The Home for Wayward Supermodels Read online

  “That’s good,” he said. Now I could see a little smile at the edge of his lips, which made me feel braver.

  “I know you like Tom,” I said.

  “Well,” said Duke. “He’s missed you.”

  I set down my cleaning supplies then, and looked at Duke until he had no choice but to look back.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said.

  Right away, he averted his eyes. But that wasn’t from insincerity; it was from a northern Wisconsin lifetime of keeping his feelings inside.

  “Oh, Daddy,” I said, welling up despite the inherent toughness of the place. I held out my arms and my dad hugged me as warmly as he had my whole life.

  “I know you’re my dad,” I said. “I mean, not my real dad. No, wait, that’s not right—I know you are my real dad.”

  Now tears popped into his eyes, a truly alarming development. In the time I’d been growing up, my dad had lost both his parents and his brother, whom he had gone fishing with every Sunday evening for his entire life, and I’d never seen him cry. I couldn’t let him start on account of me.

  “I love you,” I said.

  But if this was meant to calm him down, it had the opposite effect. He began weeping, his head down, his fingers over his eyes.

  “Oh, Daddy,” I said, moving to embrace him again. “I’m sorry if I’ve been weird. It’s just that so much has changed.”

  “That’s the thing, sweetheart,” he said, looking up so that his eyes gazed directly into mine. “For me, nothing’s changed.”

  That made me think of how he’d been with me in my earliest memories, when I’d follow behind him doing whatever he did: hunting bait in the spring, canoeing in the summer, skating in the winter.

  It made me think of him sitting in the audience at every assembly, every performance when I was in elementary school, of him coaching my soccer team and driving me all the way down to Milwaukee when I was putting together my outfit for the junior prom just so I could buy a special ribbon for my hair. He’d talked my mom into letting me have my first computer; when he went out of town on a Rotary trip, he always returned with a stack of fashion magazines it embarrassed the hell out of him to buy.

  What he was saying, I saw, was that knowing from the beginning exactly who he was to me had not kept him from loving me all along with the same full heart.

  “Did Mom ever tell you…” I said. “I mean about the other…”

  He nodded swiftly, turning his attention back to the tank.

  “French fella,” he said huskily. “Some kind of photographer.”

  “I might try to find him,” I said, unsure how he would take that, but unwilling, now that we’d come this far, to hold back so central a piece of information. “I mean, if I end up going to Paris.”

  He bobbed his head once, definitively, in a way I knew meant he thought that was an all-right idea.

  “Talked to Tom about this?” he asked, looking up at me from beneath the fringe of his eyebrows. Their dark mass, I noticed for the first time, was beginning to be wired with gray.

  “Not really,” I sighed. “But I guess we will, on the island.”

  “Yup,” he said.

  “I still love Tom,” I burst out, “but I don’t know anymore what I want to do. The world seems so much bigger than it used to.”

  “Yup,” he said.

  “You and Mom,” I said, “will you be mad at me if I go to Paris? I mean, if I decide to keep modeling for a while instead of settling down here right away?”

  “Mad?” he said. “Nope.”

  “Well, will you be mad if I marry Tom and forget about modeling and New York and Paris?”

  “Nope.”

  “I wish you would help me make up my mind!” I wailed. “I really have a problem here.”

  “You don’t have a problem,” my dad said, a grin stealing across his face. “You have a choice between two good things.”

  thirteen

  Isat in the front of the canoe, paddling steadily, as Tom, unseen behind me, steered and moved us swiftly through the great expanse of Big Secret Lake. All of the summer people were gone now and we had the lake to ourselves, the ripples from our little boat the only disturbance on the stretch of calm water.

  We paddled as we always did: expertly, companionably, and silently. But I wasn’t as relaxed as I normally was in this situation, thinking about how strange it would be to be alone with him again. And how many difficult things we had to talk about.

