Blood in the Water and Other Secrets

by Janice Law

  “You will know when you have children. The fear, the regrets. It left him with a slight limp. Most of the time it was undetectable, but when he was tired, you noticed.”

  “Athletic injuries are so common now,” Michael said. “My right knee isn’t all it might be.” He was aware of a strange, tactile memory, not in his mind so much as in his shoulders: the weight of pads, the last of the old-fashioned leather pads, and the shock of impact, the springy force of bone and muscle and leather.

  “Oh yes,” she agreed. He could feel how much she wanted to agree with him. “And contemporary lives hare certain parallels, certain points in common. Like you and Mark. The same age, the same desire to ‘see the world.’ Music as a child, too, and sports? Did you play sports, too?”

  “Soccer,” Michael said too quickly. “And a little tennis.”

  “Tennis, too,” she said with a smile. Her smiles were beginning to make him uneasy. She seemed to be finding some sort of confirmation from him, and Michael told himself that he was crazy to be trapped in a café by this stranger.

  “It’s getting late,” he said, looking at his watch. “I really do have a meeting.”

  The old buildings were turning from sienna to a deep, shadowy umber, and the waiters were putting down the umbrellas. The sky had shifted imperceptibly from blue to pink, and her sunglasses reflected an amber and purple void.

  “Of course,” she said, “of course you must keep your appointment,”

  There was a hint of condescension in her voice, and Michael said, “It might not have been the way you remember. It might not have been that way at all.”

  “But you know nothing about it,” she said.

  “He never knew his father,” Michael said. “You told me that. What boy wouldn’t be unhappy? And in a small town . . .”

  “Where everyone knows everything? Is that what you think?”

  “Children are cruel.”

  “And adults, too. We are not an attractive species, are we? You think he was miserable, that he ran away, that for twenty years, twenty years! He left his mother wondering what had happened to him. Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “He wrote me every week,” she said triumphantly. “Or called. Called more than wrote. Collect. My phone bills were huge. Hi, Mom, he’d say. I’m in Cleveland or Denver or Mesa. Wherever. I was going to fly to San Francisco and meet him there in two weeks. To celebrate his cross-country trip. Does that sound like alienated youth? I got the records from the phone company and showed them to the police. Week after week, he called. Then new friends, the campsite up in the aspens with the lake and the lead-colored mountains, and he was never heard from again. What do you think?”

  “His story might be different,” Michael said. “He might have wanted to know—”

  “Secrets?” she asked. Her well-shaped hands had rather long nails. Rather long; he had not noticed that. And though the light was almost gone, she still had not removed her glasses. Michael turned slightly. Three of the waiters were back at their station. One was smoking, the other two were starting to wipe up the tables and put away the chairs.

  “What do we owe our children?” she asked. “Love, care, a decent life. Do we owe them our history? Yes? Even if it is a terrible one?”

  “It isn’t for me to say. It was for your son.”

  “But he’s been dead for twenty years. You must answer for him.”

  Michael felt his chest tighten. He’d developed a touch of asthma after he turned thirty; it acted up under stress or in smoky places. “I would want to know,” he said. “He would be a grown man and he’d want to know.”

  “But by now Mark would have a secret, too,” she said. “As you must. By thirty-six, one has had time to accumulate follies and secrets. Isn’t that right?”

  “But you believe your son is dead.”

  “Mark has one of two secrets: the secret of his death or the secret of his disappearance.” She leaned forward in her chair, and for the first time, Michael caught a glimpse of her eyes, light, lighter than his own, intent, pained, and cruel. He understood that she was not pathetic but dangerous. “I propose a swap,” she said.

  “I can see you were always manipulative,” he said before he could stop himself. “Trading off one thing for another. Trading silence for a ‘nice’ life. For money, for protection.”

  “For my son’s happiness,” she replied quickly. “For a way to live. I was eighteen years old. No, I lied, I was barely seventeen when he was born, and scared to death. At seventeen he was on a cross-country trip to ‘find himself,’ but at that age I was faced with supporting an infant and myself with all my hopes and dreams ended.”

