“Don’t try to get funny with me, young man,” she said. “My life’s my life, and my stories are my stories.”
She fixed us tumblers of Drambuie over ice, then came around the table and sat next to me, an arm across my shoulder as if we were old schoolyard buddies, and said that she’d been thinking about Nick’s death, and had decided it was a bad idea for me to go up to Maine by myself, and that she was going to go with me.
“Even if I ask you to?” I said.
“Even if you ask me to,” she said, and then, before I could try to kiss her—and oh boy did I want to!—she drained her drink, chucked me on the arm, and left me in the kitchen. I waved good-bye to her after she was gone, but instead of thinking of her sweet mouth, or trying to recall what it felt like the time we did kiss, or imagining what it would be like if I went into her room later, lay down beside her, and began kissing her—I found myself picturing the two of us arriving at Trish’s house, with Trish embracing me, and the two of us kissing.
What I’d also begun wondering about, from the moment I read the Make-A-Wish synopsis, was whether the story about the violinist was really about Seana, and if, like the woman in the story, Seana had come to our house in Northampton because, knowing she was dying, she wanted to be near her mentor during the time she had left. The idea for the novel had been my father’s, but I had to wonder if Seana had either confided her situation in him at some point, or if he somehow guessed that the only reason she would take up nesting rights in our house was because it was the one place where she felt safe—at home—and because she wanted to be close to him on her way out. I stood, felt my knees wobble, and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady myself. The room tilted to one side, and then to the other, as if it were a ship going through high, rolling waves, and I told myself that I’d done much too much wondering for one evening, and that it was time to go to sleep so that I might, if I got lucky, become lost in a wild and lovely storm-tossed sea of dreams.
After we’d made our way across the small cuff of New Hampshire that connected Massachusetts to Maine, and stopped for lunch in a shoreline diner outside Kennebunkport, I remembered what I’d been thinking the night before, and asked Seana if Make-A-Wish had anything to do with her.
“It was your father’s idea, not mine,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “But you said you thought he might have imagined some of the stories—at least the ones you showed me—in part because it was his way of giving you notions for novels that you imagined he might have imagined would be novels you might imagine.”
“Don’t get meta-fictional on me,” she said.
“Meta-who?”
“Actually, if you need reassurance, let it be known that Seana Shulamith McGee O’Sullivan subjects herself to regular check-ups—cervix, breasts, colon, heart, lungs—the works—and that the best medical teams have failed to discover anything to worry about. Which means I have to keep writing.”
“But I thought you love to write. You told me that nothing gives you more pleasure than writing.”
“I love to write,” she said, pointing a fork at me. “But you’re missing the point, Charlie.” She tapped the flat side of the fork against the side of her head. “Use your noodle, fella. Whose story is it?”
“Oh,” I said. And then again: “Oh.”
“Oh,” she said.
“But he seems fine.”
“So do we all, some days.”
“But,” I began, and leaned forward. “I mean, do you really think that’s what it’s about?”
“No,” she said.
“But why—?”
She shrugged and lifted her coffee mug, as if in a toast to Max, then sat back. “Who knows?” she said again. “Probably because I enjoy playing you—playing with you?—seeing what’s going on behind those moist brown eyes of yours. I used to love it when Max had to be out of town and he asked me to babysit you—he said I was there to house-sit so that you wouldn’t be offended and think he thought you couldn’t take care of yourself. But it was the same then: when you’re especially happy or sad—or scared—your eyes have the same beguiling quality your father’s eyes have, did you know that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneliness—what was that all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”
“Stuck for words, Charlie?”
“Let’s just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let’s just forget it and blow this joint.”
“Do you have one?”
“Very funny,” I said. “But you know what?”
“What?”
“You’re not that funny,” I said. “You’re weird—I’ll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you’re not funny.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.
A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.
I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he did know—if he’d make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn’t, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn’t be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.
North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I’d gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I’d been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I’d been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I’d been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we’d gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.
Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I’d fallen in love, not so much with Maine’s lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.
What I’d loved about Maine, I said, was what I’d come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.
I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I’d been