Chapter 5 Lindy
Lindy
That week that Kate was sick, that summer Lindy was fourteen, David and Lindy went to the beach together twice more. After
Kate was up and about again, David invited Lindy to come out in the rowboat with him and Kate and Josh. There was plenty of
room, he insisted.
“I wake up to an altered reality,” complained Kate, though, to Lindy, the rowboat invitation only confirmed that David still
thought of her as just another little sister. Only once, at the beach, had he touched her at all. “You’re sandy,” he’d said,
tracing a two-inch line through grains that had stuck to her upper arm in a gritty patch. Her skin was hot from the sun, the
wind was whipping her hair, and a dozen other people were sharing the curved forty-yard stretch of sand, when, on a not-so-hot
day, you might have the place to yourself. It was the first of August, and David had turned seventeen a week earlier. Lindy,
who would be fifteen in November, felt her face flame, and David had looked away like he was embarrassed, too.
But, a few days after the rowboat outing, he arranged to borrow a Sunfish from a neighbor.
Lindy had mentioned in an offhand way, one of the days at the beach, that she would love to learn to sail.
Now he said this would be a perfect time: light winds in the right direction for sailing in the cove, almost high tide, and the neighbor wasn’t using the boat.
“I have no interest in that,” Kate said, flouncing off to read a book, and, anyway, only two people could go out at once.
The Sunfish was on the beach, and David told Lindy to sit toward the front on the side of the tiny cockpit, and to watch out
for the boom. He shoved the boat into the water and clambered aboard from behind, rocking it atop the glassy blue surface
of the water. Lindy was already laughing, trying to find something to hang on to. “You’re going to capsize it!”
He grinned, getting himself situated on the other side of the cockpit, grabbing the tiller and the line to control the sail.
“Am not,” he said.
Each time he tacked, they both had to duck under the boom to switch sides. Her knee kept brushing his. “Sorry,” she would
say, blushing, and he would give her a shrug or a wink.
He explained how to judge the direction of the wind. How to adjust the sail. How the slightest motion of the tiller would
cause a big turn. He made it all look easy. “Want to try?” he said, after a bit. She liked the way he looked squinting against
the sun. She’d never thought of him as graceful, but he had a nice way of moving around the boat. His arms were long and lean
and muscular.
She wanted the moment to last.
She wanted an excuse for another lesson.
“Not today,” she said. “Just keep showing me how it’s done, okay?”
He smiled and said okay.
But there were only three weeks left of the summer, and the couple of times conditions would’ve been right for sailing, the
neighbors were using the Sunfish.
One drizzly morning, Lindy knocked on the door of the yellow cottage, ostensibly to see Kate.
But Kate answered the door and said, “David’s not here.
” The instant assumption that Lindy was looking for him (had she been so transparent?) startled Lindy, but at least Kate didn’t shut the door in her face.
She simply left it hanging open and turned away so that Lindy might follow her inside.
Lindy did so with some trepidation, closing the door quietly behind her, because it was clear that Kate was unhappy with her.
Kate flopped onto the couch, arms folded. Lindy sat carefully on the opposite end, just as Kate and David’s mother sailed
through the room with a heaping basket of dirty laundry, calling out hello to Lindy. Lindy said hello back, but Mrs. Kauffman
had already gone outside, the screen door banging shut behind her. She must have decided the drizzly day would be a good one
for the laundromat.
“I know you want to know where he is,” Kate said. She had grown taller and thinner this summer, and her dark, curly hair was
long and wild. Freckles dusted her nose. She was wearing a yellow Moody’s Diner T-shirt and cutoffs, and her elbows and knees
were pointy. Her bare feet were dirty, as if she’d just come in from a long walk outside. “It’s so obvious, the two of you.”
“What’s obvious?” Lindy said, because nothing felt obvious to her. She hadn’t come here looking for David, she told herself,
although now she was undoubtedly curious where he was.
Kate rolled her eyes. “He’s camping.”
Lindy had understood previously in a vague way that David and his friends, Toby and Mike, liked to hike up into the woods
and make camp. Last summer, they’d stayed up there six days and nights in a row, only returning home for the colossal picnic
baskets their mothers packed for them each day—stacks of PB&Js, giant bags of Ruffles, entire packages of raw hot dogs for
them to cook over the fire, marshmallows for roasting, homemade cookies—which Kate said entirely voided their claims of “surviving
in the wild.”
Lindy had never before felt personally betrayed by David’s decision to spend a night away from the yellow cottage.
So, okay, maybe she had been coming to see him.
She didn’t want Kate to know. Also, even if she wouldn’t have been able to put words to it, she could sense that the dynamic
of her life was shifting, and she wanted to keep her childhood—and her best childhood friendship—intact for at least a moment
longer. “Wanna play Boggle?” she asked Kate.
But Kate just looked at her, eyes narrow, skinny arms still folded. “Not really,” she said.
