Solstice
The house with the cross is just down the road, a standard old yellow-brick farmhouse with a lumpy clapboard addition. From Mara and Tennessee’s back porch, it’s an easy sightline across the north field to the yard where the wooden cross appeared almost overnight. One Friday they drew their curtains and went to bed, and the next morning it was there, simple and stark.
“Just some religious nuts,” says Tennessee when Mara looks out the window, trying to spy. “Every town needs some.”
Finally someone else worth gossiping about has arrived to take the heat off of two unmarried academics with a fifteen-year age gap. Mara once thought their sojourn in this small town would be temporary, but after five years, it’s become a good life. The town has most things they need—the essentials plus a library and a coffee shop that isn’t Tim Hortons—and just enough yellow-brick 19th-century houses to be somewhat picturesque. They have a refurbished farmhouse outside town and a struggling vegetable garden. Tennessee loves driving to the university on the county highway, windows down and music blaring. Mara knows because they commute together sometimes, on the days she has to go in to teach her two or three classes.
They met at an engineering department wine and cheese. Mara was deep into events with free food back then, she found herself in unfamiliar buildings talking to cheerful strangers all the time. It was hard to make friends as a PhD student, much harder than she’d found it during her MA, and so she followed the food around campus.
She was standing alone next to the bar, really a table where some undergraduates were serving, when Tennessee received his red wine, took a sip, dubiously, and chucked it in the garbage. “Can I buy you a real drink somewhere?” he said to Mara, offering her his hand. “I’m Tennessee Dubois, geography. Appalling name, I know.”
Mara was going through a phase of wearing her hair in braids pinned up at the back of her head. Tennessee said later that the hair was what first caught his eye, then her air of impatience as she selected cubes of cheese. That night, in his lonely man’s bedroom (sad brown curtains, pilly grey duvet), he took out the pins one by one.
That’s what she told Renee the next morning, during one of the gossip breaks that were the main reason they went to the library together. In the courtyard, enjoying an October day bright with red and orange leaves, Mara whispered about her hook-up with an American associate professor in the geography department, and Renee was shocked and impressed. He was the first man Mara’d been with since the previous summer, since Peter. But when Mara was struggling to fall asleep that night, it was Peter’s hands and face she thought about, how he took off his glasses before he kissed her on what had been their first and last time together.
Small-town Mara, the professor’s long-time girlfriend, feels about a million miles away from maybe-in-love-with-Peter Mara, but every so often she feels her past wrap around her like a gauzy scarf, something she can try on again.
One sunny morning she’s grading summer session essays and reads something about dramatic irony, how perfectly readers can see that all the Middlemarch characters are going to go wrong. She’s twenty-three again and in a bar with Peter, trading punchlines in that way that always made her feel lit up like a winning slot machine. That’s when she sees the Jesus people. She means to get to the farmer’s market so she’s rushing, making checks in the margins next to somewhat insightful points. She’s thinking about where the canvas bags are, whether Patty De Haan will run out of big potatoes. The almost-summer air is still and silent, and she hears a car door slam then a shout.
She slinks down on the wicker loveseat and peers through the porch screen. There’s a crowd of ten or twelve people down at the Jesus house. They’re standing in a circle in front of the cross. They join hands. There’s swaying, a low hum that could be singing.
“Do you think it’s a cult?” she asks Tennessee over dinner, after she’s collected the local gossip at the farmer’s market (it’s a short-term lease with some sort of church, according to Barb in the realtor’s office, but certainly not one she’s ever heard of before).
Tennessee is reading the latest issue of Global Environmental Change, making small noises of despair. “Hm?” he says, not looking up. “Oh, probably.”
How did Mara end up with someone so uninterested in a possible cult down the road? She pushes the too-small potatoes around her plate and thinks about dramatic irony in Middlemarch.
All month, rumours fly thick and fast. It’s a town full of churches: Catholic, United, Baptist, pick your poison. (Mara and Tennessee favour atheism.) People have a relaxed and comfortable attitude about God, with church as more of a social outlet.
“It’s odd that they’re all the way out here on the highway,” Wendy, the librarian says. “And not even on the way up from London, where they’d get more traffic.”
