A visitor to Charlie Margolis’s house in Montana—which really belonged to his parents, who spent their summers there—might not have found it much to look at. The house was cramped and musty and low ceilinged. There was beige carpet from the seventies, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, secondhand furniture that smelled incurably of smoke. Someone had taped a hand-drawn sketch of a mallard to the lintel above the stairs, reminding you to duck. Board games, stacked into ziggurats, cluttered the floor. An antique sign—Sweet Cherries U-Pick-M—hung on the wall of the narrow kitchen, where every appliance was brown. Brown was the stove. Brown was the refrigerator. Brown, brown were the microwave and dishwasher. Brown was the toaster but rarely its toast, which popped up at random, unforeseeable intervals, like a jack-in-the-box. There was a charming porch—recently rebuilt, with a gorgeous prospect of the lake—and yet you couldn’t soak in the view, or hear the wakes of speedboats lapping the beach, because the yard was cut off from the shore by a major trucking route. (The whoosh of semis and logging trucks, the fart of Harleys speeding by, was the sound of summer.)
Still, Cece loved it more than any place on earth. There were orchards behind the house, ancient apple trees planted by Mrs. Margolis’s grandfather, varieties of fruit with names like racehorses: Sweet Sixteen and Hidden Rose and Northern Spy. There was a hammock where you could lie in the shade and read while sun flickered through the pines. There were raspberry bushes, magically replenishing, like something in a fairy tale. (In July you could go at them like a machine—fill six, seven buckets—and the bushes wouldn’t look any different.) And the cherries! Somehow there always seemed to be a tree within reach. Fingers stained red, bloated with fruit, you’d run across Route 35 and jump into the lake to clean off, whooping lustily at the cold, feeling like a character in a Russian novel. At least that’s the way Cece felt, as if she’d opened a door in her imagination, entered some pre-digital world where lusty whooping was all the rage. She loved the place as much as Charlie did. They loved it so much they were getting married there, more than a thousand miles from home. Some of their friends were upset—it was expensive to fly in from either coast, and not at all easy—but Cece didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine getting married anywhere else.
Now here she was, her first day in the house by herself. She’d flown out from LA a month early. Charlie’s parents were back home in Culver City, and of course Charlie couldn’t leave the hospital for more than a week: he was a cardiac anesthesiologist, fresh off his residency and tethered to the OR. So it was up to Cece to make sure the wedding came off. To save money—but mostly because it felt more genuine to her—she was planning the whole thing herself. She stared at her laptop, combing the pictures of square dance callers before snagging on one that featured a young guy in a cowboy hat looking vaguely hungover. She was attracted to the wedding band’s name, Rod-O and the Feckless Fiddlers. That was the advice she’d been given about square dance bands: the more ridiculous the name, the better it would be.
“What does the ‘O’ stand for?” she asked Rod-O on the phone. A TV blared in the background. The band she’d originally booked—the Fiddle Faddle Stringtet—had canceled the week before.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just liked the way it sounded. I’m from Mamaroneck, New York. I needed something to stand out.”
“You’re not even a real Montanan?”
“What’s ‘real’ even mean these days?”
Cece frowned. “Can you turn down your TV for a second? It’s very loud.” It sounded, from the British accents, like he was watching Masterpiece Theatre. At ten in the morning.
“I was a struggling nutritionist. Now I’m a square dance caller. It’s all part of the cosmic wheel of life.”
“Are you free on July seventeenth? That’s the date of the wedding.”
“I’ll have to check my schedule. It’s a busy summer. There’s a festival in Burlap.”
“Burlap?”
“That’s the name that springs to mind.”
“Can you look into it then and call me back?”
“Hang on. This will only take a second. Doot da doo. Okay, looks like, hmm, yes, might have to juggle some things around…I’ll have to run it by the Fiddlers, but I can probably swing it.”
Cece hung up, wondering if Rod-O was displacing his own fecklessness onto his fiddlers. But she was determined to give people the benefit of the doubt, particularly in a place she didn’t know or live in.
Salish, Montana, was one of those western towns caught in a strange moment of transition. It had begun as a Native American trading post, then had reinvented itself for many years as a logging center, and recently had reinvented itself once again as a thriving tourist destination for outdoor recreators. There was a microbrewery and a sushi place called How We Roll and a cycle shop with an espresso bar, but there was also a gun store and a bar called the Stagger Inn and a pawnshop whose employees talked openly about “faggots.” At the Lazy Bear Bar & Grill, you could go to Margarita Monday and find a sales consultant and a fishing guide or two and occasionally even an actual cowboy. But mostly you’d find people who’d washed in from larger cities—in search of fun or outdoorsiness or a different-but-not-too-different life—and didn’t know quite what they were doing there. Like Rod-O on the phone, they had a bit of a tough time explaining who they were.
