Story 8: One Summer in Missouri

They started coming to Lake Tapawingo every summer the year Natalie turned sixteen, and for three months each year they lived suspended—in warmth, water, the voices of families drifting down the shore. This summer, the second she spent with Chris, the suspension broke, and there was a fall.

Natalie was frightened when her father put down the telephone and took her mother in his arms. She waited until he said into her mother’s hair: “Tom was in an accident.” Then he started to shake. Natalie stepped closer to them and then stood still until they noticed her again.

**

Natalie’s uncle had left the lake right after dinner that night in late June because he had to meet a patient early the next day at his clinic in Kansas City, and Aunt Lydia and their five children had not left until nearly ten o’clock. On their way home, they found his car, which had rolled into a deep ditch barely a mile from home and crashed there.

“They pulled alongside his car,” her father told Natalie at the wake. He looked pale, more like Tom than she had ever noticed, not ruddy and lively as he usually did. He had put on too much aftershave and smelled sharp. “The right end was smashed way in where it had gone off the road and hit the side of the ditch, but the lights on the left side were still on and the radio was playing Fleetwood Mac. The engine wasn’t running. Lydia said she pried open the door on the left side and tried to find his pulse. There was blood down one side of his face and splattered across the windshield.”

Natalie wished her father hadn’t told her that last detail. The night of the accident, he had said that Tom fell asleep and hit his head on the steering wheel. That was a clean way to die. But now she had visions of Tom, brown eyes staring through blood-streaked brownish hair, mouth open, and reddish spittle coming out. All in front of Lydia and their five kids. At the wake, of course, he was dry; in fact, he felt as rubbery and cool as a Ken doll did after a night out in the yard. Just like her great-uncle Theo five years ago. She wondered if funeral directors would ever figure out how to make bodies feel natural. Or would that be too upsetting?

There were other details that remained with Natalie: the Frankenstein scar on the side of his head, where his skin had split as it met the wheel; the slight smile he was said to have had on his face, as if he were pleased that he didn’t have to see any more patients; how one arm rested on the bottom curve of the steering wheel, palm open. And she had questions: How fast had he been going to die this way? Had he been trying to outrun sleep?

The morning after the wake, Chris appeared at their door, arms stacked with casserole dishes. Natalie’s father was still in bed at 10 o’clock, but her mother thanked him and took the food to the kitchen, while Chris pulled Natalie out to the screened porch. They sat on the glider, arms intertwined, listening to a robin fluting in the distance and waves slapping softly against the wall between the yard and the lake.

“I keep thinking about Memorial Day this year,” he said suddenly.

“Why?” she asked him. Across the lake, several women were setting out brunch on their dock.

“That was the first time I felt really comfortable with your family.”

“Really? It took you ’til this year?”

He put his hand on her knee and played with the hairs she always missed while shaving. “Yeah. I liked them all, but I didn’t feel like one of the gang until this summer. Then your uncle stopped needling me, and everyone else could relax.”

“He was possessive of me when you were around.” Natalie started to laugh and rocked the glider violently for a few seconds. It produced an impressive metallic clang. “Checking on me by picking on you. Even more so than my father. My father gets things out, but with Tom, it’s more of a slow burn.”

Chris took her reaction to be grief and pulled her closer. She put her head on his shoulder and watched boats tow their skiers, creating rings in the lake water. Phrases went through her head: Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to weep.

Only a month since Memorial Day. Her uncle had joined them on the dock that afternoon and quizzed Chris about school, while Natalie had watched people eating and swimming across the lake, as she was doing now. Every time someone had dived off a dock into the water, Natalie had felt colder, so she had placed a towel over her legs to keep goosebumps from rising. She wanted to believe the chill had been a warning, but five summers at the lake had taught her how unpredictable Memorial Day weather could be. It had been nothing more than a cool day in late spring.

“Earth to Natalie,” Chris said.

She stiffened a little and then turned to face him, staring at his brown hair and eyes, feeling relieved that he didn’t have her uncle’s light hair or long face or smell of medical chemicals. He smiled at her, and the patches of sunburn on his round cheeks and across his nose became more visible. “Thanks for coming over,” she said flatly.