“Why the old Baaker farmhouse?” Mara’s cousin Sal demands to know. “Strange place for a church.”
“Lots of people coming and going these days,” is all her husband, Bill, says.
At the library book club, they learn more—that it’s not a group of people but a family, Geoff and Summer McCann and their four children, Sky, Star, Rain and Petal (“Oh boy,” says Wendy under her breath). They move around every few years, finding a new town to preach to. “‘All are welcome,’ he told me,” says Barb, thrilled at having cracked the case.
“Imagine! My mother would roll over in her grave.”
The church seems to operate at the oddest times—Mara will be at home on a Wednesday, working on a journal article, and she’ll hear singing. Or on a Saturday afternoon, when Sal and Bill are over for a late lunch. On Sundays, the yellow house is mostly quiet until the evenings, when they seem to have their biggest meeting of the week. The singing often goes until midnight, with old folk songs and 70s soft rock hits that Mara sang at summer camp. If there’s no wind, the sound carries clear down the road to their place and she often catches Tennessee humming along.
One Sunday afternoon she’s home alone, sitting on the porch with a stack of novels for her new research project but really just staring off into the yard. She’s so lost in thought imagining what the farm was like one hundred years ago that she barely hears the slam of a car door. It’s Geoff climbing out of a pickup, one teenager—a girl with long blonde hair and a dreamy expression—waiting in the passenger seat, window rolled down. She smiles politely in a very unteenage way as Mara comes down the porch steps.
“Hi there!” Geoff says, stopping in the driveway with a raised hand and a smile. “Came over to introduce myself. I’m Geoff McCann, living down the road for the summer with my family. That’s Star in the truck there, and we have three more at home. My wife Summer and I.”
Mara comes closer, aware of her faded lounging-around-at-home t-shirt and too-short denim shorts as she extends her hand to meet Geoff ’s. “Well, hello!” she says, trying to match his easy tone. “Nice to meet you. I’m Mara Albright, I live here with my partner Tennessee Dubois. He’s not here right now, he’ll be sorry to have missed you.” Unlikely, but some conversations call for a white lie.
“Professors down at the university, right? Star will be applying next year.” Geoff has extremely white teeth, somehow unsettling. Star smiles again out the window.
“Good for her,” Mara says. “They have some very respected programs. Tennessee’s a professor, I’m just a lecturer. But it keeps me busy.” Now why did she say that? Geoff steps a little closer and turns to look out across the field with Mara.
“You can really see us from here, can’t you? I hope our gatherings haven’t disturbed you. That’s why I came over, to invite you over tonight. We do a fire and some singing for the summer solstice. Nothing fancy but something to say goodbye to the long days and welcome back the dark. We’ll have some other neighbours there, God willing.”
How quickly a conversation can go from a friendly chat to a cult invitation. Mara looks sideways at Geoff, who’s still gazing out over the fields. For a second she slips back into those one-hundred-years-ago day-dreams, picturing herself as a farmwife and Geoff as her stalwart husband.
“Well,” she says. “That sounds very nice, thank you. We’ll try to swing by if we can.” Now why did she say that? But Geoff must be used to the brush-off.
He squeezes her shoulder and says, “Come just before the sun sets. We’d love to have you,” striding off to the truck so quickly that she isn’t sure the shoulder squeeze even happened. She stands in the driveway waving them off, the ghost of his hand burning on her shoulder.
Without really deciding, she’s decided. Tennessee’s away and Mara’s bored, plus she likes the idea of—how did Geoff put it? Saying goodbye to the long days and welcoming back the dark. Just the kind of pastoral bullshit that an atheist cynic like her can believe in. She changes into something a bit more put together, a floral skirt and a light sweater. Walking down the laneway, gravel crunching under her sneakers, she looks up at the orange-and pink-streaked sky. A dream solstice sunset, the exact kind you’d order if you were a cult leader trying to impress new recruits.
The bonfire is in the McCanns’ side yard, where the previous residents used to have a rabbit warren, of all things. There’s a line-up of trucks and SUVs on the laneway, and a few people who send her friendly waves. Mostly strangers, but a few faces she’s seen around town.
