Farley quickly unzipped the zipper, sticking her entire head into the bag, rooting around like a ground squirrel in a burrow.
“Ollie, can you finish the drawing of the Mock Turtle?” Farley asked, coming up with a green hard-back book in one hand and a pen in the other.
Nodding, he accepted, but his attention was on Wren. She knelt down on the edge of the blanket. Her dark eyes were absent, drifting and distant, lost deep in thought. Slowly over the past week, the illness had retreated its stronghold in her lungs. But it was refusing to give up ground in her head.
It wasn’t rare for this to happen, for Wren to fall into her own thoughts so profoundly that she inhabited her body like a ghost. Nevertheless, the commonality of dark-Wren didn’t change how unsettled it made Ollie feel. Nor did it lessen the impact on Farley who was always wading in the wake of her mother’s shadows. He recalled all too well what felt like being at the mercy of his own mother’s disease.
While working in the laundry room, he had caught Wren watching him mudding the walls, her eyes fixed on his body like a hunting goshawk. Had it been any other woman but Wren, he might have interpreted it as an invitation to intimacy. A path from where he was to where he wanted to be. But it was Wren, and the longer they stayed friends, the harder it became for him to see a safe crossing from friend to lover. The one time he tried to kiss her had gone so horrifically wrong.
He simply had too much to lose to make a stupid mistake now. He had to be sure of what she wanted from him. Not ready to give up, Ollie offered to take them all into town for dinner. On a Thursday, nothing would be too crowded, but Wren had shrugged the offer off, saying she had a headache. So he suggested the idea of a picnic just loud enough for Farley to hear and come bounding to accept. It was a risk playing Farley like that, but the odds were always good that Wren would fold to her daughter.
“A quoi penses-tu?" he asked, sitting down next to her. Acutely aware of the lack of grace in his descent, he fidgeted with his clothing and his body until he was comfortable, spreading his weight over an elbow and forearm and down one leg.
Wren didn’t answer, but now, she was watching him, bathed in the end of the thin light quaking through the aspens’ quivering leaves. Soon the sun would set behind the mountain, and it would be too dark to draw and too cold to sit still. Opening the book, he found the page he had been working on, adding miniature illustrations into the margins of a copy of Alice in Wonderland.
Wren’s voice surprised him. “I was thinking about the lake. I’ve been thinking about it for days. It’s what I think about when I can’t sleep.”
“Which lake?” Farley asked, hanging over Ollie’s hip watching him draw. She had also managed to find an oatmeal cookie and was dropping sugary-smelling crumbs over his side. She had already broken a piece off and put it in her pocket, he could feel it being smashed as she leaned on him.
“It doesn’t have a name,” Ollie answered, catching Wren’s eye over the top of the page. Wren was finally smiling as she set out a dinner of sliced cheeses, cut meats, and fruit on a wooden platter, carefully arranging the thick crackers as if they were game pieces.
Farley’s head rose, aiming her cheeks into the dying sunlight. “Then how do you know which lake she means?”
“Because it’s an extraordinary lake,” Ollie said, trying to focus on his sketch of the Mock Turtle on the seashore.
Finished setting up, Wren laid down on her back, extending her hand across the blanket, her palm up to the sky. Ollie could see her as she was that day, stretched out in the canoe, her hand on her bulging belly. He had been trying to figure out how to kiss her. Attempting to gain not only the nerve but the position. Realizing there was more than one argument against making a move on a woman who was eight and half months pregnant.
“I took your mom there the day before she had you. In fact, she fell in, and I’m pretty sure that’s what put her in labor.”
“Can we go?” Farley asked.
“It’s a high mountain lake. There’s still too much snow,” Ollie answered, sketching a sand dollar amongst the seafoam trolling the sand. The memory of the look of fear in Wren’s dark eyes as she pitched backward, away from his advance, caused Ollie to be too heavy-handed with the pen on the page. The lines were too bold, so he filled in the sand dollar, turning it into a stone. Wren had been more afraid of him kissing her than of falling into the frigid lake.
“In June, for my birthday?” Farley pushed.
“It’s better in August when the water is at least tolerable,” Ollie said.
“But then why did you take my mom in June?” Farley asked.
“Because we were running out of time,” Wren said so faintly the words floated loosely. “All summer in a day.”
Looking up, Ollie smudged the crest of a breaking wave he was outlining, sending a smear of black spray across the circle of the sun.
“I was about to become your mom,” Wren explained. “Ollie wanted me to see it before everything changed, in case I never got a chance.”
Farley climbed over Ollie, crawling over the blanket to snuggle into Wren.
“And my dad? Where did he go before I was born in case he didn’t get a chance?” Farley asked, snatching a slice of cheese. Holding it between her fingers, she lowered it like a sardine into her open mouth.
“La maison de sa femme,” Ollie mumbled under his breath.
“He was at work,” Wren said, glaring at Ollie. “He is always at work.”
“Not always,” Ollie scoffed.
“Yes, not always,” Farley repeated. “Sometimes he’s in the kitchen, and my mom makes him go to her room.”
Ollie’s eyes swung from Farley to Wren.
“Don’t, Ollie. It’s not what you think.” She shut her eyes. He thought she might fall completely silent but then a strange smile crept up her face. “Do you remember how when I was pregnant, you could see Farley’s feet kicking?”
He forced a playful laugh hoping it would make him feel better, and reached for a slice of meat, rolling between his fingers. She is still sleeping with Ryan. And lying to him about it. Ollie felt sick. Here he’d been thinking he really had a chance with her and it’d all been in his head.
“I kicked you? Did it hurt?” Farley asked her mother, taking a cracker and holding it in the air, lining it up with the setting sun.
“No, it felt incredible,” Ollie answered, rolling onto his stomach. He set the book down.
“Maybe to you, Mr. James.” Wren smiled at him. “Sometimes it hurt, and sometimes it felt like I had swallowed the whole sea, and you were an angry octopus trying to get out.” Wren gathered cheese and meat on a cracker and handed it to Ollie. Their fingers touched more than needed in the exchange, instantly reigniting his hopes.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked, aiming the cracker sandwich at her. She never seemed to eat enough.
“I’m not very hungry,” she said.
“Yeah, but Wren,” he began, stopping because her ‘I control this room smile’ was painted across her face.
Wren picked up a slice of pear and took a bite. She tilted her head innocently as if she was genuinely wondering what he was trying to say to her.
“Can I have a slice of that too?” he asked, putting the half-formed argument away.