“You want me to leave?” he asked, startled. She nodded. He got up slowly and left, glancing back at her from the stairs, but Natalie wasn’t looking. She curled up on her side in the glider, pushing her bangs out of her eyes, but couldn’t get comfortable. There was a pillow on top of the storage box next to the glider, and when she lifted it, she saw the Ken doll underneath. Just his head was visible, as if he were rising out of a sea of toys and stuffed animals that filled the box. Natalie lay down, head on the pillow, and watched the family having brunch across the lake. Every so often a boat towing a skier sliced her view in half.

When she heard her father’s voice in the kitchen, she rolled off the glider onto her knees and then stood up stiffly. He and her mother were marveling over the food Chris had brought: brisket, shredded chicken with Arthur Bryant’s BBQ sauce, deviled eggs, macaroni and cheese with green and red peppers, and green beans in mushroom sauce. Chris and his parents were excellent cooks, skilled at making common foods seem rich and exotic. Natalie found a spoon and sampled the macaroni, which smelled like parmesan cheese and felt silky on her tongue; then her father took the spoon and did the same. Any other day, her mother would have taken away the spoon and dished up their own servings, but she remained still, watching, a grave expression on her face.

The first week after her uncle died, Chris came over every day, at different times, trying to find an hour of the day when she was willing to talk for more than a few minutes. Once he arrived at the front door when Natalie was sitting in the living room, daydreaming, and stared at her through the screen until she noticed him. She walked to the door but didn’t open it.

Chris pressed his nose against the screen and said, “My parents are at a teachers’ conference in Kansas City all day today. Want to come over?” She nodded, and he opened the door and led her outside, down the street, and into his house. Last summer at about this time, they had made love for the first time in the TV room downstairs. Now Natalie followed him blindly, running her hands down his back as soon as they got in the house. They tripped over furniture and the edges of stairs, found the floor, and moved just enough clothing out of the way. All afternoon they were inside in the dark while the lake caught reflections outside. Finally, they turned on a light, and the clock read 5. They got dressed and straightened the room.

As they walked upstairs, Natalie’s eyes watered. She had never noticed how bright Chris’s kitchen and dining room could be. She closed her eyes for a moment and saw Tom’s eyes closing and then flaring open as he pressed the gas pedal harder, trying to get home before sleep claimed him.

“Natalie?” Chris asked, tracing the curve of her eyelashes. She opened her eyes and blinked at him.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?”

She shook her head. She wanted to get home, eat something small, and go to bed.

“I’m exhausted,” she told him.

“I wore you out?” he asked, smiling a little.

Natalie shrugged, feeling irritated. She kissed him goodbye as nicely as she could and left, unable to think of anything to say that would comfort herself or reassure him.

In her room, she drank a glass of milk, ate some of the green bean casserole, and listened to Fleetwood Mac. No one could remember which song had been playing when Lydia found Tom’s car. So Natalie played all their albums and rubbed her eyes. Her tear ducts seem to have tightened, and the pressure built from her chest all the way to her eyes until, when she finally started to cry, it actually hurt for the first few seconds.

After Natalie found sleep, she dreamed that she and Chris were in a softly painted room with Tom, who was shouting, “Your last name is Burnet? You’re a salad green!” Chris’s mouth was moving, but whether from hunger or speech, she couldn’t tell, and bright green burnet leaves began to sprout from his belly and along his hips. Then Tom was gone, and when she turned back to Chris he had changed into Ben, her first boyfriend, though he had never been much of a friend, and she wouldn’t dignify him with the title of lover.

Chris’s parents attended the conference in Kansas City the next day as well, and again, she and Chris lay naked in the TV room during the afternoon. But this time, she told him about the dream.

“That comment about my name was one of the first things your uncle said to me last summer, right after I shook his hand,” Chris said. “I was really embarrassed.”

Natalie laughed harshly. “You thought he was an idiot, didn’t you?”

“He seemed a little hostile at first,” Chris admitted.

