That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

tell us that’s what women are for. They ground us. They keep us in line.” He clapped Hal on the shoulder and said, “Find yourself a good woman. Go get yourself grounded.” And then, whistling the tune of “This Happy Land,” he walked off into the night.

1995

“Do you ever think about it?” asked Danny Rosen.

“Think about what?” asked Hal. It was Saturday night or, technically, Sunday morning, and Hal’s class had been assigned the school’s boathouse for the celebration of their tenth reunion. Hal and five or six others had taken cigars out to the dock, which wobbled slightly as Danny approached and came to sit beside him. Danny had put on a few pounds since his coxswain days, and he’d grown a beard, probably to compensate for his disappearing jawline. He no longer looked elfin. Now he looked like a hobbit. One of the old ones. Bilbo Baggins, or someone like that.

In the distance, Hal could hear Brad Burlingham, telling some joke. Voices carried, out here, over the water, and he could hear “… and she says, ‘That’s what the stick is for!’ ” followed by Brad’s loud, braying laugh. Brad sounded drunk. Brad always sounded drunk these days. Whenever Hal saw him, at reunions or at one of their summer weekends, he was always at least half in the bag, and he never made a move without a hip flask. It was getting to the point that Hal was starting to wonder if Brad had a problem. Hal himself had stopped drinking except for Friday and Saturday nights, and, even then, he tried to limit himself, stopping before he got to a point that would leave him impaired on Monday mornings.

He turned back to Danny Rosen. “Think about what?” he asked again.

“That summer,” said Danny. Hal looked at him, puzzled. “The party,” Danny prompted, and lowered his voice. “The girl. The one you…” His voice trailed off.

Hal still had no idea what Danny was talking about, but he could see that Dan the Man looked wretched. There were circles under his eyes, and Hal had noticed earlier that his fingernails were bitten to bloody nubs.

“There was a girl. A townie. A babysitter or an au pair or something. The last night, we had a party on the beach.”

“Oh, yeah!” The memory was cutting through the fog of Hal’s drunkenness. “She was s’posed to be for you!” Shit. What had her name been? Dana? Delores? “But then you couldn’t, so I did!”

“Hal, I’m gay.”

Hal blinked a few times. He peered at Danny, waiting for the punch line, as more laughter came drifting over the water. “Huh?”

“I’m gay,” Danny repeated. “I’m—I’m in a relationship. With a man. I’m in love.”

“Oh.” Hal blinked a few more times and rubbed his eyes. If Danny had dropped this bomb back when they’d been roommates at Emlen, Hal would have had a different response. At eighteen, there was no way he’d have been comfortable with some ass bandit sleeping six feet away, but now? “Good for you,” he said, a little dubiously. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.” Hal looked around. Cy Coffey and Eric Feinberg were sitting on the far edge of the dock, and, back on the land, four or five more guys were playing quarters.

As for Danny, he didn’t look happy, or like a man in love. He looked awful, Hal thought. Haunted. Miserable.

“Do people know?” he asked. “Your folks?”

“Not yet,” Danny said shortly. “And that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what happened with that girl, that summer.”

Hal’s brain felt very foggy, like every thought required extra amounts of effort. “Okay.”

“Hal…” Danny rubbed the side of his face. “I think you raped her.”

Hal stared, trying to make sense of the words, trying to fit them into his memories of the night, before shaking his head. “Nah.”

“She was passed out! And Bubs was…” He lowered his voice, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Brad wasn’t listening. “Bubs was holding her down.”

“Nah,” Hal said again, even as he wondered if that was right, and exactly what had happened. The night in question, and the girl in question, had been many nights and many girls ago. “She was drunk. We all were drunk. But I didn’t force her to do anything. She didn’t tell me to stop.”

“I don’t think she could have told you anything,” Danny said, his voice cold. “I don’t think she could talk.”

Hal shook his head, trying to clear it. “Okay,” he said. “Say you’re right. Say I raped her. What’m I supposed to do about it now?”

“I don’t know!” Danny sounded anguished. “Do you know her name? Do you know how we can find her?”

Hal felt a trill of alarm at Danny’s “we.” Did Danny think they were in this together? Was Danny proposing some kind of joint confession? “I’m not sure I knew her name.” Except, just then, it popped up into his mind. Not Dana. Not Delores. Diana. But he was absolutely not sharing that particular factoid with Danny. “I know she worked as a mother’s helper…” Hal could picture the girl, though: her hair, long and brown, the silly sundress she’d worn. He felt another unfamiliar jolt of fear as he considered whether Danny was contemplating anything as stupid as going to the authorities.

“So what’re you going to do?” Hal asked.

“I don’t know,” said Danny, sounding hopeless. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do. We’ve just got to live with it, I guess.”

Hal shrugged. If Dan wanted to eat himself up with guilt over something that had happened a decade ago, Hal wasn’t going to stop him. He supposed it explained Dan’s life. Working in that shitty public school in Trenton, taking in foster kids and stray puppies, all of it made sense. Dan’s entire life had been atonement, one long act of contrition. The same way, maybe, that Brad Burlingham, now coming off his second stint in rehab, at present trying to drown himself in whiskey,