Summer in the South (8 page)

“The life of a country gentleman. It sounds pretty idyllic to me.”

He grinned. “It’s not too bad,” he said.

“And do you do the work yourself? On the house, I mean.”

“Some of it I subcontract but a lot of it I do myself. It’s a labor of love.”

The sun had begun its slow plummet in the western sky. The edge of the beach was bathed in shade. Will sat up, resting his arms on his knees.

“What about you?” he said. “What’s it like to be Ava Dabrowski?”

“Endless boredom followed by moments of intense anxiety.”

“Have you considered medication?”

“Constantly.”

She thumped him playfully on the back, and that’s how it began. He leaned and tickled her around her waist, and she laughed and squirmed, and he pulled her against him and kissed her. Perhaps it was the slumberous spell of Longford that made her return the kiss. Or perhaps it was gratitude for the wonderful day, the first she had spent in a long time not thinking about her mother.

She didn’t mean for it to go any further than a kiss. Even now she could feel herself withdrawing, retreating.

“I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good friendship,” she said.

“We won’t.”

She sighed. What she took for a mild flirtation, he would take for something else entirely. She knew this about him, could see it in his earnest expression, in the slight trembling of his hands. “Look, Will, I just got out of a bad relationship.”

He let go of her. “I know that, Ava.”

“I’m sorry if you thought …”

“No. Of course not. It was my fault.” He rested his arms on his knees and stared at the glistening water, his hair curling damply against his ears.

A row of tattered clouds sailed across the pink sky. She had not consciously planned for this to happen and yet she had known it might. She had known last night in the hallway when he touched her back.

She slapped the sand off her legs. She had gone into the woods earlier and she now noticed several red welts around her ankles. “I hope I don’t show up at your aunts’ house with poison ivy on my ass. That might be hard to explain.”

“You’re more likely to show up with chigger bites on your ass.”

“What are chiggers?”

“Blood-sucking insects the size of fleas that live in tall grass.”

“Great,” she said. “Now you tell me.” She hoped things wouldn’t be awkward between them. She thought of everything she had given up to follow this dream. She couldn’t just turn around and go back to Chicago.

As if to reassure her, he nudged her with his shoulder and she smiled in relief and said, “So tell me this, Will Fraser. How has a guy like you managed to stay single?”

He stood and leaned to help her up. “I’m a sprinter,” he said. “No one can catch me.” His eyes were more blue than gray in the slanting light.

“I’m sure they’ve tried,” she said. She grinned, tilting her head and tapping her chin with her fingers. “But wait, there was someone. I remember now. A fiancée. In college. Michael told me you were engaged, although I never met her. What happened?”

His face changed suddenly; the happiness went out of it as swiftly as the falling of a curtain. Behind his head, a bank of feathery clouds drifted slowly across the sky.

“We’d better go,” he said, turning and leaning to pick up his clothes. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

H
e took her back to Woodburn Hall, staying for cocktails but not for supper. Ava felt wretched in the awkward silence that had fallen between them, wishing she could take back what she’d said about the fiancée. But later, when she was alone, getting ready for bed, she felt a quiver of anger. How was she to know that the broken engagement was a sore subject? It had happened eight years ago. Shouldn’t he be over it by now?

She was always saying the wrong thing, always wounding male vanity in some small unintentional way. It was a pattern she had followed in all her previous relationships. She didn’t know how to talk to men, how to flatter. But then, why would she, when she had grown up without a father, when it had been only her and Clotilde against the world?

She turned off the lamp and lay down in bed, listening to the sounds of the old house settling around her. Strands of moonlight pushed their way through the shutters. On the bedside table, the letter from the man purporting to be her father glimmered palely. She reached out and touched it with a tentative finger. She kept it there so that she could see it every evening when she went to bed and every morning when she woke up. The paper had gone frail and gauzy with her continued reading of it.
I was so sorry to hear about your mother. She loved you very much.
She had kept the envelope, too, turning it over and rereading the address until she had it memorized.

