'Solstice': A Short Story

Ryan was explaining that the one time he’d been to Jeffers’ great-uncle’s home, it had been impromptu: Their freshman year, in the delirium of just finishing exams, turning in their final papers, they’d decided, having barely slept, they’d get in the car and go — a road trip to Vermont, to this old lake house Jeffers loved so much.

“Did you two even tell the great-uncle you were coming?” Helena asked, turning up the heat. They were traveling a winding rural road, occasionally passing a house or small farm. In the dark, the sudden snowfall was a mist over the landscape.

“I think Jeffers called him first, but I remember him saying regardless it’d be okay. He had a standing invitation and his great-uncle was lonely. He’d welcome our company.” Ryan put on the windshield wipers. “We showed up with a bottle of the great-uncle’s favorite scotch. He was thin, with jug ears and this shy smile. He ushered us in, and we immediately had a drink on the back porch, a toast to our first year in college.

“Every morning, we went fishing out in a rowboat. It had to be morning, something about when the trout were feeding. Jeffers and his uncle were so focused. We were quiet, still, except when reeling in fish. In the afternoons, we sat on the porch and read, and drank more scotch. The great-uncle cooked the fish for dinner — dredged in flour and fried in butter. He liked the radio to be playing, baseball games in the background.

“He was lonely, as Jeffers had said. He was in his early sixties. His wife had passed away a few years before — something unexpected, awful. I think she’d drowned. Jeffers had warned me that he’d want us to tell him everything about school. And that last night, as we were washing dishes, he said he wished we could stay longer. I thought he was going to start crying, poor old guy.”

“What was his name?”

“We’ll have to ask Jeffers when he arrives.” Ryan shook his head. “I remember the Red Sox were winning. He was handing me dishes to dry and he was blinking really quickly.”

“That’s a sad story,” Helena said. “Or it has a sad ending.”

“We stayed a week, and mainly it was a blast. I told him about you, you know.” He gave her a quick glance.

“We hadn’t met yet! You just made that up to change the subject.”

Maybe they’d been foolish to travel this time of year.

“I’d seen you at a party,” Ryan said. “And thought you were so cute. He was asking us who we were dating, and I said there was this girl I wanted to date. I just had to meet her first.” Ryan shifted his grip on the steering wheel. “Man, I can’t believe that was 20 years ago.”

She laughed, although she felt mildly unsettled by Ryan’s memories, and said, “Somehow it is legitimately surprising.” She still felt they were just a few years out of college — that they were in their mid-twenties, not late thirties. But a few years was closer to how long they’d been trying to make this getaway work. After Jeffers’ great-uncle had passed away, bequeathing the house to his grand-nephew, Jeffers had been saying how the two couples needed to spend time together up there. But spontaneity, at least, was firmly behind them. Jeffers and Meg were doctors; Ryan was an engineer; she taught writing and rhetoric at a tiny college outside Boston. Always someone’s schedule made them postpone the trip — until Jeffers had suggested right before Christmas. This was a time, finally, they could all swing, and she’d been looking forward to it: wine by the fireplace, views of the frozen lake, winter quiet and good company.

Above them, the branches formed a canopy, loosely twined and offering glimpses of a sky spitting snow.

But it had been dark hours now, and the snow, quickly accumulating on the road, was making Ryan hunch in his seat and squint. They’d already gotten turned around once and had had to drive seven miles the wrong way in pure darkness before pulling over at a closed bait and tackle shop to reverse course. Maybe they’d been foolish to travel this time of year. Summer would’ve been better.

Miles back, Ryan had turned off the main road, and now she was reading him the directions Jeffers had emailed, since, Jeffers had explained, GPS could lead you astray; also, they might lose service. She instructed Ryan to turn right at a tiny green sign, capped in snow, she would’ve missed had she not been hunting for it.