“And then he called you ‘Green’ and you were mad ’cause nobody had called you that since high school. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

Chris traced a line down her nose. “Well, I got over it.”

Natalie curled up closer to him, learning her forehead against his. “It bothers me that you turned into Ben. The two of you have never been together in a dream before.”

“You feel unprotected,” Chris told her. “Because Tom is gone.”

“He was the one who told my parents to talk to me, that something was wrong,” she said. “He was the only one who could see Ben inside me.”

She couldn’t see Chris’s face very well, but his voice became precise and slow. “He was only there once, Natalie.”

“Physically, yes, But even that seemed to go on forever.”

Chris stroked her neck. “And your uncle got rid of him.”

“Sort of,” Natalie said, tilting her head to take advantage of the caress. “I think Ben was my ghost for a while, and Tom made other people see him.”

“That gives me the creeps,” Chris said. “As if he’s watching us.”

“Ben’s gone now. He’s been gone for a long time.”

“When did that happen?”

“A year ago,” Natalie said, smiling in the dark. “The first time we were alone in this room.”

That night he convinced her to stay for dinner. But when she saw the variety of food he took from the refrigerator and the cabinet, it made her tired. She walked over to him and closed the cabinet.

“Please,” she told him, “just something simple. I don’t want anything complicated.” She looked down at the packages on the counter and picked up a few, which she handed to him.

“Carrots, Uncle Ben’s Long Grain and Wild Rice, and cheese?”

“That sounds good,” she said. “Vegetable, grains, and dairy. Who needs meat? It’s too hard to digest.”

He smiled at her, a little confused. She knew he wanted to hug her, but his arms were full of processed food packages. “Do you want them all mixed together?”

“No. I want cheese on crackers and carrots on the side, raw and sliced.” She went into the dining room and sat at the oak table, holding up the front page of the Kansas City Star in a way that seemed familiar. Then she remembered—her father had sat at their table this morning, pretending to read the paper in just this position, but with none of his usual grunts or laughter. Natalie could feel that the information wasn’t getting over the wall he had built around himself.

Chris’s parents arrived just as he was setting down their plates. His mother stood and looked at their dinner.

“That is … spare,” Beryl said.

“And orange,” Joe added.

“It was what Natalie wanted,” Chris said.

“You always find the right word,” Natalie told her. Beryl smiled. She and Chris’s father went into the kitchen and made coffee for everyone. They returned with brimming cups. Natalie noticed that hers was just as she liked it, beige with sugar, but when she looked at the others’ cups, she was surprised that Beryl and Joe took coffee black and that Chris’s coffee was not as pale as hers. Was she forgetting things, or had she failed to notice in the past year?

“How are you, Natalie?” Beryl asked.

“OK,” Natalie said, without smiling. She had noticed that Beryl seldom grinned or laughed out loud.

“Is there anything we can do to help?”

Stop asking me questions you should know the answer to, Natalie thought, but she doubted that Beryl wanted that much honesty from her. “It was really nice of you to send the food,” Natalie said instead.

“Do you need anything else?” Clearly, Beryl was on a mission. Natalie wished she could use the Kansas City Star as a barrier, the way her father had.

“No, I don’t think so. Mom seems to have taken up cooking with a vengeance. All I want to do is sit around.”

Beryl nodded.

“Oh, and we need to return your dishes.”

“It’s not important,” Chris said. “How was the conference?”

Their voices faded as Natalie sipped her coffee. Why was theirs always better than her parents’? Surely her mother bought gourmet coffee? But theirs was less strong, more flavorful. She surveyed their house. All their furniture was clean, worn, and cushy, unlike her grandparents’ house, with its sense of style and arrangement imparted by her mother. Some of the items were clearly heirlooms, others Chris’s childhood favorites. They had been in this house for only a year, but it had more family history than her grandparents’ house that had been in the family for decades.

