The Summer Demands. Deborah Shapiro

middlebrow. Depended on the people. I confused these women once in a dream, or one turned into the other, and they’d since become the same person to me. I had to think for a moment when I wanted to distinguish them in my mind. That article about how the fate of an obscure fishery could tell us a lot about climate change. Was that Anna? No, Carrie. Right?

      I considered writing quasi-professional emails—of the I’m still here variety—to Carrie and Anna. I could write one and send it to both of them.

      There was no confusing Stella. She was only herself.

      In the athletics shed, Stella and I had found two tennis rackets, strung and in decent shape, the handles not too stripped or eaten away, along with an air-sealed container of tennis balls. Neither of us played tennis, but what a jaunty thing to do. We’d go over to the old courts by the woods, where the sun was never too strong. We’d rig up the crumbling net. We’d have a few matches and then make spritzy drinks. Lying back in Adirondack chairs, admiring our nails.

      The only message I’d received that morning was a brief rejection for a position I’d applied to, thinking I might at least be called in for an interview. They’d filled the role internally, I was informed, but they would be happy to keep my materials on file. Best of luck!

      So I gathered the tennis equipment and brought it over to Stella’s cabin. I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. No note. She’d switched her shift at work, maybe, and I wasn’t too concerned. We hadn’t made a definite plan. But I had built my day around this. More than my day.

      It was as if I were waking up. This was the way dreams ended, without conclusion. It was Friday, I realized. I’d taken out Stella’s splinter on Monday. Days so narcotic that time had slipped from its track. It hadn’t even been a week.

      When David got home that evening I asked him to go for a walk before dinner, down the road, past the semicircular, flattened spot in the woods that had once been used for archery, and the cabin where the kitchen guys lived in the summer, by the old infirmary. I’d been sick once for what seemed like days in that infirmary. Lying in bed, feverish, in a paneled room with sheer curtains and an old TV, wearing a soft, hot pink T-shirt that said ARUBA on it in white script. I’d never been to Aruba. I don’t know where that shirt came from. Aunt Esther was in the room, at one point, with a tray and a deck of well-used playing cards. Navy blue and white on the back, an intricate, scrolling Victorian design. She sat on the bed, placed the tray between us, and taught me how to play hearts. She showed me how to shuffle the pack, bending it into a falling arch. She felt my forehead and held my hand. In and out of sleep: the first time I woke she was still there, the second time I was alone. It didn’t occur to me to wonder where my parents were or what was happening to me. I was just there and it was just happening.

      I tried to get back to that state—the just being there, the just happening, come what may—as I told David that we had a young woman living in bunk 18 and that I’d gotten to know her a little over the last week. I apologized—I didn’t know why I hadn’t told him right away. And I didn’t, other than I hadn’t wanted to fully examine the half-thoughts that surrounded me like the weather. I hadn’t wanted to give those thoughts a name, a label that would contain them or that would make them mine, something I had to be responsible for.

      “A week?” That was all he said, at first, his voice catching. Then he bent down to the ground, grabbing the end of a large fallen log, and he heaved it out of the path where we were standing. He looked like he wanted twenty more logs to heave, one after the other, even though his hands were already red and marked from gripping the first. He pressed his hands into his hair, elbows in front of his face. There weren’t any more logs here and his anger, which rarely flared, had nowhere to go but toward me. “What the fuck, Emily.”

      Just happening wasn’t happening, not with my heart beating so fast.

      “I don’t understand how you just tell me this now like you don’t think it’s a big deal or that it’s disturbing, and that’s even more disturbing.”

      “I get that it’s a big deal.” And I did get it, but not enough to sound convincing.

      He pushed the fallen log farther away with his foot, pulled at a low branch; I suppose he still needed something for his hands to do. Despite his strength, David had a gentleness, an agility that made him boyish. He was like a boy, then, with the tree—more athletic than threatening. Still, there was a hole in the ground off to the side of the path, made by a small animal, and part of me wanted to twist away and shrink myself into it, scurry off and disappear. Another part of me, though, felt somewhat indignant. Was it really so terrible, what I’d done? Couldn’t I have done much worse?