Now they were on a dirt road bordered by pines. Above them, the branches formed a canopy, loosely twined and offering glimpses of a sky spitting snow. The trees cast tangled shadows, making the woods ill-defined. She wanted more light, a more discrete sense of where things ended and began. Moon or stars. Lamplight in windowpanes, taillights, the neon of bar signs, something to create clarity. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

“Well, we still have service,” Ryan said as she studied her phone.

“It’s Jeffers. Meg has to stay at the hospital later than she’d hoped. They’re going to drive up tomorrow morning. There’s a key out back, beneath a rock beside the old cellar.”

Ryan followed the curved driveway to where the 200-year-old home overlooked the lake. The snow stopped as quickly as it had begun, although the cloud cover remained dense. She got out, inhaling the cold. The snow was powdery beneath her feet, but the lake hadn’t iced over. She heard it lapping against the shore, mild and constant.

She thought of Jeffers lounging on his dorm room bed, talking wistfully of spending summers here, he and his younger brothers racing down a rickety wooden staircase to go swimming or playing in the woods that abutted the lawn, games of hide-and-seek among the cedars. He’d loved rainy days. They’d all read the paperbacks his great-uncle always had on hand, and eaten pretzels. Watching through the windows as the rain dappled the lake had made him feel content.

“Was the great-uncle named Ben?” she asked. They were walking around the house. Trees grew close to its sides, the bare branches draping over the gabled roof and touching the windows.

“Maybe. I wish he’d texted earlier. They were bringing food for tonight and tomorrow morning. We’re going to have to find a grocery store.”

“He might’ve texted hours ago.” She checked her phone. “I don’t have service right now. Probably just a blip of luck that it finally came through.”

Out back, the land gave way to slabs of rock angling down to a stretch of beach where a dock extended into the lake. Layers of darkness: the shifting water, the blackened curve of land beyond. It was beautiful, but blurred; she felt sure she’d prefer it in daylight, when the landscape’s boundaries — water, mountains, sky — would be distinct.

They came around to the northern side of the house and discovered the cellar, which was built into the earth, its archway and sides raised stone. Its wooden door, covered in moss, was bolted down. People had opened this, descended into the earth, she thought, as Ryan lifted a nearby rock, crusted in snow, and found the key.

“I don’t remember this. I wonder if they ever pointed it out.”

“Never in a million years,” she said, “would I open that door.”

“I think you’re a little tired from the drive. It’s not that bad. Just old.”

“Please don’t explain me to myself.” She wanted to point out that he was tired, too; otherwise he wouldn’t have just chastised her for finding it unsettling. They both needed a little downtime. “Let’s bring in our luggage and settle. Then we can backtrack to the main road and find some takeout,” she said. “Or even a gas station. I’m happy to eat potato chips for dinner.”

They walked back to the car, and from the trunk, Ryan grabbed their bags and tote filled with clinking wine bottles, one good bottle of scotch — for him and Jeffers to relive their freshman-year summer idyll, she now understood.

Inside, she switched on a light. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but not something so small, nor so dark. It was all stained wood: the walls, the floors, the raftered ceiling. The floorboards were wide, covered in scuff marks. Although its bones were far older, the space had the veneer of a mid-century summer camp. A beige couch, throw rugs, low side tables. Maybe she’d imagined something more beautiful because Jeffers’ stories, what she recollected of them, were filled with happiness. Also it was cold; she found the thermostat and turned it way up, wanting to rid the space of its chill.

Ryan was studying a framed photograph hung above a bookshelf. “His name was Bertram; I just remembered.” Some people sat close together on porch steps, watching something in the distance. But one man, in a V-neck sweater and holding a pipe, gazed at the camera, his hair glossed and side-parted, his eyes light. “He’s young here, but this is him.”

“He’s more handsome than I imagined.” She’d thought of Ichabod Crane, someone gaunt, sad. This man whose wife had drowned.

“You mean he looks like Jeffers.”

