the shelf beside the sink sat his daughter’s guest’s toilet kit. Toilet. What a nasty name for what was in there: toothbrush, toothpaste—lipstick maybe? What else? He reached, touched the soft leather, ran his fingers where the zipper was slightly opened, then, shamed, pulled his hand away. Never before in his life had he imagined that a teenager would stir him. Girls that age, especially if they were as beautiful as this one, were people you needed to protect! He didn’t understand that this one’s ability to stir feelings very near to lust in him was a purposeful application of power, in this case just for the hell of it, and he was as addicted to being around power as he was to painkillers—because maybe they were the same. But he did understand that when the Vicodin kicked in and he was back in bed in the dark, not counting the seconds until the next explosion, he might dream of her, and because he hoped he wouldn’t and still wanted to, he was shamed still more.
On Thursday, Amy and her mother had driven from their home on Long Island to meet Claire at JFK, where she’d flown in from London. They spent the day and that night in the City—Mom’s treat—all three in the same hotel room. Yesterday morning, Amy’s mother had put them on the train in Grand Central Station; he’d picked them up an hour and a half later at the New Haven railroad station. They were still glowing from their New York City fun. Claire’s dad, a VP of an NYC investment bank, recently transferred to the London office, was busy that weekend, Amy had explained, and Claire, whose mother had abandoned the family when Claire was eight years old, didn’t want to be in London alone, so Amy invited Claire to spend the weekend. Afterward, Amy’s mom would drive them both to Miss Oliver’s.
Typical of Amy: innocent, naive, kindness personified, but he also knew that she’d never spend a whole long weekend alone with her dad. “Just don’t listen to my show,” he told her every time she let him call her on the phone. “Just forget that part of me, and we can like each other again.” He was that straight with her. “No,” she said. Every time. “No way. You stop, and then we will.” That made him love her all the more. So when she announced Claire was visiting, he’d said, “Of course, you can bring a friend.”
They’d gone straight from the railroad station to the house, put on their bathing suits, and walked to the beach across the front lawn in bare feet, and he remembered when Amy was just five years old and she stepped on a bee; it stung her and he carried her back to the house, feeling her arms around his neck, and he put ice on it and it stopped hurting just like he told her it would. It was one of those times when he was almost crazy with happiness, but now they couldn’t go swimming because the water was full of jellyfish, which happened more and more now in August than it ever did before, and so they had sat on a blanket in the hot sun while he tried to keep his eyes off Claire as she talked about her life in London. “Oh, I’d love to go to England,” Amy had said—an enchanted sophomore to a postgraduate student. He’d coached her in T-ball and early volleyball, and now, in her one-piece modest bathing suit, he saw she didn’t have that chubbiness anymore and wondered if she was wearing it so she wouldn’t have to listen to him disapprove.
Now, with the pill inside him, he turned out the bathroom light and headed down the hall to his room where he’d get back in bed and tell himself not to worry about whether or not he’d be able to sleep. Over and over Don’t worry he’d think, Don’t worry, don’t worry, because what do you think is keeping you awake? Worrying about whether you can sleep, that’s what. Well then, stop worrying, idiot! Just lie there if you have to, it’s not the end of the world, but he’d already turned around. He went back into the bathroom, and this time when he turned on the light, the glare off the tiles was an explosion in his eyes. He opened the medicine cabinet, found the bottle of Ambien, squinted hard at the label to make sure that’s what it was, and swallowed two, imagining them landing on the Vicodin, and, just to be sure, popped a Benadryl. Then he turned out the light and it was somehow darker than it was before, like the inside of a camera, or the bottom of the ocean, and he had to feel his way with his hands on the walls, his fingertips along the grooves in the old-fashioned tongue-and-groove paneling that still smelled like just-cut trees and the door behind which his daughter and Claire Nelson slept, where he wanted to stop and listen to them breathe, but he didn’t. Moonlight shone through the windows in his room, his big empty bed right there in the middle. He climbed up into it, and few minutes later he was on the thin line between sleeping and waking, wondering if he would ever cross over. And then oblivion.
When he got up at seven he felt relieved, maybe even proud, that he’d managed not to dream of Claire, and he didn’t swallow any pills, just black coffee, and took a long walk on the beach to kill time until Amy and Claire woke up. An hour later when he returned they were still asleep, obviously, being teenagers. So he mowed the lawn, the big green sward in front of the cottage that swept down to the seawall. He figured the roar of the lawn mower engine would do it, but at nine o’clock they still hadn’t appeared downstairs. He was tempted to climb the stairs and wake them, but he was afraid to annoy his daughter. As soon as they did wake up, he’d propose they go sailing. It was one of those blue-skied September days you get only once in a while and you remember forever, the air light and buoyant, and everything sparkling, the Sound as blue as the sky with little whitecaps. If they got going early enough, they could take a lunch and sail all the way across the Sound to Long Island and back on the southwest wind, a broad reach in both directions. In the meantime, he might as well mow the back lawn too. He liked the mindless back-and-forth; it soothed him. So he cranked up the mower again and set to work. The scent of the honeysuckle that trailed up the trestles on the back of the cottage drifted to him and he was almost happy, thinking of how Harry Truman mowed his own lawn in Missouri even though he’d been the president of the United States, and Ronald Regan cutting brush in California.
The window of the room where Amy and Claire slept looked out over the back lawn, and so he left the mower’s engine on and parked it in neutral right below the window, where it roared for at least a half an hour while he raked up the cut grass, a finishing touch he’d never done before and never would again. After he saw through the kitchen window that the girls had at last come downstairs to the kitchen, he went on raking to show them the reason the mower was still roaring—and sending exhaust fumes through the open kitchen window into the house—was that he had simply forgotten to turn it off, and that it was very important to get all this grass raked up. But they weren’t even aware he was raking the grass. Sitting at the kitchen table, side by side, their backs were to the window.
“Oh, you’re up!” he said, sauntering into the kitchen a few minutes later. He was still holding the rake, as if he’d forgotten it was in his hand.
“Why didn’t you just come upstairs and wake us up?” Amy stared at him. “Don’t you think that would that would have been better?” Her irritation frightened him. Claire looked at him, then back to Amy by her side, then back to him, like someone watching a play.
He felt his face get red and turned away, and carefully leaned the rake against the wall in a corner, as if that was why he’d brought it in. “I thought we might go sailing,” he said, still facing away.
They didn’t answer. He turned around. Amy and Claire were looking at each other. Claire was wearing blue pajamas. Amy was in pajamas too, he supposed, but he didn’t know what color because they were underneath a robe. “We could take a lunch,” he said. Claire turned her gaze from Amy’s face to his. “How about you, Claire,” he said, “would you like to go sailing?”
Claire held his gaze just to see if she could, though she’d never admit to herself that’s what she was she was doing. When he couldn’t hold his gaze on her any longer and had to look away, she turned to Amy and nodded her head.
“All right then, let’s go sailing,” Amy said.
It was too late now to sail all the way across the Sound to Long Island and back. He wasn’t surprised by how disappointed he was. They’d sail east instead, toward the mouth of the Connecticut River.
