“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.