Chapter 19 Lindy
Lindy
“My head just gets crowded sometimes, Lin, you know that,” David said, throwing his sleeping bag into the back of his ten-year-old
Corolla Wagon, which was parked sideways across the yellow cottage’s lawn. The June breeze was cool, though the sun was warm.
In the cove, a pair of eider ducks—a male and a female—floated on the high-tide waters. David slammed the hatch shut. His
tent and other gear were already in there. “It’s nothing personal. Don’t worry. I’ll be back in three or four days.” He grabbed
her arms, kissed her forehead with a smack, then headed for the driver’s seat.
Lindy crossed her arms over her stomach. “But we just got here. I was looking forward to spending some time together.”
It had been a busy year. On top of trying his utmost to qualify for the Boston Marathon, David had just finished up his third year at Brown and, at the urging of his favorite professor, decided to apply to attend law school right away after graduation.
He had promised Lindy he would try for NYU, where she had just finished her first year.
Her parents had refused to allow her even to apply to Brown.
She got free tuition at NYU due to her father; besides, they didn’t want her “distracted.” (They still seemed to believe, deep down, that David was someone they needed to protect her from.) So, Lindy and David had been limited to seeing each other one weekend a month, when one or the other of them would take the train the three and a half hours between Penn Station and Providence.
This year, Lindy had been the one to do most of the traveling, since her parents finally permitted her to, and so Lindy and David could finally have some privacy.
David’s first two years of college, the only way they’d been allowed to see each other was if he took the train to New York and slept on the couch in her parents’ apartment.
Lindy couldn’t seem to break it to them that she hadn’t been a virgin since the summer of ’79, so she and David had kept up the charade.
“I’ll be back in four days,” he said now, with a cute smile, folding himself into the driver’s seat. “I’ll take you for lobster.”
She always found it hard to be mad at him, even when she wanted to be. Anyway, she’d promised herself she would make his life
easier, not harder.
She kissed him goodbye through the open window, and he waved out the window and tooted the horn as he drove away around the
bend in Summerland Cove Point Road.
Four days passed. Lindy slept and read, tuning out the music her mother was always playing on the piano or the stereo. Lindy
had not touched the piano since she was fifteen. Not since August 1978, when David had cut his wrist. She still didn’t know
why or how she’d held firm, when her mother had spent the months afterward railing, cajoling, instituting punishments, and
making demands, all of which had only escalated after they’d returned to New York. Finally, one night at dinner just before
Christmas, her father had said mildly, “It seems like she doesn’t want to play the piano anymore, love,” and Greta surrendered
in disgust.
Lindy hardly ever drew anymore, either, unless it was a small cartoon in a letter to David to amuse him, and she was too busy to visit the Met.
She was majoring in English and minoring in Political Science.
She was trying to take life seriously, the way David did, and hoped not to follow in her parents’ footsteps, though she wasn’t sure yet exactly what that meant.
She wore black most of the time. Her friends at school were thin women who smoked and talked about injustice and the importance and impossibility of making a difference.
She was starting to think she might go to law school, too, though she hadn’t told her parents yet, fearing her father’s disappointment and her mother’s dramatic reaction (a four-day faux breakdown, Lindy predicted).
Her mother thought only music mattered; her father believed in the study of history like it was an actual religion.
“David’s not back yet,” Kate said, answering the door at the yellow cottage at sunset on the fourth day. “Want to come in?”
She didn’t seem worried. Lindy’s stomach, on the other hand, had done an immediate flip. She’d known his car wasn’t out front,
but still.
She tried not to worry about David all the time, but a lot of the time—even hundreds of miles apart, the way they usually
were—she still did. He’d had good doctors back in Chicago. His father had said it was fine for David not to take the job at
the machine shop. (His face was pale, and my mother was sitting there with her hands folded, biting her lip, he’d reported to Lindy in a letter.
I guess I scared them, although that wasn’t my intent, and I feel bad about it, actually.) They’d supported his efforts to get into Brown and even helped pay his tuition, in the end. They just wanted him to be happy,
they said.
