The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  Henry just stares at her.

  “Was there something you wanted to ask me?” she says.

  “Are you buying those olives, Bridge?” Maddox says.

  “Yes,” Henry answers.

  “No,” says Bridge. She sets the jar back on the shelf.

  Henry walks around her to the counter, lays down the coffee and the can of peaches and a loaf of bread. She follows him.

  “Is that it?” Maddox says.

  Henry nods.

  “No peas?”

  Henry shakes his head.

  “So what was it then?” Bridge asks, leaning into the counter.

  Henry rifles through his left trouser pocket for a bill.

  “What was it?” she asks again. She is standing close to him, and he can smell the faint reek of salt wind off her skin.

  “What about you?” he asks, turning on her. “Was there something you wanted?”

  “Me?”

  “You were going the other way, weren’t you? And now you’re here.”

  She shrugs. “I forgot the newspaper.”

  “The newspaper?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all? The newspaper?”

  “That’s all.”

  “So you want a paper?” Maddox says. “Is that what you want, Bridge?”

  “Yes. Evening, if you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Alright then, I’ll take what you’ve got.”

  “That’ll be fifty cents,” Maddox says to Henry. Henry nods, hands him a dollar. “And a nickel for you, Bridge.”

  “I’ll get it,” says Henry.

  “No, that’s fine.” She sets a nickel on the counter and picks up the paper. “See you then.” She walks out.

  She is waiting for him outside. Her bicycle lies in the grass by his car. As he comes out of the store, she picks up the bike, dusts off the seat, and fiddles with one of the gears. She walks it to the road around his car and, as she passes the driver’s side, she tosses the newspaper in through the open window. It lands on the seat. She glances back at him over her shoulder. She smiles.

  “I’ll see you there,” she says lightly and sets off pedaling down Hix Bridge toward the turn onto Horseneck Road. His house.

  It is dark by the time she meets him at the cottage. A black sky in the east. In the west, a few last traces of steep blue. They eat outside on the porch. He lights the mosquito torches, and they eat the bread and the peaches from the can. He opens a bottle of wine that has been cellared for years, and she drinks it slowly. The wine loosens her tongue. He can see how it softens her, makes her a little careless. She tells him about her life, about her grandfather Noel, his boat shop, his ship tales, his garden, how the tomatoes he grows are brutally sweet, unlike any other tomatoes she has tasted. She will bring him a few someday. She promises this. Her voice is like music, and he finds himself staggered, speechless. At moments he can feel his eyes burn over her, wanting her, and he hopes she will not notice. At one point while she is talking about her grandfather, he realizes suddenly that the man she is describing is the same tough, battered creature he has seen on the beach mucking up the weed. He wants to tell her this. He wants to explain how their lives have already crossed, have been crossed for years this way. He is on the verge of telling her, but then he stops, afraid that if he speaks, somehow he might disrupt the magic and the wonder in her voice. So he lets her go on. He sits near her, listening. She tells him about her grandmother. Dead now, she says, but they had been so in love. They had fallen into one another in such an unlikely, incredible way. There are tears in her eyes as she talks—he can see this— strange, faraway tears. She does not seem to notice, but there is water on her cheeks, and he wants to touch it, to touch that smooth and glistening surface of her face. His hand moves. He pulls it back, sharply. He fingers the stem of his wineglass instead. She stops talking then and looks at him, and he can see, for the first time, her age. He can see that as young as she is, there are years on her, years that have only just begun to settle into thin light lines around her eyes, and again he wants to reach out and touch her, but he does not, and they sit together that way on the steps of the porch, the torches blazing in throes of jagged light around them. He feels the wind on his face.

  They move inside and put the food and wine away, and she leads him up the stairs to the bedroom. She lights the lamp and turns the flame low. She takes off her clothes, and it is like they have always done this. It is like they have already grown old together and their bodies know the script of this night. It is everything familiar, being with her, and at the same time, it is everything new.

  Bridge

  It is afterward and they are lying in bed.

  “Are you sleeping?” she asks.