  At least it didn’t feel weird to be together without speaking. I breathed in rhythm with our paddles and tried to will my mind to go blank, even though it did not want to. The thickly wooded island slid closer and soon I could see bottom, the lake as clear as the Caribbean had been, but so much rockier in its depths.

  “Stay there,” Tom said, seeming to see me as a lady for the first time. With a lurch of the canoe, he leaped overboard and swam us onto the sandy shore as I remained seated, serene and dry as Cleopatra.

  “Well, thank you, sir,” I said, smiling.

  “You’re a city slicker now,” he said. “Don’t want to muss you up.”

  “Oh, no?” I said, stepping out of the canoe onto the dark sand beach and tugging it farther onto the land. A lake as big as Secret had tides too, and we didn’t want to wake up and find our canoe disappeared, even if we had no immediate plans to go anywhere. “Maybe I like getting mussed up.”

  “Really?” said Tom. “You mean…”

  He bent down and dug his fingers into the wet sand. I should have seen it coming, but the next thing I knew my arm and the side of my face were spattered with grit.

  “Tom!” I screamed. “I can’t believe you did that!”

  Even as I was yelling at him, I was scooping up a handful of sand myself, cocking my arm. Then I let go and lobbed it at him.

  “All right,” he said, grabbing his own sand ball. “Now it’s war.”

  And then the two of us were just running and throwing and giggling, ducking behind rocks and trees, attacking and screaming, two eight-year-olds having a snowball fight or two middle-schoolers with a crush on each other. Which was exactly what Tom and I had been. I’d loved him in fifth grade, when we tore around the church parking lot on our bikes, playing a rough game of tag. I’d loved him in eighth grade, when a spitball or a snapped bra strap was the height of foreplay. And I loved him now—especially now that I felt the fun of all our years together spark and catch fire again.

  Behind a piece of driftwood, I found a cache of wet leaves. Lifting a whole huge buggy mess of them, I hurled them directly at his head.

  He stood there for a minute on the beach, dripping and crawling, and then he said, “All right, this is it for you.”

  “No, Tom,” I squealed, turning to get away from him. “Come on, Tom.”

  “No, you’ve done it this time,” he said, lunging for me.

  I took off at a run and he sprinted after me. What was most exciting was that I could run as fast as I possibly could and still know that he would eventually catch me. Finally I felt the tip of his fingers graze my back, and then grab at the strap of my bikini, and then his hand was on my arm, and then his arms were around me, lifting me into the air.

  “No!” I yelled, laughing. “What are you going to do?”

  “This is payback,” he said, holding me like a baby, his big hands tight on my shoulder and my thigh, as he started to wade into the lake. The water, the drops of it that splashed up onto me from the thrashing of his feet, were warm, but I hadn’t been in yet, and I didn’t feel ready.

  “Don’t you dare, Tom,” I said, trying to sound serious.

  “Oh, I dare,” he said, nodding. “I absolutely dare.”

  And with a thrust of his arms, he threw me up and out into the lake, where I landed with an atomic splash.

  He was laughing when I swam up to him and, with one swift tug, pulled down his shorts. He was not, as I suspected, wearing underwear.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey yourself.�
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  I swam away but he came after me. I knew what I’d started now. As soon as he caught up, he grabbed hold of my bikini bottom. I pretended to try to keep swimming, but I knew he had me. Finally I just helped him take it off, looping it over my arm like a bracelet.

  We faced each other, treading water, looking directly into each other’s faces for the first time since I’d been home.

  Home. I was home. Not only by being at my mother’s house, or in Eagle River, or in Wisconsin, or even at this island, but by being with Tom too. By being in this exact place at this exact moment with this person. It seemed that all the excitement and novelty and scariness of the past few months were like so many clouds around a peak, but this was the mountain itself.

  “I love you,” I said to Tom.

  “I love you.”

  I swam into his arms and we kissed. It was like a movie kiss, even more like a movie kiss than the one with Alex on the airstrip when Tati and I left. I shook my head hard in an effort to stop thinking about Alex.

