One Night at the Lake, page 7
“Okay, but we should get you practicing first. We’ll do some more runs later where you can start with two skis and then drop one.”
“I am the queen of the lake. The queen of the lake doesn’t need training wheels.”
“The queen of the lake doesn’t want to get injured, either. We can—”
“Oliver!” yells Caleb from the water. “A little less talk, a little more boat driving?”
Ollie goes back to the driver’s seat. I shamelessly stare at him sitting there with that faint golden tan on his skin, the tops of his eyebrows just visible over his aviators, a look of relaxed concentration on his face as he scans the lake for traffic and keeps an eye on Caleb in the rearview. Looking at Ollie is just such a rewarding experience. His only physical imperfection, if you can even call it that, is his breastbone, which instead of sitting flat on his chest, is concave and somewhat sunken. But the thing about this is that, since he’s always been self-conscious about it—largely thanks to Caleb, who teased him about it as a kid—he obsessively works out his upper body to minimize the impact of it. So what you notice, if you’re a person who likes dudes and who happens to be ogling Ollie, is a whole lot of fine, followed—maybe—by “Oh huh, I guess there’s something funky about the middle of his chest.” Caleb is crazy jacked and I guess it’s cool if that’s what you’re into, but I will take lean and ripped over Hulk Smash every time.
* * *
—
As the morning turns into afternoon, we break open the cooler and start handing around the beers. Ollie’s parents are big believers in local pride, so all the beer is from upstate New York—Saranac, Ommegang, Ithaca. We snack and talk and bake in the sun, and everyone takes a couple of turns on the skis except for June, who cannot be persuaded to try it.
“I’m a spectator, not a participant,” she says, shaking her head. “I know my lane.”
“It’s easier than it looks,” says Caleb. “I bet you’d be good at it if you gave it a shot.” He’s giving her a big, warm smile—the smile that always reminds me that he really is Ollie’s brother. And just like that, my antennae are quivering. He had better not be getting any notions about June.
“Totally,” says Terrance. “All of us had to learn how to do it before we got good; nobody’s going to make fun of you.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ollie says, reaching into the cooler for another beer. “I will certainly make fun of you.”
“Ignore that fool,” says Terrance. “He lacks basic manners.”
“For real, though,” says Ollie, “it’s not as hard as it looks. If you’re good at yoga, then you’re strong and you’ve got good balance. All you need besides that is practice.”
For a second June wavers, looking tempted, and Ollie bounces his eyebrows encouragingly. Then she scrunches her nose and it’s over. “It was a good effort, guys, but I’m gonna pass. I will take another one of those beers, though.”
“Come on, Junie, let’s float.” I get to my feet and hold my hand out to Ollie for a life vest. “Diaper, please.” While June watches with amusement, I turn the open life vest upside down, step through the armholes, wrestle it up my thighs, and yank the zipper closed. “Voilà!” I say, turning in place. “The Finger Lakes diaper.” I cannonball off the back of the boat, and when I bob back to the surface, my lower half is comfortably supported by the life vest. “Beer me.”
Ollie passes me my beer, then splashes in after me, followed by Caleb. June walks to the back platform of the boat, gets her diaper on, and immediately bursts out laughing. “I feel ridiculous!”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” says Ollie, and digs a handful of water at her.
“Ahh, that’s cold!” she gasps. “Not the way to get me in there!”
“Terrance, you want to do the honors?” Ollie says.
Terrance gives a solemn nod, then quickly steps behind June, wraps his arms around her waist, leans back so she’s off her feet, swings her sideways for torque, and launches her. Guess I was wrong—it looks like somebody does toss June, after all. She has a brief, glorious flight, accompanied by an angry squawk, before she lands ass-first in Seneca Lake. And then she comes up fighting.
“You asshole!” she shrieks, splashing frantically at Ollie.
“Why are you attacking me? He’s the one who threw you!” he laughs, grabbing her wrist.
“Because you told him to,” she says between gritted teeth.