  He smiles. “Just closing my eyes. It feels good to have them closed.”

  She lies still. Through the open window, she can hear the sound of the waves against the shore.

  It is black in the room, not quite a wash. There are the deeper shadows of a bureau, a bookshelf, a chair; muffled, unfamiliar shapes; the musty smell of wood eaten down by salt air.

  He is lying on his back. She can barely see his face. There is an ivy plant hanging in the window. She finds the shape of a heron at the edge of the plant, the ivy leaves like the folded wings of the paper birds Noel taught her how to make when she was young; their bodies in hard, creased triangles, wings bent up once, then pressed down, pulled away at an angle to mimic flight.

  She hears Henry’s breathing shift, and she listens for it, that deepening toward sleep. She pushes into his chest, her shoulder into the side of his rib. He is like clay in the darkness—what she knows of him, of who he is, of where he comes from, what she knows of his life apart from her, all of it is drowned out in this darkness, and they are alone, floating on this bed that is a continent, this bed that is a speck of light.

  She says his name quietly. There is no answer.

  Again, she looks to the ivy plant hanging in the window, and she remembers a story Noel told her once about a woman who took out her heart so a bullet shot into her chest would not kill her. She fingers her own wound in the dark, the rip in the skin, the snarl of new tough flesh around the scar.

  She has always been able to divide her body from her heart. She has always been able to let her thoughts drain and pool and splash, never solid or constant, never resting for too long, never getting too settled on any one person or thing.

  She wakes close to dawn. She slips out of the bed. Through the window that faces east, she can see out past the tip of Gooseberry. Fine streaks have begun to gnaw at the edges of the dark. She pulls on her underclothes and her shirt. In the corner by the window is an old-fashioned mahogany shaving stand—a washbasin, a flat razor, a green glass bottle of cologne. She glances over her shoulder at the man on the bed. He is still sleeping, his face turned away from her. Quietly, she unscrews the cap off the cologne, tilts the bottle and takes a few drops onto her fingers. She sniffs it, rubs it into her wrist, her neck, below her ear. She sets the bottle down again and looks around the room. Below the window is a crate of old lamps—squat vessels of thick glass, looped handles, two on stalks, one nickel-plated with a milk-shade glass. There is a tiger-maple dresser and, above it on the wall, a mirror, a skim coat of dust on its surface. She runs one finger through the dust, along the edge where the glass seams into the wood.

  On top of the low bookshelf opposite the bed, she finds six 100-franc notes and a handful of coins. She picks up one of the coins. It is a foreign coin, a French coin. She smiles to herself. Puddle jumper’s money.

  A sound comes from the bed, a sort of sigh. Without turning around, without moving her arm, she slips one of the 100-franc notes into her hand, closes her fingers around it. Then slowly, casually, she glances over her shoulder. He is facing her now, his eyes still closed. The soft light cuts across his face. He is still sleeping. She swallows. The base of her throat is dry. She glances at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Half past
five.

  She folds the 100-franc note into the pocket of her shirt and leaves the room. She walks down the hall past the water closet and takes the short flight of stairs down to the kitchen. It is a modern kitchen—a small plug-in icebox, a sunken counter with a sink, running water faucets, a cookstove. Set back on the counter is one of the new pop-up toasters. She pushes down the lever on the toaster and holds her hand above the slats to feel the heat. The inside walls turn bright orange, and she can hear the hiss of the electric coils as they warm.

  She opens the icebox. The shelves are empty except for a jar of brewed iced tea, an unopened bottle of coffee milk, a can of fancy Hawaiian pineapple. She takes out the pineapple, tilts the lid, and picks out a chunk with her fingers. She examines the iced tea. The leaves have settled at the bottom of the jar. She draws out the coffee milk instead, unscrews the cap, and takes a deep drink from the bottle. As she is setting the bottle down on the counter, she notices the photograph on the window ledge above the sink. It is a picture of a group of people standing in a garden. There is a light film of dust on the glass. She doesn’t move it, doesn’t touch it, but she leans across the counter to see it more closely. She finds Henry, a younger version of him. A woman stands beside him. She is slight, dark-haired, in an evening dress, her hair set in the fashion of a few years back. His arm is around her. Bridge can just make out the edge of his hand coming around her waist. It is his wife. She knows this. And there is something about knowing it, about seeing it, that sets a quease in her gut, the kind of feeling she has had before when she has shot a creature, then found it not quite dead.

