Read Online Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan - Free Book Online Page A

spirit, like water cutting into rock.
    On the way out they’d passed an auto graveyard, the cars laid out in rows. Ken saw it first (it would be like a playground for him, all those stilled objects, and she almost told him to stop). The damage to some of the cars astonished her. Surely no one could have survived that collision, or that one there, the roof chopped off. Lise was surprised to see a whole row of minivans—sides caved in, windowless, noses smashed flat—each speaking of some family’s terror.
    â€œActually,” Ken had said, “I’m surprised there aren’t more.”
    She expected that from him now, the morose, heartless comment. Logical, flat, at the core a pitiless truth he pretended to accept. No, the sad thing, she thought, was how quickly she agreed with him.

5
    Arlene swiped at the bench with her hand, only to find it dry. The air fooled her, cool and filled with water. How bright it was in the dark. Overhead, the moon let in light like an eye, its spectral outline to one side. The stars winked, the field deepening the longer she looked up, but it was hard on her neck. She exhaled, found Rufus with her ankle, inhaled and tapped the ash behind her into the water.
    She and Henry used to take the canoe out on nights like this, dipping the paddles in silently, a war party sneaking up on the enemy. When they were far enough from shore so the light from the cottage was just a dot, they stopped and let it drift, the only sound their breathing, the paddles dripping, fish breaking the surface. Henry took out the Pall Malls he’d filched from Uncle Perry’s jacket and, shielding the kitchen match from shore, they lit up and lay back, keeping the brilliant end below the gunwale, taking the smoke in and breathing it out languorously, the way people did in the movies. One each, and even that was a risk. The butts sputtered when they flipped them overboard. If they timed it right, they would be sitting there in absolute black when the clock tower up at the Institute struck twelve, the solemn tolling of the bell clear and sharp as the moon, seeming to go on far too long and then echoing away to nothing in the hills, the lake still again.
    For a while they didn’t speak, and then Henry said, “That was a good one.”
    â€œIt was a great one.”
    Their voices were tiny in the dark and made everything seem more important. They talked about the war, and what branch Henry should enlist in, and how she would become a nurse and follow him to the South Pacific. They talked about what they were going to do now that the war was over, what college to go to and what kind of jobs they wanted. They talked about Emily, and whether Henry should get married before he finishedhis degree. But always there was the canoe and the moon and the bell tower chiming midnight.
    â€œI think,” Henry said, “that this is my favorite place in the whole world.”
    â€œMe too.”
    If only they could stay here, never get older. But it was already too late.
    â€œWill you come out here with her?” she asked one night, and she knew what it sounded like, but he didn’t laugh.
    â€œNo, this is just for us.” And the way he said it, she didn’t have to make him promise.
    They’d been out a few times after that, though she knew Emily resented it. Their talks were different, as if she were in the canoe between them.
    Tonight Arlene had come out to hear the bells. The canoe was long gone, and their father’s mahogany Chris-Craft (the
Lady Belle,
after their mother), and the old dock, but she was sure that at some point back then her body had occupied this same space, breezed through it like a ghost—riding in a boat, or diving, fishing the pilings. She had probably filled every square inch of this shore at some time or other, and a hundred feet out into the lake. But this water was all new, the old moved on to God knows where. Downstream. She thought of the