“Hey, Terrance has free will,” Ollie says. “And anyway, you’re in now. Chill out and float.”
From the back of the boat, Terrance wiggles her beer back and forth in his hand like bait. June releases a huffy breath and swims over.
“Sorry, but it had to be done,” Terrance says, grinning. “Otherwise you were just gonna sit here on the boat and swish your feet around.”
“Because it’s freezing in here,” she mutters, and takes a reluctant sip of her beer.
“Yeah, I can see your goosebumps,” says Terrance, brushing his thumb along her shoulder. I give a subdued squeak of excitement; that guy has got moves. “But now you’re stuck. If you get out again then you’re admitting defeat.”
June nods in concession, but I notice that her right hand has disappeared underneath the water. Terrance, lovestruck fool that he is, is too busy smiling at her to notice what her hand is doing until she swoops it up toward him, nailing him right in the face with a handful of Seneca. He rocks backward, laughing and sputtering, and then he sets down his beer and dives right over her head. She looks around, alarmed, then yelps as he grabs her from underneath.
I roll onto my back and paddle toward Ollie, who wraps his arm around my shoulders. “Ah, young love,” I say as we watch June and Terrance splashing.
“You think?” says Ollie.
“Are you kidding me?” I crane back to peer at him upside down. “You didn’t see him looking at her like she was a human ice cream sundae?”
“Terrance flirts with everyone.”
“Yeah, and look how much she hates it.”
He frowns as he watches them. “I better say something to him. She just got out of a relationship.”
I lean up and kiss his jaw. “You’re sweet to be protective. But she’s fine. Rick the Dick was hardly a blip on her radar. The only person you need to keep away from her is Caleb. And look at them, they’re having fun.”
June has now attached herself to Terrance’s back like a turtle shell, and he’s trying unsuccessfully to dislodge her while remaining afloat. Their laughter bounces over the water, sparkling above the music—this one I can ID, it’s the Gov’t Mule version of “Soulshine,” one of Ollie’s favorites—and I sigh and rest my cheek on Ollie’s chest. I lazily stretch my arm out, and my fingertips brush a delicate stalk of seaweed that’s drifting by, its bright green vivid in the shaft of sunlight that filters through the water. A funny trick of the lake is the way cooler currents from below mix with warmer ones at the surface; so even if you’re holding perfectly still, you will feel a pocket of warmth slip over you, followed by a swirl of cold and then another momentary break just as you start to shiver.
Ollie told me about this phenomenon called lake turnover, which happens in a deep lake like Seneca where only the upper layer of water gets heated by the sun throughout the summer. As the days shorten and the surface water gets colder, its molecules contract and grow denser, which makes the cooling water sink below the water that used to be beneath it. The water underneath then rises to the surface, bringing with it everything that was at the bottom—dead fish, decaying plant matter—which remarkably echoes the way humans exhale carbon dioxide when we’re done with our air. The mixing of the layers cleanses the lake of the junk at the bottom and replenishes the oxygen levels in the water.
The whole goddamn lake is breathing.
8
June
THE SERENE, ROSY LIGHT THAT rises over Seneca Lake on the morning after our arrival promises me that things are going to be better now. Determined to fake-it-till-you-make-it my way to a sense of ease, after breakfast I park myself in the hammock underneath the weeping willow at the corner of the lawn, accompanied by my cellphone, a big iced coffee, my tablet, and Spencer. Ollie lounges alongside me, but I notice his head tipping up from his book every time he hears the buzz of a Jet Ski motor from the direction of the lake.
“Go,” I say, patting his foot that’s resting near my shoulder. “I don’t want you to sit around in the hammock just for my sake.”
“But I like sitting in the hammock with you.” He takes hold of one ankle and shifts my leg until it’s resting on his chest, then begins stroking the back of my calf with two fingertips. Ever since he discovered the particular sensitivity of my skin, Ollie loves to touch me in ways that look completely innocent, yet will quietly drive me nuts until I cry uncle and drag him somewhere private: a restaurant bathroom, a dark bedroom at a friend’s party. We like sex with a hearty side of mind games. I don’t know what that says about us.