  “You should have thought of that before you got into bed.”

  “Do you suppose that’s what he thought?” she asked. “I would be happy if he had, but I think he had other fears. You would understand that. I can see you have imagination. I can see you have an appreciation of what is not ordinary.”

  “Things happen,” Michael said. A little breeze sprang up out of the arcades and chilled his damp chest.

  “Things happened up in the aspen grove,” she said. “I am an intelligent woman. I didn’t know that at seventeen— or even at thirty-four. I’ve discovered that since. Twenty years is a long time. The works of Shakespeare, the theory of relativity, a treatment for cancer. What can’t be done in twenty years if one puts one’s whole mind to work?”

  “Not everyone can write like Shakespeare,” Michael said.

  “But maybe there is a task for everyone,” she said. “A unique task. My task was always Mark, protecting him, searching for him. You might be interested in how I proceeded.”

  “It is getting late,” he said.

  “Yes,” she agreed, ‘very late. Brian, David, Judy, and one other with Mark. Up in the aspen grove. I spoke to the camp manager. He is a rather sour, indifferent man. He remembered drinking, marijuana, loud music. The night Mark disappeared, he heard shouts in the dark, but he was not one ‘to borrow trouble.’ That was his phrase, ‘to borrow trouble.’ He just sat in his office and collected the camp rentals, but he was decent enough to store Mark’s gear.” She reached into her bag and produced a snapshot. “Judy. It took five years to find her. A fortuitous meeting. You know, it was rather sad about her. She died on her honeymoon in Hawaii— one of the very first cases of attacks on tourists. She left the campsite the same night Mark disappeared. I got these from her.”

  Michael looked at the photos spread on the table: young men with scruffy beards, shorts, hiking boots, and big rucksacks on frames. He remembered the smell of dust and unwashed socks and hemp. “That was David,” she remarked.

  “Was?”

  “It only took me three years to find David. An unattractive person,” she added reflectively. “Not the sort of friend Mark had been used to having. He had a motorcycle accident. I read later that they believed he’d been forced off the road by another vehicle.”

  “How did you find him?” Michael asked.

  “Judy’s snapshots. She knew his name. I found his address by contacting very motor vehicle department in the country. It took a lot of time. David told me about the party. There had been a fight, he thought, but he had been too drunk to remember. In the morning, he said, Mark was gone. I did not believe him.”

  “Perhaps you should have believed him,” Michael said.

  “But that would have raised other questions. Brian, now, took nearly eight years. He’d gone into camping equipment, working as a mail-order company for serious backpackers and hikers. There are a surprising number of mail-order companies. I paid to have a computer age the image from Judy’s snapshot. And, of course, travel is my business. I found him in San Diego.”

  “How did he die?” Michael asked. His voice sounded hoarse, unfamiliar.

  She looked at him quizzically. “He died in a fall,” she said. “Ironic for a climber, but he fell down his office stair.”

  “Four years ago?” Michae
l asked.

  “About that. I’d figured maybe another six or seven years for you, but there is always serendipity. I saw you sitting here when I least expected to, but of course you’d always been in my mind.”

  “Of course,” Michael said.

  “And now we must swap,” she said. She laid her handbag on the table. It was the size of a small duffel bag and looked heavy.

  “Perhaps you do not really want to,” he said.

  “Perhaps you are afraid,” she said. “Afraid to know.”

  “None of this has anything to do with me,” Michael said. “Now Mark . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Mark was afraid.”

  She waited.

  “When it happened— and before— he was afraid . . .”

  “Ah,” she said, “when what happened?”

  “The fight, the accident. It really was an accident; it was no one’s fault.”

  “Up in the aspens,” she said. “The night of the party.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was afraid . . .” she stopped, and, for the first time, hesitated.

  “He was afraid of violence, of unforseen craziness and confusion.”

  “Why?” she asked and bit her lip.

  “I think that is what you have to swap,” Michael said. The lights were coming on. Their golden pinpoints swam in her dark lenses.

