The Lost

The Dog Days of Laurie Summer by Patricia Gaffney

For Jolene,

who’s always allowed

on the furniture

Before

I have a strange story to tell.

Too bad there’s no one to tell it to. No real way to tell it, and by now, no compelling reason to, either. Still. I feel the need to get it off my chest. Already it’s begi

That’s what I’ll do, then: I’ll tell the story to myself.

Where to begin? With my childhood? When I married Sam and we had Be

Better to begin when things started to go off track. Faster, more interesting. Well, that’s easy-that would be the day I drowned. The first time.

Such a nice day, too. Early June, late afternoon, our first full weekend at Sam’s cabin on the river. Our cabin, but I thought of it as Sam’s-he was the one who’d found it, dreamed of restoring it, and generally yearned for it, until I surprised him on his thirty-eighth birthday and bought it for him. Us. It needed an enormous amount of work, but it was habitable, barely, and even though it wasn’t my idea of paradise, I had to admit it did look charming that afternoon, with the windows blazing orange, the low sun casting tree shadows on the rough planks and the dirty white chinking. We were watching it from aluminum lawn chairs in the fast-m oving shallows of the Shenandoah, Be

“To us,” Sam toasted back with his beer, and I hoped that didn’t mean he thought I was going to help with the renovation. I liked the idea of him and Be

Sam had looked handsome the night before in his magic-act tuxedo, but he looked even better now in faded cutoffs and a holey tee. Mmm, all that tan skin and soft blond hair. I was looking forward to later, after we put Be

“But mostly to you, Laurie,” he said, “for being brilliant.”

“Thank you,” I said with mock modesty. Mock, yes. Last night I’d received the Shanahan & Lewis Mega Deal Maker of the Year award, and this morning Ro

Full of myself, then. I was pret-ty damn full of myself.

“Looks like somebody’s ready for bed.”

I thought Sam meant me and he’d been reading my mind, a skill he only pretends to have in his magic act. But then Be

Does that mean anything? Or my refusal-does that mean anything? I said, “No, honey, we can’t,” without hesitation, because it was completely out of the question. No way could we get a dog; we were all too busy, and besides, I had allergies.

But now I wonder. It was the last thing my sweet, five-year-old son asked me.

Then again, the last thing Sam asked me was to bring in my chair, and I didn’t come back as a chaise longue.

My cell phone rang.

“Don’t answer.”

I checked the screen. “I have to. It’s Ro

Sam made a face, one I’d seen (and ignored) many times before, and started to get up, stretching his long arms over his head, splashing his bare feet in the water. “Okay, pal,” he told Be

And Be

“Hi, Ron,” I said at the same time Sam said to me, for a joke, “Don’t forget your chair.” I smiled, watching him pick his way through the rippling, ankle-deep river toward shore. Then Ron mentioned the new Potomac Aerie development and I stopped watching. That was my last look at my family: Sam setting Be

Something else I wish I could go back and redo.

Ron’s a talker; our conversation went on for a good fifteen minutes. More or less-it’s about now that things begin to blur. I remember deciding not to bother putting on my water sandals to make the twenty-yard trek to the riverbank. I remember standing up and folding my chair. I must’ve had my sandals, empty wineglass, and cell phone in one hand, chair in the other. Why didn’t I put the phone in my pocket? My lifeline, my keystone, my-words fail me. The beating heart of my professional life. Why didn’t I put it in my pocket?

I didn’t, and it flipped out of my hand like a live fish.

I guess I lunged for it. Don’t remember, but that’s what I would have done. I probably threw everything else up in the air first, shoes, chair, glass. Who knows? If I’d been carrying Be

Okay, no.

I have one last tactile memory, quite vivid and distinct: the instant-l ong but somehow-f orever feel of my foot sliding across a slick, slimy rock. After that, zero.

During

For how long? Two months, I’ve heard since, but that’s not right. It was zero, literally nothing, for a time, but then-a week later? three weeks? five?-rips began to show in the matte black curtain, like the difference between a thick blindfold and a thin one. No, that’s not right, either, because the first sense I got back was hearing, not seeing. So-the difference between a set of Bose headphones and Be

Sound instead of silence. Such a blessing, like being saved. Word fragments at first. You know how, when you close your book, turn out the light, and prepare to go to sleep, bits of the author’s syntax and rhythm float around in your mind for a while before you drop off? But if you ever wake up enough to concentrate on one of the bits you’re remembering, it turns out to be nonsense? Like that.

Bits of music, too, jumbled, unrecognizable, like when you spin a radio dial too fast. And voices. Strangers’, and then, mercifully, Sam’s. That was the moment I began to heal. Or hope, which is the same thing. I didn’t always know what he was saying, especially in the begi

Touch came next. The unutterable comfort of it. Skin on sentient skin, and it didn’t matter whose then, just the nearly unbearable relief of not being alone anymore. To the nurses and aides and rehab people it must’ve felt like massaging a corpse, but I couldn’t get enough bending, stroking, manipulating. I even liked it when they put drops in my eyes. Sam used to rub lotion into my hands and I’d drift off into something like nirvana…

Sight was last. “She can open her eyes,” somebody mar veled, and I remember feeling a surge of childlike pride, like a toddler praised for uttering her first complete sentence. It was narrow sight, just the thing I was looking at, everything else wavy as old glass.