An Unstable Canoe
For me it was all about tennis now. If I could have pitched a tent at the tennis court I would have done it.
As things were, I kept hitting against the backboard and spending time with Jonathan whenever his coaching schedule allowed.
Though I had been paying him for the extra time out of my summer earnings, Jonathan taught me for free now.
As always, nobody seemed to notice my trips to the court or the beautiful new racquet I brought with me when I went there.
Back at Wonderland, excitement was building for the big Labor Day blowout.
Forrest had purchased a new pair of running shoes for the running portion of the triathlon and tuned up his bike.
Prudence had taken the punch bowl out, ready for the party the Emersons would be hosting as the boats circled the cove, and the fireworks that would follow.
Jilly and Hayward were making decorations for the Emersons’ entry into the Lake Catherine Regatta.
All around the lake, families were preparing their boats, stringing garlands of flowers around the masts, making signs.
Everybody wanted to have the most elaborately decorated boat.
Forrest would be launching the Chris-Craft, of course. He had rented a pirate costume for the event—a tricornered hat with a feather plume, a velvet vest, and a white shirt with big puffy sleeves. Knowing Forrest, he’d keep the shirt unbuttoned.
He’d rented a dress for Regina at the same shop. “You’ll be my saucy wench,” he told her, flashing his customary grin. Getting Regina to join in the festivities seemed unlikely. But I could tell how hard he was trying.
Forrest’s plans for this year’s regatta didn’t stop with the pirate outfits and decorations.
More than any of that, the big news was that in addition to the Chris-Craft, he was planning to launch the birchbark canoe into the lake for the first time in years, rather than the Old Town I’d used when I paddled out to the island.
Forrest’s plan called for Jilly and Hayward to dress up as Native Americans.
They’d paddle the birchbark canoe behind the Chris-Craft—Hayward in a headdress and loincloth over his swim trunks, with a tomahawk strapped to his chest; Jilly in braids and a fringed faux-leather skirt and the pair of moccasins he’d bought for her that day we drove up from New Jersey.
Regina was dubious about the idea. Then again, Regina was dubious about most ideas.
In this case, she had a point. For as long as the family had owned it, everyone knew the birchbark canoe was prone to tipping.
This was why it stayed in the boathouse.
Only an experienced canoeist had any business taking that canoe out, and even then, the odds were strong that the boat and whoever was paddling it would end up flipped over in the water.
That was a birchbark canoe for you. Beautiful but unstable—words that also applied to a certain member of the Emerson family, it occurred to me. Liable to capsize at any moment.
Typical of Forrest, he researched a solution.
As hopeless as he’d been as a student, he had a knack for the kind of skills other kids probably learned from their father or their Boy Scout troop, though in Forrest’s case he learned them from books he picked out at the Lake Catherine Library’s do-it-yourself section.
Forrest had acquired the ability, early on, to figure things out for himself, and when there was something that mattered deeply to him—like making it possible for his children to paddle the birchbark canoe in the regatta—he’d do what was necessary to bring it about.
This was one of the things I had always admired about him.
One of the many. He didn’t always finish what he’d started, was all. Sometimes he lost interest partway in.
With the aid of a library book on canoeing, Forrest had hit on the idea of installing a couple of outriggers on either side of the canoe to make it safe for his children to paddle in the regatta. With three days to go before the Labor Day weekend regatta, he got to work.
Forrest spent hours down at the boathouse during those final days, constructing the outrigger and then attaching it.
Knowing Forrest—particularly Forrest as he was, post-Brenda, redoubling his efforts as a family man—I guessed he’d want to turn this into a father-and-son project, or father-and-daughter, or both, but Hayward and Jilly didn’t seem all that interested.
I was, of course. I was interested in everything Forrest did.
That never changed. But I hung back now.
It was late afternoon—the children’s sailing lessons had finished for the season.
The two of them were up at the house, watching a video, as usual, and Regina was taking a nap.
Forrest had set the canoe on a couple of sawhorses, with the outriggers he’d built (his third attempt) attached on either side with a vise.
Seeing me on a lawn chair with my book a little ways off, he called out to me to give him a hand.
“You mind?” he asked. “It looks like you’re really into that book you’ve been reading. God forbid I get between you and Stephen King.”
As disillusioned as I’d become, and as angry as I’d been with him, I couldn’t help it that I still loved spending time with Forrest. Now that he’d sent Brenda packing, I didn’t have to pretend otherwise anymore.
He would never again be the god he once was to me, but of course I wanted to help him fix the canoe.
I put my book down and headed over to the sawhorses where the canoe sat. “At your service,” I told him.
From his research, Forrest had discovered an elaborate technique for sealing birchbark that involved digging up the roots of cedar trees, soaking them in water, cooking them, then scraping the bark, for the purpose of creating a gummy substance to brush over the places where water might get in. He handed me a brush.
For a few minutes we just stood there over the boat, applying the cedar gum. Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t like the old days, but close enough.
“You’re a very smart person, Frances,” he said. “And you’re the kind of girl who notices things other people might not.”
He was right. I didn’t know where he was going. So I just listened, brushing cedar gum onto the bark.
“You’ve probably noticed that for a while there I was . . .” He paused. “Distracted.”
I dipped my brush back in the gum concoction and drew it over another patch of bark. I liked the smell. I liked everything about this moment.
“I haven’t always been the greatest husband and father to my family,” he said. “I try, but I slip up sometimes.”
I wanted to tell him that I got it. I understood more than he might imagine about how the presence or absence of sex can make people do crazy things. Over the summer, I’d witnessed many of these.
“It’s a little like a canoe,” he said. “You can lose your balance. For a while there, that’s what happened to me. But I’m OK now. Steady as they come.”
He made no mention of Brenda Barnett, or the tryst on the island, or any of those other trysts that had no doubt taken place over the course of the summer now drawing to a close—and all the summers before this one.
I made no mention to Forrest of having known about them.
Or that I’d kept notes and reported the details of the most recent of these to Regina.
Not unlike his wife, in those times she’d confided in me about the most intimate aspects of her marriage, now it was Forrest who seemed almost to have forgotten who he was talking with. How old I was, anyway.
“I got in over my head,” he said. “I could’ve lost everything I care about the most. My family.”
I might have felt flattered that Forrest was confiding in me as he did now.
What got in the way was that even as he expressed remorse for his behavior over the course of the summer, he made no mention of me.
As much remorse as he expressed for betraying Regina, he seemed not to have considered that he’d neglected me—a girl who’d loved him all her life—for a stupid affair with a terrible person.
Never mind, I told myself. The important thing was that it was over with Brenda now. The important thing was that Forrest trusted me with his confession. Regina seemed happier. Everything was going to be fine after all.
“Sex can make you crazy,” Forrest told me, dipping his brush into the cedar gum and moving it over the bark.
“It’s like a drug or something. All of a sudden you find yourself in this place you never dreamed you’d be.
It’s like you’re in this little dinghy going through some class five rapids in someplace like the Grand Canyon, and you don’t know how to get out.
Things just keep happening that you never intended.
You end up places you didn’t mean to go. ”
On the island with Brenda, for instance. Plotting the murder of his wife. Or listening to someone he knew plot her murder, anyway. Someone he’d just finished having sex with.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m back now,” he said. It was almost as if he knew I’d been there in the library that day, and on the island, and in the yard outside the Barnetts’ rental house even.
“It’s over,” he said.
“That’s good,” I told him. “I’m happy for you.”
“You know you mean a lot to me, don’t you, Frances?” he said.
But the warm feeling I would have felt once, hearing these words, was gone.