Lindy was pretty sure they were still as scared, deep down, as she was, and as Mrs. Kauffman came up behind Kate now, Lindy
could see it. Mrs. Kauffman’s hair was iron gray; four years ago, it had been a soft brown. “Lindy!” She gave her a warm hug.
Mrs. Kauffman never forgot who had found David in the woods. She never forgot who had suggested that he apply to Brown, giving
him something to live for. “Come in! I just made cookies!”
Mrs. Kauffman soon went upstairs to bed, leaving Lindy and Kate alone, and they sat at the kitchen table eating cookies and drinking milk like children, talking about their first years of college.
Kate, at Northwestern, had had one boyfriend, then another, then another.
She was on the pill, so she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant.
She was thinking of focusing on women’s studies—no major was offered, just a certificate—but it didn’t seem practical, not to her parents and not even to her.
Josh, seventeen now, came in after a while from being out with friends. He acted happy to see Lindy, but she could see worry
in his eyes, too, when Kate told him David wasn’t back yet, even as he said goodnight and thundered up the stairs.
After that, Kate got out two glasses and pulled a bottle of red wine from where it was hidden among the cleaning products
under the sink. Lindy wondered if Kate had been hiding it from her mother, or if Mrs. Kauffman had been trying to hide it
from Kate. Either way, Kate said it would dull the edges, and it did, without truly helping anything.
Lindy and Kate sat at the table till midnight, but David still wasn’t home. Kate’s eyes had blurred, with the wine, and they
darted nervously as she saw Lindy to the door. She grabbed Lindy’s arm, and Lindy realized Kate was drunk, which seemed oddly
surprising. Lindy had never seen Kate drunk before. “He’ll be back tomorrow,” Kate said, but she didn’t sound very sure.
By the next evening, Mrs. Kauffman was considering calling the police. “He didn’t even say where he was going!” Lindy and
Kate convinced her not to, communicating with their eyes to each other that Mrs. Kauffman could not be allowed to think the
worst, because, if she did, then they would have to think it, too.
The next day, Kate got into a fight with her latest Northwestern boyfriend over the phone and broke up with him. Josh crashed
his bike, scraping up his leg and hand. His mother pulled the gravel out piece by piece with tweezers while he clenched his
teeth and swore.
Back at Innisfree, Lindy yelled at her mother to say she had cleaned the bathroom and washed the dishes, and what was she, some kind of domestic servant just because she was a girl?
And would it be like this if she’d been born a boy instead?
Greta threatened they could just go back to New York before Lindy’s dad even got there; the entire family could just not spend summer at The Cove at all, and Lindy could forget about lobster dinners, lazy afternoons at the beach, reading on the deck, Monopoly with her dad, Boggle with Kate.
She could forget about tennis at the SCPA club, the ice cream social, sailing in the Sunfish, crab salad, and fireworks on the Fourth of July.
“Fine,” Lindy snapped, and went to clean the bathroom again.
Lindy lay awake that night, her bedroom flooded with moonlight, her windows open to the cool salt air. Even the sound of the
ocean lapping the rocks below didn’t soothe her the way it usually did. She wondered where David was, if he was ever going
to come back, if summer at The Cove meant anything to him at all. She was pretty sure he was excited about the prospect of
law school, at least. But it was hard not to remember him in that tent four summers ago, blood pouring from his wrist, clenching
the knife in his hand.
The next day, around suppertime, Lindy was sitting with Kate and Mrs. Kauffman on the porch of the yellow cottage when David’s
Corolla came sputtering up onto the lawn and parked.
Lindy ran for him, was breathless beside the car before he’d even stepped out. She wanted to scream, That was six days, where the hell were you, how dare you, we’ve all been worried sick, don’t you remember, please!
She said, “Hi, honey! How was your trip?” and David climbed out smiling, taking her in his arms and kissing her like he’d
been away at war.