“Mara!” Geoff is saying up ahead. The crowd of people behind him are mingling, and it could be any other social gathering except for Geoff holding out his hands. “Welcome, welcome. We’re glad to have you.”
It seems like he wants to take her hands, so she lets him, and he gazes into her eyes. “To tell the truth,” he says, “I was pretty sure you weren’t going to come. Glad to be wrong.”
This close, he’s handsome in a stock photo, TV cop kind of way. The thick hair, the teeth, the appealing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiles. For a moment she imagines they’re at the altar saying marriage vows. All his attention, focused only on her, is dizzying.
“Well,” she says finally. “Thank you. What happens now?”
They fall into step together, walking toward the bonfire. Beyond it, the cross that was so daunting from down the road turns out to be smaller than expected, not quite the height of the barn door. Mara sees two De Haan cousins and the essential oil vendor from the farmer’s market. The girl from the truck is handing out little booklets and sparklers, with the help of three other blonde children. A willowy blonde woman who must be Summer is engaged in a serious-looking conversation with a young couple. She looks like a Summer (did they all pick out their enviably long, thick hair from some heavenly catalogue?) and also like someone who would be married to Geoff. They’re a tall and attractive set, like matching candlesticks.
“Hi again!” says Star, friendly and businesslike. “The song lyrics are in there if you need them, and we’ll light the sparklers after sunset.”
Silence settles over the group as Geoff raises his arms. “Welcome, welcome, everyone.”
There’s a long moment, an expectant hush. It’s so good to be outside, to be in a group, that Mara’s throat closes up a little. She swallows hard and blinks as much as she dares.
“Thank you all for being here. It’s so good to see new and familiar faces today,” says Geoff. “Summer, will you walk us through the plan?”
“We’ll start with some songs, to send off the long days,” Summer says. Her voice is crisp and firm, not quite what Mara expected. “Then we’ll have a few moments of quiet discussion about what solstice means to us”—oh dear—“and we’ll sing in the darkness, then light up our sparklers.” Out of nowhere, Geoff ’s produced two guitars, and he and the oldest boy begin strumming.
The singing lasts for several more songs and Mara makes it through the meaning of solstice discussion—one advantage of academia is that she’s very good at making up some nonsense at a moment’s notice—and finally it’s time for sparklers. It’s full dark but they’re safe and secure around their ring of fire. Mara’s throat closes up again as she watches the teens and younger kids laughing and running. Maybe she could believe in it. Whatever it is. With no mentions of God or sinning and repenting, it could be anything at all.
“It’s powerful, isn’t it,” Geoff says, suddenly at her elbow. “The night, the fire…there’s something in it that calls to us.”
It’s the kind of non-statement Mara teaches her students to support with textual evidence, but at this moment there is something calling to her, the fire at the centre with darkness all around. She thinks about Peter sleeping over on her couch all those nights, how the darkness of her apartment felt comforting when he was there, and like it might last forever. Right now, she could be anyone at any point in history. She could be that farmwife, or a druid, a sorceress, someone who lives a simple life that follows a well-worn path.
Geoff squeezes her shoulder again. In the firelight, he too could be anyone, a pagan priest, a lord of the manor. They could be two medieval peasants sneaking off into the fields. They could be anyone at all.
Summer’s placid face materializes out of the darkness. “It’s time for the chanting,” she says. That breaks the spell—chanting is weird enough that Mara snaps back to herself. She’ll participate to be polite, but then she’ll go home and text two to four friends about how weird it was.
Still, as Geoff calls for silence again, as they link arms with their neighbours, as their sparklers sputter out and their voices rise together to say welcome to the dark, Mara wants to keep believing in it, that small circle of light in the darkness.
The summer passes and Mara sees Geoff and his family around town, but she doesn’t go back to the yellow house. She doesn’t tell Tennessee so that she doesn’t have to answer any questions or listen to his rant about organized religion. The memory stays with her: the darkness encroaching, the heat of the fire on her hands and face.