I close my eyes and absorb the sensations: the drone of a lawnmower in a neighbor’s yard; the scent of the cut grass it leaves behind; the warm breeze on my face; Ollie’s fingers on my skin. If I can just wrap myself inside these things and stay there, I’ll be fine.
After another few minutes, Ollie’s hand has crept up until he is stroking the inside back of my knee with his two first knuckles. On me, that represents an explicit statement of intent.
“Baby,” I manage. My voice is thick and dark as high-summer honey, even to my own ears, and he chuckles softly when he hears it.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
My eyes flutter open. His eyes are half-closed, sleepy, and he’s watching me melt from inside out with one side of his lips lifted in a faint, smug little smile. God, but he makes me want to screw his brains out when he looks at me like that.
Maybe that’s exactly what that haunted bedroom needs.
I have one foot on the grass when Caleb’s shout rings across the yard. “Hey, lovebirds!” He’s striding toward us in a bathing suit and T-shirt, a beach towel wadded in one hand. “Mom took Eli and Leslie into Geneva to go to the playground,” he says when he gets closer, “so I’m off kid duty for a bit. You guys feel like hitting the Jet Skis?”
Ollie clears his throat. “Ah, actually June and I were going to—”
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. There is no verb he could use to finish that sentence that Caleb wouldn’t intuit to mean “do it,” and I do not need him commenting on that. “You guys go ahead. I think I’ll stay right here and read until I fall asleep.”
“You sure?” says Ollie. And he means it. But I saw his whiskers quiver when Caleb said those magic words.
“Of course. Go have fun. I’ll see you when you get back.”
“Okay. Don’t worry, we’ll be careful.” He plants a smacking kiss on the side of my head and hustles back to the house to change into his suit.
“Whatcha reading?” says Caleb, nodding his chin at my tablet. I shudder inside at the pointlessness of answering the question. The title won’t mean anything to him; neither will the designation young adult book.
“Just a novel,” I say.
“Well, I hope it’s more interesting than that,” he says, nodding toward the hardcover memoir Ollie abandoned in the hammock. “Is that another one of his NPR fire-sale specials?”
My tablet bounces on my belly as I laugh. Generally, Ollie lives on a steady diet of music biographies and American Songwriter, but he’s periodically seized by a spasm of guilt that he isn’t doing enough “serious” reading. Whereupon he buys the most ponderous literary novel or depressing memoir that our local bookstore can recommend, lugs it home, and proudly displays it on his night table, reading one-third of one page per day until he buckles under my teasing and puts it out on our stoop for takers. “Yes,” I say, “it is definitely more interesting than that.”
Caleb shakes out the towel in his hand and smooths it over one forearm. “You know, we were thinking of coming down early for the wedding—maybe spend a day or two in the city before we head out east. I’m sure you guys will be busy getting ready, but if you had a couple hours to meet us for lunch or something, that would be nice.”
This is an unusual request. In the year and a half I’ve been with Ollie, I’ve never known Caleb to propose spending time together outside of larger family gatherings; usually it’s Ollie bouncing out invitations, which get ignored or brushed aside. “Oh! Um, I’ll have to talk to Ollie, but I’m sure we can figure something out.”
Caleb nods and, evidently satisfied that he’s done his conversational duty, turns to look out over the lake. But just as I am edging my tablet upward in my lap, he speaks again. “It must be weird for you to be here.”
For a second, I just stare at him. This is so far from a topic I ever would have expected him to raise. “Um…yeah. It is.”
He nods again. “Me too. For different reasons, but still. I hadn’t even been here in a few years, but Leslie insisted. She’s got this cute idea that Howard and I will learn to love each other if we just spend enough time in the same room together. And she doesn’t listen when I tell her it’s the opposite. I lived with the son of a bitch for eleven years before I left for college. That was the chance for the happy family thing. Not now.”
