Summer's End (24 page)

They went slowly. Leaving the packs behind, Jack walked sideward, pointing the flashlight at her feet, his other arm up to steady the canoe if she stumbled. But she never wavered.

At the end of the portage, he helped her lower the back tip of the canoe to the ground. He lifted the front end so that she could slip out from underneath. He flipped it into the water, and they went back to get the other packs.

“You're very strong,” he said.

“Of course I am,” she answered. “I don't know why that always surprises people.”

“I suppose it's because you're pretty.”

How irrelevant that seemed right now—what she looked like. She was so like him, all instinct and motion. That's what mattered, not her beauty.

He had made a hash of his conversation with her before the campfire last week, but it was probably better to have things out in the open. He would take honesty over dignity any day.

When they were on the water again, they could see a light halfway up the lake. It was the ranger station.

“We made good time,” she said.

“We made very good time,” he answered.

The ranger station was simply a little cabin with a big antenna. It was set up on a rise so that people could see it from anywhere on the lake. Jack turned the canoe toward the shore. There was a narrow strip of sand at the water's edge. Amy hopped out of the canoe, and with his weight keeping the stern low in the water, she easily pulled the canoe onto the shore by the painter rope attached to the bow.

“I need to pee,” she announced as he got out of the canoe. “You go distract the ranger while I sneak into his biffy.”

Jack started off toward the cabin, and Amy went to the little outhouse at the edge of the woods. He saw a small campsite set back from the water. He whistled, caught her attention, and pointed it out to her.

The ranger was straightforward and affable, radioing for a plane immediately. “It's great that you came in now,” he said. “They can get themselves organized tonight and then take off the minute it is even half-light. They should get to your people just as the sun is rising.”

Jack thanked him, took the lantern and pot of hot water the man offered, and went back to the little campsite by the water. Amy had unrolled the tent and had the first flickerings of a fire going. The tinder was flaming brightly, and the bigger pieces of kindling were ignited.

Jack hung the lantern on a tree. “And your brother said you had no outdoors skills.”

“I don't. But I've got a visual memory. I conjured up a picture of what fires looked like before the match was lit and did my best to duplicate that.”

The technique had clearly worked. Jack started to assemble the tent poles. Amy began to unpack the food. He watched her. She had put on her sweater, and its chunky knit hid the clean, hard muscles of her arms and back.

Her fire was doing well. It was an A-frame with a little tepee built on the crosspiece. Her brother laid a tepee fire; her sister built a classic A-frame; he himself combined the two in the way Amy had done. Any one of them worked fine, but when she had “conjured up” an image of a fire, it had been his.

“You knew that you, not your brother, ought to come, didn't you?” He didn't wait for an answer. “If no one else had thought of it, would you have said anything, or would you have just let Ian go?”

Her answer was immediate. “Oh, I would have let Ian go.”

“Why? If you were sure you were right…why not stand up for yourself?”

“To Phoebe and Ian? You have to be kidding.”

“Why not? If you know you were right.”

“Well, it wasn't like they were completely wrong.” She poured some of the ranger's hot water into their smaller pot, set it on the grate to reheat, and emptied packets of dried soup into their cups. “Ian would have done all right.”

He started to unpack the sandwiches and dried fruit that was the rest of their meal. “Are you like this about everything?”

There was a chance that she wouldn't even understand his question. She might be so passive about everything, letting agents, managers, whatever, make so many of her decisions that she didn't even know that it was happening.

“You don't stay where I am by being someone's puppet.”

So she did understand. “Go on.”

The water was hot. Pulling the cuff of her sweater down over her hand for a pot holder, she poured water into the cups and handed him one. She took hers and sat down, leaning against a big rock. She told him about how she and these two other skaters had gradually accepted a lot of responsibility for their own careers, doing their own choreography so they weren't dependent on other people's ideas, now even planning their own tour. “You don't have to be creative to do well as an amateur, you just have to be expres
sive. But to last for any length of time, you do need to be imaginative. And fortunately the three of us are.”

The broth was thin and salty, but the powdered stuff always was. “Go on.”

She sat down again. “Everyone says that figure skating is the one sport in which things get easier when you turn professional. Athletically that's true. The Olympic-division skaters do routines that are technically harder than what we do. But there's so much more to this than just the skating. If you're going to keep selling tickets, you have to be a celebrity. The public has to love you.”

People didn't understand fame, she said. When it first happened, you were too busy to know about it. In the weeks leading up to the Olympics, she hadn't realized that her face was everywhere. It would have thrilled her, there was no question about that; it was one of her dreams to walk into a store and see her face repeated again and again on magazine after magazine. But she hadn't gone anywhere during those weeks; she had either been practicing or been holed up in a little conference room giving the interviews that were behind those cover stories. Even after the Olympics, walking through the airport to fly home, she had been surrounded by other people and too distracted to notice the newsstands. Of course, she had seen individual copies of the magazines later, but that wasn't the same as seeing people buying them, reading them.

Then publicity became something to worry about—were you getting the right coverage? were the good photos used? how misleading were the quotes? Publicity brought no joy. The best possible feeling was relief.

“What's the good part about being famous?” Jack wanted to know.

“You can get things done,” she said. When you were
famous, you got your phone calls returned. “Amy Legend is on the line.” People noticed that. They opened their checkbooks, their hearts. An ill child got air transport to a bigger hospital, and a hotel chain donated a room to his family. A desperate blood bank suddenly had a hundred donors snaking a line down their hallway. A water-soaked school library received boxes and boxes of children's books and plenty of volunteers to clean, catalogue, and shelf. “Henry still cares about winning the professional competitions. Tommy and I can't make ourselves care about that anymore, but we're more satisfied, we're more content than Henry because we do more good.”

“Is that why you thought I ought to go work for the Red Cross?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Doing good works for me.”

