Stillwater

A little while ago I started posting a novella here called The Triggermen, and then I stopped. I had various reasons for this, but the main one was that the story wasn't finished to my satisfaction, and as much as I wanted to keep posting it, I couldn't find the time to end it the way I wanted to. I'd like to do that someday, but I'm aware I left you hanging, and I'm sorry for that.

I'd like to make it up to you.

What I propose is this. Starting right now, I'm going to post an entire novel, one chapter at a time. And I promise I'll finish it. I say this with confidence because the book is already done.

So without further delay, here is Stillwater.


CHAPTER ONE

It was Stacy’s idea to have drinks on the boat.

She and Tim had arrived late the previous night in a rental car cluttered with fast food wrappers, toll receipts, outdated tourist brochures that Stacy picked up at various rest stops (“See the Maine Lobster Boat Races!”) and a crisp new map of the Northeast. The map in particular had been a point of contention. She’d picked it up at the AAA office on 34th Street on her way home from work and Tim refused to unfold it. His parents were already up at the cottage, having arrived from Boston the previous day with Tim’s sister Karen. She had flown in from San Francisco, and the Actons had picked her up at Logan Airport on their way north.

In the morning the five of them slept in and woke late, lingering over coffee, toast and Catherine Acton’s famous mushroom omelet, looking out the kitchen window at the view. After breakfast Stacy changed into her bathing suit and went down to the dock, where she dipped one toe in the water and declared it too cold to jump in, but stood by, arms crossed over her breasts, while Tim cast a line into the water, trying to catch lunch. In the course of ninety minutes he landed two small trout, threw them back, and they all ended up out on the deck eating crab cakes that the elder Actons had picked up in Portland, sipping iced tea and listening to the cry of the loons across the water. It was mid-October, a fine time to be in this part of the world, and all the other families that kept cottages on Stillwater Lake had already closed them up for the year and gone back to their homes in Connecticut, Boston and New York.

Tim’s father had bought the cottage eighteen years ago, and the family had come up to the lake every summer since then. Dr. Acton was a partner at a busy internal medicine practice in Newton Highlands, and he’d commuted up on weekends. Tim’s mother Catherine had spent her summers refinishing the deck, supervising ongoing kitchen and bedroom renovations, and taking a yellow highlighter the novels of the Bronte sisters in preparation for the classes she audited at BU. In their childhood, Tim and Karen had done cannonballs off the dock and gone paddling out to sun their small bodies on the raft anchored fifty yards offshore. They shot off Black Cat firecrackers on the Fourth of July and went to the local drive-in to see double features, falling asleep in the back of the car during the second movie. When Dr. Acton was there he took them water-skiing and pulled them behind the boat in an inflatable tube. Although Catherine knew how to drive the boat, she’d never become comfortable behind the wheel, and they rarely took it out on the water except when the doctor was there on weekends.

Today was ideal autumn weather, not quite seventy according to the 7-Up thermometer mounted on the deck, the tall maples and oaks blazing deep russet and auburn fire across the lake’s untroubled surface. After lunch, Tim and his father set up the badminton net on the lawn. The men took one side, Stacy and Catherine the other, while Karen sat in a deck chair watching the match in the afternoon light. Stacy was in good shape -- she ran and worked out three days a week at their gym in the city -- and she swung her racquet intensely, diving and lunging, as if fighting for her life. After losing three games, Dr. Acton dropped his racquet and walked off, red-faced and panting, to check the moorings on the boat.

Tim ducked under the net, slipped his arm around Stacy’s shoulder and leaned in to kiss her lightly on the temple. “Whoa, baby. How come you never told me about that killer backhand?”

Stacy laughed. “I haven’t held a racquet since summer camp.”

“You were out for blood,” Catherine said, sounding as if she approved. “I’m just glad you were on my side.”

Turning, Tim watched Karen stand up and saunter away from the group, slipping a pack of Marlboros from the hip pocket of her jeans as she disappeared behind a tall stand of familiar pines. Besides a few phone calls late at night, he’d almost lost touch with his sister over the past few years and wasn’t sure how to approach her now without the conversation feeling contrived. He knew she lived in the Bay Area, worked in a bakery and shared an apartment with two roommates -- he had a vague sense she was still taking classes. She had three tattoos that he could see, and no doubt others that he couldn’t, and a tiny gold stud in her nose not much bigger than a single gleaming pore. Over breakfast, her parents asked her only a few questions about her life, her plans or her future, and when she replied her voice tended to be low and guttural, with the hint of a gravelly chuckle, as if she’d swallowed a cloud of smoke.

Karen wasn’t the Actons’ biological child. Tim’s parents had adopted her after his older brother Charles died. Tim’s mother had decorated the lake house with pictures of the boys together. On the whole, these photos formed the backbone of Tim’s memories of his brother: playing on the beach, standing on the dock, throwing a Frisbee for Charles’s dog, a shaggy Lab mutt named Bogart. After Charles’s death, Tim’s mother had insisted they get rid of Bogart. Tim remembered crying as his father carried the dog to the vet’s office in a cardboard box, Bogart’s pink tongue hanging happily with no idea that he wasn’t coming back. When Karen got older they’d bought her a cat, but after Bogart there had been no more dogs at the lake, only pictures of Charles, perpetually tan and forever nine years old with his floppy blonde hair and crooked smile; Charles, the only ghost the house would ever have.