Page 46 of Cruel Summer

TWENTY-SIX

The Great Northern

Now

The drive north was lush and green, even in the heat, and when they got into Washington, it was a good twenty degrees cooler than it had been down in southern Oregon.

They didn’t linger in Washington, but moved quickly through the state and into Montana.

“Are you going to tell me what your plan is?”

“I was thinking I’d keep it a surprise.”

“Is it a very fancy villa where we can have sex in a hot tub?”

“No,” he said. “I was thinking camping.”

She frowned. “Camping.”

“In Glacier.”

She had never been to Glacier National Park before. She was interested in that. But she was a little bit skeptical about camping.

“Did you bring a…a tent?”

“I did. And a Dutch oven. And food.”

“Well,” she said, trying not to sound grumpy. “It sounds like you’re ready to take care of me a little bit at least.”

“You don’t like camping?”

“I haven’t actually done it since the kids were really little, and it was kind of a supervision nightmare. We never did it when I was growing up. And no, I don’t think I like it. But you didn’t ask.”

“Sorry. I guess I should have…”

“We can do it,” she said.

He had planned this. He had brought everything. It felt like he was showing her another piece of himself, and that felt like it mattered. It felt important. To say yes to this.

“Are you martyring yourself?”

She thought about it. Really. She was trying not to just go along with things, but she didn’t think that’s what she was doing here.

“Do you like camping?”

“I always wanted to do it when I was a kid,” he said.

“But my mom didn’t like it. My uncle took me a few times.

In some parks down in Southern California.

They were crowded. I kind of wanted more wilderness camping experience.

But I liked it. It was something that I…

I thought that if I had a dad, we might have gone.

You know, obviously I have a dad, just not one that cared.

I’m over that.” He looked at her from the driver’s seat.

She wondered if he was actually over it.

She wondered if you got over something like that.

Becca hadn’t chosen to leave Chloe. It was a trauma, definitely, to lose your mother like that. But she could know, really know, how much her mom loved her.

Logan was missing that from his father.

“You took Chloe camping,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “We did it a lot before Becca got sick. It was our thing.”

“Then you just ended up going on our vacation rental beach holidays. Which must have been very not what you enjoyed.”

“It was different,” he said. “For a while that was what I needed. We got back into camping when Chloe was in high school.”

He was giving to his daughter what he hadn’t had.

Something he’d imagined a good father would do.

She hadn’t appreciated until this moment just how much weight was on this man’s shoulders.

He wasn’t just trying to be the mother Becca would’ve been, he was trying to be the father his own had never tried to be.

He had no guidebook for the past he’d been forced to walk.

“Logan, I don’t think that I fully appreciated the work that you put into giving both Becca and Chloe what you didn’t have.

You are an incredible man. You weren’t just there for them.

The way that you were there for me after my mom died was so needed.

Desperately. I don’t know where you got the strength to do all of that. ”

“You remember when you told me that loss was just shitty sometimes? I needed that. You didn’t give me platitudes or try to cheer me up. Try to tell me she was in a better place or that it was some divine plan. That I must be strong to have been given so much to carry.”

She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “I would love to believe that that didn’t happen, and that those things weren’t said to you. But I of course know they were. I can even imagine which people said them.”

“It’s well-meaning. But it’s pointless. It isn’t pointless to sit there and acknowledge how hard something is.

To support somebody like that. Will… He was the best friend I ever had, but things like that make him uncomfortable.

Whether it’s grappling with mortality, or just the fact that you can’t always shape life into what you wanted it to be, I don’t know.

He was happy to have a drink with me. But he couldn’t give me that.

That acknowledgment that it was just bad. But you did.”

“A couple of years after the fact, if I remember correctly,” she said.

“It was almost more important to get it then. Because at that point, people have stopped bringing you casseroles and sympathy.” He laughed.

