Yes, Cammie looked beautiful—yes, she did, with her great eyes, like mythical moons, under that pixie thatch.
She looked, Tracy realized in that moment, exactly like Olivia.
Tracy squeezed her forehead between the palms of her hands.
“What’s that, Mom?” Cammie murmured, wakened by the doorbell, coming into the kitchen. She often stayed up late, then slept well into the afternoon, often in Tracy’s bed on the shaded side of the house. Once a week, usually after therapy, she told Tracy that the psychologist assured her that the fantasies that kept her awake would dissolve over time. Right now, it was normal for her to rewind the film and then try out different endings. It was what happened to so many crime victims or survivors of disasters. It was, Cammie said, a process that was part of healing. Cammie would go back to school in the second semester. By then, some of this would have receded to a pinpoint of memory.
But not yet. Now the distance was real only when she was awake. In sleep, she was there, pleading under a blasted sun on Opus.
“Oh, Aunt Holly,” Cammie crooned, tracing the curve of the beloved face. “Mom, look how beautiful and young she was—” Cammie seemed to bite off her sentence and was absent for a moment, as if concentrating on a sound in the distance she was trying to identify. Then her eyes snapped back. She said, “You have to frame this, Mom.”
“In time, I guess I will. You have one, too,” Tracy said.
“Do you think Meherio sent it?” Cammie asked, sitting down, rubbing her forehead with the tips of three tapered fingers. Still, Tracy noticed, no polish and no “squovals.” Cammie’s nails were cut straight across and filed only enough to keep them from snagging her clothes.
“The photographer, I suppose.”
“But the envelope is from the Opus,” Cammie pointed out, tapping the return address. Tracy noticed then that a label with a telephone number, handwritten, was attached to Cammie’s envelope that hadn’t been to her own. She stifled a desire to snatch it from her daughter’s hands.
“I imagine they pay the photographer to do that with every one of the boats,” Tracy suggested, her body thrumming, edgy with impatience.
Cammie opened her envelope. When she tipped it, not only the big photo but also a small square envelope—with a pale, lime green watermark—fell with it. It was not sealed. Cammie pulled out a snapshot, a dried flower, and a single folded sheet of stationery.
Michel smiled at her from the depths of a white dress shirt that seemed to engulf him like a prizefighter’s robe. His fingers were arched, as if at play on the padded arms of the wheelchair—and his feet, in carefully laced shoes, hung with a telltale carelessness from the enormous cuffs of khaki pants, one toe dangling off the footrest.
“He’s . . . alive,” Cammie breathed, as if she were alone. She reached up and made a fist around the tiny cross and the necklace of shells that she had never removed.
Tracy crossed to Cammie’s side of the table. “He’s so thin, and look, he’s badly hurt,” she said.
“Do you think . . . ?” Cammie asked.
“I don’t know,” said Tracy.
“I should go to him,” Cammie said.
“No,” Tracy said. But then she added, “I don’t know, really. Do you want to?”
“He would want me to,” Cammie said.
“But to send you this picture, with no word, what is he trying to say?”
Cammie said, “There’s a note.” She touched the flower—bougainvillea, the blossom he had tucked behind her ear that day in St. John—with her fingertip. It crumbled, as a mounted butterfly wing would have crumbled, removed from its pin. Tracy sat down expectantly. “For me,” Cammie told her gently, and took the sheet and the photos into her own room.
“Dearest Cammie,” she read:
Meherio and my mother are fierce nurses, and I am no longer scheduled to die as I was when I frightened an old Basque fisherman nearly into his own grave. He thought that I was dead when he found me. The rock I crashed into on the tender tore it apart. I didn’t feel this, but I will never go climbing up the mast again. I am lucky it wasn’t more damage, as it is my legs, but not more. The doctor says I will still be able to be a father one day, though I can’t imagine a woman who would want this ghost. Perhaps we are all ghosts, of “Opus,” Meherio and Sharon and Regin and Lenny and me. Meherio and her brother are hard at work repairing the boat, and sometime soon, it will be a party and wedding boat. She says I am a partner, of course, but it may be that my days of going to sea are ended. I write to tell you how sorry I am, beyond my ability to say, and how happy that you have survived and that one day this will all be as if a bad dream. Meherio sends her best wishes, and I remain,
Yr friend,
Michel Eugène-Martin
Cammie turned the sheet over and examined both sides for another word. There was none, only the handwritten number on the larger envelope. Was that his number? Was it an office phone? Did he mean her to call? “Yr friend . . .”
He did not mean for her to call or to come to him. He was ashamed. No one would have been more shamed by such helplessness. Oh, Michel, she thought. She let her mind’s cascade of pictures fall open: Michel climbing the ropes, his careless, athletic grace, his back roped with the kind of musculature no gym ever made. Holding the picture facedown on her lap, she thought of his shameless, wide smile on the night she’d come wading out of the surf. She saw herself, impossibly naive and, yes, lovely, a hopeful Venus from the foam. Where was this Michel? He had written of the ghosts of Opus. Was she one as well?
Cammie examined the photo again and saw things she did not remember. There was a snarling blue-and-red tattoo of something, a dragon, perhaps, on Michel’s exposed forearm—such small forearms now, small as a teenage boy’s. A tattoo! Cammie didn’t know boys who had tattoos, except boys who’d been in the military. She didn’t . . . date boys with tattoos.