  Tom unsnapped my top and escalated the kissing, which helped dispel Alex from my mind. We were touching and kissing and swimming. I felt like a mermaid, a mermaid who’d come upon a shipwrecked sailor. A very horny shipwrecked sailor. Tom was already at full mast and he looked so delirious, each time I touched him there, that I was afraid I was going to make him drown.

  He took my hand and led me, so we were swimming hand in hand, toward shore, where he put his big arms around me and held me close so that I wouldn’t shiver. We’d made love for the very first time on this island two years before, but then it had been at night, in our tent, inside our zipped-together sleeping bags, with the fire glowing and popping outside.

  Now I knew that no one was around to see us, and also we did not have to work so hard at what we were doing, and also I wasn’t afraid the way I’d been the first time. Now it was me who kissed him hard, who pulled him kneeling into the sand, who didn’t even want to wait until he found a towel in the canoe and spread it out for us to lie on. I wanted to do it in the dirt, wanted to feel him pinning me down there with the grains of sand biting into my back, as penance for all the wanting I’d done for Alex.

  But Tom got the towel and I lay down on that, which made me feel more guilty but also more tender toward him, my gallant playmate. We kissed—this was more kissing than we’d done in a long time—and then we began. Feeling Tom in my arms like that, the heft of him, the powerful muscles even in his back, there was no question that he was the one for me. I wanted him, only him, excited by his bigness against me, by his brute physicality against all that was not brute or even physical in me. It was like he was body and I was soul, and together we were one.

  When we finished making love, we both fell asleep and woke only as the sun dipped behind the trees in the middle of the island, throwing the beach into shade. We roused ourselves and set about doing what we usually did as soon as we landed: unpacking the canoe, setting up the orange tent, laying out the sleeping bags, building a fire ring, gathering driftwood, and hanging our food in a tree, away out of reach of insects and animals.

  While I got a fire going and worked on boiling water to drink and wrapping potatoes in foil to bake and setting the contraband beers that Dad had slipped us into the lake to cool, Tom caught our dinner. The food tasted amazing in the fresh air of the chill night by the heat of the fire. Tom had, as always, brought his guitar along, and after we cleaned up, he played and sang “Friend of the Devil” as I lay with my head in his lap and looked for the northern lights until it was time to crawl into the tent and go to sleep.

  I woke up in the middle of the night with an urgent need to pee—I’d grown so unaccustomed to drinking beer, I really was a city slicker!—and despite all my best efforts to repress it, I finally crawled out of the tent and squatted near the edge of the woods, alert to any sounds.

  By the time I was back in Tom’s arms, I was wide awake, my ears still trained on the scurrying of little animal feet in the bush and the lap of the waves on the sand, the interior of the tent glowing from the light of the moon. Lying here like this reminded me of the nights in the Bahamas, when I’d lain awake thinking of Alex. And thinking of thinking of Alex made me think even more of Alex.

  It was easy, here on the island, to push the possibility of Alex aside, to believe that Tom was the only one for me and that Alex was merely a fantasy. But it had been easy too in the Bahamas to forget about Tom and feel that Alex was the one who was real.

  Now, lying here, with Tom asleep so that there was room for Alex to sneak in, I felt guilty for holding them both in my heart at once. Yet I was also able for the first time to believe in both of them, to feel at once all the love and excitement they both aroused in me. They seemed equally attractive, equally wonderful, even. Yet so different. How could I ever choose between them?

  Six Reasons to Pick Tom

  Great arms.

  Knows how to catch or shoot dinner.

  Sex: excellent.

  Down-to-earth.

  Gets along with my parents.

  Knows where I’m from.

  Six Reasons to Pick Alex

  Great accent.

  Knows how to order wine.

  Sex: theoretically excellent, based on quality of kisses.

  Sophisticated.

  Gets along with my friends.

  Knows where I want to go.

  That was as far as I got before I fell asleep.