  “There is no way he could have known,” she said softly.

  “There are always rumors, hints.”

  “In a small town, yes, rumors, hints, whispers.”

  “And when it happened— we were all drunk, you know— when it happened—”

  “It? It?” she demanded.

  “You’ve been there,” Michael said. “The loneliness of it, the mountains, the sheet of water with the trees quivering and dancing.”

  “The campsite was sordid.”

  “In the mountains, you feel small,” Michael said. “The wind comes down and blows your soul away.”

  “But if he was afraid,” she said, “he was afraid of himself.”

  “He had a temper,” Michael agreed.

  “But nothing like . . .”

  “You were going to say?”

  “I was going to day, ‘Nothing like his father.’ Nothing like.”

  “Yes he was worried,” Michael said and gripped the edge of the café table.

  “There was no sign,” she said carefully. “There was no sign whatsoever. Schizophrenia develops typically in adolescence. His father— his father was ill from the time he was eleven or twelve.”

  “A fine father you picked for your son,” Michael said.

  “‘Picked’ is not the right word. But that’s another story. We were talking about Mark. He was seventeen when he disappeared. True, the danger years, but there was no sign ever.”

  “But you must understand,” Michael said. The night awash in beer, rivalry, anger, a sudden violence—”

  “And my son was killed,” she said in a cold voice.

  “There was blood,” Michael admitted; he sounded surprised. Yes, there had been blood. “Even in midsummer, it is very cold there in the morning. The light is bluish and the mountains are the color of lead. You can wake up there and see the very shape of your fears lying in a pool of blood.”

  “You had killed . . .”

  “Let me give you the situation, all right? This guy was in the camp. A stranger passing through. He joined the party that night. He made a pass at Judy, picked a fight. In the morning, he was lying dead in the tent, and the others were gone.”

  “They would have had ordinary fears,” she observed, not unsympathetically.”

  “They bugged out. Mark had no head for alcohol. By the time he came to, everyone else was gone. He was left to . . . clean up.”

  “The lake,” she suggested.

  “The lake is very deep,” Michael agreed.

  “But not as deep as deception.”

  “Nor as madness. There was the proof, wasn’t there? Proof of what he’d always wanted not to know. Proof of the rumors about crazy Uncle Ben, who’d done something terrible, who was locked up far away, who could never, ever be released.”

  “You knew all this and yet you left him,” she said, her voice dangerous again.

  “I’m trying to give you the situation.”

  “The situation in which he died or in which he ‘disappeared’?” She began fumbling in her purse and Michael stood up.

  “It was Uncle Ben, wasn’t it?” he demanded. “Mark’s father was loony Uncle Ben?”

  “You see,” she said softly, “why it was better not to tell him. You see how much I had to protect him from. You do see that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe you can see why he had to protect you, too.” Michael’s whole body pounded with his heart like a great resonating chamber, and a gray mountain light suffused the Café Visconti, bringing with it the inescapable awkwardness of death. “Why life was impossible for him. How could he have told you, for God’s sake!”

  “He would have told me in the end,” she said calmly. “We were very close. I can’t expect you to understand that, but he would never have left me wondering and grieving for twenty years. Never. You had an ordinary life, a conventional home. You have no idea.” A little black snub-nosed pistol peeked out over the top of her purse. “You are the very last,” she said. “After twenty years.” She raised the pistol, and full of anger and regret and fear, Michael leaped back from the table and broke for the street. His bad leg slowed him, and she saw that the instant before she saw the car. She jumped up and shouted his name, and he glanced back— she would remember that he did glance back— but he had hidden too well, the past was too terrible, and all alternative futures too full of regrets and recriminations. He was still running when he hit the street.

  The squeal of brakes and the thump transfixed her heart and turned her nerves to thorns. After a few seconds, she sat back down and laid the child’s pistol on the table. When the carabinieri arrived, the pistol would be lying there, a harmless toy, and she would be staring toward the dark street behind her tinted glasses. She knew what she would say, something about a present for a friend’s child, a misunderstanding, a curiously unstable stranger. She knew she would say those things, though she was not sure why she should bother, for now she was not convinced that she had not, after all, made a terrible mistake.