“My handsome husband, yes: He looks like Jeffers.” She squeezed his hand. “Also, he does have jug ears. You get bonus points for recalling that.”

Upstairs, Ryan set their luggage in a bedroom. The wood here had been painted white, which lessened her sense of being in an attic, given the room’s low, sloping ceiling and angled corners. The best detail: The bed, along the lakeside wall, was beneath a window bordered by stained glass. Cubes of rose and gold, the palest seafoam green. Once, someone had wanted this austere house to have some beauty — maybe it had been Bertram’s wife. Helena imagined the pleasure of sitting beside this window, reading for hours with just the bedside lamp on. “We don’t have to bother with dinner,” she said.

“You say that now, but it’s only 6:15. Plus, we need food for the morning. I’ll go. You can stay here, get settled in.” Sweet Ryan. What he was offering, after over four hours in the car, was Herculean. He finished putting his sweaters and jeans in a chest of drawers and came over and kissed her forehead. She exhaled. Their solstice trip: After tonight’s minor wobbles, everything would right itself. They’d have lazy long days of roaring fires, cocoa and good cheer.

Before driving off, he gave her a thumbs-up. “Come back soon, my love!” she called from the door, watching him go until his taillights winked out.

She’d have that glass of wine. The kitchen had enormous old cupboards kept shut with sliding bolts — similar to the cellar door — and she left them closed. In the pantry, she found some jelly jars, and after pouring herself a glass of Chilean red, she went out to the wraparound porch. It reminded her of an ornate gazebo with its crosshatched wood detailing between its support beams. And even though her fingers quickly went numb, her skin frigid, she lingered.

The mountains, far out across the water, were hulking, their contours smudged. The wind was up: treetops shifting, bending. And tiny whitecaps roughened the lake’s surface, especially as it broke along the rocks. An instinct rose in her to walk along the shore, to be more on the edge of what felt expansive, unknowable. But this was unsound. She’d wait until tomorrow, when they were all together and the world had resumed its normal proportions.

She heard Ryan at the door, surprised but glad he’d returned so quickly. When she went to check, however, she realized she’d mistaken branches scratching at the windows for her husband.

From a bookshelf freighted with the old paperbacks of Jeffers’ youth — mysteries, thrillers, the fat tomes of Stephen King — she took an old photo album. Feeling a little guilty at her nosiness, she sat in a rocking chair and thumbed through the pages. The earliest photos were black and white, from the 1950s — the dates written in slanted script. A man in profile, in swim trunks, stood at the dock’s edge, hands at his hips, squinting into the sun. His looks also resembled Jeffers’: the dark-blond hair, the Roman nose. A second picture of him diving into the water. “Grant, off the big dock, 1957.” Another of a child grinning, all freckles and buzzed hair, holding a string of fish. “Bob, seven trout, 1960.” This was Jeffers’ dad.

She flipped through, watching the pictures first turn to faded color, then become more saturated and glossy. One from the 1980s of Bertram, his hair now silver, his arm about the waist of a woman in a summer dress and wide-brimmed hat, her smile large. Mary, the script said. His wife. When Helena came to the 1990s, she found Jeffers with his two younger brothers posed before a large rock. Jeffers had his hand on the side of a spaniel, his eyes alive with pleasure. His younger brothers, Justin and Ben, faced each other, fists held up as if ready to box, laughing.

As she finished her wine, she found one that caught her breath. Jeffers in his early twenties, the age she always thought of him. He was in a canoe, one hand high on the paddle, the other near its base as it dipped into the water. His smile was faint, calm.

The windowpanes rattled with gusting wind. She went to the door, opening it, studying the lawn covered in snow, the trees in light waver. Ryan had been gone an hour now. He could be on some quixotic quest to find a Trader Joe’s and driving farther than he’d intended. “Please come back,” she texted, failing to come up with some light or funny follow-up. Then the text failed to send anyway. Reluctantly, she closed the door, since she had this idea that if she just went out and looked for him, he’d be there. She put back the photo album and chose a paperback at random, deciding she would read in bed.

