“I think Teddy’s father was anxious for him to meet someone,” I said.
Rebecca looked at me. “You mean a girl his son could have a sexual experience with?”
“Yes, probably,” I answered. “He must have seen Laura at some point, although I don’t know exactly when that might have been.”
Perhaps from behind the tattered paper shades of his own cottage, perhaps from the screened porch that looked out over the sea. In any event, Mr. Lawford had no doubt glimpsed her, had let his eyes settle upon her body as she moved along the side of the house, or strolled through the tall green sea grass to the beach below, all the time brokenly aware, as he must have been, that she was well beyond him, that he was too old and bald and fat to inspire anything but repulsion in such a beautiful young girl, but that she might make a suitable offering for his son.
“Mr. Lawford invited us over to his cottage the second night we were on the Cape,” I said. “My mother hadn’t really wanted to go. Jamie, either. But both of them had finally come along with the rest of us.”
It was early evening, and a gorgeous red sun was lowering on the horizon. I’d never seen a sunset on the sea, or even the kind of deep blue light that descended upon us that evening. It was warm, and Laura was dressed in a pair of white shorts and a dark green blouse, its ends knotted at the front. I remember that Teddy came to attention as she walked into the backyard, his dark eyes clinging to her like talons.
“Teddy fell for my sister at first sight,” I told Rebecca. “They hadn’t even spoken, but he was crazy about her.”
“So it wasn’t exactly love,” Rebecca said.
I shook my head. “Love? No, it didn’t have time to be love.”
But it was very powerful nonetheless, and it grew unabatedly during the entire evening, as Laura and Teddy inched their way into a different universe. The contrast between them and the rest of us must have been amazing. Jamie sat morosely by himself, dully watching the sea. My father and Mr. Lawford talked idly and passionlessly of business matters, my mother listening to them silently, her hands folded in her lap. As for me, I scuffled with Mr. Lawford’s cocker spaniel, both of us rolling mindlessly across the sandy lawn.
And yet, even as I rolled around that evening, I could sense the emergence of a new state of being, a world that had suddenly sprung into existence, and which floated in the air between Teddy Lawford and my sister. I didn’t know what it was, but only that it was something that had been mysteriously created, and that its movements were infinitely fast.
“It wasn’t love,” I told Rebecca once again. “But once you’d felt it, you wouldn’t want to live without it.”
Rebecca lifted her face slightly. “It was romance,” she said firmly.
“Well, whatever it was, Teddy was in the full grip of it. He came over to our house the very next morning.”
He was dressed in a pair of cutoff blue jeans and a white T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up above his shoulders. I saw him lope across the yard, pause a moment at the little stone walkway that led to our house, then bolt forward, as if, in those few hesitant moments, he’d thought it all over and decided the issue once and for all.
Though it was still early, Laura had been awake for a long time. I’d glimpsed her sitting alone on the screen porch, then later strolling absently in the backyard, making odd, aimless turns, her long hair blowing in the early morning breeze. Despite the chill, she’d gone into the yard wearing nothing but the bottom of her bathing suit beneath a loose-fitting blouse, purposely leaving behind her thin blue windbreaker, the one she’d tightly wrapped around herself while she’d remained on the porch.
“Laura had gone out to attract Teddy,” I told Rebecca. “You might say, to display herself. She was very beautiful that summer, and I’m sure Teddy was completely overwhelmed by that.”
And so, that morning I watched as Teddy bounded down the walkway toward our cottage, not even able to control his stride. I was at the window, and it was only a few feet from there to the door, but Laura was at the door even before I could get to it, answering his knock instantly. A wave of white light swept over her when she opened it, and for a moment, as I watched, she seemed encased in its radiance. She stood quite still, talking to him, her hands toying nervously with the loose ends of her blouse. I can still remember the words that passed between them, so ordinary they seemed to burst in the heated air:
“Oh, hi, Teddy.”
“Hi, Laura.”
“Have you already eaten?”
“No, not yet.”
“There’s a little diner down the road. It’s not so great, but I go there for breakfast. You want to come with me?”
“Well, my father’s still asleep, you know?”
I had come up quite close to them by then, walking very slowly from the window to the door, listening intently as I moved toward them.
Laura looked at me, and I noticed that, despite the chill, small beads of sweat had formed a moist line across her upper lip.
In an instant, she was gone, the two of them disappearing behind a curve in the road. She hadn’t asked my father’s permission. She hadn’t said so much as a “see you later, Stevie” to me. It was as if a mighty wind had picked her up and blown her out the door.
“She was completely swept away,” I told Rebecca. “I couldn’t imagine what was going on in her. I couldn’t believe that she’d just left without saying anything to my father.”
He woke up an hour later, fully alert, the way he always did, as if, each morning, he returned to himself in a sudden, startling realization. He was dressed in a pair of blue trousers and a checked shirt, and he barely offered a passing wave as he headed for the kitchen. I heard him making a pot of coffee, then, after it was made, I saw him walk out onto the back porch and stare out across the field of high, green sea grass that stretched almost to the beach. The morning light was even brighter by then, and it framed him eerily as he stood, his back to me, peering out toward the bay, the black mug of coffee rising and falling rhythmically before he finally spun around, as if alerted by some sound, and looked at me:
“Where’s Laura?” he asked.
“Laura?” I repeated hesitantly, stalling for time, but remembering the look she’d given to me as she’d left with Teddy, a look that had unmistakably commanded me to lie. “I don’t know, Dad,” I answered. “I haven’t seen her.”
He nodded slowly and lowered himself into one of the rusty metal chairs on the back porch. It was only then that the oddity of his initial question struck me. How had he known that Laura was not in the house, not sleeping in her bed like his wife was? I know that the question rose in my mind that morning, but only in a child’s mind, quick, glancing, devoid of further investigation. It was not until I’d related the whole story of that morning to Rebecca that the answer actually occurred to me.
“He had expected to find her waiting for him on the porch,” I told her. “And when he walked out onto the back porch and saw she wasn’t there, he knew something was wrong.”
“What did he do?”
“He had another cup of coffee.”
And another and another, while the sun rose steadily and my mother slept mindlessly, and I wandered in the backyard, glancing apprehensively toward him from time to time. Something had gone wrong, and I knew it; some mysterious and confusing element had entered into our lives. I could see it in my father’s face. For even though his features remained very still, I could sense that wheels were spinning wildly behind them.
My mother got up at around ten that morning, but she didn’t join my father on the back porch. Instead, she mechanically made breakfast for herself, the usual boiled egg and toast, then walked out into the living room and ate it absently, as if it were merely tasteless fodder, fit for nothing but the maintenance of life.
I went out to play in the backyard. Mr. Lawford’s spaniel spotted me and ran over for another round of tussling in the grass, and this occupied me fully for quite some time. The strange dread I’d felt vanished in the frolic, and so it was not until I saw my father come to his feet that I even noticed that he still remained on the back porch.