The Cottage’s Promise
Kiren Dosanjh Zucker
The cottage now belonging to the Patel family didn’t have a flagpole of its own, but the American flag guarding the Hendersons’ boat dock waved pointedly in their direction as the Lake Ontario winds swept into Miller Bay from the north.
Once Professor Mohan Patel had earned tenure, his renewed faith in his adopted country led him to test its promises once again. With a contagious type of confidence, Mohan began speaking up at department meetings. Panji started waiting for the Patel children on the elementary school’s playground instead of the sidewalk, joining the other mothers who chatted easily with each other until the school bell rang. Speaking slowly to lull her Indian accent into hiding, Panji answered their polite questions. “Jack is in first grade, and Mandy is in third grade” she explained, carefully pronouncing her children’s American nicknames while thinking of them as Jagdeep and Manjit.
One afternoon, Panji exchanged pleasantries with a woman named Laura, who kept tugging on her blonde ponytail as she glanced around the playground, searching for a more familiar face. Both women turned away with relief when the school doors flew open. Panji eagerly scanned the crowd of children for her black-haired son and daughter, whom she could call by their proper names once they had walked far enough from the school. She had not noticed Mandy running to her, but now saw her standing in front of her, her large brown eyes spilling out tears.
“Mommy! Tell Shannon I was born in America! She called me a liar!” Manjit was pointing to a girl who was already in Laura’s protective embrace, their identical hairstyles and pink ski jackets helping them to fold in together like paper dolls.
As Panji’s pride fumbled with the anger fighting its way into her veins, she reached for her daughter’s hand but ended up holding the Brady Bunch lunch box she had packed that morning.
“Certainly, you were born in America. Don’t be silly, Manjit, darling.” Panji instantly chastised herself for her mistakes: for not catching her daughter’s Indian name before it made an early escape, for hiding her children’s real names from those who still saw them as outsiders.
After a few years of pushing against the invisible borders that divided his family from those Americans with unquestioned birthrights, Mohan had been drawn to the cottage’s lakeshore. The crescent-shaped bay offered Lake Ontario a place to rest before stretching out again beyond the bay’s horizon, reaching Canada, another country that laid a claim of its own.
The two-story wood-shingled cottage which Mohan hastily purchased had no fence or driveway separating it from the one-story cabin that the Hendersons, a pleasant, aging couple resembling a set of salt-and-pepper shakers, called their “camp.” On the opposite side, the Patels’ border was marked with tall evergreen trees, keeping their other neighbor out of reach.
On weekends from early spring through late autumn, Mohan would park his family’s Volvo station wagon next to the Hendersons’ Chevrolet van on the weedy ground that abruptly ended at a short stone cliff. A set of concrete steps led down to a rocky bit of shoreline that the two families shared; the Hendersons’ boat dock and motorboat stood at a polite distance from the Patels’ side of the shore. Dressed in polyester pants and short-sleeved button-down shirts in summer, and wool slacks and cardigans in autumn, Mohan would unload bags of groceries, while the children lugged their books and resentment inside. After a week of greeting neighbors with a forced smile and dressing self-consciously in tweed or linen as the college professor’s wife, Panji would wear her frown and denim skirts into the cottage.
A man and a teenaged boy, who Mohan assumed were the Hendersons’ son and grandson, would sometimes arrive in a large truck, parking behind the Volvo. Avoiding trouble, Mohan would not complain, leaving the pair to the task of unloading their shiny contraptions that would chop noisily through the bay’s waters.
In the twilight, usually with an assortment of guests, Mr. and Mrs. Henderson would gather near the parked cars, cooking the day’s catch of fish on an outdoor barbecue grill, still euphoric from a day spent cheerfully exercising dominion over the water.
Witnessing the lake bear this disturbance, this affront to its sparkling, noble horizon, Mohan was forced to abandon his vision of peacefully gazing beyond the bay’s confines from atop the stone cliff. Sitting inside with a chipped teacup in his hand, Mohan regretted that the kitchen window did not offer a full view the bay’s opening to the majesty of Lake Ontario.
