The Fisherman (32 page)

“Goddamnit,” I said again. Apparently, Dan’s and Howard’s lunacy was catching. I turned and knelt beside my tacklebox. At the bottom of it, underneath packets of rubber worms and loose bobbers, was a knife I’d picked up at a yard sale a few years ago. It looked like your average wooden ruler, a foot long, blond wood, but there was a seam at the six-inch mark. Grip the ruler to either side of that and tug, and a six-inch filleting blade slid out of inches six through twelve. I was thinking that I would draw a little more line out of my reel, then use the knife to cut it. I could secure the extra line to a rock, and if there was any mercy in heaven, once I returned from fetching Dan, the fish would still be here.

As I was standing, something caught at the top of my vision. At the edge of the treeline, thirty feet away, a slender white figure rested its right hand on the trunk of a hemlock. Naked, her hair and skin soaking, a young woman regarded me from eyes as golden as any fish’s. I want to say it took a moment for her face to register, but that isn’t true. Immediately, I knew her, as if I’d only just now watched her chest rise and fall for the last time.

It was Marie.

V

There Fissure

Already, she was sinking into the woods. I couldn’t find the words to tell her to stop, couldn’t find the voice to utter them. It didn’t matter. I was moving forward, propelled by legs still half-asleep. Arms out, mouth moving dumbly, steps stumbling, I staggered after her like a kid playing Frankenstein. My heart—I could not feel my heart, nor the emotion gripping it. What I felt was too big—it was as if it were outside me, a current that had swept me up and was rushing me along. Everything around me, the rock, the trees, the Creek, the rain, seemed to be part of that feeling, of that motion. The only thing separate from it was her, Marie, whose golden eyes did not blink as her bare feet took her deeper into the forest. Her skin was pale, pale as the flesh of a lily, but it was as unblemished as it had been the first time she had dropped her robe in front of me in a hotel room in Burlington. She might have stepped to this moment directly from that one, before the scars on her chest, the bruises on her arms, before her scalp bared, her cheeks dulled, before her body shrank to her bones as the cancer consumed her. All that was different were her eyes, whose metallic hue seemed in keeping with the strangeness of seeing her, here.

You may have read or watched reports of folks who thought a loved one was dead, killed in an accident or catastrophe, and subsequently had that news contradicted when the supposedly deceased opened the front door. You can appreciate how those people must have felt. Here they were, trying to adjust to their loved one’s having been wrenched from the category of the living and thrust into that of the dead. Of course the mind resists such a dramatic change, so in addition to the joy that leapt in them at the sight of their loved one, a small voice inside them must have whispered, “I knew it.” No matter that your wife is lying without breathing on the hospital bed before you, that the nurses have switched off all the machines that were monitoring her and disconnected the wires that allowed them to, you can’t accept it. You may understand it, but you can’t admit the fact into yourself. That surrender has to be negotiated over time. Once it has been accomplished, however, you can imagine how upsetting—how deeply, fundamentally traumatic—it would be to find yourself confronted by the person you had relinquished to death.

My strides were more confident, hers, not as quick. I might have guessed she wanted me to catch her, but I couldn’t read anything in those eyes. At last, she stopped, her back to a large maple. I was so focused on her face that I almost crashed into her. Closer to her than I had intended, I halted, the momentum of my pursuit carrying speech past my lips. “Marie,” I said, the name somewhere between a question and a statement. “Marie.”

“Abe,” she said in the voice I’d resigned myself to hearing only on our wedding video’s tinny soundtrack. Not like this, the rich, slightly throaty tone that rose up into whatever she was saying, filling it with her warmth and intelligence. At the sound of it, my vision swam with tears.

I wiped my eyes, swallowed. “How?”

For a reply, she lifted her right hand to my face and pressed her fingers to my lips. Her fingertips were cool, her skin charged with the briny smell of the sea, but her touch was as solid, as real, as ever it had been. I caught her hand in both of mine. She raised her other hand to my cheek.