In September, Peter emails and says he’s coming to give a talk at the journalism school, and can Mara recommend a good hotel? She calls him. “Stay with us,” she finds herself saying. “When’s the talk? We’ll run you back to the train station the next day.” Now why—again—did she say that? Strange to hear his voice. Mara knows how he’s doing, broadly, all about his wife and son and political reporting job. They email, and have even met for dinner a few times over the years. If she’s had enough wine, Renee can be persuaded to dole out tidbits about his life. Mara wonders if Peter ever asks for tidbits about her life, but she’s not self-destructive enough to ask Renee.
She pens the date onto the kitchen calendar and runs it by Tennessee while he’s distracted by departmental budget meeting minutes. She’ll roast a local chicken for dinner, serve greens from their vegetable patch. Some French cheese as an appetizer. She texts Renee: Invited Peter to stay here while he’s in town. Bad idea / worst idea?
Hours later, Renee replies: Live your life, no regrets! It’s the phrase they used to say in grad school, usually while drunk and trying to justify a bad decision. It reads like an auto-reply. Mara feels chastened, a little silly, like a kid planning an elaborate dinner party of mud pies.
The day before Peter’s arrival, Mara’s out in the garden choosing her greens, which have wilted in the heat wave, when she hears singing. The song drifts over on the still air, an old folk song popular at open- mic nights and church picnics. “You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles,” she sings along, but the sound catches in her throat. In full sun, with no bonfire, there’s no more magic to be had.
The day of Peter’s talk, Mara rides into town with Tennessee. She means to spend the time in the library, but instead she sits outside and watches students running back and forth, clutching books and laptops and one another. She spent hours deciding what to wear for the occasion and was pleased with her polka dot dress that buttons down the front, felt cool enough in the humidity, but now that she’s surrounded by casually stylish students she’s hot and frumpy.
They all meet in the centre of campus for the drive out to the farm. Peter hugs her firmly but quickly, shakes Tennessee’s hand, and makes small talk about how it all went. All the way home, Mara can’t bring herself to look directly at his face—she keeps finding herself gazing at an eyebrow or a shoulder and nodding along to whatever’s being said. She stares at the spot where his brown hair thins ever so slightly, the freckles on his neck. When she feels able to move her gaze to the passenger side window, she watches him smile as he chats to Tennessee about rising sea levels.
After dinner, sitting on the porch with their peach pie remnants, Peter asks about the cross. “Oh, they’re the local cult,” Tennessee says easily.
Mara bites her lip, then volunteers, “It seems to be mostly singing. And vaguely pagan celebrations of summer solstice.”
Peter’s thinking face, which Mara has seen over a hundred different tables in libraries and coffee shops, looks the same. Narrowed eyes, a twisted mouth, so many things going on under the surface that she wants to open his skull and actually look at his thoughts rocketing around.
Tennessee laughs. “They can’t decide what they are. Some sort of pagan-Celtic-Christian muddle. I had a long talk with him at the Foodland, didn’t I tell you, Mara? A perfectly nice fellow, though yes, overzealous about his Lord and personal saviour.”
Oh, Tennessee really is an old windbag sometimes. Her eyes meet Peter’s, and they both look away quickly to avoid laughter. A rush of secret triumph.
“They do seem harmless,” she agrees. “Mostly guitar playing around the cross. But it’s a little much for this town.”
“Then again, what isn’t?” says Tennessee, standing and stacking plates, waving Peter off. “You two stay out here and reminisce. I’m off to bed.”
As he clatters around inside, Mara and Peter smile politely. They do the old-friends-catching-up roll call, running through every mutual acquaintance. Midway through her tepid recap of a run-in with their old Shakespeare professor, Mara feels bone-weary. They have no new, real things to talk about.
“It’s kind of amazing you ended up doing what you love,” says Peter finally, sweeping his arm around to encompass the farmhouse, the night air, as part of what Mara loves. “You beat the grad school odds! You’re one of those success stories Dr. Barton used to talk about.”
“Am I?” Mara says. “A few classes a semester, teaching kids who couldn’t care less about Chaucer. I hitched my wagon to Tennessee’s red dwarf star.”
This is a borrowed line. When Tennessee says it at faculty parties, people are charmed and their faces beam, smiling at his self-deprecation. But now it sounds bitter and sneering. Mara doesn’t know how to do that—take a comment about smallness, a realistic assessment of flaws, and turn it light and charming. That’s a Tennessee skill she’ll never have. And she can see, in Peter’s candle-lit face, soft surprise at her tone and then, disappointment. The truth is that maybe it doesn’t work when you’re saying it about someone else. Someone you love.