  On the fourth day of the trip, when we were supposed to leave, it grew suddenly cold, a wind blowing across the lake from the north. I noticed for the first time that many of the trees along the mainland shore were tinged with red and gold. The water was choppy and we broke camp earlier than we’d planned, happy to throw ourselves into an activity that would keep us warm and render talking impossible.

  It had felt, during our days on the island, that we were postponing the big talk we both knew was inevitable. We had been having so much fun swimming and fishing and making love, hiking and sitting by the fire and snuggling inside the tent, that later always seemed to be a better time than now.

  Now later would soon be here, and I found myself no more resolved than I’d been the night I lay awake debating the merits of Tom versus Alex, or the afternoon in the bait shop when I tried to get my dad to make up my mind for me.

  When the canoe was loaded, we decided to eat the last of our food and burn the final pieces of the wood we’d gathered, building a bonfire by the water’s edge, where we could easily douse it before we set off. Once the blaze was high, we huddled together on a folded-up sleeping bag facing the fire and the water, holding sticks threaded with hot dogs and bread over the flames.

  Suddenly there was a streak of darkness and, from out of the woods, a whisky jack swooped down and landed on Tom’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” he laughed, addressing the bird. “Where have you been?”

  The bird, which looked like a blue jay except gray, and friendly, cocked its head to the side as if to say: What kind of question is that? I’ve been here all along.

  “I guess you’re looking for food,” Tom said, tearing off an end from one of the hot dog buns and holding it out to the bird, which pulled off a hunk with its beak and flew back into the trees.

  “It’s the cold,” Tom said to me. “They’re starting to stockpile food for the winter.”

  “I always forget this,” I said, pulling Tom’s fishing vest tight over my sweater, “how suddenly one day summer’s over and it’s suddenly fall.”

  “Yup,” Tom said, sounding exactly like my dad.

  I had a sharp memory then of what life felt like in Wisconsin at this moment of the year, when you suddenly knew for certain that you were facing cold weather that was going to last so long that next spring seemed like a faraway possibility—like China, or the Pyramids. You knew it was out there, but it seemed extremely remote that you would ever see it.

  I’d always liked winter; you had to, to live with living here. But part of liking it had b
een accepting its inevitability. Now I knew there was another choice. Lots of other choices.

  Whatever I decided to do right now about Tom, and Wisconsin, and Alex, and Paris, I now was aware of so many things I wanted to do in my lifetime.

  Twenty-five Things I Want to Do Before I Die

  Stand with one foot on either side of the equator.

  Swim in every ocean of the world.

  Study Arabic and Japanese.

  See if the Mona Lisa’s eyes really move.

  Meet my biological father.

  Meet a movie star.

  Have a baby. Someday.

  Go to Carnivale (Alex told me about that).

  Go to Ukraine (it’s only fair, since Tati’s been here).

  Go with Desi somewhere, anywhere, outside New York.

  Grow an orchid.

  Ride in a Jaguar.

  Ride on a boat around Manhattan (I’d never had time this summer).

  Ski on a tall mountain.

  Own a dog (Mom’s allergic, so I never could).

  Read all those books that in high school I thought would be boring.

  Wear real diamonds in my ears—I mean in life, not on a shoot.

  Learn to walk in high heels.

  Let my hair go white (someday).

  Dye it blonde, red, and purple (maybe).

  Learn to make a piecrust as good as Mom’s.

  Ride a gondola in Venice.

  See the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  See the pope.

  Have sex with someone besides Tom.

  That last one brought me back to the moment, where I shook my head to clear it and pulled my nearly charred hot dog from the fire, setting it in a fresh bun and taking a big bite.

  “So what do you want to do?” I said to Tom, trying to keep my voice light. “I mean, now that summer’s over.”

  Tom would have some work as a fishing guide in the fall and winter, parties up for the last of the trout and salmon in the fall-chilled streams and even for ice fishing. But his rush of the year was now officially over.