  She lifts the bottle of coffee milk to take another drink, but the smell seems too sweet to her now. She put it back in the icebox. She will go upstairs, get her trousers and boots. She will leave before he wakes up. She will not come back. She is turning away toward the stairs when across the room she notices the jasmine, set on a child’s chair against the wall. She walks over to it. He has replanted it in a glazed pot, and the earth is dark and fresh and loose. She finds one flower on it and three more that have gone by.

  There is a daybed underneath the picture window, a writing desk, and beside that, an unfinished wooden sea chest. The original hinges have been replaced by shiny brass, but the box itself is beaten, gorgeous. A rough crack runs halfway across the lid. She lifts it slowly. Inside is a notebook, heavy, leather-bound. She lifts it out, sits down on the daybed, and turns back the front cover.

  Walking the meadows of the risen earth, the children shall find in the grass the golden chessboards on which the gods played out their games.

  The passage is alone on the first page. It had been cut out of another book and pasted in, its lines perfectly crisp as if he had used a straightedge and a blade to do it. She turns to the next page.

  How shall my heart be unsealed unless it be broken?

  She continues turning the pages. She finds an essay on pisciculture written in 1881, and one from a 1919 medical journal about the use of common magnets to extract bullets from the brain. She begins to flip more quickly. She passes black-and-white etchings, abstract designs, stamps from Africa, Asia, rough watercolors of pomegranates, grapes, sunflowers. She runs her fingers over them. The pages around them have wilted, shrunken as the paint dried. She comes to one passage cut like the others but in a different type and framed out with black ink.

  each Swallow followed those that had gone before it as though guided by the marks of wing beats in the air.

  She finds ticket stubs and flowers pressed and dried, orchids, lilies, postcards from France, Amsterdam, Spain; a yellowed photograph of two men and a woman in fine clothes standing on the front porch of Shorrock’s store. She keeps flipping the pages, more quickly now, looking for a handwritten entry, a passage not lifted, cut, or taken from somewhere else, looking for words that were his alone, that he had written directly onto the page.

  Finally, at the end of the book, she finds it, after a long section of blank pages. A fluid script. Legible. Not what she would have imagined. It begins on the last page.

  October 27, 1928

  How has it begun to tick in me again? Gears. Wheels. Cogs.

  Rusted out from lack of use. Why this new stirring? Why

  this desire?

  Some things are not meant to be seen.

  Some things not meant to be wanted.

  I should know this.

  Was it Millay who wrote:

  “No place to dream, but a place to die,—

  The bottom of the sea once more.”

  Wasn’t it Millay?

  Bridge looks up from the page to the small writing desk against the wall. Black iron legs and a thin cherry top. She wonders if he wrote the words there, or if he wrote them early one morning, sitting outside on the porch steps. Maybe he wrote them somewhere else entirely. But she suddenly finds that she needs to know, not what the words mean, but where he wrote them, what he was looking for as he wrote them, what he wanted, and why would he start from the wrong end of the book as if he were trying to write himself back toward the cut-and-paste collage that was the rest of his life.

  She stands up, walks over to the writing desk. She cracks the long drawer and rummages through it for a pen. She opens the notebook and turns to one of the blank middle pages.

  Henry.

  No. She crosses it out. She will not use his name. Her hand freezes then, above the page in midair, her skin suddenly cold. She puts down the pen and begins to flip back through the book, slowly at first, calm, then more quickly, but with control. She flips past the pressed flowers, the postcards, and the etchings until she comes to the photograph. The two men and the woman standing outside the Head store. They are well dressed. Strangers. She does not recognize them. Judging by the style of their clothes, the photograph was taken awhile ago—perhaps fifteen years back—and there in the corner, sitting off to the side on the steps—what she must have glimpsed the first time through, what must have been sidling through her brain—there is a child—a girl—barefoot, in simple clothes, a pair of battered shoes on the steps beside her.