Peter says she looks like a success to him, and asks questions about her research, so she goes on for too long about interwar novels by women writers. “They’re so melancholy,” she says. “The characters are desperate for freedom but it makes them so unhappy.” Peter tells a few funny stories about being on the Ottawa desk for a Toronto-based newspaper. Finally, they go up to bed.
Normally Mara relishes the quiet of the country and the sounds of the old house settling around them. Insects outside buzz and chirp, wood creaks somewhere, and she imagines she can hear Peter’s breathing, just like she used to when he slept over on her couch. Her bedroom in that apartment was a converted dining room with glass French doors, and she could see him out there, sunk into the peeling leather couch, the space between them alive with things they hadn’t said.
It happened gradually and then all at once. Renee claimed Peter’d been circling for months, since their first meeting at the welcome barbecue when he’d teased Mara for standing away from the group with her arms crossed, assessing. “Flirting pretending to be friendship,” she said. But Renee was in love with a self-important philosophy student and wanted everyone around her to be fizzy and full of longing, too. It was friendship first, Mara knew that for sure, the kind of immediate friendship that felt as necessary as air. That lasted through seminars and papers and Christmas break, coffee dates and office hours. And it was easy, the easiest thing in the world to spend all day in the library working on their thesis projects, then making a dinner out of snacks at her apartment and talking about novels and art and their classmates. There was no room for longing because they were always together. Renee visited as an emissary from the outside world, other friends came and went, but the easiest, best day of all was a day spent in Peter’s company. He was thoughtful, funny in a sly way that seemed serious, could defuse tension in any heated classroom discussion. Mara felt herself rise to meet him, becoming the sparkiest version of herself.
It might have continued that way, but the little world of novels and art and classmates ended in August. Mara was already booked on a train back to Ontario, and Renee would follow in September. Peter had a reporting internship at an alternative weekly in Vancouver. For three weeks in August, they spent most nights at Smith’s drinking red wine and saying goodbye to someone. The mood was excited, not wistful. They had budgeted, in time and money, for a yearlong master’s program, and they had triumphed.
One goodbye night at Smith’s, Mara’s feet were propped on the rungs of Peter’s chair and his arm around the back of hers, their heads close together because it was too loud in the bar. She felt entitled to his attention, aware of his height and arms in a way she wasn’t usually, and wanted to crowd his personal space. She was teasing him about his teeth—his weird neighbour had complimented his teeth once and Peter was convinced she wanted to harvest his organs. Across the table, Cate was watching them with the cool, evaluating look she wore in seminar.
Mara went to the bathroom. She’d had three ciders, she was flushed and drunk and careful with her dress zipper, and when she emerged Cate was waiting at the sink. “Are you guys flirting?” she asked.
“Who?” Mara said, knowing who. It’s not that she hadn’t thought about it, but the way they’d met, when he’d teased her and she’d been sarcastic back, had seemed to say friendship, and then that’s what it was.
“Mara,” Cate said, raising her eyebrows. “I thought you guys were going to start making out. You should make out!” She turned on the water.
For the next week, Mara thought about making out with Peter. As she packed her four suitcases, she imagined being crammed together in her single bed. Cleaning out the fridge, she wondered if he was a good kisser. But the date of her departure loomed and her last night was already planned: her and Renee and Peter in the apartment, drinking the last bottle of wine. There was no time for last-minute confessions of love.
“Are you sure these aren’t just sad feelings about leaving?” Renee asked. “I mean, you know what I think. But are you sure because this is the kind of thing that ruins friendships.”
Mara was mopping and despairing. “It just feels like something I have to do.”
“Okay, listen,” said Renee. “You better, I don’t know, send him a text first. He’ll come over, then I’ll make an excuse and leave.”
As it turned out, it was in fact the easiest thing in the world to text Peter, Cate thinks we should make out.
You and her? Thanks for letting me know! he replied. “He’s not sure you mean what he thinks you mean,” Renee said. “Come on, Mar. Be brave one more time.”
“Oh god,” she said, and texted back: Funny. No, you and me.
