by Reed Karaim
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to imagine what the sky looks like to a fish. Trying to see the stars through the water.”
“Okay, then. Time to head back.”
I picked up the oars again and made my first broad stroke in the water. We slid between stars above and below, and the feeling was like beginning a long, slow, effortless descent through the heavens.
“Eric.” She leaned forward and splashed water my way. It fell short. She splashed harder and I felt it against my arm. “Eric, Eric, Eric. You would make a lousy fish.”
“A lousy fish. A lousy pirate.” I pulled on the oars. “I better get us home.”
Anna leaned forward and held my hand, stopping me from rowing.
“Have you ever seen the ocean?”
“Sure,” I said, surprised at the urgency, the strength in her small hand.
“Do you know I’ve never seen the ocean?”
“No.”
“I have. I have seen the ocean, but not really. I saw it once in Seattle, but I never saw it. It was too early. I took a trip and saw the ocean, but I never really saw it. And now every day is another day I haven’t seen the ocean. I think trying to see the stars through the water makes total sense. I think trying to be a fish makes total sense.”
The boat rocked. We both became aware of her hand holding mine at the same time, and when she let it go, I felt the damp ring around my wrist as if it were filled with light, and it reminded me of everything I didn’t understand about her.
“Hallucinations are common at sea,” I said. “We’ll get you home and you’ll be fine.”
She was still leaning forward, close, and I wasn’t sure if I could really see her eyes, or maybe it was just the way her body was poised, but she seemed to be weighing something. The boat drifted on the mirror of the lake, and there was nothing else, nothing but the two of us inclined toward each other in this silent balance, until I heard her take a breath and she splashed in my direction, gently at first and then harder.
“Eric, Eric, Eric.”
“What?”
“You should really try to be a fish.”
She was still close and the water was hitting us both, and I could feel it against my face and I could see it in faint, fractured reflection on her cheeks. High above the world in an airplane, I knew she had done the right thing sending me on my way. I would not have changed the course of my life. And I understood my own hesitation, my own refusal to see some things until too late. We draw lines to protect the people most important to us. This woman who claimed she was done with men, who carried her damage like a faint shadow across even the brightest day. This friend who had already placed so much of her trust in me. This woman briefly splashing water in my eyes. This friend I needed to prove I deserved. This beautiful woman. This friend.
But I wanted that moment back. I wanted to feel the water on her face, not just mine. I wanted to slide into the midnight lake together. I wanted to be a fish. I wanted to course weightless through the warm darkness with her and wrap our submerged bodies together and breathlessly stare at the blurred stars at the end. I knew how much it would have complicated our lives, and I wasn’t foolish nor arrogant enough to think it would have necessarily saved her, but I wanted it so badly. I wanted it for myself, and more than anything, I wanted to show Anna it was possible.
Chapter 29
I WAS SURPRISED TWO YEARS LATER when I received an invitation to Stephen’s wedding. He was living in Alexandria, only a few miles outside of Washington, and the wedding was at the Episcopal church in Old Town that had once been George Washington’s church. I hesitated but finally decided to go. It was a bright spring morning. Stephen had grown into a tall, somewhat pensive-looking young man, with dirty blond hair and pale skin. He didn’t look much like her at all.
I introduced myself in the receiving line.
“Thank you for coming. I think you were the last close friend my mother ever had,” he said. There was an old question in his eyes, and I understood now why I had been invited.
“I was honored to be her friend,” I said, pretending I didn’t see it. “I didn’t know you were in D.C. What are you doing here?”
“I work for Senator Dorgan. I have for a while. Legislative affairs.”
“That’s great. He’s a good man.”
“Yes, he is.”
I was about to move on.
“I was a little jealous of you at the time, actually,” Stephen said, still looking at me with a quiet, attentive curiosity that suddenly reminded me very much of her.
“Trust me. If you could see me back then, you’d know there was nothing to envy.”
He shook his head, as if uncertain how to take that, and then laughed.
“Well, thank you for coming, Mr. Valery. Make sure you say hi to Sam.”
But I didn’t. I introduced myself to the very beautiful bride and her parents and I saw Sam up ahead, talking with vigorous animation to a couple her age. She still had her wild red curls and the same freckles, the same radiant, reckless energy, but she had grown into her mother’s slight yet sturdy figure, and as she leaned forward to tell her friends something, it was as if I were seeing an alternate, untroubled version of Anna, the one who never married too soon, who never ended up on the floor of that trailer staring at a half-open door.
I slid out of line and worked my way around to the side of the church, where a handful of ancient gravestones tilted on the verdant lawn. I resisted the urge to walk over and study the inscriptions. It felt out of tune with the day. They turned out all right, Anna, I thought. You did good. They turned out well.
“Stephen said you were back here. What are you doing?”
Sam was teetering through the soft grass on high heels.