A tumble of chairs hugging the cottage’s stone fireplace, however, offered a slightly better vantage point. During their frequent visits from Toronto, Panji’s youngest brother, Ajit, and his Canadian girlfriend, Eleanor, were told to sit in those preferred spots while Mohan positioned himself to block their view of the small cabins dotting the bay’s tip. Panji would fold her brother’s bedding to let her children slump on the scratchy sofa that had come with the cottage, as they tried to remain unseen as well.
To Panji’s chagrin, Eleanor would not sit still for long. With a bandana neatly tied around her auburn hair and her blue jeans rolled evenly up to her knees, she would blow a kiss to her boyfriend and descend to the shoreline, out of the view of those who remained inside. More troubling to Panji, Eleanor would frequently call out as she paused at the screen door: “Jack, Mandy, do you want to join me?” In Eleanor’s blue eyes, Panji saw pity tucked into that seemingly lighthearted invitation. Panji would then hesitantly allow her children’s passage. “Be careful, Manjit and Jagdeep” she would say through slightly clenched teeth as she closed the screen door behind them. The trio would return with a collection of rocks that had been smoothed over in the lake’s depths, washed to the bay’s shore, only to be gathered in the shallow waters lapping against the Patels’ property. Jack would remember too late to roll up his khaki pants, hoping his mother would not notice the seaweed stains. The hems of Mandy’s long cotton skirts could not hide from her mother’s frustration.
On an August Saturday, Panji laid out on the cottage’s kitchen table two bracelets of red silk threads interwoven with strings of gold beads, and an amber-colored bottle of drugstore perfume. In a voice of forced cheerfulness, she asked her brother and children to meet her in the kitchen. “Today is Rakhi, a festival celebrating the bond between brother and sister.” This explanation was aimed at Eleanor, who was standing to the side with a curious smile.
Panji then ordered her daughter to tie one of the bracelets around her brother’s wrist. “Now wish your brother a long and healthy life.” Mandy mumbled the words as she tied the bracelet on his wrist too tightly. Jack yelped, and both the siblings laughed as Mandy loosened the knot. “Hey, be serious!’ chided Panji, putting the perfume bottle in Jack’s other hand. “Now, give this to your sister, and tell her that you will never forget her and always protect her.” Mandy wondered if Jack had picked out the perfume himself as she thanked him. She always felt bad for Jack at Rakhi, having to keep the bracelet on for eight days; luckily, his first day of junior high school was still one month away.
“Now, my brother, it’s our turn” Panji announced to Ajit. During the children’s exchange, Ajit had slipped out the door to his parked car and reappeared with a Niagara Falls Gift Shop bag. Eleanor had cringed, unnoticed by all but Jack. When she had watched her boyfriend try to surreptitiously purchase a “Flowers of Canada” scarf at the gift shop, she had assumed he was buying her a gift, a token of gratitude for making these frequent trips across the Canadian/U.S. border, for putting up a cheerful front during these doleful weekends with his overbearing sister and her unhappy family.
After Panji tied the second bracelet securely around her brother’s wrist, she enthusiastically opened the bag he offered her and admired the scarf sitting in a thin plastic box before remembering to wish Ajit a long and healthy life.
As Panji started to recite the promise that Ajit was to make to her in return, Eleanor interrupted: “I don’t think you have to worry about your Ajit ever forgetting you, Panji!” Her effort to frame the remark in laughter failed, her improvised chortle falling around her with a thud.
The Hendersons’ son was named Paul, as Eleanor found out later that afternoon. Leaving his father to clean the fish they had caught together, Paul approached the pretty young woman standing with the awkward foreign children from next door.
“Come join us on the boat tomorrow,” he said to Eleanor, admiring her freckled shoulders in the lowering sun. Eleanor paused, hugging the two children to her. “Is there room for my niece and nephew too?” Confused, Paul mumbled, “sure, the more the merrier, I guess.” Jack and Mandy smiled approvingly at the woman they could now rightfully call Aunt Eleanor, against their mother’s directions.
That night, tossing ash on the barbecue grill’s embers, Paul Henderson remembered that the boat had room for only two more. Hopefully, the invitation was already forgotten.
If he had listened carefully over the waves caressing the shore, he may have discovered what the wind was eagerly carrying: a young couple’s fierce whispers mixed with a woman’s sharply spoken foreign words and a man’s pleas for her to “calm down.”