In the end, as Michel had said, he was a different species.
She could not deny the turbulence of pity and relief and gratitude, of regret and sweetness. And guilt. A long stain of guilt. All unintentionally, in exchange for a game, a little game of passion between a boy and a girl, Michel had paid so much. She had paid, too, although her debt would not last forever—oh, it wasn’t possible! Michel! Cammie wanted to pound her fist into her hand at the endless injustices of the Opus. She was just young enough to imagine that going on, without eyes, or hearing, or after the loss of a leg, was mere existence, a pitiable trap a person endured for the sake of others. Was he even glad to have survived, having lived so fully in his body? His body. She swallowed a dangerous lump in her throat. It was gone. What he was, was gone. She thought of Olivia, of Franco’s neediness that had so repelled her. Was she, Cammie, such a coward? So reptilian, absorbing warmth but unable to return it?
No. But she could not lie.
She could feel herself, tiny, swept up in Michel’s arms. He had been thin but so strong, holding her against him in a way that demanded and defended her. She’d been as pliant as a fresh leaf. That was the only moment of unambivalent lust and possession, of being possessed, that Cammie had ever experienced. Had it been a bottomless pool, she would have, at that moment, stepped into it and allowed it to subsume her. Now the recollection was as flat as the snapshot. She didn’t know who Michel really was. And she was not equal to this. She had to extract herself from this, carefully, as she would an earring caught in the weave of a costly sweater.
The shame was hers, too.
But neither of them owed an apology.
Someday, Cammie hoped, a woman of the island, a friend, an old lover, would give him children, help him, cherish him, say sweet words to this sweet man who deserved at least this. A hot needle prodded her as she considered this. But she forced it away. Would he even want to see her? To have her see him? He would not. A heady moment between two healthy young animals: It should have been no more than that. Of course, it had been what followed, the merciless accretion of wicked luck and desperation an
d drama, that had given it heft and contour, had fashioned each word and touch into part of a sculptured story Cammie clung to with both hands, those blazing days on the boat and even later, in her bedroom, in her cool, shuttered dreams. But at the moment that Cammie saw Michel’s photo, the substance of the story began to dissolve into a shape that pressure would reduce to particles.
Was she merely rationalizing her fear?
If she was, it amounted to the same thing as truth.
She let herself taste the mixture that had been her and Michel; and the taste was the taste of seawater, or of tears.
Gently, she slid Michel’s snapshot and note back into their small envelope, then back into the large cardboard sleeve, along with the big photo. She walked into their computer room and deposited it, all of it, deep into the recesses of her father’s commodious wastebasket, covering it so Jim would never see it. Then she went back into her room, closed the door, and lay on her bed. Instantly, she was asleep.
Tracy woke next morning to the sound of the garbage trucks.
It happened all the time.
Garbage day had been changed now from Monday to Friday; and it threw her. Ted, who had a honey, had begun to stay out late. Half the time he hauled out the large bin but forgot to collect the liners from the household cans. Shouting a warning from the back door, Tracy ran around grabbing up plastic bags from the bathrooms, the office, her bedroom and Ted’s, tying them on the run. She didn’t bother with Cammie’s room, knowing Cam would sleep until noon, only to nap again later. Down to the curb Tracy sprinted, to hand the bags up to the young men balanced on the lip of the garbage truck who were just emptying the larger bin into the maw.
Then she saw Cammie run out of the house, wearing only boxers and a cutoff T-shirt, screaming, “No! Did they take the trash?”
“Yes,” Tracy said, “except these couple of things. . . .” She had just handed up the small cluster of plastic bags.
“Put that down!” Cammie shouted over the roar of the garbage truck. “I’m sorry! Please put those bags down! Give them back!”
Shrugging expressively, the men let the bags drop onto the lawn.
Cammie fell to her knees, ripping open the bags. Disposable razors and crumpled tissues and spent soap wrappers flew onto the grass of the parkway. The truck, with a massive bleating of its brakes, stopped at the next house. Tracy glanced around her. It was 7:00 a.m. and there was no sign of neighbors. She quickly fetched a leaf bag from the garage and began to gather up trash as fast as Cammie tossed aside one bag and began shaking out another. More crumpled paper, wrappers from granola bars, blueprints.
Finally, Cammie spotted the edge, with the imprint of the bougainvillea blossom, and grabbed at it. The handwritten label with the phone number in the corner was not smudged, still legible. Sitting in a rubble of paper towels and apple cores, she held the big envelope first to her breast, then, closing her eyes, to her cheek. Tracy moved quietly around her, gathering up trash before it could blow away. The wind was picking up, the leaves showing their undersides. That, and a metallic smudge of scent in the air, hinted at rain in the offing. She didn’t want her parkway strewn with sodden wads of tissue.
Cammie seemed to waken and glanced up into the branches of the chestnut tree her father had planted when she was born. Her body presumed it had been months and months—a season, a year—since she’d walked out into the early morning. Her body presumed it should be cold by now, school weather. It was not: The air was warm, muggy; and the grass smelled freshly mown. The tree was a glossy, full-bodied umbrella, with just here and there a furled tint of yellow, a handful of shells and crisp brown leaves at the base. Impossibly, it was only August. It was still summer.
Trembling, Cammie opened the white cardboard sleeve: Although she had shaken the bags with all her strength, she had not lost it, the small, pale green envelope nestled deep inside.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, Still Summer
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