Cece changed into her bathing suit and walked down to the dock, darting across the highway when there was a gap in traffic. Even at ten o’clock, there was a steady stream of SUVs and semitrucks and rental cars. But the rush of the road evaporated as soon as she crossed the boatshed lawn and got to the lake, which steamed quietly in the sun. The water was so bright she had to squint. The Mission Mountains rose to the left of her, bristling with pines, and then farther across the blue expanse of water were the ghostly peaks of the Salish range, hovering in the distance. Before coming here three years ago, Cece had never seen anything like it. She’d grown up in LA, where the only “lakes” were artificial, the water—if you could even get to it—murky and opaque. The water in Salish Lake was so clear that you could see straight down to the rocks, picking out minnows and lost lures as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool. The swim ladder shone as brightly below the surface as above it; in fact, the submerged half looked somehow sharper, truer to the eye, though the two halves didn’t match up. It was like a more perfect world that had snapped off from the first.
Cece dove into the lake, then popped up hooting at the cold. In Montana, you hooted in the morning and whooped after lunch. Or so Cece postulated to herself. She enjoyed coming up with aphorisms like this and was indifferent, as a rule, to their truthfulness. She floated on her back for a while in the steaming water and then climbed up the ladder shivering in the sun. Vigorously, she grabbed a towel from one of the Adirondack chairs and dried her hair. A man was standing on the lawn, watching her from the base of the dock. She should have been startled, even frightened, except that the lake was so beautiful it seemed somehow rude—ungracious—to imagine anything sinister. The man was wearing coveralls and a trucker cap that looked like it had been chewed up by a donkey, then spat back onto his head. He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender. From his expression, it looked like he hadn’t seen a woman in a bathing suit for a while.
“You’re steaming,” the man said.
“Excuse me?” Cece said.
“There’s, um, smoke coming off you.”
It was true. Steam rippled from her arms. The man kept his distance, standing there with his near-beard, and so Cece wrapped the towel around her waist before warily approaching him. Garrett Meek, Charlie’s best friend from college. He’d grown up in Missoula and had recently moved nearby, to an apartment in Woods Bay. Cece, who’d been hearing about Garrett for three years, eulogized in comic anecdotes, had not pictured a dour-looking guy dressed like a mechanic.
“I was on my way to work, so I thought I’d stop by and see if you needed anything.”
She crossed her arms, partly to hide herself. “You mean Charlie called you and made you come by.”
He blushed. “No. I mean, he called, yes, and told me you might need some help with a few things.” He glanced at her arms. “You’ll freeze to death swimming in the morning. It warms up by noon.”
“A person afraid of cold water is a bystander of life.”
“Who said that?”
“Me. I did. Anyway, the lake is so beautiful in the morning.”
“It’s a graveyard,” Garrett said. “The native fish have all disappeared. They stocked some lakes with Mysis shrimp, back in the eighties, and now they’ve invaded everything and fucked up the food web for good.”
Cece frowned. Who was this guy? Why he’d moved back to Montana from the Bay Area was unclear, and Cece didn’t ask. Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time—what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk “a bit of a hard time” generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction or both. She knew a friend of theirs had died in college, a skiing accident. The death had been rough enough on Charlie, but apparently Garrett had never really recovered. Now he was working at the airport, which spoke for itself.
“Charlie had me lower the boat lift for you,” Garrett said, nodding at the old Crestliner moored in its slip. “I did it last weekend. It’s good to go.”
“Why?”
“I think he had the idea I might take you fishing or something, in case you got bored.”
“I thought you said it was a graveyard.”
“There’s more than enough lake trout,” Garrett said, frowning. He said “lake trout” the way someone might say “child rapist.”
“Well, it’s so great to finally meet you,” Cece said. “Charlie won’t shut up about you, you’ll be happy to know. Especially if he’s had a beer or two.” She checked her watch. “I’ve got the caterer coming at ten thirty.”
Garrett stared at her.
“We’re supposed to discuss some things—the menu—so I’d better get changed.”
“Oh. Here. Almost forgot.”
Garrett reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie, which he handed to Cece. Weed. An eighth or so, it looked like. She used it for a sleep aid, mostly, but of course hadn’t dared to take any on the plane. So Charlie had arranged this favor and hooked her up. He was the cardiac anesthesiologist with weed connections. Cece thanked Garrett Meek and offered him some money, explaining that her wallet was in the house, but he mumbled something she couldn’t make out, shaking his head. Incredibly, Charlie had asked this morose baggage handler to be the officiant at their wedding, insisting that he had a way with words. “The most eloquent man you’ll ever meet,” Charlie had called him. “Eloquent man,” in Cece’s experience, tended to be a bit of an oxymoron. She had objected—strenuously—but it seemed to mean a lot to Charlie, and Cece was arranging every other detail of the ceremony, so she’d given in.
