“He didn’t talk about it till years later. Then he said that it was the scariest thing he had ever seen. The cold, it preserves everything, and so he saw bodies, lots of them. Native Indians, Mafia hits, drowned swimmers. All of them jumbled together, as perfectly preserved as on the day they died.”
I scramble on my knees, leap to my feet, and start walking fast down the pier. He runs behind me, says, “What’s wrong? You’re shaking. It’s just a story. Something people say. I’m not even sure it’s true.” But I can’t shake the image. Those layers of bodies, just like the salmon, all held unmoving in water, the sins of this land held in perpetual silence like the layers of a grotesque cake. All water is connected, and my father’s body was pulled from a river. I remember his closed coffin. Samson, who might be captured in water or not. Nothing is forgotten or finished. All of history is lodged in the earth, in the water, in the strata of our flesh.
*
We drive to other places. Gorgeous high vistas opening onto unreal views, pine ridges, the lake like an emerald cut askew, shimmering far below. We see silent-footed deer deep in the woods, wild turkeys so large and regal I vow never to eat their domesticated brethren trussed and carved on the Thanksgiving table again. But I’m quiet through it all. A certain cold came up from the lake and dipped a finger into my jugular, and all his talking, all these beautiful sights cannot melt the icy shards in my veins.
I tell him about my father’s death that night. He holds me close in our hotel bed as I shake and cry and tell him what water means to me, what the image of bodies in water does to me. There are other memories I cannot speak of, but now I fall asleep in his arms and feel that I have reached safe harbor.
Fourteen
In these early days I wonder if it is possible to be heartbroken with happiness. Yes, a cliché, but in the cavity of my chest, in the embrace of my ribs, my heart unfurls. There had been a whorled shell around it, like a ripple-edged, tightly closed clam. My heart had been a pearl in the center of it. He had slid a knifepoint into a crevice and prized with all his strength, and this covering had cracked open. The heart muscle, freed now, expands and fills as if with tide-pulled liquid. The sound of his voice, the silk of his skin—these are the sum of my treasure. I calibrate my days around his presence; I weave my life around him. This is what he does for me: he breaks my heart with happiness.
In some far part of myself, I know that it is dangerous to love like this. I know that this love has meant letting him occupy the space of my spirit. But my spirit was a room I had left long ago. Letting him reside there, letting him be the whole of my interior, is to feel my ghosts rise and leave. Pain retires to the far shores; it is a glorious and complete inhabitation.
*
We have six months in our kingdom of two. It is everything I’ve ever wanted and I could have lived like this the rest of my life, but one weekend morning he says, “We should go out and meet everyone!” I don’t want to. I haven’t returned calls for months, and now my phone barely rings. I have him. Who else do I need? “We need friends,” he says. “You should call yours. I’ll call mine.” I don’t, but he does, and quickly I learn that there are many people who adore him. We go out with them. They hug him tight and ask, “Where the hell have you been?” and he introduces me and they say “Oh!” with surprise in their eyes.
Now I see the ease with which he fits with these people. I witness their delight in shared memories, the way the conversation rolls off their tongues, the loud laughter. These are folks he has collected throughout his life. There are a few from high school, who escaped the same dreary little hometown and came west; a whole contingent from his art school years; and some other friends he’s made in adulthood. They are mostly American, mostly white. They have a kind of perfect belonging, a knowing of where their earth is, where their roots sink. Next to them I feel like a hydroponic plant, roots exposed and adrift.
We go to parties, dinners, bars—a whole series of events to make up for the six months they refer to as his “kidnapping.” A term that makes me feel like the kidnapper. As if those first glorious months had not been mutual, as if I were the aggressor and he the taken. I don’t like sharing him; I dread these nights. It never feels easy; there is always some discordant note.