Natalie finished her coffee and said, “I should go home.” She realized she had interrupted them, but she had no desire to make conversation anyway, except for the murmurs she and Chris made alone in the dark. She kissed Chris on the cheek and thanked his parents for dinner. When she got home, she went down to the dock, where her parents rocked slowly in the iron chairs, and slipped between them to sit on the bench. None of them said anything. Natalie wanted only to sit and let the day’s remaining heat sink into her and the slight breeze take off the edge. And sleep with Chris. When they were together, grief fed the physical sensations and then tapered off as they did. But as soon as Chris wanted to talk, she became desperate to leave. What was so bad about silence between a couple? It could be full of all sorts of subjects that needed to rest and ripen between them.

After a few yawns, her father got up and trudged to the house, saying “’Night.” Her mother looked her over as if she were just now recognizing her.

“I don’t think I’ve really talked to you for days,” she told Natalie. “How are you?”

“OK. How’s Dad?”

“I think he’s lost ten pounds since Tom died. I don’t know what to do.”

Natalie got up and sat in the chair her father had just vacated. Iron didn’t hold a person’s body heat the way fabric and vinyl could, but the metal was still slightly warmed. Her mother was wearing a yellow linen dress that glowed in the twilight and darkened her auburn hair. Natalie placed her hand on her mother’s arm for just a second.

“Remember how at birthdays, sometimes, Dad would tell funny stories about the person having the birthday?”

Her mother smiled slowly. “Once he told my women’s group about the time we were at the Renaissance festival and a little boy ran up to me and grabbed my skirt. It was an elastic waistband, so down it came in front of hundreds of people. I haven’t worn one since.”

Natalie continued. “Why don’t we ask Dad to tell us stories about Tom? Maybe that will ease things for him.”

“I should know how to make him feel better after all these years,” her mother said, fiddling with the round neckline of her dress, “but I don’t.”

The sun had gone behind the trees across the lake. “I’m going to talk to Dad,” Natalie said to her mother, who nodded but otherwise stayed put. As she reached the yard, she heard her mother murmur, “But who will ease things for me?”

Upstairs, her parents’ room was illuminated only by the orange sunset high up in the windows. Her father lay on his back and stared at it without acknowledging Natalie. He did look thin underneath the quilt and seemed hardly to breathe, until he sighed out of the corner of his mouth and blew hair off his face. He had needed a haircut when Tom died, and now clumps of reddish-brown hair stuck out in every direction. She sat down next to him on the wide bed and said, “I want you to tell me a story about Tom, something that happened before I can remember.”

For a while her father paid attention to the light moving down the window panes. Then he laughed and looked at her. “When Tom was in medical school, I bugged him to let me see a cadaver that had been worked on. You know how people say, ‘He had some nerve?’ Well, I wanted to see nerves. So he snuck me in one night after the last class.”

“That must have been spooky.”

“It was OK when the lights were on and he was nearby. But at one point he went to the bathroom, and I was left alone with a roomful of dead bodies with their nerves hanging out. Tom had stretched a few out with clamps so I could see which one was which. I swore I could hear them jangling.” He stopped talking.

“Did you get caught?” Natalie asked, wanting the conversation to continue.

“Tom never got caught.” He turned back to face the windows, which were mostly dark now. “Ever since then, whenever I’m stressed out, I dream about those bodies, as if they were violins, and the nerves were their strings. I’ve been having that dream all week.”

She leaned over him and kissed his cheek. “But you won’t have it tonight.”

“I won’t?”

“No, not since you’ve told me.”

“Good.”

After midnight, Natalie was still awake, thinking of her father’s dream of Tom and the cadavers—the dead among the dead. It was probably too much to call it a prophecy, what her father had dreamed for years. And then there was her dream of Tom and Chris and Ben, three men connected only by her or by what she had said of one to the other. She hoped the dead would not invade her dreams. A dream could not be taken as a sign of love, for dreams were markers of invasion and experience, of the events and people life placed in one’s way rather than those one truly chose. Dreams were a reminder of what could have been, of what might happen to those who were not careful. And, Natalie had to admit, at times she could have been more careful with men.

When she went down to breakfast the next morning, her father was reading the paper, snorting at Reagan’s latest announcement about the defense budget, looking rested and more like himself. He told her, “You were right. I didn’t have that dream.”