The next morning, Eleanor, dressed in a bathing suit, floppy hat, and terry-cloth shorts, descended the stairs. “Jack and Mandy! let’s go for that boat ride” she said crisply, donning her sunglasses and picking up her straw purse.
Mandy retreated behind her mother. Jack stepped forward, taking Eleanor’s hand, his rakhi bracelet momentarily catching in her fingers.
As they reached the Hendersons’ boat dock, Eleanor bent down and whispered, “you can take off the bracelet for the boat ride; I will hold it for you.” Jack gratefully obliged; Eleanor then sprayed them both with sunscreen which she tucked back inside her purse, along with Jack’s rakhi bracelet.
Mr. and Mrs. Henderson, standing on the dock with their grandson as Paul climbed into the boat, gave them a friendly wave. Jack was amazed at how they did not make a fuss over their guests; instead, they casually asked Eleanor to grab one of the coolers before handing them both bright orange life jackets and telling him to choose a hat from a canvas bag lying on the deck. Stepping down into a boat for the first time, Jack was shocked by the lake’s power to knock him down, to carry him away. The water he had waded in, that had lapped around his ankles, was now holding him captive, asking him to trust it while keeping him unsteady.
From the lake, the cottage did not look lonely, or even that different. On the other side of the evergreen trees that lined the cottage, which Jack and Mandy had been warned to not go near, stood a silver mobile home. The Hendersons’ other neighbor had a well-kept stone home with a gravel walkway leading down to their own boat dock, from which a sailboat bobbed. The cabins that seemed so small from the cottage’s kitchen window came into vivid view, with families paddling together in canoes or playing badminton; their laughter was drowned out by the Henderson’s boat’s motor, but Jack thought he heard it.
Eleanor rested both her elbows on her knees as she leaned in to talk with Mrs. Henderson as if they knew each other well. Jack saw his father standing alone outside the door, his hands clasped behind his back, growing smaller as Paul Henderson steered the boat to the middle of the bay. Paul’s son, who remained silent and nameless before boarding his jet ski, slowly circled the boat. Suddenly, the jet ski roared, tilting sharply and then speeding toward the horizon.
Mohan watched as the boat bobbed like a cork in the violent wake of that jet ski. With some relief, he noticed Eleanor grabbing Jack and pulling him close, both facing away from the shore. Mohan couldn’t see Eleanor’s smile or hear the Hendersons’ amused response to getting soaked because of their own grandson’s crass impertinence, but he could sense his son’s inherited fears breaking away that summer day as the boy sat among those who lightly embraced the unexpected.
Years later, when no one was left to call him by his Indian name, Jack stood near the cottage’s door, staring at the angry waters that had risen and reclaimed the rocky shore from Miller Bay. His mother had passed away before his father, who had left the cottage to their son, a promise he made silently on the day Jack lost his rakhi bracelet, the same day as Jack’s first and only boat ride.
Eleanor had taken the blame, explaining that she had told Jack to take off the bracelet, that she had foolishly thought it would be safe in her bag. Panji kept her fury quiet until they were in the Volvo, following the cloud of dust raised by Ajit’s car on the way back to the main road.
As his mother berated him while his sister stayed frozen on her side of the back seat, his father had interjected American-style euphemisms such as “accidents happen.” Then, in defeat, Mohan had added solemnly, “what is done is done.” Jack remembered looking at the cars passing them on the highway, catching glimpses of other families, and wondering what they were saying to each other.
In the weekends that followed that summer and into the autumn, Jack would quietly leave the cottage to wade in the water alone, hoping to find the missing bracelet. As Eleanor slipped out of their lives even before she left Ajit, Jack blamed himself for her disappearance. If only he had kept wearing his rakhi bracelet on the boat, or if he had taken it off on his own and put it in his pocket, then Eleanor would have stayed, still coming to the cottage and leading him and Mandy outside to collect stones.
Kiren Dosanjh Zucker lives near Los Angeles, California with her husband and their two daughters. In 2023, her short story, “Memory of a Braid”, won the American Bar Journal’s Ross Competition for Legal Short Fiction and was published in the American Bar Journal (November 2023). She also authored “Lost in a Place Called Home” published in The Pine Cone Review (2024).
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