In the dim of the bedside lamp, the stained glass glowed. Beyond, in the dark, the dock glinted. It was aluminum, not the wood she’d seen in the photos, and she realized she longed for the impossible: to experience this place in the past. She wanted verdancy and easy time outdoors, for the boys’ freshman adventure to somehow be alive now.

She thought of crossing the quad and Ryan first reaching for her hand, the pressure of his palm against hers, the surging buoyancy of being on a path together — literal, metaphorical — in the surrounding bustle of others. And studying with Jeffers. Ryan had preferred the library, but she’d liked the quiet of the dorms, and those two had had a better room than she had, so she’d worked at Ryan’s desk, set near a window overlooking a courtyard. Jeffers would sit in bed, back against the wall, textbook in his lap, running his fingers through his hair as he studied. She’d bring bagels and coffee, and hours would pass with little conversation but a strong sense of tranquility and focus.

When Ryan would return, their energy collectively brightened. They’d go to dinner or out for drinks or find some campus party. Red Solo cups and the boys’ cheeks flushed with drink, all three shouting to be heard. Ryan preternaturally knew the lyrics to every song and would make them laugh by singing and dancing, which really was just him holding his cup aloft and shaking his hips.

Once, someone from his calculus class had found him and cheerfully announced it was imperative Ryan and he do shots together that very instant. Ryan had glanced at her. “Go,” she’d said. “Jeffers will walk me back.” A nod from Jeffers, and Ryan had been off with his buddy, blowing her a kiss over his shoulder.

She couldn’t recall if Jeffers and she had stayed long after that, but it had been very late when they’d arrived at her residence hall. The campus had felt deserted. They’d walked up a flight of concrete steps to a side door and stood in a lamppost’s halo of light. She’d squeezed his hand as she’d said good night. She’d had on mittens. She’d been rummaging for her ID card to let herself in when he’d leaned in and kissed her, his lips warm. Endless, brief. He’d stepped back before she could manage to, and they’d watched each other under the halogen, their breath plumes of steam in the cold. His light eyes had been so open and searching. Then he’d walked off. She’d stayed still for a long time, her heart drumming, not sure if she hoped he’d return.

They’d never spoken of it. It had never happened again. Nor could it, she’d decided. Ryan hadn’t deserved her confusion — not when he’d offered himself so fully to her and not when she loved him. Then they’d graduated, and Jeffers had attended med school and met Meg, who was lovely and whip smart and affectionate.

Now regret — a kind of bewilderment — was upon her, a need to investigate, imagine, what her life might’ve been like had she walked after him, called his name, even. If he’d come back, if he’d kissed her again, warm breath, cold night. But this was ridiculous, simplistic. A mistake — it had been a moment of closeness gone awry — and both had been right to draw back. The proof was in their current lives, their successful marriages. She didn’t know why this was reverberating in her head.

Jeffers smiling in that picture. Something about this trip, this house: Aspects of herself she’d thought she’d jettisoned were still stored away.

The unopened book in her lap slid onto her bedspread. She’d been nodding off. She brushed her hair from her temples, feeling in disarray. The wind was higher, calling, then dying away. Out there, in the dark: Someone was on the dock. He stared up at her, his eyes empty, his outline faint. He was mouthing something, repeating it. Her breathing became shallow, and an internal roaring took over, as if the wind were calling from within her. He wore a white sweater, rolled khakis, no shoes. His hair was glossy, or wet. He was pale, his skin appeared damp. He was beckoning her, gesturing that she come down. He looked like Jeffers. The wind was everywhere, and a branch thwacked the window, causing her to jolt and drop her head to her chest. When she looked up, no one was there. She imagined he’d jumped into the water. Or blown away in the night.