**

After the fireworks on the Fourth, July offered nothing but endless, muggy heat. On the water or off it, the sun was as close and bright as a bathroom mirror first thing in the morning. A few minutes ago, Natalie and Chris had been rocking the largest inner tube either of them had ever seen, brought home by her father the week before. She had taught him the trick last summer: place your feet on either side of the legs of the person opposite you and lock your knees. Then rock. Her feet just barely reached the other side of the innertube, but his knees were bent slightly. Their hands clasped each other’s wrists, and they pulled away from each other, elbows locked straight, as the tube pushed the lake down and then rose up. When Chris closed his eyes, Natalie lifted up her feet and tumbled backward into the water.

Chris came up snorting and grabbed her as she tried to climb onto the tube. “Are you trying to drown me?” Water ran down through white patches of sunscreen on his ears and nose. He pressed a finger to her shoulder and watched the white impression turn brown again.

“You’re so brown,” he said, smiling. He pulled her away from the tube and kissed her. They started to sink. Natalie put her legs around his waist, and he began treading water. The inner tube drifted toward the dock.

“Are you still sad, Natalie?” he asked.

She nodded. Her chin barely cleared the water.

“You haven’t said anything recently.”

“I miss my uncle,” she said. “What’s there to say?”

“I thought I could take away your grief,” he said, breathing hard.

“Do you know why I fell in love with you?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Because you trusted me when you knew I had lied to someone else. I want you to trust me again.”

“To do what?”

“To take as long as I need,” Natalie said. “One month isn’t long enough to grieve Tom. He deserves more than that.”

As she swam after the innertube and climbed up, Natalie thought, A month since Tom died. A month until my junior year of college. During the first month, time had expanded and contracted like an accordion, but the way time was speeding by her lately, she was quite certain that the second would go far too quickly.

Chris lay down beside her and was quiet.

**

Natalie took her favorite letter from Chris, a trash bag, and scissors with her to the overflowing front garden down the road from her house. This summer, her fifth one spent at the lake, she had finally met the gardener, who liked to explain the mysteries of her plantings. Natalie had fallen into the habit of talking to her once a week. Chris had come with her once and impressed the gardener by naming the different varieties of sage he recognized, but then he and his parents were fond of cooking with fresh herbs they grew in the garden that wrapped around their house. This week, her last at the lake until Christmas vacation, she had been tending the flowers while the gardener had gone to visit her family in New York. A few more flowers needed deadheading, and then she would be done. She clipped calendula and California poppy seedheads and plucked out the blooms of petunias. This woman liked the flat blooms of various kinds of daisies, “platforms for butterflies,” she called them. She insisted that Natalie let the coneflowers go to seed so that the birds could have something to eat in a few months.

Now the garden was as neat as it would ever get. Natalie liked to compare its bright chaos to her mother’s rose bushes in Boulder, which were pruned each spring until they bloomed out of desperation. In this garden, flowers grew exuberantly wherever they could, spilling over walls and creeping into the spaces between flagstone steps. A sparrow or two hopped among the plants, and dozens of bees clung to the pale orange poppies and the Missouri evening primrose, whose yellow blooms spent the nights open and the days shriveling. Natalie sat down on the cement wall guarding the opposite house’s front door and imagined her grief for her uncle drying up in the next few months, subsiding into the earth as the garden went to sleep. Then by next March, tulips would be rising among the dry seedheads, and summer flowers would have begun sprouting new growth.

Last summer, she and Chris had often walked past this garden late at night, meeting secretly after everyone else had gone to bed, after the summer heat had subsided a little. She had told herself then that he was merely a summer romance. Months later, he had written her this letter, the day he arrived back at college after their first Christmas together:

“I hadn’t imagined that Lake Tapawingo could hold so many different experiences. First impression: a small, limited place, wholly manufactured. No real life of a city or even a small town. I asked myself, is this the way everyone will live in the future? In communities that try to resurrect a sense of togetherness that we once were able to build? Just withdrawing into a summer life of swimming and BBQs and waterskiing. It seems so easy—too easy. But in winter, now, what do these people do? Mourn the loss of open water? Do they think the lake is sleeping, resting from all the activity on its surface in the summer? Cleaning up oil and dead skin and dog hair—and other, more personal things—deposited in it? We are 75 percent water—after several summers, are we 75 percent Lake Tapawingo? And what percentage of you and me is in the lake? Just think what that water might contain.”