All the time she was talking to Will on the phone and trying to decide whether to come south, she had been weighing what to do. He had signed his name,
Frank.
The envelope return address read,
Frank Dabrowski, 1645 Hennipen Street, Garden City, Michigan.
The father on her birth certificate was listed as Frank Dabrowski. It must be the same person.

But how could she be sure? Would she know him if she saw him?

She had the photograph she had found among her mother’s belongings, the one of Clotilde with a tall, long-haired boy. On the back of the photo, “Frank,” written in Clotilde’s beautiful script.

By the time she accepted Will’s invitation to come south, she had decided.

B
efore Ava headed south to Tennessee, she first took a detour to Garden City, Michigan. She took her time driving from Chicago to Detroit. The fields were flat and brown, still swollen with the spring rains. From time to time she passed a barn painted with a black-and-white portrait mural: Ben Franklin, Beethoven, Paul Revere.

Ava had no recollection of her father; according to Clotilde, they had broken up not long after Ava began walking. “It was no big deal. He was a nice guy, but we just didn’t get along. He wanted someone who could stay put and I couldn’t. Besides, we figured it would be best for you, not being around all those bad vibes.” Ava would have liked a say in what was best for her, but she never got one. She stopped waiting soon after her tenth birthday for cards and Christmas presents that never came. When she was ten, Clotilde told her that Frank had been killed in an ice-fishing accident on the Detroit River. “He was drinking,” she said, “and fell into the fishing hole he’d cut. They found him later, several miles downriver, staring up through the ice.”

They were living in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, at the time, house-sitting for a professor at the university where Clotilde had gotten a secretarial job. Clotilde had awakened one night to find Ava standing at the foot of her bed like an apparition, and when she swore and flipped on the lamp, Ava had stared for a moment, and without a word, turned and walked back to her bedroom. The next morning she remembered nothing.

“You scared me to death,” Clotilde said. “You were sleepwalking.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Ava said.

But the episodes became more frequent. Clotilde would hear her padding through the house, or awaken to her small dark figure standing eerily beside the bed. And when they moved to a big Victorian house it was even worse, because then Clotilde would hear her walking up and down the tall staircase in the dark. Ava never stumbled, she never lost her footing, although if Clotilde flipped on the light she would stand like a zombie, and then, blinking, turn and head back to her room. She never said a word, never responded to questions, and in the morning she had no recollection of the episodes.

Clotilde did what she always did when one of them was sick. She went to the health food store, bought a bunch of foul-tasting herbs, and brewed a tea that she made Ava drink daily.

“Can’t I just see a doctor?” Ava asked belligerently.

“The body will heal itself,” Clotilde said sweetly, “given the proper nutrients. If this doesn’t work we’ll try a hypnotherapist,” she added.

For a while the sleepwalking episodes did become less frequent. But that was only because the disorder was changing, metamorphosing into something more terrible, as Ava discovered not long after their move to Indianapolis. She was in the seventh grade when she had her first attack of sleep paralysis and awoke to what she perceived as a room full of small dark men touching her arms and legs with long spidery fingers.

This time Clotilde had no choice. She took Ava to a doctor.

The doctor asked Ava if she began dreaming immediately upon falling into sleep and if she dreamed in color. Ava responded, “Yes.” Didn’t everyone?

“Are you sleepy during the daytime?”

“Of course,” Ava said.

“Narcolepsy,” he said resolutely. “With symptoms of hypnogogic sleep paralysis.” He ordered a sleep study and put her on medication that made her nervous and forgetful, or dull and zombie-like, depending on the dosage.

The daytime sleepiness and medication issues made school difficult, and she had to work twice as hard as everyone else to compensate. It also made sleepovers with friends difficult, as Ava was always nervous about having an episode in front of someone. When she moved to Chicago and began high school, the episodes gradually became less frequent, and she slowly weaned herself off the medication. By the time she graduated from college they had become an unpleasant memory, like so much else that she took pains to overcome and hide, and throughout most of her twenties she had been able, for long periods, to forget about the sleep disorder entirely.

