Chapter Seven
The embers in the fire have nearly burned out when, behind me, a twig snaps, and Paul Burke emerges from the trees. “All by yourself?” he asks.
“Me and the loons,” I say.
He settles onto one of the boulders and rests a foot on the edge of the firepit.
He wears a light wool coat and a striped scarf tied in a loop knot as if he’s prepped for a walk in Central Park.
He tosses a canvas bag onto the ground beside me.
A bag of marshmallows falls out. “I found those in the kitchen,” he says, handing me a metal skewer and keeping one for himself. “God knows how old they are.”
We both push two marshmallows onto the end of our skewers and rest them over the embers, rotating them as the exterior turns golden and the scent of caramelized sugar fills the night air.
Paul holds a special place in my life. Growing up, he visited me on parents’ weekend at prep school and took me to Yankees games in the summers. He drove me around New England on my college tour and used some connections to help me get into Newburg College in Connecticut. He’s someone I trust.
“I didn’t mean for you to find out about the podcast that way,” I say.
“Well, your mom knows about it now. So does Reid.”
I pull the marshmallows from the fire and slip off the crisp outer shell to savor the sweetness as it melts on my tongue. “Do you think about that night? About my father?”
Paul’s marshmallows catch fire. He lets them burn until they fall from the skewer and smolder in the embers.
“This is off the record,” I say, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m a lawyer. I worry about everything.”
“And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask questions.”
“What exactly is your job, Charlie?”
“I’m a journalist,” I say, though I can hear the question mark at the end of the sentence, because mostly what I do is edit audio.
“If you’re playing journalist, I’ll play lawyer. Who else knows about this project besides us?”
“Only a few people.”
“Who?”
“My producer at the station,” I say. “Seton.”
“Anyone else?”
“I talked to Lisa Lawson on my way to town. She was married to the lead investigator, Wendy Burrows. The one who died later that summer.”
“How did you find Lisa Lawson?”
“Wendy’s name was on the police reports,” I say, “and then it wasn’t. It didn’t take much of a leap to figure out something had happened to her. I found Lisa’s name listed in the obituary.”
“Wendy Burrows was a drunk six months from retirement,” Paul says. “She drove her car into the lake, and that was that. By then, the investigation had stalled anyway, and it never picked up again.”
Or maybe Wendy Burrows got too close to solving the case.
“I get it, Charlie,” Paul says, staring into the fire.
“You have questions, and you want answers. I’d feel the same way if I were in your place.
I’ll tell you this much: Your father was a friend.
A good friend. And what happened here on the lake, it doesn’t leave you.
Ever. Especially at night, when you can’t sleep. ”
I wait for Paul to continue.
“I think about what I could have done differently,” he says, eventually.
“How another choice could have altered our fates. I’d come in from New York that morning and hadn’t heard the local gossip about your mother’s affair with Isaac Haviland.
All I knew was that Andrea and Isaac didn’t show up on the dock here at Idlewood, and the tension between your parents was palpable.
But instead of sticking around, I paddled away. ”
“Would my father have listened to you?”
“Who knows? But with anything like this, the trick is to cut out the evil before it takes root, to eliminate the darkest parts. Your father showed his dark side that night, but what if I’d brought him toward the light.
Or what if I’d convinced Isaac to leave.
Or what if I’d stuffed a dozen deviled eggs into my mouth, tripped off the dock, and let everyone forget how angry they were at each other.
Or what if—” Paul stops. “See how this works? I won’t get much sleep tonight. Probably none of us will.”
I know I won’t.
“What does Seton say about your project?” Paul asks. “Is she working with you?”
“God, no,” I say. “She tore me a new one when she found out what I was doing. And we don’t discuss her father, or mine. It’s our unspoken agreement.”
“Not a bad strategy. The less said about some things, the better. Learn from that friendship.” Paul stands and brushes pine needles from his jeans. “Are you going to ask Seton on a date this summer?”
I’m surprised Paul knows to ask, since I’m not sure myself what’s going on between the two of us. “There’s nothing between Seton and me.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
Paul’s footsteps fade into the night, but his words linger—the possibilities, the alternate paths our lives could have taken if one small thing had gone differently that day.
Maybe my father would be here right now.
Maybe Seton and I would have gone on that date.
Or maybe our lives would have diverged long ago, as though we’d never met.
When I return to the cottage, I make my way through the house as quietly as I can, moving across the warped wooden floors and up the narrow stairs to the long corridor lined with bedrooms. As I pass my mother’s darkened room, a faint, skunky odor lingers in the air, and a light clicks on. “Charlie?” my mother says.
I freeze like a teenager sneaking in after a night of drinking at Burkehaven.
“I hear you breathing,” my mother says.
I’ll have to face her eventually.
I tap open the door. She sits up, her back resting against the brass bed frame, her curls cascading around her shoulders.
“Are you talking to me?” I ask.
She lights a bud. “I’ve mellowed out,” she says, offering me the pipe.
“Not tonight. I’m running in the morning. And what would Grandpa Tony say?”
She laughs, coughing on the exhale. “He’d find a way to blame Hadley.”
I perch on the edge of the mattress.
“When you were young,” she says, “you used to sneak in here and get under the covers with me. I’d be so tired, and half the time I was stoned and hoping you wouldn’t get stoned from secondhand smoke. Now here I am wishing I’d appreciated it at the time.”
