Page 13 of I'll Be Waiting

“That’s great,” I say. Then I pause. “Which means you’d need Keith to look after the kids. When he’s supposed to be at the séance with me.”

“Right.” She clears her throat. “I don’t have to go to this conference. Only I was thinking… maybe you’d like me to?”

Maybe I’d like an excuse to do the séance without Keith. That’s what she means.

“I’d be a coward if I said yes, wouldn’t I?” I say.

She’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I really hate getting between you and Keith. I always have. He’s being a pain in the ass. It’s only because he loves you, but if we’re trying for the perfect setup, everything just right…”

“Having Keith there is going to mess it up. He’ll interfere, and we’ll fight, and Jin will get caught in the middle, and after it’s done, I’ll have an excuse to saythat’swhy the séance went wrong.”

“Idohave a conference invitation, and itisunexpected. If Keith strongly objects, we can revisit it. But I think, while he’ll fret, he trusts Jin to be there for you. You just might have to tolerate daily phone check-ins.”

“Okay, give him a call. If he will stay home, I’d rather he did.”

Keith is staying in Toronto with his kids. He’d done exactly as Libby expected. He grumbled, but gave in on the understanding that there would be daily phone calls and, when the séance was over, he’d bring Hayden and Lucy to join Jin and me for a weekend at the lake.

While Jin had offered to drive, I feel more comfortable with my own car. Since starting on the new meds, I haven’t needed to be hospitalized for an infection, or even have a nurse come to dump antibiotics through the shunt permanently embedded in my arm. I still don’t like being an hour from the nearest major hospital without feeling free to hop into my car at 2A.M.if I need to. I also have a lotof stuff to bring—my airway-clearance vest alone comes in its own carry-on-sized wheelie bag. Yep, I don’t travel light. But I do travel, and that’s the important thing.

Before we leave, I do my daily half hour with the vest and my forty minutes with the nebulizer. I also do my workout in the condo gym.

When people hear I have CF, they offer me car rides for short distances or help carrying bags. I appreciate that, because I know they mean well. It’s true that, with my shitty lungs, exercise-induced asthma is a concern, and I’m no longer running the half-marathons of my university days. But exercise has always been an important part of my treatment. I might even be a touch neurotic about it, and knowing I won’t have a gym at the beach house, I’m getting in an hour before we leave. Once there, I’ll make a point to rise early for long walks.

I’m in decent shape. Weight is often a concern in CF—our difficulty absorbing nutrients and processing food can lead to us being underweight and even malnourished. Heading into my thirties, I got a lot of “Oh, you’re still so slender” and “No middle-age spread for you, huh?” Again, I understand the sentiment, and I only smile and don’t explain. My focus is on keeping up a healthy weight and staying as strong as I can for as long as I can.

I pick up Shania and Jin and then start the trek to Lake Erie. Toronto is on Lake Ontario. Erie is to the west, which means an hour drive along the highway and then another hour south through farm country until we reach the shore.

There are no major cities along the Canadian shore—they’re all at least a thirty-minute drive north. Halfway across Lake Erie it becomes the United States, with Buffalo at one end, Detroit at the other, and Cleveland in the middle. Where we’re going is across the lake from Ohio, only visible as a glow of nuclear plants at night. Okay, that’s not true. Sometimes you can also see smoke from the plants during the day.

The town nearest the lake house is big enough to have a name but too small to have much else. There’s a beachside stand for fries, a couple of bait shops, a pier, and a half-dozen small RV parks, just starting to fill as we’ve passed the Victoria Day long weekend.

Our destination is lakefront but not beachfront. Along this shore, Lake Erie is mostly cliffside viewing, and that cliff is eroding fast. When we pull onto the road leading to the house, Shania gasps.

“Look at that view,” she says. “Can we get down to the water?”

“There’s a path if it’s still safe,” I say. “We can do that later, maybe at sunset. It looks like we’ll have one today, and they’re stunning.”

I pull into the semicircular drive in front of the two-story red-brick house.

Jin rolls down his window to gape up. “Okay, when you said ‘lake house,’ I expected a cottage. Do I even want to know how much this place cost to rent?”

“It was cheaper in the off-season, when Anton and I always came.” I stop the car in front of the steps. “But the price isn’t bad, mostly because it’s five years overdue for a touch-up and ten years overdue for a renovation. In other words, expect dated furniture and a toilet you might need to flush twice.”

“I don’t care,” Shania says. “It looks amazing.”

The house is two stories of Georgian-style brickwork, a red rectangle of perfect symmetry, like the way a child would draw a house, the windows all just so. Ivy covers the entire front of it. It had been in Anton’s family for generations, built at the turn of the twentieth century as a summer home for his great-great-grandfather, who’d made his fortune in textiles.

Eventide Manor—as it was once called—was designed in the pre-air-conditioning days when well-off families had a summer house. Dad would stay in the humid and sweltering city for business while Mom and the kids retired to the lake, with Dad joining them on weekends. Anton remembered his grandmother telling him stories of her parents doing that—her father staying in Torontowhile her mother brought the kids to the lake house once school ended.

By the time Anton’s grandmother inherited it, the family no longer had the money for a summer residence, so she’d retired here following the death of her husband. Even then, there hadn’t been money to keep it up, and Anton remembered summers spent helping his father lay bricks and his mother clear the overgrown gardens.

These days, the house and gardens still have a slightly disheveled look, as if someone’s really trying to keep them up, but never quite manages. If it reminds me a bit of my brother—solid, reliable, and a bit down-at-heel—maybe that’s part of its charm.

The gardens are mostly stone and statuary, with some bushes and perennials in need of pruning. There’s a wild look to them, one that reminds me of Victorian children’s novels with overgrown English gardens. When Anton and I had been here last, it’d been too cold to sit outside for long, but I’d like to do that this time. Find a spot in this wild place and curl up with a book.

We walk in, and I toss my luggage down in the front hall.

“I’m taking the Monroe bedroom,” I say. “You can’t miss it.”

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