“Just taking a moment.”
“My mom’s last great love. You were too young for her, you know.”
Well, there you were.
“Certainly too immature, anyway,” I said. “Still.”
“And odd. You did always seem a bit odd.”
“Once again. Unchanged.”
She was standing beside me now, and when I glanced at her in profile, it was too much. I looked at the graveyard.
“Cheery spot you’ve picked,” Sam said. “It’s a celebration, you know. My brother’s marrying a nice girl with loads of money.”
“You’ve grown up. You and Stephen both.”
“Yep. Sorry. You kind of look the same, Mr. Valery.”
“Rick, please.”
“Mom always called you Eric.”
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
She hesitated. “I don’t, really. Stephen does. I don’t really remember you at all. Just this shadowy, big, very, very old man who was my mother’s boss. Stephen remembers you. I remember your picture.”
I looked at her then.
“It was a long time ago. I was twenty-one years old.”
Sam seemed to take this as a mild rebuke. She shrugged.
“I just wanted to make sure you knew you were invited to the reception. It’s at the Palmer House.”
She started back to the church and then stopped and turned.
“She had a lot of happy years, you know. She loved being the editor of the paper. And you should have seen her the day Stephen graduated from college. Her health was terrible then, everything hurt and they could never get the medication right, but you should have seen how happy she was.”
Her tone was so familiar I couldn’t help but smile. “You sound like her. She was always explaining things to me.”
“She had a good life. For a long time she had a good life. That’s all I’m trying to say. Just because—” Sam shook her head impatiently.
“Was there a note?” I heard myself ask.
And now Sam wished she hadn’t stopped. “No. Everyone wants a note. Something that ties it up all real neatly. Oh, this is why.”
That was true, I was about to say. People want explanations.
“I jus
t think she was tired,” Sam said. “Everything hurt and I just think she was tired. She knew we could take care of ourselves. She said goodbye. I look back and I realize she was saying goodbye all the last weeks. She had this . . .”
She shook her head again, unhappy she couldn’t find the word. I wondered how much she and her brother knew.
“Did she ever talk about the end of her marriage?”
Sam’s green eyes—green, not the same color as her mother’s at all—considered me with heightened doubt. “Just that it was hard. Raising a child. I knew I came along later. A boyfriend that didn’t last.” She smiled. “Hard to imagine.”
“Not really. The boyfriend, I mean. Your mother was beautiful.”
“She said Stephen’s dad had disappeared and she knew it was hard, but we didn’t want to know him, and she’d lost touch with the boyfriend. We used to wonder, of course. Stephen, particularly. But . . .”
So that was it. I couldn’t imagine she would tell anyone else if she hadn’t told her children. That I had been the one to whom her secret had fallen seemed a strange and precious honor, a faith I wasn’t sure I had earned. One winter afternoon. In a beat-up old car. Together on a couch. As close as we ever got to each other.
“. . . gentleness,” Sam said. “That’s what it was. I mean, she was always gentle. But those last weeks when we saw her, there was this way she had with both of us, as if she wanted us to know it was all okay. Everything . . . I can’t get it right, but it was a kind of . . .”
“Love.”
Sam stared into the manicured wealth of Alexandria, Virginia, blinking back tears.
“You’re odd, Mr. Eric. Why do people tell you these things?”
“I’m a professional journalist. It’s natural.”
It was meant to be a joke, but Sam didn’t hear me.
“I don’t think she thought we needed her anymore. That’s wrong, you know. Do you have any kids?”
“A daughter.”
“Remember that. It’s wrong. It’s always wrong.”
I nodded. A change came over her, desperation rising from somewhere deep and unexpected. Her voice was thick when she spoke.
“Why do you think she did it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
“You’re a surprisingly bad liar, Mr. Eric.”
She looked like her mother and she wasn’t her mother and would never be her mother, which was the great gift Anna had left her. I wondered what Anna would want me to say. I wondered what words could do her justice.
“I think she had decided a long time ago. I think the only question was when it would be okay—when she could leave and hurt people as little as possible. You and your brother, really. When she thought you could manage without her.”
As I said this I saw the truth of it. I saw how Anna had chosen each day to go on, and not just to go on, but to live, with all that asks of us, and it seemed to me the bravest thing I had ever seen.
But Sam looked at me in disbelief. “That’s horrible. How can you say that? Her whole life—she was just waiting to kill herself? That’s terrible! I can’t believe you’re saying that.”
“I’m sorry, you don’t understand. I’m not saying she was waiting to die. I’m saying she loved every day she lived more than you or I can imagine because she had made a promise to herself a long time ago. She thought she . . .” I stopped because Anna had decided long ago that she didn’t want them to know. “Listen. You said how much everything hurt, right? It was like that when I knew her, too. It was always like that and she never made a big deal out of it, but it was always there. And I just think she had made a promise to herself that, when she could, she would end it. The pain. But every day, for years and years, she didn’t. Every day she got up and made a choice that this wouldn’t be the day, that she would find something to treasure about this day, and that was the thing about her, that was the amazing thing about your mother.”