“You’re getting weepy on me,” I say.
“Nostalgic. Thinking about what could have been.”
Like Paul, out by the firepit. And, if I had to guess, like Reid, wherever he’s gone. The only one of us sleeping soundly is probably Hadley, dreaming of dancing with the Swiss ambassador in Kosovo.
“I talked to Reid,” I say. “I’ll talk to him again in the morning. What was that about property taxes earlier, anyway?”
“Nothing to worry about,” my mother says.
“Reid has another life away from us. Sometimes I think he’d rather spend his summers in Provincetown or Fire Island, but he comes around eventually.
” She tucks her hair behind her ears, revealing the scars along her chest. “Tell me about your project. And I want details. Don’t hold back. ”
I trace the stitching in her quilt, not sure where to begin.
“We got upset tonight,” my mother adds. “I got upset, but emotions are overrated. I’d have been out of business decades ago if I’d let emotions rule my decisions.”
“You’re not as stoic as you let on,” I say. “You’re the one who hid from Mrs. Haviland this afternoon when she brought her bullhorn to Burkehaven.”
“I wasn’t hiding.”
“What was keeping you occupied inside an idle construction site?”
“Okay, maybe I did hide. This town is too small to have enemies, so Andrea and I avoid each other when we can. But I mean . . . she is so annoying.”
“She’s not that bad.”
“She’s terrible.”
I swing my legs onto the bed and lie next to my mother, eyes closed.
If I want honesty, if I want vulnerability, I’ll have to offer it, too.
“Sometimes I feel as though I’m stepping into the middle of a conversation.
I was always away at school. You and Reid, you had a life here in town, one that didn’t involve me. ”
“Those years . . .” my mother begins. “They were hard. I made choices, and there were reasons, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t make other choices now if I could.” She shifts beside me. “How does the podcast work? Do you record on your phone?”
“Or on a digital recorder.”
“I won’t sign a release. Not yet, but let’s see where the conversations go.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Not at all, but I’ll give it a try.”
I run down the hall, grab the digital recorder from my room, mark the time and place, and return to my mother’s room, where I lay the recorder on her bedside table next to the pipe. Maybe my mother will find it easier to tell her story on the record.
“Do I just talk?” she asks.
“Or I can ask questions. Whatever’s easier. You were telling me about choices.”
“You were making me feel guilty.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
“All the time. I probably shouldn’t have sent you to boarding school, but Reid .
. . he was traumatized, and getting him through that took any energy I had.
You were a happy kid. I wanted to give you some distance.
Besides, you reminded me of Hadley: independent, fearless, ready to do whatever you wanted.
She made friends and traveled the world, and I wanted that for you, too.
That’s what I meant earlier when I told her things had worked out for her in the end.
Sometimes I’m jealous of the life she’s led, untethered, free to do whatever she wants. ”
“Tell her tomorrow,” I say. “Or I can play her the tape.”
“You can broker all our secrets soon if you keep this up.” My mother settles into the bed, closing her eyes, and for a moment, I think she might be nodding off.
But then she says, “I’d broken things off with Isaac Haviland by the time he came to the lake, but he didn’t want to hear it.
He tried to convince me to leave with him. ”
“Were you tempted?”
“I’d made my choices by then.”
“Why did you have the affair?” I ask.
“You have to ease into these interviews, Charlie. That’s a big question, and not one I can answer at midnight.”
“How about one clue,” I say.
“Good marriages don’t end. And bad marriages don’t have a good guy and a bad guy. We all play our parts. I played mine, and so did your father.”
“You make it sound like Dad had an affair, too,” I say.
My mother rolls on her side and looks as if she might say more but stops herself. “Enough memory lane for one night,” she says.
This was a good start, better than I’d hoped for after what happened earlier. “You’ll get used to the recorder after we’ve talked a few times,” I say. “Eventually, you’ll forget it’s there.”
“I doubt that.”
“Paul came to the firepit tonight. He talked about those moments before, when the world was one way, and all the choices he could have made.”
“You can’t change the past,” my mother says. “No matter how much you wish you could. We walked through a door that night. What came before was a different lifetime. And what’s followed, we’ve muddled through.”
I stand to leave. “At the firepit, Paul told me to cut out the evil before it takes root, to eliminate the darkest parts. That’s what this project’s about for me, eliminating the dark so I can come toward the light.”
I turn to say good night. My mother stares after me, as if she’s seen a ghost, or as though I’ve spent the evening making her relive her worst moment. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She shakes her head. “For what?” she asks.
“You have a right to know your story and to understand who your father was. I should have told you about him a long time ago. You can ask me anything, Charlie. I’ll tell you what I can.
Get some sleep. I’ll be gone in the morning at a site visit near Finstock, but we can talk when I’m back.
There’s something important I want to tell you. ”
I could press her to tell me now, but I get the sense if I push too hard, my mother will shut down. She’ll tell her story at her own pace. I stop in the doorway, not ready to leave. “Why did he do it?” I ask.
My mother flicks off her bedside lamp. “When you find the answer, let me know.”
If I’ve learned anything tonight, it’s that we’ve each been asking the same questions for years. Maybe we can find the answers together.
A moment later, I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying tonight’s conversations. When I finally sleep, I dream of rocking in a rowboat, of paper lanterns floating against a darkened sky, and of my brother’s frightened heart beating against mine.