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.
Ahead of me, Marie stopped. I slowed, drawing up to her but maintaining what I hoped was a safe distance. In front of us, a road ran across the forest floor. Composed of rounded stones sunk into the earth beside one another, it reminded me of the cobblestoned streets workmen in Wiltwyck occasionally uncovered when they were repairing a city street. These stones, though, were much larger, a yard across, and had been worn flat. I’m not much of a geologist: they might have been marble, or they might have been another, whitish rock. Stalks of grass sprouted from the spaces between the stones, while the ground to either side of the road, which was clear of leaves, had a red tint I hadn’t encountered in these parts. This could have been an old country road, bypassed by newer and better routes and forgotten, but it didn’t feel like that. It seemed ancient, as if it had been supporting the footsteps of men and women for as long as they’d been around. Which was impossible for this area, I knew, where the Native peoples had not favored this type of construction, and where the European settlers who had succeeded them and who would have laid such a path had been present for only the last few centuries.