I could ask him why he decided to share this with me, but I already know. All my life, people I don’t know well have told me their secrets. Whether I wanted to hear them or not—and I usually haven’t—I’ve been the recipient of confessions, observations, and gossip. I think it’s partly because, to white people who can’t be bothered to pay attention, my social read is “quiet Asian girl.” If that’s what you’re expecting me to be, my outward demeanor can arguably fit into that slot. Especially in contrast to the ebullient loudmouth I used to have for a best friend, I look like the human version of a dark well you could throw your shiny copper penny into, never to be seen again. Still waters run deep, or something. When I told Leah that a guy I’d started dating had said that about me, she made one of the jerk-off gestures in her varied repertoire. “Your quiet act is such a load of horseshit. If this dude is only now realizing that, just cut the poor boy loose.”
I repeated the still waters comment to Ollie once, as a test. He slid his hand up my throat until his thumb fit under my jaw, and then he looked into my eyes and shook his head. “Baby,” he said softly, “you are a waterfall.”
* * *
—
Once Ollie and Caleb have headed off to the lake, I feel unexpectedly lonely. On the grass nearby, Spencer sighs and shifts position in his sleep; even if he were spry enough to make it into the hammock, I don’t think he’d be comfortable. One of the many things I miss about Winfield is his affinity for lap cuddling.
I pick my phone up to check for messages, but there are none. I’m not a heavy texter myself, but friendship with Leah got me in the habit of frequently checking my phone; anytime I wasn’t physically with her, and she wasn’t studying or in class, my phone would fill with messages from her, bubble after bubble popping up on my screen. Mostly it was a one-sided conversation, but while I did not have to respond to every volley, I was nonetheless expected to read and absorb. Woe betide me if she ever had to utter the words, “But I texted you about that.” Seven years later, I’m still checking my phone more often than I need to. Seven years later, something still yanks inside me every time I see that dark, empty stretch of glass.
I read an article recently by a neurologist whose research challenged the disease model of addiction. I like reading about brain and nerve science, because it makes me feel a little closer to Leah for a moment; I always wonder what her opinion on the topic would be. Addiction, this scientist said, was not an illness but rather a destructive offshoot of the healthy processes of memory. The changes that happen in an addict’s brain, that building and strengthening of neural pathways around one particular source of reward, are essentially just the brain revisiting a route it’s taught itself to enjoy. The mind seeks out that pathway again and again, in a relentless cycle of craving, satisfaction, and loss, because it favors the repetition of the experience; and the more it repeats, the more deeply ingrained it becomes. There’s a reason the word habit can mean both a routine and an addiction.
As I stare, a text blinks onto my phone. How is it? The message is from Sam, Leah’s little brother, all grown up now and writing algorithms for Google. He’s playing it close to the vest, as usual. I’m pretty sure Sam lives his entire life close to the vest; but when it comes to Ollie and me, those cards don’t even leave his pocket.
It’s weird, I write back. Mostly awful. They’ve changed the whole house around, but I see her everywhere.
How’s Ollie?
Better than me. He’s been coming back here for years.
It isn’t different, having you there this time?
I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it too much. I pause, then fire off another message. With Sam, I am in the unenviable position of having nothing to lose. Your mom mentioned that you’re staying for a couple of extra days next week. Would really love to see you once we’re back from Seneca. Both of us would really love to see you.
He doesn’t respond. I sigh, then remind myself that he didn’t say no. He didn’t say no, and he could have. That has to count for something.
* * *
—
Apparently, the blessing I’d given for the Jet Ski excursion covered an entire day’s worth of activities. Ollie and Caleb reappear after an hour, stay long enough to grill some burgers on the deck, then evaporate amidst some muttering about taking the new boat out for a spin to see what it can do. I catch eyes with Leslie, who lifts an eyebrow in a silent expression of sisterhood, but I’m afraid that being left alone with her and Rachel will result in some well-intentioned probing, so I retreat downstairs for a nap.
