PART ONE FRIDAY
1.
The boy on the back of the boat, laughing.
The sky, pewter-stamped and threatening rain.
Michael Starling, age thirty-three, warm on his father’s boat, watches the other boat, the boy, the bay—the water that will never be his because Michael’s parents are selling the house.
Yesterday, they arrived—Michael and Diane, Jake and Thad—and were given the news: Richard and Lisa Starling will not be retiring to the lake. In a week, the Starling family summer home will be sold so that Michael and Thad’s parents may retire, instead, to a pocket of Florida shore that screams margaritas and sand and all things distinctly un-Starling.
This decision, it’s not like Michael’s parents. They are not Florida people. They are ex-hippies, academics. They are lovers of cold mountain lakes and clear, cool streams, of trees that change color in the fall. Their summers are North Carolina summers, starry skies and the converted double-wide the family affectionately calls its cabin in the woods.
What has become of Michael’s parents? Who are these brave fools who splash before him, bobbing in swimsuits and inner tubes in the calm waters of a Lake Christopher summer day?
Onshore, a heron picks through reeds for fish. Above, clouds cover and uncover the sun.
A morning on the lake—sandwiches, swimming—this was the Starlings’ plan before the rogue vessel arrived, unzipping the water behind it, never mind swimmers or the bay’s enforced no-wake speed. The boat dropped anchor too close, and the man at the wheel uncovered his head and waved with a hat—a captain’s hat!—from the deck. He whooped, spat a wad of tobacco overboard, then turned up his music very, very loud.
This is not good lake etiquette. This is not done.
Lake Christopher is not a party lake, and this is not a noisy bay. Longtime residents work hard to keep it that way, having survived decades of development and two challenges—one public, one corporate—of eminent domain.
The interloper boat blasts Jimmy Buffett, The Party Barge stenciled pink along its side. Its pontoons gleam gray under a gray sky.
Michael’s father doesn’t seem to mind. “Join us!” he calls to the man with the captain’s hat. Then everyone from The Party Barge is in the water, all but the boy (swimmer’s ear, his mother says, a shame) and his older sister, left aboard to watch the boy. Soon, though, the sister is under the canopy on her back on the deck of the boat, eyes closed, earbuds in.
Michael watches the boy and wants a drink.
The boy is four, maybe five. Where the boy’s biceps should be are pumpkin-colored water wings. He moves to the outboard motor, then straddles the cover, a jockey in silver swim trunks. His horse is tattooed Evinrude, his racetrack the sun-dappled water in his wake. “Giddy-up!” he screams.
Some might find this cute. Michael doesn’t.
The inflatables bulge like blood pressure cuffs around the boy’s arms. One hand releases an invisible rein, and the boy mines a bag of Cheetos in his lap. He turns his head to observe his sister in the boat, his parents swimming fifty yards away. Michael follows the boy’s line of sight. When he looks back, he finds a finger. It is a middle finger, the signature neon of Cheetos, and it is raised in Michael’s direction.
Michael shuts his eyes. Why is he watching over this kid? He doesn’t even like kids. He opens his eyes. The boy sticks out his tongue.
Hey, Michael wants to call to the negligent parents, your shitty kid’s giving me the finger, and your other shitty kid’s asleep.
Michael should be swimming, but his head has bats in it. Sobriety is wings in the skull. It’s echolocation behind the eyes. He needs vodka, stat, but this morning he woke to an empty orange juice jug and no way to sneak liquor undetected onto the boat. His family will put up with a lot, but not vodka before noon.
The boy raises the chip bag to his mouth, and his chin and chest are dusted orange. Then he drops the bag into the lake. He stares at Michael, daring him to speak.
It’s a new sensation, being bullied by a child, and Michael can’t say he cares for it.
He cradles his head. He misses his liquor cabinet. He doesn’t miss his house. He’d rather be here than back in Texas. He’s spent every summer on this lake since he was two, and if there’s a place he feels at peace, it’s here.
The boy draws himself to his knees and peers over the motor cover’s edge.
The boy’s family, they aren’t from here. Michael had them pegged for out-of-towners. But out-of-towners pilot marina-rentals, and this is no marina-rental. This pontoon is an Avalon Ambassador, 90K on a good day, a watercraft that makes the Starlings’ six-seat fishing boat the seafaring equivalent of Tom Hanks’s Cast Away raft. (Michael’s father christened theirs The Sea Cow, hand-painting the name on the gunwale in blue house paint that, thirty years later, has faded to a wavery a Cow.) No, these people—the mother with her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, the father with his faux naval captain’s cap—they aren’t locals or vacationers. They’re newly minted lake house owners breaking in the captain’s midlife-crisis present to himself. Even as the Ambassador entered the bay, the mother was probably cutting price tags from the stack of towels at her side.
These are loud people who loudly flash their wealth around. To Michael, these people are everything that is wrong with America in 2018.
Speakers thump. Guitars strum. And for the love of all that is holy, would someone get Jimmy Buffett a goddamn cheeseburger already?
At the shoreline, the heron lunges and comes up with mud.
On the other boat, the girl who’s supposed to be watching her brother is definitely asleep. She’s young, late teens, bikinied, body toned and honey-tan. She’s roughly the age and shape Diane was when she and Michael met here, in this bay, fifteen summers ago.
The boy leaves his knees. He’s squatting on the motor now. His sister shifts in sleep, and it occurs to Michael that these siblings are far enough apart in age that the boy might be a mistake. Perhaps the accident waiting to happen has been an accident all his life.
The first one you smother. The others, he’s heard, raise themselves.
Michael doesn’t want a first one, never did. That was their agreement. That was always the agreement.
Diane floats on a raft in blue water, belly-up. She won’t show for a few weeks, though sometimes Michael swears he sees the hint of something, a contour, a fattening. His wife isn’t fat, but she’s no longer the girl on the boat. He wishes she was, and, wishing, knows this makes him hashtag something or other. He doesn’t want to be whatever wanting a fit, young wife makes him. But wanting not to be won’t ease the want. He misses youth, his and his wife’s.
Does this make him sexist? His mother would say yes. His father would say no. Thad, his brother, wouldn’t care, and Jake wouldn’t know what Michael was talking about. Jake, Thad’s rich, attractive, slender boyfriend, is young. He’s naive. He lives in New York and makes paintings for other rich, attractive, slender people who live in New York. As far as Michael can tell, Jake’s interest in other people extends only as far as the dollar signs attached to his canvases.
In the water, Jake and Thad toss a football. Michael’s father and the captain laugh, water noodles rising from their crotches, red, obscene. The mothers tread water, talking, Diane between them on her raft.