Dale cleared and planted a lawn that wrapped around one side of the house to the backyard, preserving the bigger pine trees that broke the space up into little glades. The trees were tall and straight like ships’ masts, and the sunlight filtered gently down through their long, shushing needles. On the edge of the lawn he put up a dog run for Bear, our new border collie. Beyond that, a snowmobile trail cut through the thick forest that ran down to the pond. A wide window in the living room framed a triangular slice of still water or gray, opaque ice, depending on the season. In the deepest months of winter, I’d fall asleep to the high whine of snowmobiles whipping through the tree-crowded dark.
On cold, short weekend days, Dale would take me down to the pond for ice fishing and skating. I’d sit on the back of a plastic sled behind the big ice auger and Dale would pull me down the snowy trail, looking back occasionally to make sure I didn’t tip over. At the bottom, we came out of the woods and into the dome of white light made by the overcast sky and the milky ice. Once we got out near the middle of the pond, Dale would hoist up the auger—a huge screw, with sturdy handles—and twist it into the ice to make a fishing hole about a foot wide while I laced up my high-ankle figure skates. Then we’d spend a few hours together out in the cold—Dale sitting patiently by the hole on a cushion, sipping a beer in a foam koozie and waiting for a fish to spring the red flag, me gliding tentatively over the ice, watching for other fishing holes. If I skated too far off, Dale would call me back.
Dale and I fished in the summer, too, on Otter Pond and on many other calm lakes and ponds in the area. We would pick up bait early in the morning from a dusty old convenience store filled with outdated candy—Zero bars, Charleston Chews, Necco Wafers. I was about seven when I caught my first fish, a decent-size rainbow trout that Mom caught again in a snapshot filtered through the blue of a softly falling dusk.
In my memory, all those quiet summer days with Dale blend together, creating one long, peaceful afternoon. Beyond the sandy shallows the water was flat and navy blue, darkened by the reeds and granite boulders below. The trees were thick and wild, branches bending over the water’s surface to snag my line again and again. Dale was always patient when he took my rod from me to jiggle the hook off a branch, or when he waded in to untangle me from underwater grass. I worked hard for the smooth arc that would land my Snoopy bobber out in the sweet spot between the shallows and the deep, smiling when that swissssshh . . . plop sounded just right. There was almost nothing better than hearing Dale tell me I’d done a good job.
As the years passed, there were occasional reminders that I should call Dale by his name; he didn’t want to be “Dad,” and I’m sure this had more to do with his discomfort than any deference to Tom. Dale spent many hours watching out for me while Mom was at work, but he insisted she make all the decisions about my upbringing. If, say, I wanted to spend the night at a friend’s house, I had to wait until she came home to ask her. And although the Otter Pond place was our home, it was Dale’s house: he was the one with the money to buy it.
I didn’t mind that Dale wasn’t Dad; he was a lot more fun than the grumpy, preoccupied men who lived in some of my friends’ houses. The three of us had a common refrain: that Mom and Dale would still be together when he went bald. Dale was muscular and energetic. His hair was barely thinning, just getting a little wispier at the crown of his head. And I knew they were still in love because I’d hear the tidal waves of their waterbed on afternoons when I was supposed to be playing outside. We had plenty of time.
* * *
One summer afternoon, a day when the moisture in the air hung thick and close, I was reading in my bedroom when I heard the sliding glass door to the deck open and close, the rubber seal letting the air in and out like a breath. Mom came to my room and asked me to follow her outside. We thumped down the steps from the deck to the grass, and I saw the garden that Dale had been making on the steep slope toward the pond, finally finished, salvaged railroad ties holding the earth in, lumpy dirt already getting lighter as the topsoil dried in the sunshine. I pictured the tall corn and the waving pansies he had described to me, and I felt a pure, young pride in this man who belonged to me and my mother.
But it wasn’t just the garden they were showing me. Dale held up another surprise: a hexagonal crystal, about an inch across, clasped between his thumb and forefinger. Moist, dark earth clung to it. He had found it in one of the sealed bags of soil he’d bought from the hardware store—not a crystal from a quarry but a glass prism with a hole machined through one of its facets, the kind they sold in the knickknack shop on Main Street. It amazed me that they’d found this shining thing inside a sealed bag of dirt. It seemed like a gift from fate, a little bit of preserved light to prove there would always be magic in whatever they did. Dale gave the crystal to my mother, and she ran a length of fishing line through it and hung it from the rearview mirror of her car.
The crystal stayed suspended there for the rest of Mom’s life, catching the sunlight and the gray rain light and the refracted colors of everything we passed on our long drives along back roads and our short trips to the grocery store. When she made a sharp turn and the crystal tapped against the windshield, she’d reach out and catch it, smoothing its anchoring string down to center, calming its motion to keep it from breaking.
But one day when I was ten, I came home from a friend’s sleepover and sensed a change, as though that light was suddenly hidden by an overcast sky. I distinctly remember that the air in the house tasted different, felt thin and empty, as though its molecules had compressed themselves into a far corner, making way for something large and hard and sharp. People speak of weighted silences, but this one seemed light and brittle, hanging on to that thin air tenuously. I went to my room and read for a couple of hours, willing our house to fill up once more with talk and warmth. Later that night, Mom and Dale started fighting, a rumbling explosion that broke the tension irrevocably. It was fighting like I had never heard before, hours and hours of loud, angry yelling.
For the next couple of months, the three of us fell into a pattern: they would scream late into the night for two or three days in a row while I cowered in my bedroom. Then a tense hush would fall over us all, until, a week or so later, we would gradually come together in a tentative peace. Then, just when I thought the fighting was over, they would break the post-dinner quiet, and the loud, furious shouting matches would begin again. Often when they fought, I sat on my bed and listened, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, why we weren’t happy anymore. How I could fix it.