Jack finished his sandwich. Amy shook open the little bag of dried apricots, took a few for herself, and handed him the rest. The little fire danced and flickered. The wind rustled in the pines. Jack sat forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely. Suddenly he felt a cool splash against the back of his hand. It was a raindrop.

Amy looked up at the sky. She must have felt the rain too. “Is it raining?” The moonlight was still bright. “It can't be raining. The sky's been clear all day. How can it rain?”

She did not want it to rain, she wanted to go on sitting by the fire, but what she wanted didn't make any difference to Nature. It was definitely raining. Jack stuffed the last of the apricots into his mouth and stood up. He started kicking the fire apart; it would be easier to put out that way. “You can keep asking how all night, but you'll be talking to yourself because I'm going to be somewhere dry.”

Amy hopped up. She started moving quickly, scooping up the trash, gathering the dirty dishes. “It's okay just to give these cups a good rinse and call them clean, isn't it?”

Of course it was. “Go in the tent. I'll do this. There's no sense in both of us getting wet.”

“Don't be silly. I can do my share.”

The rain was increasing. A gusty wind blew clouds across the moon; the light grew dimmer. Amy dunked the cups into the remains of the hot water. Jack scrambled the rest of their equipment into the Duluth pack. He carried the pack back to the water's edge, stowing it under the overturned canoe, quickly arranging their tin pot, cups, and plates on top of the canoe.

Amy helped. “Why are we doing this?” she asked, balancing a plate on the curving canoe bottom. “If we want the dishes to air-dry, this may not be the best spot.”

The raindrops were hitting the aluminum canoe with light metallic pings. Little puddles were already gathering near the rims of the plates.

“It's in case of bears.” Bears weren't too big a problem around here, not like in Yellowstone, where the bears had gotten so used to humans that they could open dumpsters and pop car trunks. “If a bear tries to get at the pack, the plates will rattle and scare him away. It's good that your family still uses metal plates and cups. Plastic doesn't make enough of a racket.”

“Two tin plates and a three-cup pot are going to scare a
bear?
”

She had a point. “At least it will wake us up and scare us.”

“I can't wait,” she said.

Jack could feel the rain starting to bead up in his hair, but everything seemed to be packed. He prodded Amy,
urging her to get under cover. He detoured back to the fire site to grab the lantern.

When he got to the tent, she was already inside. He lifted the flap and carefully passed the lantern in, not releasing it until he felt her grip it firmly. Then he crawled in.

He had to sit cross-legged. The tent was an old-fashioned pup tent with triangular ends and steeply sloping walls. It was no more than seven feet long and four and a half feet wide. Its center ridgepole was only a bit more than four feet from the ground.

Amy was holding the lantern at arm's length. Its green metal shade was beaded with raindrops, and the whole thing was hissing. “Why is it making this awful sound?”

Jack had no idea. “Because it is. But don't worry. It's not about to blow up.” He looked around the tent for something to do with it. A shiny metal hook on a ribbed tape was sewn into the center seam. He took the lantern and hung it up, letting go of it gently, hoping that its weight wouldn't pull the tent down.

“You're going to bump your head,” Amy pointed out.

The lantern was right in the middle of everything, and its base swung about three feet above the tent floor. “You're just as likely to bump your head as me,” he said.

“No, I'm not.”

She started unrolling the sleeping bags, spreading them out. She knew that he was watching her, waiting for her to bump into the lantern. So she started to make a show of it, flinging her arm, thrusting her shoulder, tossing her head, always coming within a half inch of the lantern but never touching it. And she did all this without ever looking at it. She simply knew where it was. What a sense of space she had.

“How do you do that?”

“I don't know. I just do it…although this is easy, because there's also a sound and a temperature change.”

That wouldn't have helped him in the least. “But you could have done it without the sound or temperature change.”

“Probably.”

Which meant “of course.” Jack shook his head. He had thought that he had decent reflexes, but compared to her he had the reaction time of a large hibernating animal.

She waved him over to sit on the unrolled sleeping bag so that she could do the other one. To unroll the bag in such a small space, she had to flip it out in front of her, scoot over onto that part, and then turn and smooth out the rest. The lamp's sharp light shone against the fine grain of her skin, and a faint woolly smell rose from her sweater.

It was time for a little conversation. Surely they were both on the same page here, both committed to their roles as noble rescuers, as fleet-footed messengers, but it probably did behoove him to make clear the purity of his intentions.
You're one hot number, babe, but I ain't gonna put the moves on ya
.

Also, she was hardly a “hot number.” She seemed remarkably unaware of her sexuality.

He took a breath. This wasn't easy, but he had to do it. “Last time I tried to talk to you about anything”—he was referring to the disaster of a conversation they'd had before the campfire back at the lake—“I made a total hash of it.”

She smiled. “You did reveal more than you intended.”

That was no big surprise. “When I was a kid, I had this book about King Arthur and all those guys, and whenever a knight rescued a lady and they had to travel together,
he'd always talk about sleeping with his sword between them. I didn't get it then, but of course I do now and while I don't exactly have a sword with me, I suppose we could use a canoe paddle, except that the paddles are even wetter than we are, and—”

He stopped. He was getting nowhere. “You know what I mean.”

Now, that made sense.
You know what I mean
. That was all he needed to say. She knew what he meant.

“I know what you
think
you mean,” she countered. “But I assume you did enjoy this afternoon.”

What did that have to do with anything? “I loved every second of it. You know that. I don't think I've ever felt that close to a—no, not just to a woman, to anyone.” Oh, Lord, he was starting to do it again, starting to talk too much. He never talked about himself. So why did he keep blathering on? “But that's probably only because I didn't have a dog as a kid. I might have higher standards for companionship if I had had a dog.”