At first, Faye wasn’t able to recall with any kind of clarity what happened that day, wasn’t able to reconstruct in orderly sequence or linear time her afternoon out at Lake Baylor, the evening meal she shared with Kershaw, or the drive back to town. But that doesn’t surprise Dieter. Because that’s how memory works, he could have told her, in bits and pieces, in fragments, in a burst of jazzy chords seemingly unconnected, arbitrary, stray.
At sunrise he writes, types, his desk facing the Indiana meadow where first light silvers patchy grass punctuated by the red splash of a trillium or a cluster of cobalt bluebells hanging upside down. Writes, revises, stops to eat breakfast, writes some more. Drinks so much coffee it’s difficult to remain on task then switches to iced tea even though the tea packs a bigger wallop of caffeine than the coffee does. Coffee, tea, booze, the stress of facing, morning after morning, another blank page: it all adds up. What he should do is drink more water. But water’s boring, water’s tasteless, water doesn’t kick him in the ass the way caffeine does.
The morning Faye drove out to Lake Baylor, high clouds drifted inland over aisles of fence posts on either side of the road while a black stream twisted across a pasture into the darkness of a tangled wood. As she headed east on Rutherford Road, the coastal landscape—horseshoe harbor and the dark waters of an estuary spilling across an open field—gave way to stretches of dry scrubland and occasional stands of sand laurel oaks. She remembers that at least. And then later, more, much more. Gradually it all comes back, the way childhood memories come back unbidden yet startlingly fresh. The serrated blades of palmettos glittering in the sun like the raised weapons of a standing army, a sea of bayonets. Swift clouds, a spotted pony in a paddock, a sun-faded barn. For a few more miles, the road meandered aimlessly, without direction, before eventually straightening out again. Crest of a hill then the road plunging down a sudden chute, an unexpected dip in the land Dieter sees in his mind’s eye too, a heat-mirage of shimmering water at the foot of the pavement.
He hears Maggie rummaging around upstairs, clattering open a drawer to look for a pair of scissors or a ballpoint pen. It was so easy to shatter his concentration. Muffled footsteps on a carpet in a room two doors down unravels the next sentence. In the kitchen, Maggie whispers something to the boy and the thread of the narrative breaks. Like the clouds over the panhandle the writer’s attention wanders, drifts. And yet omniscient, godlike, he still sees, if faintly now, whatever Faye sees. Fenced inland fields thick with mosquitoes and clotted with heat. A cloud of white dust as she turns off Rutherford Road onto a gravel track. Climbing out of Dieter’s car, she notes a stillness she isn’t used to, the air stagnant and unmoving without the breeze off the sea to shuffle it around.
Chitter of cicadas in the underbrush and the faint drone of a fighter jet high overhead. Then the first awkward moments in the foyer of Kershaw’s house which smells, wonderfully, like rain, like old cedar barn boards stained by a flurry of rain. The detective shakes her hand casually, hoping to put her at ease before ushering her into the kitchen, a pleasant room filled with morning light and her first stirring view of Lake Baylor.
Dieter writes, types, eats a sparse lunch. Yanks the page out of the typewriter carriage and slashes a pencil across those unwieldly blocks of text, blacking out a word here, a word there, an entire paragraph.
Sometimes when Hunter hangs out with his friend Timmy Whitaker from across the road, Dieter and Maggie make love to rekindle the original flame, erotic heat followed by genuine affection, genuine tenderness, what they had when they started and somehow misplaced along the way. Because Maggie’s unhappy, it’s as simple as that. Even when Dieter’s writing, even when he’s deliriously lost in the story he’s trying to tell, her unhappiness is there, a dead weight every word has to carry across the page. At times he catches himself staring without sight out the window, no longer lost in the story, just lost, and he knows that he has come to a crossroads and that his marriage is teetering on collapse.
Her first summers in Bloomington had been fine. She had her new garden to tend, volunteer work delivering hot lunches for Meals on Wheels, Hunter to entertain with games of Yahtzee or Risk. She attended a weekly yoga class, swam laps at the community pool, ate Indiana tomatoes right off the dewy vine. Like Jen she developed an easy, natural rapport with Dieter’s father, skipping over to his house on Sunday evening with a slice of pecan pie. But when she came home, Dieter’s relentless work habits left her stranded, isolated, alone. Even when he wasn’t writing, he was writing, mentally constructing the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word.
Thrown off balance by Maggie’s severe mood swings, he promised to commit at least one day a week to trips around the state, just the three of them cruising down the scenic back roadways. On consecutive weekends they visited the limestone caves at Spring Mill, canoed the shallow waters of Sugar Creek, drove up to Parke County to tour the covered bridges. Hunter kept a journal, including photos he showed to Timmy Whitaker’s parents when they invited him over for one of their belly-groaning dinners, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, something called succotash, a bowl of black-eyed peas. When she asks after Maggie, Hunter tells Mrs. Whitaker that his mother’s fine even though he doesn’t really believe it. Because Mom has gone quiet again, distant. Hunter pictures her standing on a dock watching a ship she wishes she had boarded sail away.
Kershaw unties the bowlines, turns over the engine, and steers the pontoon boat into the familiar channel. The wind is slight today, barely ruffling the water, the sun a torch. He hands Faye a bottle of sunscreen and returns to the wheel as she rubs the lotion on her arms, her shoulders, her legs.
