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“Did I do something wrong?” said Rick, coming toward her with a look of concern on his face.
She turned back to him with a sigh. “No . . . it’s just being here again,” she said, not sure how to make him understand. She really didn’t want to get into it now. She wasn’t ready for him. Not yet, it was too soon. “I know it’s only been a year,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve been away forever.”
Her gaze went around the room. “It doesn’t look like anything’s changed,” she said, sighing wistfully. “Even the paintings are still crooked.”
She went over to the wall and straightened one of the inexpensive landscape paintings. Her father had bought them at a “starving artists” warehouse sale, thinking he had found a real bargain, and later had found out that the “starving artists” were starving in Korea, where they were being paid slave wages to turn out hundreds of copies of the same landscape scenes for export.
“You’ve certainly changed,” said Rick, watching her, unable to understand her standoffishness. “Don’t you even say hello anymore?”
“I’m sorry,” Chris said, turned back to him. She forced a smile. “Hello, Rick. How are you?”
He smile uncertainly. “Well, that’s a start.”
He reached for her and bent down to kiss her once again, but she pulled back, retreating from him.
“Could you just slow down please?” she said. “There’s a whole weekend ahead of us. Let me get to know you again. Let me get to know this place again.”
“Okay,” said Rick, with a grin. “But there’s only just so many cold showers I can take.”
Chris rolled her eyes. “Come outside and help me with the bags,” she said.
Lighten up, Chris, she told herself. He doesn’t understand. How could he? A year ago this time, they had been discovering something really special together. They were starting to get serious and talking about the future in a way she hadn’t thought she’d be ready to discuss for a long time yet, and then her whole world caved in.
Rick didn’t have a clue about what happened. At her family’s request, it had been kept
out of the papers and she had never told him, never bothered to explain, because she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t. She had not been able to deal with it herself, how could she expect him to accept what had happened to her? She was afraid to tell him.
So far as he knew, she and her family had simply gone back home. He wrote her letters asking what happened, and she wrote back, pretending that something had come up at the last minute, something to do with her father’s business, and they had to leave at once; there had been no chance to say good-bye. They had kept in touch, but Rick was not much of a letter writer, and on the occasions when he called, she was either noncommittal or she pretended that she wasn’t home. He wasn’t stupid. He knew something was wrong, but he did not know what it was and he was trying to pick up where they had left off to recapture what they had last summer. She really wished they could, but no longer knew if it was possible.
Still, it’s not his fault, she told herself as they went outside. And she really was happy to see him. Maybe it would be easier with him around. Loosening up a little, she jumped laughing, onto his back and thew her arms around him as she preceeded her down the porch stairs.
“Ooof!” he grunted, exaggerating the strain as he carried her piggyback. “You know, Chris, I think you’ve gained some weight since last summer.”
“I have not!” she said, punching him playfully. “You creep! Put me down!”
He dropped her at the van. “Here,” he said, reaching up to untie the ropes holding down their gear and the canoe, “get the ones inside and I’ll get the ones on top.”
She went over to the side door of the van. It was partway open. She paused, looking at it uncertainly. “Wasn’t this door closed just a few minutes ago?” she said to herself.
“What did you say?” said Rick as he grabbed the bags off the top of the van and started to carry them back up to the house.
Chris shook her head. “Nothing.” She looked around, took a deep breath, and exhaled heavily. “Chris . . .” she said, admonishing herself.
She had only just arrived and already she was getting paranoid. This wasn’t a good sign. First she gave Rick a hard time about greeting her with a kiss and almost giving her a heart attack, as if it were his fault about what happened, and now this. She was feeling jumpy about an open door, as if someone had crept into the van when nobody was looking and was waiting to leap out at her. She had to get things back under control. She couldn’t go through life overreacting to every little thing. She reached into the van for a bag and jumped back with a small cry as a hand closed around her wrist.
“That’s my bag”
“Shelly!” she said, not so much angry with him for startling her as angry with herself for being so jumpy. “What are you doing in there? Why aren’t you down at the lake with everybody else?”
“Oh, they said they were going skinny-dipping,” he said with a self-deprecating grimace, “and I’m not skinny enough.”
He couldn’t even bring himself to take his shirt off in public. Back in high school, the locker room during gym class had always been horribly traumatic for him. He hated it when guys came up to him and grabbed his flabby pecs, saying things like, “Hey, come on, honey, let me cop a feel,” or “Hey, Shelly, what cup size do you take?” They thought it was extremely funny, but it hurt. It hurt incredibly and filled him with such overwhelming self-loathing that he promptly went out to a pizza joint and pigged out on a large deep-dish pie with the works and a pitcher of soda. There was no escape.
He watched Chris as she walked back to the house with Rick and sighed. It looked like everybody had somebody. Everybody except him. Debbie and Andy were coming back up from the lake, arm in arm, and Chuck and Chili were off somewhere getting stoned together. There was Vera, “his date,” though she acted as if he didn’t even exist. He wondered, longingly, what it would be like to have someone like Vera. Yeah, sure, he thought, fat chance. And fat was the word, all right.
Chris opened the door and stood aside for Debbie as she came in from the balcony corridor. “This was my bedroom,” she said. “It’s yours for the weekend.”
“Great,” said Debbie, looking around at the homey little room. She raised her eyebrows in puzzlement and turned around, her gaze sweeping the room. “Chris, I don’t mean to be picky or anything, but where’s the bed?”