I was scaring Sam and I knew I wasn’t getting it right, I wasn’t doing Anna justice.
“I don’t—”
“Listen to me. You and your brother filled her with more joy than anything else in the world. I’m sure of that. You called me her great love. That’s silly. It was you and Stephen and always you and Stephen. I was just some young guy—incredibly charming, no doubt, Sam—but it was you two, you were everything, every day, every moment, everything. She treasured them all—every moment with you. She did, in a way you and I can never understand because she had measured them out. She had chosen to give herself a certain number.”
This was both true and a lie. I could never know how much I finally meant to Anna, but I knew how much she meant to me, the young man who needed to be taught so many things and then sent on his way. I suddenly saw, as I never had before, what that must have cost her—not letting me go, but letting me get close enough for it to matter.
Sam’s attention had turned to the small cemetery. She was trying to decide how much I had hurt and offended her.
“I don’t understand, and I think you’re probably full of shit. And now you’ve ruined my brother’s wedding.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I just came out here to say hi and . . .”
“The thing you have to understand is you’re not the reason she died. You’re the reason she lived.”
She shook her head. “Just stop. Please. I can’t think about it now.”
“I am sorry. I’m not coming to the reception. But tell your brother how much I appreciated being invited.”
Squared shoulders and a raised chin and refusal for now to surrender to doubt or confusion, a daughter you would be proud of, Anna. But you were. I know you were.
“Still odd, Mr. Eric. I wish I could say it was good to see you.”
Then I was alone with the grass and the stones and the perfect blue sky. The distant murmur of traffic like the fundamental sound of the universe working toward some obscure purpose. Had I done the right thing? Should I have told her more? Is there anything worse, I wondered, than a half-told tale, and do we ever get more than that? Because this is where the story ends, standing outside a church, wondering about all I said or should have said. It was time to go home.
• • •
BUT THERE WAS A DAY I haven’t told you about, an unexpectedly warm afternoon in late fall, a last gasp of Indian summer on Veterans Day. Anna had taken pictures of the parade earlier, but we decided to go with commemorative rather than celebratory, so we drove out to the Shannon cemetery, where too many of the graves were staked with flags.
“I love cemeteries,” I said, and this was before she had told me anything, really, but all Anna did was smile.
“Is it because there’s no one to interrupt you?”
“No, they’re great. Peace and quiet. Beautiful grass. Old stone. What’s not to like?”
Her smile sat there, delicately balanced, small plastic flags snapping impatiently behind her, and then she was laughing, I know now, at my innocence.
“Nothing,” she said. “We should have brought a picnic.”
A different season but a beautiful day. Like this one. She knelt in the grass and took pictures while I read the names and dates on the tombstones, sometimes aloud. A hundred endings etched in stone and the ghosts all dispelled, as harmless as the scattered clouds sailing high above us. My father had died a few months earlier and another winter was coming for Anna, but we were momentarily free of it all. I remember her lowering the lens and listening as I read some strange family history revealed in stone. I think it was three wives and twelve children, with the epitaph, “Devoted father and husband,” and I had intoned “and husband and husband . . .” And I remember Anna’s laughter, always surprisingly loud and sensual, and there was nothing more complicated than this: the two of us in a field of grass and cut stone on the last perfect day of autumn, and friendship, affection, love, use whatever word you’re comfortable with. They’re all true.
&n
bsp; “Well,” Anna said, running her finger along the carved words. “You have to live, right?”
You do. You did.
Look at us sitting cross-legged in the grass, so young, really, both of us. The trees along the edge of the cemetery are very nearly bare and the wind blows the stray leaves loose and they pinwheel through the air like the days in all the years since, and ours are already so fleeting, but I see you relaxing into this nearly forgotten and perfect day, your tangled hair blown back, your dark eyes bright, your smile relit every time the sun escapes the clouds. Look at us! We are alive to everything. You reach deep into the grass and toss a handful into the air and it hangs there, blown apart, a tangled alphabet, a story, a life, sure to tumble as all things must, but not now, not yet. It floats above your open palm in the blue sky, like our young hearts, aloft.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK Starling Lawrence, Ellen Levine, and Leslie Perls for their sensitive and thoughtful readings of this novel. Most of all I would like to thank my wife, Aurelie Sheehan, whose patience and careful attention as I worked my way through earlier drafts of Anna and Eric’s story prove that it is, indeed, possible for people to collaborate in both love and work.
also by Reed Karaim
If Men Were Angels
Copyright © 2017 by Reed Karaim
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