Nearing the far side of the lake, he throttles back, allowing the boat to drift south. Then he props open one of the wells and retrieves a dripping shrimp bucket filled with shiners. He offers to bait Faye’s hook but she smiles and says no, I’m good, I know how to do this. With a steady hand she spears the hook through the silver flesh below the dorsal fin, casts the shiner out toward the grass mats twenty feet away, and yanks the line at the last moment so it doesn’t snag in the green tendrils. Time and again she casts the shiner along the perimeter of the mats the way her father taught her to fish in the shallows alongside the sunken logs in the strip pits south of Terre Haute or the deep green inlets of Paint Mill Lake.
On the fifth or sixth cast, she feels the first strike, a sudden thump that immediately tightens the line and drags the shiner under the mats. Instinctively she jerks the rod backward, securing the hook, the tension in her arms and wrists tightening the muscles and making them ache as Kershaw wheels the boat a few degrees west, helping her urge the fish back out into open water. From the arc of the rod he knows that whatever she’s hooked is substantial, a striped bass or a channel catfish. Grinning his lopsided grin, he asks her if she’s okay and she nods, gritting her teeth. Steady on, he says, I’m right here with you, I’ll work the boat with you, and she hears a kind of reverence in his voice for the art of angling in grassy shallows and perhaps for her too, for her skill and patience, for her ability to land a large fish on her own.
Facing the meadow, Dieter taps the typewriter keys, falling under the spell of writing once again about Quintana Roo, fiction and memory joined, welded, forged. A bonfire on the beach, a gibbous moon rising over dark water. He types, remembers, relives it. The lisp of surf on quiet mornings when he went for a walk out to the lagoon before returning to core peppers or slice plantains in the restaurant of the hotel where divers from Madrid or Miami came for the reef, for the weed, for the hippie strays they seduced with romantic descriptions of shipwrecks off the coast of Spain. Parrish at sunrise sitting cross-legged in the sand watching the whitecaps roll in. Jen grilling pompano over fagots of native wood.
Coffee to sweat out last night’s whiskey. A piece of dry toast to settle his indigestion. A page he will later, in a fit of pique, tear into shreds . . .
Afterwards she remembers how the wine Kershaw served with dinner loosened her tongue and how she began to talk about Mexico, about the village on the sea and the bonfires on the beach and the day Pablo Mestival showed up, tacking his sailboat into the lagoon. Afterwards, in wonder, even awe, she remembers how for the first time since the rescue she was able to describe to a stranger, as she hadn’t been able to describe to her therapist or her parents or even her sister, Hannah, what really happened in Quintana Roo.
They ate on a screened lanai overlooking the dusk-shadowed lake. On the table, Kershaw placed two kerosene lamps alongside the brats he had just grilled and the potato salad he had made that morning. Famished, Faye forked a brat into one of the heated buns then sampled the potato salad, surprised by the unexpected sting of heat.
Tabasco?
No, chipotle, an old family recipe. Is it okay?
It’s great, I like the heat. He showed her the chilled bottle of chardonnay, which turned out to be a lucky choice. Of course, she smiled, accepting a glass.
After a second helping of potato salad and a second glass of wine, she dropped her napkin on her empty plate. Then she looked him in the eye.
Dieter told you about me, right? What happened to me?
Yes.
She nodded, staring off through the black screen at the lake, the sky, the curved blade of a sickle moon slicing through the belly of a cloud. I don’t mind you know.
No?
No. I mean you’re a cop. You must hear, see, terrible things.
All the time. Comes with the job.
She nodded again, still staring through the screen.
Does it ever get to you, she asked in a small voice. The stuff you see?
Yes, it gets to me.
Do you dream about it?
I dream about it.
I see ghosts, she said. I see these ghosts.
He watched her carefully, trying to imagine how hard this must be for her to tell him these things. And how desperately she needed to.
Afterwards he held the half-empty bottle of chardonnay up to the kerosene light but Faye shook her head. Then how about coffee, he suggested.
Yes, let’s have coffee. I need to sober up before I drive back.
Kershaw hesitated. He didn’t want to sound too aggressive and scare her away, but if he didn’t ask, he would always wonder what her answer might have been.
You could stay here, you know.
She lowered her eyes, staring down at the table, and Kershaw realized that he had made a mistake, a terrible miscalculation. After what she just told me, he chided himself, I suggest sex?
What I mean, he blurted out, is I have a spare bedroom. You could sleep there tonight and drive back in the morning.
Thanks, but I better get back.
Of course.
He walked her out to the car and opened the door. You sure you’re all right to drive?
I’m fine.
Okay then. He offered his hand, casually, as he had when she first entered the house. But this time she held on to it with both of hers. Thank you, she whispered.
For what?
For taking me fishing. And for letting me get all that off my chest. All that baggage. All that . . . drama. Abruptly she let go of his hand and shook her head, looking off at the dark spaces between the trees. I just hope it wasn’t too awful. I mean I hope you don’t think . . .
What I think is you’re a survivor, okay? What I think is you beat the odds down there by refusing to give up. What I think . . .(and here he hesitated, unsure how to go on, unsure how to say what he felt such a desperate urge to say) . . . Look, I’m just glad you didn’t give up. ’Cause if you gave up you wouldn’t be here tonight. With me.
He watched her bite her lower lip and he was afraid she was going to cry, something she hadn’t done, not once, during her long and painful recital. Then he felt her hand cup the back of his neck and her lips press against his and when she finally pulled away, her grin was lopsided too. I’ve been wanting to do that, she murmured, all day.
While he caught his breath, she slid into the driver’s seat and looked up at him. Will you call me tomorrow?
In lieu of a reply, he leaned down and kissed her through the open window, a gentle peck this time. Are you kidding? Of course I’ll call you tomorrow. Whadya think this is, a one-time deal?