Alice tried to chitchat with Lily while they were making up the beds—“I call dibs on the one by the window” and “I sure hope this cot is more comfortable than it looks”—but Lily didn’t answer and kept her same grumpy expression. When they’d finished, Alice unpacked her things and put them in the bureau （“I call the top two drawers”）， and Lily took a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen from her suitcase and settled against the propped pillow on her bed and started writing. To Jump, presumably, not that she bothered explaining that.
Alice gave up on her. She put on her swimsuit and a big shirt and collected her camera—a Brownie Starflash she’d been given for her last birthday—and went back out to the kitchen, where she found Mercy hunting a pitcher for the tea she’d just brewed. “I’ll look for one while you go change,” Alice told her, and Mercy said, “Oh, thanks, honey,” and disappeared into her bedroom. She emerged a few minutes later in a shirred latex swimsuit such as Esther Williams might wear, and a peach kimono fluttering open at the front and cork-soled sandals with giant pompoms on the toes. “Where’s Lily?” she asked, and Alice made a face and said, “Writing a letter.” Mercy just gave an airy little laugh. She seemed to view Lily as some belle from Gone with the Wind, with boys galore lining up to “dance attendance,” as she called it.
They left the cabin and set off down the path that Robin and David had taken earlier. It was hot but not unbearably so—a good ten degrees cooler than Baltimore, Alice would guess. Tiny insects buzzed around their heads whenever they passed through shade, and squirrels scrabbled up the trees.
The lake was bigger than Alice had expected. You could see the opposite shore, but it looked very far away, and the near shore curved to the left and disappeared behind a clump of bushes, so she knew there must be more lake in the distance. A heavyset woman lay tanning on a towel, and an old man, fully dressed, sat facing outward on a canvas chair at the end of a rickety dock. The only one in the water was Robin, swimming a determined breaststroke parallel to the shore with his expression grim and set. David stood watching from the water’s edge. He had taken off his robe but he was bone-dry; clearly he had not so much as dipped a toe in. “What do you think of the lake?” Mercy asked, coming up behind him, and he turned and asked, “Is Daddy going to drown?”
“No, no, no,” she assured him, “Daddy’s a good swimmer.” David turned away again and resumed watching his father.
“You planning to get wet?” Alice asked him.
He said, “Pretty soon I am.”
“Want me to take you?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Alice removed her shirt and tossed it onto the sand next to her camera. “Well, here goes,” she said, and she began wading in. The water was lukewarm but turned cooler the farther she waded, and when she finally ducked under it was cold enough to make her gasp.
Viewed from here, the shoreline had the quaint, static look of a scene in her mother’s book of French paintings—the old man on the dock shaded by a giant straw hat, the woman just a flattened strip of color against the sand. David was squatting now to fill his bucket. Mercy was taking dainty steps deeper and deeper until finally she launched herself forward in a breaststroke considerably more graceful than Robin’s. She had spent her girlhood vacationing in Ocean City, was why. She was no stranger to water. But after a few yards or so, she stopped swimming and stood up. “Come on out!” Robin called to her, but she said, “I don’t want to get my hair wet.” She had the kind of hair that took forever to dry, thick and wavy, with ringlets spilling from a chignon piled high on top of her head. She said, “I was thinking I might fetch my sketch pad and take a little walk in the woods. Can you keep an eye on David?”
“Sure thing,” Robin said. “I’ll teach him how to swim; how’s that?”
“Oh, good,” Mercy said. She turned and started wading back, her arms held straight out at her sides and her hands lifted like little birds, while far beyond her, up at the edge of the woods, a small version of Lily could be seen shading her eyes to observe them. She didn’t come any closer, though. She didn’t even have her swimsuit on, and after a moment she turned away and disappeared again.
The difference between this scene and the ones in the French paintings, Alice thought, was that the paintings all showed people interacting—picnickers and boating parties. But here everybody was separate. Even her father, a few yards away from her, was swimming now toward shore. A passerby would never guess the Garretts even knew each other. They looked so scattered, and so lonesome.