We had named our daughter for the plucky girl in the first act, the smartest girl in her class. We had not been thinking about the third act at the time.
Emily shakes her head. “I’m just talking. I don’t think I’m going to die in childbirth.”
Which doesn’t mean I can get the thought of her dying out of my head. “So it really is the cherry trees?”
She nods. She still isn’t looking at me. “I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t tell you.”
“This would be the day.”
She takes in a deep breath, giving me just enough time to flash through every horrible thing that might have happened to her without my knowing it. “I never forgave you and Dad for burning those trees.”
“Which trees?” We have burned a great many trees over the years.
“I think I was nine. I don’t know, I might have been younger. If it had happened before, I don’t remember. I think you used to burn trees when we were in school or else you sent us to the neighbors’ or something. Dad said they were old, they weren’t putting out enough fruit anymore so he had them pushed out.” She turns to me then, her cheeks wet with tears. “Look at me!” she laughs, rubbing at her nose. “I’ve been to hort school and I still can’t talk about this. We begged him not to do it. I said I’d bring out buckets of water. Fuck.” She pinches the bridge of her nose and waits. “I’ve burned so many trees since then but that first time I couldn’t stand it. You set them on fire like it was some kind of party. ‘You’ve outlived your usefulness! Time to die!’ The neighbors were standing around drinking cider. All I wanted to do was save them and I couldn’t save them. I’m sure I’m going to miss having children. I’m sure in twenty years I’m going to feel awful about it, but for now all I can think of are all these trees that aren’t going to make it and how we’re going to pull them all up and burn them.”
The men had come in the afternoon with a 4WD loader. They sank the tines down into the ground and then bulldozed the trees, pulling them up to shake off the dirt before piling them to burn. By the time the work was done it was nearly dark and we set the fire. I remember it now, our girls screaming as if the plan had been to throw them into the blaze as well. Had they just not remembered, or had they really never been there before? Those fires are enormous and I worried about keeping up, all three of our girls were runners. I had to keep them safe. Maybe we did send them away before that. Maybe this was the time we decided they were old enough. Old trees have to be pushed out but we didn’t need to turn it into a party. We’d told the girls that the trees were our life and how good they were to us and how they took care of us because we took care of them. The night air was bitter on that autumn night but one by one we pulled off our jackets. The flames shot twenty feet over the pile of branches, throwing bright--orange sparks up to the stars. Joe couldn’t leave, he and the neighbors had to make sure the fire didn’t get out of hand, so finally I pushed the girls into the station wagon and drove them around until it was done, until they’d cried and kicked and slapped at the back of the seat for such a long time that they wore themselves out, falling asleep against their will. When we got home Joe lifted Maisie out of the car and I took Nell, but Emily was awake. That night she said she hated us, and that she had always hated us, that she would always hate us.
Hazel runs out of the woods and right away starts frantically digging a hole in the sand next to Emily. She digs and digs, then sticks her head in the hole she’s made to see if it fits, then takes it out and digs some more.
“Here we are.” Nell throws herself down beside us. “Our day off.”
“Let me try to ruin it for you.” Emily wipes her face with a towel.
“What’s your dog looking for?” I ask Maisie. When Hazel stops digging long enough to look up, the sand--colored dog is covered in sand.
“Treasure,” Maisie says.
“If we’re going to be miserable and cry, let’s do it in the lake.” Nell stands up to pull off her T--shirt and shorts. The girls had taken the time to put their swimsuits on under their clothes. I take mine out of my bag, glancing up and down the beach.
“We can hold up our towels,” Maisie offers. “Make you a towel tent.”
But I decline, taking my clothes off where I stand and then struggling into my one--piece. They have seen me and I have seen them, even if they’ve forgotten. They follow me into the water, screaming at the cold.
“You said the lake was getting warmer,” Maisie yells. “If all hope is lost we should at least get a decent swim out of it.”
The four of us go out straight and strong. We don’t have a swim platform, we don’t have any destination at all; with a little orienteering we could swim to Wisconsin. I drop beneath the surface and open my eyes. It’s as if someone bought up all the diamonds at Tiffany’s and crushed them into dust, then spread that dust across the water so that it sifts down evenly, filtering through the shards of light that cut into the depth. We are swimming through eternity, my daughters’ bright mermaid legs kicking out towards deeper water. I stay beneath the surface and marvel for as long as my lungs can hold.
“Swimming is the reset button,” Pallace used to say.
“Swimming starts the day again.”
We swim and we swim and we swim, and when we’ve exhausted ourselves we turn and head back to shore. Duchess the German shepherd is there now, having bunched one of our towels into an unsatisfying bed while Hazel keeps an eye on the cheese and mustard sandwiches Maisie made. We shake out the remaining towels and crowd together.
“Tell us the happiest day of your life,” Nell says.
“You and you and you,” I say, looking at each of them, their dripping swimsuits and wet, tangled hair.
“No, seriously,” Emily says. “You have to keep it in the context of the story. What was the happiest day of your life at Tom Lake?”
“The happiest day of that summer wasn’t at Tom Lake.”
They deem this to be an acceptable variant, as long as it’s the happiest day within that limited period of time. They stretch out on their towels in the sun to listen and dry.
“There’s a small setup before we get to the day itself,” I say.
“Certain scenes require setups.” Nell covers her face with her hat.
Duchess emits a sigh of unspeakable boredom then gets up to leave.
“Really?” Maisie says to the dog.
Duchess goes and stands in the lake, gulping at the water before turning to cross the narrow beach. We call for her to come back, come back, but she doesn’t listen to us. She follows the path into the woods and is gone.
After opening night the director’s work was done, which had not been the case in the community theater, nor the case in college. But Tom Lake was professional theater, which meant that Nelson would take a bow after the first performance and be off to his next job in the morning. All of us wondered what that next job would be but as far as I knew, none of us had asked him. That was why I stuck around at lunch break one day shortly before we opened, when everyone else ran off to the lake to swim. I wanted to find out where Nelson was going. He was younger than many of the actors in the play but he had never been one of us. He never came to the lake. He was the adult and we were the children rushing off to swim.