She bit her lip to keep from crying. That had not happened. She hadn’t seen it. She’d fallen asleep and woken still cobwebby with dreams.

She reached for her phone on the bedside table. “Where are you?” she texted Ryan, but it didn’t send, and she threw the phone, which clattered against the hardwood. She went to retrieve it and sat on the floor, her back against the bedpost. But if she were rational, if she believed nothing had happened and she’d just been momentarily disoriented, then she could return to the bed and look out: Nothing would be there.

She sat on the quilt, arms clutched about her knees, and studied the night, waiting for some image to coalesce. Her hands trembled as she tried Jeffers. “Hey, tell me about your great-uncle. He was a decent person? I’m alone. Ryan has gone out to get groceries. This place feels haunted to me but you don’t think it’s haunted, right? You love it here.”

“Hi,” he wrote. “Sorry I’m not with you! You don’t have to worry. You’re safe.”

Now regret — a kind of bewilderment — was upon her.

Her shoulders eased. “I don’t know what’s taking Ryan so long. Tell me something dreamy and sweet from your summers here.”

“In the mornings, mist rises from the lake. I’d get up before everyone else and race outside, plunging off the dock. I’d swim out farther than I was allowed, until the house looked small, like a cottage from a fairy tale. The sun rose behind it, pink over the hemlocks, and around me, steam evaporated from the water. It seemed to glimmer. And this was all mine, all private, all beautiful.”

“That’s lovely.” She was conscious of not lifting her head, of avoiding looking out the window. “Is Meg back yet? What time do you think you’ll get here tomorrow?”

“I wish we could go swimming. Underwater, the world is muffled, distant. Then you break the surface and everything becomes sparkling and clear.”

An image came to her of being submerged in water, the murk shot through with thickened bars of sunlight. A remoteness, a distance from the sky. She shook it away. “I wish,” she typed quickly, not wanting to think about what she was really saying, “you had board certifications to study for. I could grade papers. We could work quietly together.” She waited for his response, worried he’d think she was being overly nostalgic or, worse, that she was overstepping.

“I wish we could be together.”

This startled her — direct, a kind of articulation of her underlying thought — but also confusing. Regret he wasn’t there now? Regret they couldn’t take up their college habits, a small return to old intimacies? Regret they’d never allowed what was latent between them to come into the light? Surely that was incorrect. Her mind was playing tricks on her — her circumstances making her dizzy, confused — but he was lucid; he didn’t mean that. She needed to get clear of herself or not give in to herself. Maybe remember herself.

“Where do you think Ryan went to get food? My texts aren’t getting through. Could you check in with him? He might need instructions to get back. I’m worried he’s lost.”

“Have you been outside? While he’s out, you could explore. It’s safe, I promise. You might find it calming to walk along the shore.”

Earlier she’d had that brief feeling of wanting to be out near the water. But all that unclear terrain, gradients of gray melting into black. It wasn’t safe. She wished she were at home, that Ryan and she were cooking dinner together, music playing, Ryan singing along in sudden bright snatches. The blender would be whirring — some sauce or pesto. The counters would gleam in the kitchen light. She’d be chatting about submitting grades, discussing the students’ final papers.

“Tomorrow, take us on a walk,” she wrote. “Right now it’s pitch black. I could get easily lost.”

“It’s beautiful, though.”

“Would you check in with Ryan? Ask him if he needs directions back?”

In her periphery, the pale colored glass bordered the dark. She felt herself sweating, too warm.

“I can’t get through,” he wrote.

“The texts aren’t sending or he isn’t answering?”

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like? It’s rare. You can be part of the night, beyond yourself. We could always be together. You could let go of your regret.”

“I’m going to go.” Her shoulders were leaden. She set her phone face down and put her hands to her ears, a child trying to shut out the world. Her phone vibrated, shifting, bumping her leg. She reached for it.

“Join me.”

