Page 101 of Vacationland

“Just a month,” she says. “It was fall, before you closed up for the year.”

“The two of you sat right here,” he says. “I remember coming down one morning, early, and you had fallen asleep holding him. You looked like Madonna and child. The sun was just starting to come up—” He pauses and studies his hands. “It was so beautiful,” he says. “So beautiful.”

“I remember that visit,” Louisa says. She remembers being elated, exhausted, overworked, overjoyed. She remembers Matty’s little fists, beating lightly at her while he nursed. “That was a good visit,” she says. There’s so much else she wants to say—about Kristie and Danny, about Sheila’s death and Kristie’s baby, about Annie holding the secret for so long. But when she opens her mouth, what comes out is this: “I think Matty got his heart stomped on this summer. By Nicole’s daughter. Hazel.”

Her father raises his eyebrows and chuckles. “Happens to the best of us, I’m afraid. He’ll recover. He’ll be grand.” A trace of the Dubliner he once was comes out in that phrase.He’ll be grand.She imagines her father as an impish schoolboy with a cowlick, a sweater vest over a bow tie, short pants.

“I think he will too.” After all, sometimes it takes the younger generation to atone for the missteps of the parents’ generation. But she won’t get into that now. Louisa knows that these moments of lucidity of Martin’s won’t last; she knows that the disease will continue its endless march through her father’s brain until his memory bank is wiped entirely clean. Toward the end of his life Ronald Reagan no longer knew that he’d been president of the United States! This conversation with her father, this temporary clearing of the neural pathways, is an unexpected gift.

Be in the moment. Connect.

This will be the final time she sits like this with her father. She had thought at one time they’d all be here forever on this porch, summer after summer, winding the memories around their fingers in an endless game of cat’s cradle. There was the time that. How about that day. Do you remember when. But this is it. It all goes so fast, no time to look around.

Steven will be itching to go; they’ll have to leave soon if they have any hope of avoiding traffic through Queens and into Brooklyn. They will need lunch and at least three bathroom stops—nobody will coordinate, and Claire will need to go twice.

Louisa stands and holds out her hand to her father. “Come on, Daddy.”

He stands, using her weight to steady his. “Where are we going?”

Before they walk through the screen door she turns and looks again at the Samoset across the way. She can see it fully now. She can see the breakwater and the rolling swaths of emerald grass that stand between the harbor and the resort’s pool. It’s amazing she can get any words out with her voice clogged this way, clogged with all of the things she’ll never say. “We’re going out to the car so you can say goodbye to everybody before we leave. How’s that sound, Daddy?”

“Good,” he says. “That sounds good.”

The sun is dancing off the water in the most lovely way. Miraculously, at least for now, the fog has cleared.