See you tonight, then, was the enigmatic reply.
She didn’t even change out of her cleaning clothes. It went exactly like Renee said: he arrived, they drank, Renee left. It was inevitable, something they didn’t need to discuss. He took off his glasses, lined up everything from his pockets on the coffee table, and then they did a lot more than make out.
Sometime after 3 a.m., Mara rolled over and found Peter right there. “What?” he said quickly.
“I can’t sleep,” she whispered. She was crying, didn’t think he’d noticed until he gave her arm an awkward pat that turned into the gentle, reassuring swoop of his fingers over her shoulder. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I know,” he said. “It’ll be okay. It’s not forever.”
She fell asleep like that, not asking what, exactly, wasn’t forever. His hand soft on her skin, his low voice in her ear making jokes about James Joyce.
In the morning, Tennessee makes coffee and they all say polite things until it’s time for Mara to run Peter into the city. As she pulls into the kiss-and-ride outside the train station, she feels the gauzy scarf of her past self again, or maybe it’s that her outer layers, ten years of working and failing and hardening, have peeled away and now she’s down to the old her again, that softer, thinner skin.
“Well, thanks for having me,” says Peter. “It was great to see you and spend some time with Tennessee.”
She knows she’s going to ask it and that she shouldn’t. She’s so close to getting away with having had an anodyne visit with an old friend. But the question has lived somewhere in her for almost fifteen years. “Do you ever wonder what could have happened between us?”
The mood of quiet politeness shifts to something sharper, more dangerous—the dizzy, reckless feel of that text on their last night. Peter sighs, drums his fingers on his knees, looks at her sideways with his careful, cagey expression. “Sometimes I think about it,” he says. “But our timing wasn’t right.”
No answer will satisfy her because it has to live up to, and then undo, fourteen years of longing. She, too, used to think of timing like it was a force outside themselves. It seemed insurmountable, all those years ago, being on opposite sides of the country and committed to their own paths. Maybe they waited too long to realize what was between them, maybe their lives were meant to diverge. Truthfully, it wasn’t that much to go on. But Mara knows now that you can believe in something enough to give yourself over to it, to fold your life around it. People do it every day.
Peter says, “I think I always expected we’d be back in each other’s lives somehow. But it didn’t work out that way.”
“It’s not that I wish things were different,” Mara says, realizing that this is true: she has her life, and it’s good. She can’t imagine a real, everyday one for them, in which she doesn’t like his mother and he forgets to call when he’s running late. All she sees are their greatest hits. “But I thought they might be.”
“Well, we’re friends, aren’t we?” Peter asks.
“I don’t think we are.” She means it lightly, thinks about how some friendships can stretch across decades and not break, but this one was something else, maybe never friendship at all. She looks at him, fully, with the kind of attention she used to devote to looking at him from across seminar rooms or crowded pubs. The eyebrows that raised when she parried his sarcasm back at him, the faint freckles on his nose that darkened that summer. The bits of a person you forget and remember.
They look at each other, and then he reaches for her, settles his hands on her shoulders. He pitches toward her in the awkward space of the car and rests his lips on her hairline, above her left eye. It’s the smallest moment of contact, barely even a kiss. Just his warm lips, his clean soap smell.
“No, I guess we’re not,” he says. His fingers flexing on her shoulders. An echo of an old feeling rising in her, that wave of possession. And then he leans back and opens his door and unfolds his long body from the car. “Thanks again, Mar.”
Peter disappears into the train station with a single wave, not even a smile, and Mara idles in the line of waiting taxis and tries to understand why her hands are shaking and her cheeks are hot. Here’s the feeling she’d do anything to change, this ache of grief and regret and something sadder, despair at how her life kept going and Peter never came back into it.
She feels a flash of tenderness for her younger self. She wishes she could go back and warn that girl, whoever she was. Listen, she’d say, you only get so many chances in life. And when you’re young you think you’ve got so many more coming, all lined up in front of you somewhere in your future, another three or even five men who will light you up in that way. You think that’s just how it works, life providing you with abundance, but it isn’t. Oh, it isn’t at all.
Photo graciously provided by Joshua Suckoff from Unsplash.
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