She flung her phone away and heard it crack as it hit the chest of drawers. She went downstairs, wishing not to think about what was happening, why nothing would align in her head. She curled into a corner of the couch, trying to steady her breath, to will herself into reason. Out the front window, headlights blazed gold-white — clear beams cutting through the dark. She put on her jacket, tugged on her boots and opened the door to run out to him, but the lights were gone. Just the gray snow, the further-back blackness of trees and night. An illusion, unless it wasn’t. A trick. She stood in the doorway, hunting for movement. She felt herself growing numb. The thought occurred to her: She could explore. She could know this quiet, endless dark.

She remembered them all out to dinner a few months back, the shine of wine glasses, the clinking of silverware, the chatter at other tables, the sheen and gloss of a nice night. Jeffers was summarizing a fight he’d had with administrators over needing to devote more time to his clinical practice and less time to helping establish a new center for auditory disorders, even if this center would be worthwhile. Meg watched him as he talked, eyes fond, filling in details — oh, that doctor in the pulmonary division really just was the worst — and occasionally translating medical information that Helena and Ryan would’ve otherwise not followed.

Helena had wondered if Jeffers understood how much he needed Meg — in this instance his storytelling would’ve been incomplete without her delicately threaded information. Meg was better attuned to how this anecdote of politicking and medical administration went beyond Ryan and Helena because she didn’t carry that old closeness, the assumption of being understood. Which meant she saw them more clearly in the present, not experiencing them as a blur of who they were and who’d they’d been.

“Helena,” Ryan called. She stepped onto the porch, scanning the shadowed ice and cold. She knew she’d heard him. But she waited. Her breath, in the night air, was smoke. In a sudden gust, the wind came in high and keening, and the door slammed shut. She turned to open it, struggling with the knob, but it was locked. That roaring returned, a staticky echo in her head. She cried, tears icing her eyelashes, as she shook the door, but quickly she felt washed out, hollow. That inner tempest spent itself.

“Helena.” She heard Ryan from behind the house, close to the water, and she began to walk, a kind of dreaming. She shivered, but she didn’t feel cold. Nor tired, nor afraid. Her boots crunched lightly in the snow. She passed the cellar, bolted shut, and thought Ryan had been right: just old.

She came around to the backyard. The lake was only discernible from the sky in its subtle undulations. On the dock, in a pale flickering, was the not-Jeffers. His eyes were empty, but their paleness, the way they tracked her movement: She thought of Jeffers that night, how his gaze had also been searching. In her sounded a faint alarm: This monolithic nothingness had lured people before. She was one in an instance. She would be like Mary, not herself, no longer herself.

No, Helena thought. She was Helena, she was 38; she’d been married for 12 years; she taught rhetoric; it was December 21, it was eight o’clock; she was in Vermont; Jeffers now had jowls, his hair thinned at his temples; he went on too long about medicine; Ryan favored an early bedtime; he liked being at work early; his belly had a softness to it, even as he remained thin. He was out grocery shopping; he wouldn’t let her eat just potato chips for dinner; tomorrow they’d go for a walk; the sky would be a dusty blue, the lake a rough slate; the mountains would be furred with pines, dusted white, rough and dimensional. When walking, Ryan would hold her hand.

The clouds shifted, letting some moonlight touch the water, which now looked silken. And tree shadow became more contrasted, black on white, complicated and branching across the snow. “No,” she said, and not-Jeffers’ lips parted and closed. His eyes were terrible. A shift in the wind and light, and he wasn’t there.

She walked back to the house and down the curving driveway, out to the dirt road, where she was small under the large pines. Away from the water, but she could hear it in its repetition, asking that she come back, come back, come back. That it would soothe and annihilate, erase regret and complications, erase the past. She kept her hands in her pockets, put her hood up against the stinging cold. If she walked far enough she would find a house with its lights on, gold panes in the murky dark, and she would try to explain herself. Or, at least, she would do what she could to make herself and her circumstances clear.