When David’s first letter arrived in New York in early October, Lindy was astonished. In late August, she had helped the Kauffmans
pack the big station wagon for their drive back to Chicago. She had been standing beside it when Mrs. Kauffman and all the
kids piled in. (Mr. Kauffman was long gone, having managed to spend just two weeks around the Fourth of July at The Cove,
traveling back and forth by airplane.) David had only waved to Lindy from a distance as he’d climbed in on the passenger side,
while Kate had given her a tight hug and promised to write, which, honestly, was a relief, though Lindy couldn’t help but
feel a knot in her stomach watching the station wagon disappear around the bend of Summerland Cove Point Road, reentering
the world. Had Kate been wrong to say it was “obvious” about Lindy and David, when that seemed to imply that David had as
much of a crush on Lindy as she did on him? Or, possibly worse, had Kate told David something that had put the kibosh on whatever
inclinations he might’ve had toward her?
She’d tried to put both possibilities out of her mind. To tell herself it didn’t matter. Summer things didn’t matter at all
once you got back to New York, that was what her mother always said.
But now, a letter. She and Kate had always exchanged intermittent letters over the winter, but David, obviously, had never written to her before.
She stuffed the envelope with the familiar return address in unfamiliar handwriting inside her backpack for the elevator ride up to the apartment, hiding it away like it was something shameful.
“Your father and I would not be very happy if you started spending too much time with that Kauffman boy,” her mother had told her back in August, and when Lindy had asked why, Greta had said something about him being seventeen while she was only fourteen, but Lindy was sure there was more to it than that.
Upstairs, though, as she turned the key in the lock with a click, she heard the familiar sound of her mother playing intricate
notes on the piano, back in her studio with the door closed. When not out on tour, Greta practiced seven hours a day, eight
in the morning till four in the afternoon, with an hour off for lunch. When she was done, Lindy was granted access to the
studio and required to practice from four to six. Her father joked that theirs was the only piano he knew that worked longer
hours than he did.
One of the best things about summers at The Cove: Lindy was required to practice only one hour per day. Greta still practiced
for four or five, which she swore to Lindy’s father was “taking it easy.” Lindy might’ve thought this would give Greta more time to notice Lindy was alive, but in fact it seemed
she had even less, since she did all her own cooking and housekeeping and entertaining at Summerland Cove, not like in the
city where she had help come in. And because Lindy’s father was always up in his attic office writing his boring academic
history books—he did his research throughout the winter in New York, and said Summerland Cove was the place where he could
really write—Lindy was left more to her own devices in general.
But today her parents’ absence worked in Lindy’s favor. Lindy went into the narrow U-shaped kitchen and grabbed a Tab from
the fridge, then retreated down the hall, passing her mother’s studio just in time to hear a wrong note, a pause, her mother
swearing, then the complicated passage beginning again. Lindy went into her bedroom and closed the door, shutting out as much
of the noise as possible. Without taking off her jacket, she sat cross-legged on her white canopy bed and pulled out David’s
letter from her backpack. She set it on her green and pink patchwork quilt. She examined her name—Lindy Sanderson—in his crooked handwriting and decided she liked the way it looked.
She cracked open the Tab and took a bracing sip, the bubbles tickling her throat and nose. Then she ripped open the envelope.
Dear Lindy, the letter said, and her heart beat faster.
But after that it was really just small-talk-type stuff. He wrote about how he had recently placed second in a regional cross-country
meet, how Josh was playing quarterback in peewee football, and how, when his family had arrived back home after the summer
in Maine, his father had noticed that David had grown two inches and insisted on marking his new height on the kitchen doorjamb.
Lindy realized now that, although seeing the envelope from David had, at first, been a huge surprise, she had leapt immediately
to expecting that inside would be some kind of declaration. A statement of interest in her, at least. But all he’d written
at the end was: Write me back and tell me what’s going on with you. Sincerely, David Kauffman.
She huffed out a sigh, even as she got up, crossed to her desk, and sat down to write him back. She used her pink stationery,
her favorite blue pen.
Dear David,
If we’re going to be pen pals, I’d prefer that we get to the bottom of important things right away. To start, I would like
to know three things.
What are your biggest dreams?
Where do you want to live when you grow up?
Why did you ask me to go out sailing with you?
Sincerely,
Lindy Sanderson
All her friends later said she was lucky he’d written her back at all, but it had never occurred to her to prevaricate. She came by that honestly from her mother, she guessed. Anyway, two weeks later, his answers arrived.
Run a four-minute mile.
Not in a city. Probably the woods in Maine.
Because I think I like you.
If he’d written, “Because I think you’re cute,” the way she imagined most boys would, she might not have bothered to write
him back. But somehow, “I think I like you” made her feel not just seen but taken seriously, the way David clearly took most
things in life. And to be regarded in this thorough and serious way by David Kauffman seemed suddenly like something Lindy
had been hoping for since she was ten years old, although she hadn’t exactly known it until now.