It was time to go, but I did not see Sylvie, and it was only when we reached the bank I saw she was already there waiting. It looked as though she had been crying, but I was not sure and did not say anything.
The sky was ablaze, red-golden by then, tearing through the final darkness as we loaded ourselves into the boat. The sun fired harder, rose-gold and copper over jeweled water, and the iron mountains in the distance were beginning to glow, as the fog draping the silent water slowly burned away. Soon it would be full light and beautiful, and fill all the people along the shore and all those out on the lake with the awe and wonder of how perfect and well loved they were, in the way certain mornings make you tremendous with the knowledge of just how beautiful life is, and how connected all life is — everything that has been alive and everything that ever will be alive — and how magnificent it would be to live forever.
Sylvie was holding the porridge, which was wrapped in a broad leaf, and still steaming in the morning chill as the heat rose from it. My shoulder was beating full of pain, so I knew I could not suffer it much longer, and was anxious to go.
Sylvie saw I was hurting and trying to hide it, and I knew she knew it. I smiled at her, and we thanked the blue-black man for the boat, and the blue-black woman for the food, and the blue-black children just for being, in a state of thankfulness.
It was our boat now, but for one piece of business. As he pushed us off into the water, the blue-black man paused and made a staccato chanting we were not expecting, which was a prayer and blessing, or at least I took it to be.
He shoved us from the shore then, pushing us out until the water came to his waist.
“I will row,” Sylvie said. “You need to rest.”
“No, it will go faster if we both do. At least until it becomes too difficult.”
“Do you remember the way?”
“I think so. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“We are safe now.”
There was a dull, brass sheen to the air at the horizon, and to the smooth white stones and pale birds all along the shore and the mountain’s blue iron still in the far distance, as Sylvie arranged herself facing the shore, and took the port scull. I faced the prow, with the other scull in my left arm, which when I swept the water did not aggravate the wound too much.
“You will tell me if it gets any worse,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
“I will be fine.”
“Do you promise me you will be fine? This time I really will not know where home is anymore without you.”
“We are headed north,” I told her. “The sun should always be at the right, and we will only be about eight and a half miles to the other side. If we stay on the hypotenuse it will only take three or four hours.”
“That is a long way, what with the bullet still inside of you.”
“It’s not far,” I said.
“If anything happens to you — just promise me you will not die.”
“I promise,” I said. “I will never die.”
“Don’t make me cry. We have to take care of each other, just as they do. It is what our lives are for. If you die we won’t be able to, and everything will be meaningless.”
“I won’t die. I promise.”
“I believe you.”
“May I ask something?” We had finally pulled beyond sight of the shore.
“Anything you wish.”
“When did you first know you loved me?”
“When I first saw you,” she said. “You were in your boat, just like this, and I knew we were going to meet. And then you came to dinner. Do you believe that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“When did you figure it out?”
“At dinner, I think,” I replied. “Except before I could accept it, first it had to get through all the parts of my heart I did not know, until I could see it was all of love.”
We plunged the sculls into the water and watched it ripple, feeling how alive and fortunate we were.
“We might have died,” she said.
“We did not,” I said.
“How is your shoulder?”
“Holding on. Are we on the hypotenuse?”
“I remember the way.”
“Okay.”
“Can I tell you something?” she asked.
“Whatever you wish.”
“It sounds foolish, but when I was waiting for you at the shore, I felt in my whole body the energy of my feet plunged into the earth, and every particle within me started to disintegrate and pull toward the sun, and then all of my energy and all the energy in the world were flowing through me, and all of you, too, and I wept.”
“You had a moment of grace.”
“Have you felt such a thing?” she wanted to know. “I mean, really felt it?”
“Not before I met you. I think before I only knew the rapture.”
“Honey, what happened with your other woman?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The one before me. The one you loved, and never talk about.”
“I told you.”
“You told me the story, but not what it did to you. I know that you loved her.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was afraid to ask about her before. Now I am not. Because I know we are together.”
“It is the past.”
“The past does not frighten me, unless it frightens you.”
I reflected a while, remembering deeper, an open window down a summer corridor, where a birthday cake cooled on a side table. I walked toward its wafting aroma, a pilgrim, to my own first memory. Outside, a truck parked in the middle of the street with sirens that do not sound, but glow bright as candles on a winter night. I walked into the house, sensing something was the matter and asked where she was, and was told not to worry. And the way in which it was said made me ask again, and I am told again not to worry — She has only gone to visit friends. I pressed further and no one answered, so I submitted to those in charge. Later, when I would not stop asking, they told me she was in the hospital, and I asked what that was. It is for people who are sick. I asked what was wrong; what had happened, and when would she be well. No one answered. They were in charge, and I submitted. But later they confessed, She is not coming home, and I asked, Why? Because she has gone home. I thought this was her home, and asked where else her home could be, and they told me it was where God is. I asked about God. He is the Lord who made the world, and everything in it, and where we will all go one day. She is with Him, and is happy now. When will she be back? We all go to the Lord someday. And it is awhile before I unravel it. Heaven means death. And I remembered the song they sang in church, because it was her song, and her mother’s song. And the cake that day is the last I had of her sweet breath in my face and sweet smell of her skin in my nose when I pressed to her bosom. And that dessert was the last sweet bite in my memory’s mouth, and it was still sickly sweet. I did not have a mother after that, nor trust what my father said. I knew later all fathers were liars, the world demands it of them, but found out too soon, and wished for one more memory, but had lost all memory before that, except the light from her eyes sometimes, in dreams, in my cells themselves.
I did not know if the self we sometimes claim to know is truly the self, but I felt my entire being on a great ocean flowing into everything around the lake as I looked down and saw myself in the boat, and saw Sylvie, and saw the lake and both shores. I saw the errors of my life, and they fell all away as the overflowing price of being alive, and I saw its triumphs, and they enfolded me as its bounty.
“Sweetheart?”
“Yes.”