The Summer That Made Us. Robyn Carr

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      There it is, Charley thought. Everyone in the family had their own response to Bunny’s sudden death and Megan’s was to forget. Most of that last summer at the lake didn’t happen in her mind. She had been only fifteen at the time. The doctor called it a nervous breakdown and completely understandable, given the circumstances. They hospitalized and medicated her. She didn’t stay in the hospital long, then came home and seemed her old self with one exception—she couldn’t remember almost a year of her life. Pieces came back over time but it wasn’t talked about.

      The Berkey-Hempstead family was very good at not talking about things.

      “Do you think if you go back to the lake for a while it will all come flooding back, after twenty-seven years?”

      “No,” Meg said. “I think I’ll remember the golden days of summers there. I think I’ll remember what a happy childhood we had. For the most part. I think it will be healing. So relaxing and healthy. I want to hear the ducks, the boats on the lake, the children at the camp down the road, the naughty teenagers partying across the lake in that cove. Surely that’s still there, the cove.”

      Charlene remembered partying on the beach at the cove around the bend from the lodge. She had been all of sixteen. “Hopefully someone built a great big house there,” she said. “Or a parking lot.”

      “I hope it’s not very changed...”

      “That’s what you really want?” Charley asked.

      “It’s all I want.”

      Charley knew she had no choice because you don’t deny your only sister who has cancer anything. “I’ll have to go there,” she said. “Certainly things will have to be done to make it civilized. I’ll have to make sure the house is habitable. I should tell Michael our plans, talk with Eric...”

      “Will Michael put up a stink about this?” Meg asked.

      “I don’t know why he should. Of course I’ll have his complete support—he loves you. Maybe he’ll even steal a little time and come out for a visit, bring Eric.”

      “Everything is all right with you and Michael, isn’t it?” Megan asked.

      “Of course! Why would you ask that?”

      “I don’t know,” Megan said. “You sounded uncomfortable when I asked about him.”

      Charlene laughed. “Sorry. This is an odd time. I have no job, no place of my own, no idea what’s coming next. The only home I have is Michael’s house in Palo Alto. It shouldn’t be such an adjustment. But it is.”

      “I bet you feel dependent for the first time in your life,” Megan suggested.

      “Maybe that’s it,” she said. But that wasn’t it. She and Michael were fighting. They’d had a standoff. About marriage, of all things.

      * * *

      Charley Hempstead met Michael Quincy when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-two. It was supposed to be a rebound fling, not a twenty-two-year love affair. Charley had been through quite a lot by that time in her young life; she’d had a baby out of wedlock at seventeen and had given her up for adoption, was attending college in California—as far away from her mother as she could get—and had been through a string of boyfriends, all useless college boys.

      Michael hadn’t fared much better. When they met he was separated from his wife of six years and it was a bitter parting, the divorce promising to be quite messy. He was a professor of political science and had just escaped a shallow, loveless, acrimonious marriage. On the one hand, he was relieved there were no children to suffer through the divorce, but on the other, he worried he might never be a father. He had wanted children. His wife had not.

      Both of them embarked on their relationship thinking it would probably be a mere comfortable blip on the radar, a placeholder until they could heal and regain their strength. But they were derailed by passion. Michael, the handsome young professor who all the coeds crushed on, fell in love with Charley. And Charley fell for him. They were living together in a small apartment in Berkeley within a few months. They talked, debated, read and made love constantly. They didn’t marry—at first because of the complications of Michael’s divorce and later because Michael was a little soured on marriage and didn’t want to spoil the relationship they had. Charley, if she was honest with herself, wanted to be different. Modern. And she didn’t mind pissing off her mother. The fact that Charley became pregnant accidentally a few years later changed very little. By then, Michael’s divorce was final, the settlement done, and he bought a small but fashionable home in Palo Alto, a place for them to raise their child. It was the ’90s—people cohabitated and had children together all the time; women even had them alone without suffering much recrimination. So, for Michael, who had feared he might never have a child, and Charley, who had been forced to give one up, the birth of Eric brought much happiness.

      Michael did want them to marry one day to establish that their commitment was real, fearless and holy.

      “Holy?” she’d asked with a laugh. “When did you get religious?”

      “I just mean I’m not afraid to make a lifetime pledge. I want to do that. Someday.”

      By the time little Eric was four years old, Charley had graduated from Berkeley and been in the workforce for some time, moving up very quickly in the world of television. She used the name Berkey, dropping Hempstead. She said it was better for television, but truthfully, she was still angry with her parents and secretly hoped it would piss them off. Michael was a full professor at Stanford. Charley went from production in the San Francisco affiliate, to weather reporter, then anchorwoman, and it wasn’t long before she took over a local morning talk show. The ratings soared and she was picked up by other markets. She bought herself a town house in the city—a very nice town house with a view—which she had used every nickel plus loans to buy. It was not only a great investment but convenient. Even though there were two houses between them, they managed to spend most nights together. If they stayed with her in the city, Eric and Michael would head back to Michael’s Palo Alto house and that was where Eric went to school. Charley’s house wasn’t entirely an indulgence. She reported to the studio at four a.m. and as long as she lived in the city the station sent a car for her.

      They’d been together for twenty-two years. They’d had arguments here and there, power struggles over how to raise Eric or how the money should be spent, and conflicting political ideas. They managed well for two people with demanding careers and a child they were devoted to; they made such an exceptional team they were the envy of many long-married friends. The subject of their own marriage hardly ever came up.

      Then Charley’s world turned on its ear. She had not been prepared for the network to pull her show without warning. She had no backup plan. At almost the same moment Megan was undergoing radical chemo to precede a bone marrow transplant. The doctors gave her a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the cancer, which had spread, and the chemo had already nearly wiped her out. Charley was not prepared to lose another sister.

      And she was not prepared to have no career. Her career was her identity; she was proud of it. She had been successful.

      “Sounds like a good time for us to get married,” Michael said.

      She was stunned. “What, in your twisted mind, makes you think this is a good time for me?” she asked, gobsmacked. “And what, pray, do you think marriage will do to make it good?”

      He СКАЧАТЬ