They had exchanged letters for months, but that one was the first love letter he had sent her: less like the newspaper articles he mailed copies of, more intimate in its musings. Perhaps he had felt more sure of her after a summer and a winter vacation spent together. She returned the letter to its envelope and the envelope to the side pocket of her shorts. She wanted it to stay crisp and folded no matter how many times she moved. There was a history of her embedded in the flowers and soil here and carried along in the lake water. A history of her and Chris that she had never really understood. He had left three days ago, going the short distance south to the University of Missouri; she would leave tomorrow for the Rocky Mountains and the University of Colorado. Would distance make them easier with each other or eager to find someone else?

Several seedpods she had missed caught Natalie’s eye. She got up and cut them; her trash bag was pretty full. She knew she should go home, but she wanted to linger here. When she turned to go home, she saw Chris’s mother coming toward her. Natalie waited as Beryl walked up and held out a pair of her earrings. As usual, she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat to shield her face from the sun. The shade it cast darkened her brown eyes.

“You left these at the house,” she said. She didn’t say where.

Eager to get rid of every trace of me? Natalie thought, blushing, but she took the earrings and thanked her.

Beryl turned toward the garden. “Chris told me about this garden. I’ve been meaning to come and take a good look at what she had.”

For a moment they stood searching the garden as if it could offer conversation tips, with the hot silence of August enveloping them.

Beryl noticed the envelope sticking out of Natalie’s pocket. “What have you got there?” she asked.

“An old letter from Chris,” Natalie said, feeling shy.

Beryl’s expression became a little sad. “He really does love you.”

“How can you be so sure?” Natalie asked.

Beryl stared at her for a moment. “I hope you won’t give up because of your uncle’s death,” she said.

Natalie shrugged. “Chris thinks I’ve given up.”

“I talked to him about that.”

Their conversation reminded Natalie of the slow climb up the first hill on a roller-coaster, the wait for the swoop down and up again. She asked, “What did you say?”

“I told him about my cousin’s death when I was in high school. No one is prepared when the first person they really love dies. I told him to be more patient.”

Natalie waited; she could feel Beryl working herself up to something. It occurred to her that Beryl might find her too quiet, even though most people did not. But she couldn’t help talking to Chris’s mother as if she were interviewing her, perhaps because his mother was tall and had a tendency to stare down at her. “How did you feel?”

“Oh, I tried just about everything,” Beryl said. “I withdrew into myself; then I got crazy and wild for a while. Finally I realized that I had to tell people what to do for me.”

“I talked to him about Tom,” Natalie blurted out. “But Chris just didn’t get it. He thought it was about him.”

“You have to give people specific instructions. I would say, ‘When I tell you I miss my cousin, say you’re sorry and hug me.’ At first I was angry that I had to explain, but then I saw that it worked.”

“Specific instructions,” Natalie repeated. They smiled at each other. Natalie put the scissors in her pocket and began walking home, dragging the bag behind her. She enjoyed the rasping sound. When they reached Beryl’s house, she turned to say goodbye, but Natalie stopped her with a question. “Did Chris ever tell you how we met?”

Beryl shook her head.

“I was out for a walk a week after your family moved here. As I went by your house, he said something to me from the doorway. I kept turning around, trying to see who was talking to me.”

Beryl laughed. “Chris always did like to surprise people.”

Natalie turned around and pointed out to Beryl where they had gone. “We walked toward that gate and stopped in front of the garden. Every time I see that garden, I think of Chris.”

Beryl studied the potholed road. Then she glanced over at Natalie and asked, “Does he still surprise you?”

Natalie didn’t immediately reply, so Beryl answered the question herself. “Because that’s all that really matters.”

Beryl went inside. Walking away, Natalie held onto the earrings Beryl had returned, as if she had given Chris to her, or back to her.