.
She turned to see Colin and his family come down the steps from the deck to greet them. The golden couple, Ethan had once called Colin and Brooke, not just because of their blond good looks, but also because of how easily they seemed to glide through life. Even here, in this rustic corner of Maine, Brooke looked as stylish as ever, her blond hair clipped in a gleaming pageboy, a pink sweater twinset hugging her slim waist. Behind them lurked their son Kit, his face half-hidden beneath shaggy blond hair, his shoulders slouched, as if he was trying to blend into the background. As everyone else shared hugs and hellos, Kit kept his distance, managing only an awkward wave of greeting.
“We expected you here hours ago,” said Colin as the two brothers pulled suitcases from the trunk.
“Traffic was bad,” said Ethan. “Plus, there was an accident.”
Colin paused, frowning into the trunk. “Is this box, um ... Dad?”
“Oh, just give him to me,” Elizabeth said, and calmly plucked the box containing her husband’s ceramic urn out of the trunk. “I’ll be glad when I don’t have to worry about this anymore.”
Colin and Ethan watched as their mother carried their father’s remains into the house. The screen door slapped shut behind her.
“Well,” Colin said dryly, “Mom seems to be handling the loss very well.”
“It has been three months,” said Ethan.
“It’s not that long.”
Brooke said, “Everyone handles grief in their own way, Colin. And your mom’s never been the sentimental type.”
“I suppose.” He shut the trunk of the car. “As long as she doesn’t plant him on top of the toilet.”
They followed Elizabeth into the house, and two steps inside, Susan halted, staring in wonder at the spacious living room. Sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows and gleamed on polished hardwood floors. Open beams arched overhead in a cathedral ceiling. A gallery of family photographs covered one entire wall, documenting the Conover family through the decades.
Brooke leaned in and whispered to Susan: “And they call this place just a cottage.”
“It’s not at all what I expected,” said Susan.
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. A cabin on the lake. Bunk beds.”
Brooke laughed. “Trust me, the Conovers don’t do bunk beds. Thank God, or I wouldn’t have been coming here all these years.”
Susan turned her attention to the family photos on the wall. It was a pictorial history of the Conovers in Maine, dating back to an image of a young Elizabeth and George, standing beside the pond with a group of friends.
“These were all taken here?” said Susan.
“Right next to the same pine tree. The tree’s out there, by the canoes. You can see how much it’s grown over the years. Every summer, Elizabeth makes us stand under that tree for a photo. Here, that’s right after Colin was born.” Brooke pointed to the cherubic blond baby in Elizabeth’s arms. She moved on to a different photo, of Elizabeth holding a different infant, this one with dark hair. Colin, now a sturdy toddler, scowled up at his new brother. “And here Ethan makes his first appearance.”
Even as babies, the brothers were different, thought Susan. As the years passed, the differences grew more apparent. She could already see her future husband in the lanky child with the glasses and the serious face. Even then, he had a book in his hand, while Colin, the taller and blonder brother, projected robust confidence. A confidence that no doubt served him well on Wall Street.
Footsteps pattered down the stairs. Susan turned to see her daughter, already dressed in her purple bathing suit, scampering through the living room. “Zoe?”
“Just a dip, Mom! Come on, come out with me!”
“We have to unpack!”
But Zoe had already pushed out through the screen door and was dashing down the deck stairs and across the lawn, toward the water. Of course she was; if there was a body of water nearby, Zoe could not resist plunging in.
Susan followed her daughter out of the house and was only halfway down the lawn when Zoe splashed into the pond and shrieked in delight.
“It’s like having a humongous swimming pool all to myself!” yelled Zoe.
Susan stepped onto the private dock and smiled down at her daughter, who was effortlessly treading water. “Not too cold?”
“Not for me!”
The water’s never too cold for a mermaid, Susan thought as she watched Zoe glide away across a surface that gleamed a brilliant red gold. Except for the haunting cry of a loon and the soft splash of Zoe’s strokes in the silky water, the afternoon was magically silent. There was only one other person in sight, a man gliding past in a kayak.
She waved to him, expecting him to wave back. That’s what people did in Maine, wasn’t it? They waved to each other.
The man did not return the wave. He merely stared back at her, his face a black cutout against the glare of the sunlit pond, then he paddled away.
“She just couldn’t wait, could she?” said Ethan, chuckling as he came down the lawn to join his family.
“Can you blame her? She’s been cooped up in the car all day.”
He wrapped his arm around Susan’s waist, and for a moment they just stood together, watching Zoe’s head bob in and out of the water, her dark hair slick and gleaming like a seal’s.
“It’s beautiful here,” Susan sighed, leaning against her husband. “I’m surprised you waited so long to come back.”
He shrugged. “It’s a nice spot, I suppose.”
“Not exactly a ringing endorsement.”
“It’s my parents’ house. Not mine.”
“But I thought the whole family was welcome here. Brooke and Colin come every summer, don’t they?”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him, but he was staring across the water, as if looking into a past that she could not see. One that had clearly not been happy. “You never told me much about this place. Is there a reason you haven’t been back?”
He sighed and pointed up the slope to a tree with a massive trunk and spreading branches. “See that maple there?”
“What about it?”
“When I was seven, I spent most of an afternoon trapped up in that tree, afraid to come down because Colin was waiting below, throwing rocks. Hannah Greene had to come out and rescue me.”
“My God, what a jerk.”
“It’s a stupid memory. You’d think I’d outgrow it, but that’s how I remember all my summers here. Colin, king of the hill. Eventually, I just stopped joining them. It’s been years since I was here. Now I feel like I’m just a summer guest.”
“You’re not just a guest. You’re family .”
“I know. I know.”
“How about we make this summer different, okay?”
He smiled down at her. “It already is. I have you and Zoe.”
“I think it’s going to be good for us, being out of the city for a few weeks. This trip could actually be a gift from your father, making us all come to Maine to scatter his ashes. It’s forced you to step away from your desk and take a deep breath. And maybe something about this place will inspire you. You’ll see or hear something you can use. I’ll never forget what you said when we met at your book signing. ‘If you’re a writer, no experience, good or bad, goes to waste.’”
“Ah, yes. I have the best pickup lines.”
“Well, it worked on me.”
He pulled her into a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For not being much fun lately. For being so distracted by this stupid novel and these stupid characters. I’m starting to hate them for taking me away from you.”
“As long as you come back to us.”
He smiled and pressed his lips to hers. “We should go unpack,” he murmured.
“We should.”
“The neighbors will show up any minute for cocktails ...”
“And I promised to help with dinner,” she added.
But neither of them moved. It was too beautiful here, just the two of them, the pond agleam like liquid fire, their daughter gliding across the water.
A perfect summer evening, she thought. Let’s make it last a little longer.