“At that point, people think that maybe you’ve moved on, and they don’t realize that you having to live your life is not an indication that you’ve let anything go. ”

“It must be hard. Because I understand that even with my mom, I don’t want to forget. You want your grief to be less sharp, but you don’t want to forget the person that you loved. And sometimes it feels like pain is the tribute.”

“Sometimes it does.”

She remembered the women at Orcas Island, and Will’s commentary on Logan’s sex life. “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Considering the amount of personal things that we’ve done, sure.”

“Okay. Point taken. But sometimes I think this is maybe more personal.”

“This? This topic of conversation? Yeah. I guess it is.”

“How long did you wait? To…to sleep with somebody else.”

He looked out the windshield, and she thought she saw something like shame in his eyes. “Not as long as I should have. Probably. Because there’s a point where you’re not thinking clearly, and everybody walks away feeling used.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t turn me into a paragon. I really don’t deserve it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever considered you a paragon. I think you’re a good man. That doesn’t mean I think you aren’t a man.”

“Well, sooner than I would like to admit, there were times when you or my former in-laws would have Chloe, and I would just go and lose myself for a couple of hours. With a woman I didn’t know. It was a way to forget.”

She didn’t say it, not right then, but she had a feeling it was a way for him to hate himself too.

“I don’t judge you for that. Hell, life is a lot more complicated than I ever give it credit for. I don’t care if you did it the night after the funeral.”

“It wasn’t quite that quick. But I barely made it a month. I told you, I did a lot of things she wouldn’t approve of.”

“Maybe that’s why you had to do it. It makes sense.”

He nodded slowly. “Thank you. For understanding that too.”

“It makes sense if you were angry. About a lot of things.”

“I was. But maybe not quite in the way you think. But behaving well… I couldn’t really see the point to it. As far as I could tell, there was no reward.”

“So you were as self-destructive as you could think to be without compromising your relationship with your daughter.”

“Just my relationship with myself.”

“That’s fair.”

“I didn’t keep that up. There were a few years there where I didn’t really… I lost interest. It wasn’t doing it for me anymore.”

“When was that?”

“After the bonfire. Until Oahu.”

“Logan…”

“I’m sorry. For the way you’re tangled up in this. In my stuff.”

“Don’t apologize to me. You’ve been tangled up in all of this. It isn’t particularly fair to you. You have enough…baggage and pain in your life without being in whatever this is with me.”

“You’re a good part of my life,” he said.

“Okay. Well, then you need to accept that you’re a good part of mine. Don’t apologize to me. Not for anything. Definitely not for camping. Most especially not for sharing you.”

He leaned over and kissed her, while driving, and the thrill of it buoyed her all the way to Glacier.

The campsite that he chose for them was near the water, nestled into the trees, and it provided a fair amount of seclusion in spite of the fact that the park was a fairly popular destination.

The bright red car, all shiny and bright against the rugged landscape, made her smile, as did the way Logan gamely set up the entire camp himself.

“As the resident camping expert,” he said.

He got out a lawn chair for her and handed her a soda can, encouraging her to recline while he put up the tent and unloaded all of the food.

“We will keep it up in a bear bag,” he said.

“All right,” she said, looking around. “There are grizzly bears here, aren’t there?”

“Yes,” he said. “There are.”

“That’s unnerving.”

“Don’t be unnerved. You’re safe.”

She trusted him. It was that easy.

He got a fire going and put the Dutch oven over the flame, announcing that he was making camp chili for them.

He looked up at her, the firelight spilling over his face.

It was the strangest thing. Because it didn’t happen when he was telling her about his wife, or his wounds. It didn’t happen when they were kissing.

It didn’t happen when they were having sex.

It didn’t happen when he was saying something particularly insightful or encouraging to her, which he often had.

It was just right then. Realizing that right now she would rather be here, camping with him, out here in the wilderness prepared to sleep in a place with grizzly bears, than anywhere else in the world.

She had fallen in love with him.

