When it rained, he and Claire walked together down the trails cushioned in pine needles, the ferns smelling like licorice. At night we played Monopoly and Scrabble, three-handed blackjack, charades. Claire and Ron did routines from Streetcar Named Desire, Picnic. I could see what it was like when they were first together. His admiration for her. That's what she needed to remember, how he was the one who wanted her.
I'd never spent so much time with Ron before. It started to irritate me, how he was always the one running the show. When he got up, he woke me and Claire up. But when we got up first, we crept around, because Ron was still sleeping. A man's world. It bothered me, the way it was Ron who decided the day's activity, whether it was a good day for fishing or hiking or a trip out to the coast. Ron who said when we needed to go to the store and when we could get by another day, whether we took slickers or sweaters or bought firewood. I'd never had a father and now I didn't want one.
But Claire looked healthy again. She didn't throw up anymore. Her coloring grew vivid. She made gallons of soup in a big cast-iron pot, while Ron grilled fish over the open fire. We had pancakes in the morning, or eggs and bacon. Ron smiled, crunching bacon strips. "Poison, poison. And such small portions" — the punch line of a joke they had. Thick sandwiches in our backpacks for lunch, ham and salami, whole tomatoes, smoky cheese.
Claire complained that she couldn't fit into her jeans anymore, but Ron hugged her around the thighs and tried to bite them. "I like you fat. Enormous. Rubenesque."
"Liar." She laughed, swatting at him.
I dangled my line in the McKenzie, where the sun glittered on the surface between the trees, and the shapes of fish darted deeper, where the trees laid their shadows across the moving water. Upriver, Ron cast and reeled, but I didn't really care if I caught anything. Claire walked along the bank singing to herself, in a fluid, effortless soprano, Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you ... She picked wildflowers, which she pressed between layers of cardboard when we got back to the cabin. I felt at home there, the silence, the spectrum of green under a resonant sky ringed by the tall fingers of Jeffrey pine and Douglas fir, a sky you could expect to see drifting with dragons and angels. A sky like a window in a portrait of a Renaissance cardinal. The music of flowing water and the resinous perfume of the evergreens.
I cast and reeled, my back warm in the sun, stared into my shadow in the water where it formed a dark window in the reflections. I could see down to the bottom with the stones and the fishes, the shapes moving toward the fly.
Suddenly the reel sang and the line zipped out. I panicked. "I got one!" I screamed up to Ron. "What do I do?"
"Let him go, until he stops running," Ron yelled downriver to me.
The reel still turned, but finally slowed. "Now bring him back to you."
I reeled, feeling the weight of the fish, he was stronger than I thought, or the drag of the current on him. I dug my heels in and pulled, watched the long flexible rod bend in a whip curve. Then the line went slack. "He's gone!"
"Reel!" Ron yelled as he came wading downriver, carefully, step by step. He had the net out. "He's coming back this way."
I reeled like mad and sure enough, the line turned, he was swimming back upriver. I held my breath, I could not have anticipated my excitement at lowering my line into a river and having a living fish take the fly. Having something alive where I'd come in empty-handed.
"Play him out," Ron said.
I let the line spool away. The fish ran upstream. I shrieked with laughter as I stumbled into a hole and my waders filled with icy water. Ron pulled me up, steadied me. "You want me to land it for you? " Already reaching for my pole.
"No," I said, jerking it from him. It was my fish. Nobody was going to take this fish away from me. I felt as if I'd caught it on my own flesh, line from my clothes. I needed this fish.
Claire came to watch. She sat on the bank and drew her knees up to her chin. "Be careful," she said.
The fish made three more passes before Ron thought it was tired enough to bring in. "Reel him in now, reel him in."
My arm ached from the reeling, but my heart leapt as he broke from the water, gleaming liquid silver, two feet long. He was still thrashing wildly.
"Hold on to him, don't lose him now," Ron said, coming for the fish with his net.
I wouldn't lose this fish if it dragged me all the way to Coos Bay. Enough had slipped through my hands already.
Ron netted him and together we walked to the bank. Ron scrambled up the side, holding the giant thrashing fish in the net.
"It's so alive," Claire said. "Throw it back, Astrid."
"Are you kidding? Her first fish? Bop him," he said, handing me a hammer. "On the head."
The fish flopped on the grass, trying to jump back into the water.
"Quick, or we'll lose him."
"Astrid, don't." Claire looked at me with her tenderest wild-flower expression.
I took the hammer and whacked the fish in the head. Claire turned away. I knew what she was thinking, that I was siding with Ron, with the world and its harshness. But I wanted that fish. I took out the hook and held it up, and Ron took a picture of me like that. Claire wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the afternoon, but I felt like a real kid, and I didn't want to feel guilty about it.
I HATED THAT we had to go back to L.A. Now Claire had to share Ron with phone calls and faxes and too many people. Our house was full of projects and options, scripts in turnaround, industry rumors, notes in Variety. Ron's friends didn't know how to talk to me. The women ignored me and the men were too interested, they stood too close, they leaned in doorways and told me I was beautiful, was I thinking of acting?
I stayed close to Claire, but it made me nervous to watch her wait on these people, these indifferent strangers, chilling their white wine, making pesto, taking another trip to Chalet Gourmet. Ron said not to bother, they could order pizza, bring in El Polio Loco, but Claire said she could never serve guests out of cardboard containers. She didn't get it. They didn't see themselves as her guests. To them she was just a wife, an out-of-work actress, a drudge. There were so many pretty women that summer, in sundresses and bikini tops, sarongs, I knew she was trying to figure out which one was Ron's Circe.
Finally, she went on Prozac, but it gave her too much energy. She couldn't sit down, and she started to drink to even out the effects. Ron didn't like it because she said things that she thought were funny but nobody else laughed. She was like a woman in a film that was badly dubbed, either too fast or too slow. She bungled the punch lines.
IN SEPTEMBER, in wind and ashes, I started the twelfth grade at Fairfax, and Ron went back to work. Now Claire couldn't find enough to do in the husbandless house. She scrubbed floors, cleaned windows, rearranged the furniture. One day she gave all her clothes away to Goodwill. Without sedatives, she was up all night, filing magazine clippings, dusting books. She had headaches, and believed someone was listening in on the phone.