She stopped for a cup of coffee at a fast-food restaurant just off I-94. The skies above the landscape were gray and wintry. The closer she got to Detroit, the more nervous she became. What would she say to Frank? What if he didn’t want to see her?

Her stomach lurched suddenly, and she pulled to the side of the road and was sick.

G
arden City was a neat little blue-collar suburb of small houses and big trees. She drove slowly down the narrow streets, crisscrossing Hennipen until she gathered the courage to turn onto the street.

It was a tiny green cement-block house nestled beside a towering hemlock tree. A swing set and colored plastic toys littered the yard, which surprised Ava, because it meant some of his children were young. She sat for a long time staring at the house, trying to work up the courage to knock on the door.

While she sat waiting, the door opened and a large heavyset woman stepped out onto the stoop, eyeing Ava suspiciously. The two stared at each other for a brief moment and then Ava looked away, pulled slowly into the street, and, without a backward glance, drove away without ever having met her father.

T
he day after their trip to Longford, Will showed up for Toddy Time with a bouquet of wildflowers. Ava was in her room, sitting at her desk overlooking the garden. She had spent the day reading through the Longford plantation journals, an occupation she found much more agreeable than working on the outline for her novel. She was beginning to understand that daydreaming about writing a novel and actually writing it were two very different things.

He tapped lightly on the door and when she said, “Come in,” thinking it was one of the aunts come to check on her, he opened the door and stepped inside.

“For you,” he said. He had already put the flowers in a vase and he set it down on the nearest dresser. He seemed jovial and relaxed, and Ava was glad to see that whatever trouble had passed between them yesterday seemed to have been forgotten. She stood, going over to the mirrored armoire to check her appearance.

“You look pretty,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

He clasped her wrist, delicately yet exactingly, as if preparing to sweep her into a dance.

She said, “Behave.”

He kissed her lightly and let her go. She ran her fingers through her hair until it stood up in short curling tufts around her face. He sat on the edge of the bed watching her with such a look of frank admiration and respect that Ava averted her eyes in embarrassment. It wasn’t in her nature to be so openly amazed and worshipful.

“I came to remind you that today you meet my cousin Fraser, Alice’s son.”

“He’s the one who dresses like Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Right.”

She smirked, and was rewarded by a faint flush of color in his face. “And why does he dress like a dead poet?” she asked innocently.

“It started in college. He was asked to join the Raven Society up at UVA. They’re the ones who keep Poe’s room as it was when he was there, who leave a glass of cognac and three roses out every year on his birthday. It’s really a big deal to be asked to join. It’s one of the oldest societies on campus, and Fraser picked up his interest in Poe while there. Plus he double majored in history and drama.”

“That would explain it.”

His manner was casual, complacent. He acted as if nothing had happened between them yesterday, which she found somewhat jarring. She had the impression that she should not mention it at all. So much of what happened down here seemed to pass beneath the surface: thoughts, desires, hurts trolling like icebergs beneath a placid sea. She wondered if she had the subtlety for it.

“There’ll be a crowd today,” he said. “In addition to Fraser, several of the neighbors are invited round for drinks.”

“More cocktails?” she said. “Good God, they don’t drink every day, do they?”

“Every day but Sunday.”

“How is it they’re not all alcoholics?”

“They drink less than you might think. And I’ve never seen any of them drunk. It’s a generational thing, a social ritual, like the English drinking tea.”

“Right. Eighty proof tea.”

“How’s the work coming along?”

“It’s not, I’m afraid.”

He looked around the room, mildly alarmed. “They haven’t been bothering you, have they?”

“Who?” She stared at him in the mirror. “The aunts?”

“They promised to leave you alone to write.”

“They’ve been lovely. No noise. No interruptions. They left breakfast on the stove with a note, and lunch was chicken salad on the verandah, just the four of us.”