She didn’t know if it had happened in the last three months, three years. She just knew that she had.

And she didn’t know what it meant. Or what the right thing to do with that was.

She was still legally married to Will. What did a new relationship look like now?

Between two people who had already raised their kids, one who had lost a spouse to death, and her, who had gone through this reckoning.

Who had questioned everything, coming to the conclusion she wanted her life to change.

That she wanted Logan. For more than just sex.

Will didn’t even know that yet.

Did Logan want to spend the rest of his years with her?

Should she make that kind of proclamation now? With things in her life still so messy?

Her kids would freak out.

What about Chloe?

They had time. They had three weeks of this trip. A month until the end of this. This summer apart from Will and her life.

She wanted to sit with this realization. Because it was beautiful and terrifying. She wanted to turn it over. What it meant. How it was the same to love as she had experienced it before. And how it was different.

Because she needed to be able to tell him. When she had kissed him in Boston, she hadn’t been able to give him the answers that he wanted.

Now she wanted to give him every answer she possibly could. Every answer that existed inside of her soul.

She needed to create those answers. She needed to know them, so that when she told him that she loved him, she could say exactly what she wanted from him.

It terrified her. So she needed this moment to last.

This moment to be just about them. Nothing more. Nothing less.

She had realized that she needed to look to the future, but this was where the future was bringing her.

To this sort of terrifying place. That was filled with wonder and something she had never thought she would find.

This was a passionate kind of love.

This was something she thought was reserved only for movies. She wasn’t rewriting her past.

She was not foolish enough to create a story about how she and Will had been unhappy.

About how their love had been fake, or hadn’t been real.

But it had been young. It had been founded on immature feelings, and forced into a very mature place out of fear.

They had been forced to grow up quickly, and because of that, they hadn’t grown in a way that was intentional or on purpose.

It had just been wild and desperate. They had needed to survive, and they’d done it.

They’d created a life and a family, and they had created a measure of real happiness.

But she had fallen in love with Logan without boundaries. Without expectation. Without the influence of anyone else.

It was this mad, wonderful thing that she had never expected to find. That she had never in her wildest dreams thought existed for her.

No, she was not foolish enough to rewrite her life, for better or for worse.

She had loved Will. Their love hadn’t faded. Not because of familiarity, or any of the things that you normally blamed waning passion on.

That wasn’t them.

Their love was like a flower that had been put in a pot that was far too small.

The roots were stifled. It hadn’t been able to grow. Eventually, a plant like that withered away.

It could never be all that it might’ve been.

But that didn’t mean it wasn’t real. It didn’t mean it hadn’t flowered. That it hadn’t been beautiful. For all the seasons it had lived.

But it was done growing.

By the time it was dark, the chili was done, and she and Logan sat next to each other in lawn chairs while she made worried comments about bears.

“You’re not going to get eaten by a bear,” he said.

“You would have to sacrifice yourself for me,” she said.

“I would?”

“That’s chivalry, Logan. A man must stand when a lady enters the room, and he must lie down and allow a grizzly bear to eat him so the lady can run away.”

“That’s not very progressive of you.”

“Well, when it comes to bears I’m very traditional.”

“Good to know.”

They went into the tent, and she smiled when she saw the sleeping bags were zipped together.

“I like your version of camping,” she said, taking her clothes off and sliding beneath the covers.

“I’m a simple man,” he said, taking his shirt off, and then the rest of his clothes, getting into the sleeping bag with her.

It was so quiet out there. When he turned the lantern off inside the tent, so dark. But she knew the feel of him now. His body had become familiar, and there was something exciting about that.

She moved her hands over his chest, and he wrapped her up in his arms, kissing her.

She made love with him, knowing that she loved him.

She remembered what he had said back in the motel in Tahoe.

That right in that moment, they were the only thing that was real.

She knew now that it was true. They were real. This was real.

It wasn’t a break from real life. This was real life.

The way she lived it from now to forever was up to her.