A Summer to Die (14 page)

"Meg," he said. "Will you please hush?"

The lady at the front desk knew Dad. "Dr. Chalmers," she said, "I was so sorry to hear about your daughter."

"Thank you," said my father. "This is my other daughter, Meg. Meg, this is Miss Amato."

I shook her hand, and she looked at me curiously. "Oh," she said, as if she were surprised. Didn't she know that Dad had another daughter? "
Oh,
" she said again. "The photography exhibition is in the west wing, Dr. Chalmers."

I hadn't even heard about a photography exhibition. Not surprising, because I'd been so busy, fixing up the new darkroom, and getting ready for school. I had a sudden sinking feeling as Dad and I walked toward the west wing.

"Dad," I said, "you didn't submit any of my photographs to an exhibition, did you?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I would never have done that without asking your permission, Meg. Someday you'll do that yourself."

The huge white-walled room was filled with framed photographs on each wall. The sign at the entrance to the room was carefully lettered in Gothic script:
Faces of New England.
As I walked
around the room, I recognized the names of many of the photographers: famous names, names I had seen in magazines and in books of photographs that I had taken from the library. The photographs were all of people: the old, gaunt faces of farmers who live on the back roads; the weathered, wrinkled faces of their wives; the eager-eyed, sunshine-speckled faces of children.

And suddenly there was my face. It was a large photograph, against a white mount, framed in a narrow black frame, and it was not just the coincidence of a stranger who happened to look like me; it was my face. It was taken at an angle; the wind was blowing my hair, and I was looking off in the distance somewhere, far beyond the meticulously trimmed edges of the photograph or the rigid confines of its frame. The outline of my neck and chin and half-turned cheek was sharp against the blurred and subtle shapes of pine trees in the background.

I knew, though I had not known it then, that Will had taken it. He had taken it in the village cemetery the day we buried Molly there and heaped her grave with goldenrod.

There was something of Molly in my face. It startled me, seeing it. The line that defined my face, the line that separated the darkness of the trees from the light that curved into my forehead and
cheek was the same line that had once identified Molly by its shape. The way I held my shoulders was the way she had held hers. It was a transient thing, I knew, but when Will had held the camera and released the shutter for one five-hundredth of a second, he had captured it and made permanent whatever of Molly was in me. I was grateful, and glad.

I went close to read what was written below the photograph. The title was "Fringed Gentian"; on the other side was his signature:
William Banks.

"Dad," I said, "I have to go back. I have to see Will. I promised him."

My father took me back on the weekend. I remembered, in the car, what a long trip it had seemed last winter, when we went for the first time to the house in the country. Now the distance seemed short. Perhaps it is part of a place becoming familiar that makes it seem closer; perhaps it is just apart of growing up.

There was Will, with his head inside the open hood of his truck. He stood up straight when we drove in, wiped his hands, and chuckled, "Spark plugs."

"Will, I came so you could show me the fringed gentian. I'm sorry I forgot."

"You didn't forget, Meg," he told me. "It wasn't time until now."

My father waited at Will's house while we walked across the fields. Almost all of the flowers were gone. Ben and Maria's house was closed up tight and empty, although the curtains Maria had made still hung at the windows. They had gone back so that Ben could complete the last course for his master's degree at Harvard.

"They'll be back," said Will, watching me look at the house, with its paint still new and its garden still tidy and weeded, even though the vegetables were gone. "The house is theirs now. Maybe next summer you can help Happy learn to walk."

Maybe. Maybe there would be another summer filled with flowers and the laughter of a little boy whose life was still brand-new.

Will went right to the place on the side of the woods where the spruce tree was beside the birches. I had forgotten the spot that he had pointed out months before, but this was his land; he knew it like his life. He pushed aside the underbrush and led me to the place where he knew the gentians would be growing. It was very quiet there. The ground was mostly moss, and the sunlight came down through the tall trees in patches, lighting the deep green here and there in patterns like the patchwork of a quilt.

The little clump of fringed gentians stood alone, the purple blossoms at the tops of straight stems that grew up toward the sunlight from the damp
earth. Will and I stood and looked at them together.

"They're my favorite flower," he told me, "I suppose because they're the last of the season. And because they grow here all alone, not caring whether anyone sees them or not."

"They're beautiful, Will," I said; and they were.

"'It tried to be a rose,'" Will said, and I knew he was quoting again, "'and failed, and all the summer laughed: but just before the snows there came a purple creature that ravished all the hill; and summer hid her forehead, and mockery was still.'"

"Will," I said, as we turned to leave the woods, "you should have been a poet."

He laughed. "A truck mechanic would have been more practical."

I fell a little way behind him as we walked back across the field, wanting to capture every image in my mind. Even the goldenrod was gone. The tall grasses had turned brownish and brittle, like the sepia tones of an old and faded photograph. In my mind, in quick sequences as if a film were stopping and starting, I saw Molly again. I saw her standing in the grass when it was green, her arms full of flowers; with the wind in her hair, with her quick smile, reaching for the next flower, and the next. The floating pollen drifted in patterns through the sunlight around her, as she looked back over her shoulder, laughing.

Somewhere, for Molly, I thought suddenly, it would be summer still, summer always.

Across the field I saw the little house that had been our house. And ahead of me I saw Will. I watched as he walked toward home, pushing the grass aside with his heavy stick, and realized that he was leaning on it as he walked, that he needed its support. Walking through the rocky field wasn't as easy for him as it was for me. I understood then what Ben had told me once, about knowing and accepting that bad things will happen, because I understood, watching him, that someday Will would be gone from me too.

I ran to catch up. "Will," I said, "do you know that the picture of me is hanging in the university museum?"

He nodded. "Do you mind?"

I shook my head. "You made me beautiful," I said shyly.

"Meg," he laughed, putting one arm over my shoulders, "you were beautiful all along."