  Pigskill

  Martin met her on holiday— a bad time, if you ask me, to meet a wife. He was in the south of France with gorgeous weather, perfect food, and no more than three words of French, when along came Diane. “I’m from Liverpool,” she said, “Luv.” That “Luv” should have warned him, but if it did, he closed his ears. Her much-processed hair was golden against the blue water, her bracelets jingled to the hopeful guitars and flutes of the boardwalk musicians. Even “Luv” was heaven; she spoke English.

  It was the best holiday of Martin’s life: long days on the beach, lazy dinners down the rail line in Cannes, then the trip back in the almost dark, the rail carriage dim, the red rocks of the cliffs diving straight into the sea and marking their entry with a whoosh of breakers. Such nights are like nectar, and Martin wasn’t the first to try to bottle that charm for the cold New England winters. Not by a long shot.

  Her package tour left from Marseilles, and he went into the city to see her off. “Goodbye, Luv,” she said. Her mouth still tasted of the sea, her hair blew against his cheek. “Write,” he said. Though she promised, it was not enough. There on Quai Cinq of the main Marseilles station, Martin Forbish did the first of the three very foolish things he was to do in life: he proposed.

  Diane, charmingly, hesitated— calculated, he would later say, but one was as deceived as the other. He looked at her and saw pleasure, sunshine, bouillabaisse, strong white wine, and soft black nights behind the long shutters of their room. She saw a prosperous man who liked a good time and could be generous to the woman who amused him. He was a trifle older than she’d have liked and she’d h
ave preferred him blond, but as the train pulled out she thought again. Liverpool meant rain, hard times, sore feet from the shop. At the next station she got off an hired a cab. In her haste, the luggage was left on the train, and when she fell into Martin’s surprised arms, her bridges had effectively been burned. They were married in Nice, which their friends thought romantic, and flew to the States.

  At the start, things did not go too badly. Diane occupied herself with canvassing the house, with discovering all that was missing and that she could supply by trips to the mall. There was the novelty of company for him, and it was not until the rains of late October were followed by the bitter cold of November and December that the costs of their impulsiveness became clear. Put in simplest form, they were not the people they had supposed. Martin Forbish was not the generous bon vivant he had appeared on the French coast. Rather, he was an intensely cautious, fiscally conservative realtor who spent his days in the excitements of surveying an assortment of rural properties, and, when he was lucky, in the conveyance of wornout farms and scrub woodlot to investment-minded suburbanites.

  As for Diane, I regret to say that she was what she seemed— only more so. At home, Martin noticed that she was vulgar, that her clothes were flashy, her makeup loud, her whole style a little cheap. She needed blue skies, white sun, the red rocks and pastel stuccos of Provence. She needed warmth. Undone by travel posters for Miami and Orlando, Diane had expected palms, pools, and heat; instead she found a trim but chilly New England village that was clogged with snow and ice for four months of the year. Before long she was bored— bored with the town, bored with Martin, bored with the shop— so much like the shop she’d left in Liverpool! What was she to do? The answer was as irritating as it was unsurprising: first it was George, who worked in the hardware shop next to her own every so dreary billet at the drugstore. Then it was Peter, who, if no better, was younger, then Alex, who was sweet, and Leonard, who definitely was not. There were nights out for drinks and afternoons out at the motel along the country road.

  Things went in this way from bad to worse. Martin took to having a bite of supper after work, and a few drinks, too, in order to get home just in time to plant himself in front of the TV and watch the sport of the season. Diane, who had been reasonably circumspect, began to flaunt her affairs. She came in late, took days off work, left the house in a shambles, and spent the food money on perms and fancy cosmetics. The Martin Forbishes began to quarrel, to curse fate, to regret the soft lights and madcap romance that had raised their hopes beyond reasonable fulfillment.