A sob I hadn’t been aware was forming burst from me. A second, and a third, followed it, each eruption of sound a convulsion that doubled me over, squeezing tears from my eyes. Marie’s hand in mine, I dropped to my knees, sobs shaking me. She sank beside me, her free hand touching my face, my ear, pushing back my cap to slide her fingers into my damp hair. “Shhh,” she said, “shhhh.” My tears pattered on the dead leaves underneath me. Interspersed with my sobs, a low, keening moan escaped my lips. To be sure, I had wept over Marie, before this. I had cried at her bedside. I had cried at her graveside. I had cried liquor-flavored tears many a night thereafter. The river of tears that rolls through all those old sad songs had poured down my cheeks. But what had me now was of a different order of magnitude entirely. This was no river; it was an ocean forcing its way through a canal. I brought Marie’s hand to my mouth and kissed it over and over again. Her left hand shoved my cap off and stroked my hair. She leaned in to me. The briny tang of her skin filled my nostrils.

She pressed her lips to my forehead. Then to my eyebrows. Then to my eyelids. When she reached the bridge of my nose, she started to make the soft noises, little sighs and groans, which in another life had signaled her growing arousal. She slipped her hand out of mine and used it to lift my chin so that my lips could meet hers. Her mouth was as cool as the rest of her, but she kissed me the way she always had, a press that softened into a caress. She took my head in her hands as she extended the kiss. I was not done sobbing, but the sobs lessened as I responded to her. The moan that was issuing from me was changing tone, sorrow giving way to desire. Marie’s hands were moving down my neck, to the collar of my shirt, to the zipper of my raincoat, which she pinched and lowered. My hands were clasped in front of me, as if I were praying, but when her fingers started unbuttoning my shirt, I released them and reached for her breasts. They were full in my hands, the nipples raised at my touch, and she gasped into my mouth as I cupped them. Her hands moved faster, tugging my shirt out of my jeans, slipping up under my t-shirt and sliding over my chest. I was fever-hot with the want of her, and her cool skin was a balm on mine. Her hands were at my belt; mine were on her hips.

I have desired women before: Marie, yes, and the handful who preceded her, and the few who followed her. I’ve known the hand-shaking eagerness of the young, and the dry-mouthed anticipation of the more experienced. There was a time I broke the speed limit and blew through at least two stop-signs in response to a suggestive phone call Marie made. There was another time I emerged from what had seemed a particularly vivid dream of us making love to discover Marie moving on top of me. The emotion that filled me now, though—it was as if the grief that had been pouring through me had ignited, sparked furnace hot. There was desire present in it, but it was fueled by the grief, which gave my appetite a searing urgency. As Marie dragged my fly down, I pushed her over onto her back. Leaves rustled; twigs cracked. I could not read the expression in her eyes, but her hands guided me into her. She was as cool inside as she was outside, but I was plenty hot for the both of us. “Oh, Abe,” she said. I tried to reply, but couldn’t, all my attention taken by what was happening between us. Her legs raised, clasped my hips. I pressed against her. She gasped and turned her head to the right, closing her golden eyes. I kissed the corner of her mouth. She murmured the sweet obscenities that had first shocked and then aroused me. I groaned. Her head tilted back. We moved faster. She pushed her hands through my hair. We moved slower. She flung her arms out to either side of her. We moved faster again. She cried out a long series of cries, and I shouted as the torrent that had been rising within me found release.

Head swimming, I eased myself off Marie and onto my back. Once upon a time, I would have cracked a joke—at the very least, said, “I love you.” But nothing I could think of seemed appropriate—adequate. Truth to tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of organized activity happening between my ears. The conflagration roaring through me had blown out, extinguished by the finish to Marie’s and my lovemaking, leaving me empty, scoured and scorched by its ferocity. Aware of her beside me, I gazed up at the trees pointing to the clouds overhead, blinking at the rain that made it through the lattice of branches. Mother-of-pearl, the clouds struck me as blindingly beautiful. My mind a pleasant blank, I turned to Marie.