  He couldn’t have known. Even now, if he looked at it, he would have no idea. She does not remember being there. She does not remember when that photograph was taken, but she has the sudden awful sense that someone, something, has been stalking her, watching her all morning. And it is suddenly, desperately wrong. Not just what she has done, rummaging through his things, but all of it. Her being here. With him. There is a line she has crossed, a world she has walked into where she has no business being.

  All around it was a mistake. A mistake. She knows this now.

  She folds the notebook closed and puts it back in the chest. She walks quietly up the stairs into the bedroom. He is still sleeping. She finds her trousers on the floor, her boots under the chair. She looks back once at the man lying on the bed, his arm across the empty space where she had been. The new pale yellow light streams across the sheet and washes over his chest.

  She leaves the room, drawing the door closed behind her. She still has her fingers on the knob when she remembers the 100-franc note in her pocket, and it nags her. For some reason, it nags her. She tries to twist the knob and close the door, but that note in her pocket, that note she took, even though it is foreign money, useless money, even though she had stolen a thousand things before and he probably wouldn’t notice it missing, wouldn’t care if it was, but knowing that he might notice and that it might matter, not that it was gone, but that she had taken it, that she had taken it from him, for some reason, some stupid, blasted-up reason, it just didn’t seem right.

  Quietly, she lets the door swing open. She crosses the room and puts the bill back on the bookshelf where she found it. She hears a movement behind her, the rustle of sheets.

  She swings around.

  His eyes are open, his head is on the pillow. He smiles, and she can see that he is happy, looking at her. She can tell by his face that he did not notice what she took. He did not see her put it back.


  “You’re leaving,” he says.

  She nods.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  And it is simply this—what he says and how he says it. His eyes wash through hers and every other thought is swept out of her mind. She goes to him, without knowing why, but knowing it is the one thing, the only thing, that she is meant to do.

  Henry

  They show up the next morning. Two black cats. Scuffed fur. Young. From the same litter, he thinks. He leaves food for them, and they take up informal residence under a corner of the garden shed. He leaves them scraps at first, and then on a whim, he bakes a small whole chicken, and places it outside in an exposed part of the yard so he can watch them feed. They come slowly at first, testing the limits of the shade. They cling together at the edge of the brush, then split apart, each approaching from one side. He watches them from the front porch, and he can see how the nose of the smaller one stiffens to the air, the smell of the cooked meat drifting downwind.

  Bridge comes again that Saturday, and as they lie together in the crisp blue summer light filtering through the window blinds, he thinks of those two cats, and it occurs to him that she is not unlike them. She has that same wariness, her eyes that same detached and cool stealth way of prowling the space around.

  She lies on her belly, her mouth slightly open, her breathing light, but even though she sleeps, he has the sense that she can hear him, feel him.

  He turns her body over in his hands. He rolls her onto her side against him. Her skin is damp, like dark wood, and smells of shade. He spoons himself around her, gathering her arms in his arms, and as they lie there together, her slight warm naked curves against him, he remembers what someone told him once, about how men are fuel, how they burn to be consumed, how they are fire and heat and ash.

  “I have not lived like that,” he says softly.

  Bridge shifts, her weight against his arm.

  “Not at all like that.” His mouth is on her hair, and she stirs, her face turning toward him. He breaks off. Her eyes shift under the lids. They do not open. He does not want to wake her, but he touches the side of her cheek gently, and she smiles, and he wants to tell her that when he is with her, he walks so close to his heart, he can feel his bones crack, and this hunger, this need he has for her, it is the most beautiful thing he has ever felt, the most beautiful thing he could feel, and at the same time, it is the sky weeping. It drives a deep trench inside him, dread rising up out of it like smoke.