What was sharing the forest floor with me had the same gold eyes, but the rest of its face might have leapt out of a nightmare. Its nose was flat, the nostrils a pair of slits over a broad mouth whose lower jaw jutted forward, exposing the row of daggered teeth lining it. Its hair was stringy, a mane of tendrils. The hand it rested on my chest was webbed, each thick finger capped by a heavy claw. Its mouth opened, and gave forth a sigh of post-coital contentment.

More than anything else, that exhalation sent me scrambling away, crab-crawling as fast as my arms and legs would move me. Had my pants not been bunched around my ankles, I might have gotten further; as it was, my legs caught on one another and set me down on my ass, hard. I grabbed for my belt, simultaneously trying to raise myself to my feet, but the thing that had taken Marie’s place—the thing that had been Marie—was up and approaching me, its webbed hands out in front of it. “Abe,” it said.

Despite myself, I said, “Marie?”

The thing’s features shimmered, as if I were seeing them through a layer of water across which a succession of ripples passed. They settled, and I was looking at Marie. “Abe,” she said, and stepped toward me.

“You stay right there!” I backpedaled, yanking up my jeans as I went. My heel caught a root, dumping me on my ass, yet again. When I stood this time, I had found the filleting knife where I’d slipped it into the pocket of my raincoat and had it out and unsheathed; although, to be honest, I’d never appreciated quite how small it was. Not to mention, I had no idea how to use it outside of cleaning a fish.

“Abe,” Marie—I didn’t know how else to think of her—said.

“What are you?” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“What are you!” The knife trembled in my grip.

“A reflection,” Marie said.

“Of what?”

She smiled, faintly.

I didn’t understand. I said, “You are not my wife.”

She didn’t answer that, either.

“Where are we? What is this place?”

“Dutchman’s Creek.”

“That’s—what about the fish?” I said. “The one I caught over there,” I flung my arm in the general direction of the pool.

“What about it?”

“What is it?”

“A nymph,” Marie said.

“I don’t—what do you mean?”

“You’ll have to come upstream to find out.”

Upstream reminded me of Dan, who had vanished from my mind the instant I’d recognized Marie. “Sonofabitch,” I said. If I had encountered Marie—or this thing passing for Marie—did that mean he’d found what he was searching for? Or that he thought he’d found it? “I came here with a friend,” I said.

“Yes,” Marie said. “Dan. Your fishing buddy.”

“I think—he wanted to go upstream. He was hoping he’d find—”

“His family, Sophie and their boys.”

“Did he?”

“Would you like me to take you to him?”

I could not conceive of any way in which accompanying Marie to wherever she had in mind could be a good idea. But what else was there for me to do? I swallowed. “I guess you’d better.”

“It’s this way.” She turned away from me and set off through the woods on a course roughly parallel to that of the stream. Keeping my knife in hand, I followed her, stooping to pick up my cap where it had fallen. I figured we’d be climbing and traveling the ridge I’d crossed to find the Creek; for the moment, though, our path ran more or less level. I used my free hand to stuff my t-shirt inside my jeans, but couldn’t button my shirt one-handed. I solved the problem by clenching the knife between my teeth long enough for me to button and tuck my shirt. Ridiculous as it sounds, I was worried about Dan taking one look at me and knowing I’d had sex with whatever Marie was. It was a way, I suppose, for me to keep from dwelling on our act in the leaves. I could not believe this shape picking its way through the branches and twigs strewn on the ground was not my wife. She lifted her leg, her foot pointing down like a ballerina’s, and I saw her stepping into the bath. The cheeks of her ass rolled up and down, and I was propping myself up on one elbow, watching her cross the bedroom to the dresser. What I had glimpsed of her other face had been as real as what was in front of me—or no more unreal, if that makes any sense—and if I pictured that Marie moaning underneath me, her mouth opening and closing like a bass gasping in the air, I had to fight the urge to run in the direction of the Creek with all due haste. But looking at the curve of her spine brought to mind all the times I’d pressed my thumbs into the muscles to either side of it, massaging away the day’s tension. Maybe it was the afterglow, or maybe, when you got right down to brass tacks, I wasn’t that much different from Dan, desperate for any chance to recover what I’d lost, no matter what I had to look past to do so.