Now she wished she’d stuck to her guns. Just standing in front of Garrett was like a flash of bad news. The light sort of got sucked out of the sky. She wanted to get rid of him, to say goodbye in a way that might discourage further visits, but he was staring impolitely into space.
“You’ve got an osprey on your property,” he said.
“Where?”
Garrett pointed at the trees along the beach. Sure enough, wedged in the crotch of a dying pine, as if a beaver’s dam had lodged there in a flood, was a tangle of sticks—a nest—from which a beautiful bird gazed back at them. A band of brown striped the bird’s eyes, like a tiny blindfold. Its beak, bent straight down at the tip, seemed to be melting. Peeking from the nest were two chicks, homely as dinosaurs.
“How long before they’re big enough to fly?”
“Seven, eight weeks,” Garrett said.
“So they’ll be there for the wedding,” she said happily.
“Unless a bald eagle gets them first.”
Cece looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Baldies like to pluck them out of the nest sometimes. Makes for a good fight.”
“How awful!”
Garrett shrugged. “Eagles need to eat too. They don’t have the same, what do you call it…cuteness response.”
Did he mean to be so insulting? Cece gazed out at the lake, searching for bald eagles. A stand of cumulus clouds, darkened underneath like charred biscuits, had banked over the mountains. As she scanned the horizon, a beam of sunlight spoked through one of the clouds, projecting a distant movie onto the lake.
“Holy smokes,” she said, wishing Charlie were there to witness it. From their apartment in LA, you could see a mini-mall with a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“I wonder when it was that a caveman, Australopithecus or whoever, first looked at the sky and thought, That’s beautiful. I’m going to stop what I’m doing and look at it.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could have been a woman.”
“A woman?”
“A she-Australopithecus.”
Garrett looked at her and frowned. Was he sexist? The last thing she needed in her life was some dorm-room philosopher from Charlie’s past. What a strange and awful man, she thought. His coveralls smelled like BO. She felt suddenly depressed, as if the Eden she’d looked forward to all winter and spring had been contaminated by this smelly man who’d forgotten how to smile.
“I’ll check back in a day or two,” he said. “To make sure you haven’t gone crazy or something.”
Cece had the sense Garrett was doing this—keeping an eye on her—out of an obligation to Charlie. She smiled vaguely, watching him cross the boatshed lawn to his pickup, which made a truck-show rumble when he started it. How did someone pissed off about Mysis shrimp justify driving that thing around? And what did it mean that Charlie liked him so much? Not “liked,” but adored? Cece would have been surprised to learn they were second cousins, let alone best friends. For a moment, the man she was about to marry seemed like a stranger.
Cece went up to the house, shivering in earnest now. Once inside, she felt immediately better. The cedary smell. The warm rug on her feet. The view of the old wire clothesline in the backyard, a forgotten sweatshirt swinging like an acrobat in the wind. Yellowflower, the house was called. It actually had a name. (There was a notebook on the coffee table called The Yellowflower Bible, filled with divine instructions.)
Cece opened her laptop and checked her email: two from Charlie, both in the last hour. Miss you already, about to head into the OR. At work he killed people and brought them back to life. More specifically, he froze people’s hearts so that a cardiac surgeon could repair them, then thawed the hearts again to see whether the surgery had been a success. Did Garrett M come by? I told him to bring you a present. Cool guy, right?
Actually he depressed the shit out of me, Cece wrote back, then came to her senses and deleted what she’d written. It was clearly important to Charlie that the pair of them get along. She’d do her best to be polite.
He seems great, she wrote instead. Maybe a bit lonely?
Cece went up to the bedroom, where she struggled to unstick the door. None of the doors shut properly; when you pried one open, another would telekinetically open in a distant room of the house. She loved this too. She changed into some jeans, and an old ragg-wool sweater she’d stolen from Charlie’s closet at home, before starting to unpack the last things from her suitcase. She’d lied about the caterer; he wasn’t coming till the afternoon. She had the whole day to relax and recover from getting in late last night; with the layover, the drives to and from the airport, the trip had taken six and a half hours.
She coiled a pair of brown socks into a cinnamon bun and then put it in the top drawer of the Margolises’ dresser, which smelled like mothballs. A woman with a messy sock drawer was a woman in crisis, she thought to herself. Or maybe the opposite was true: a woman who coiled her socks was secretly unraveling. Cece pondered this. It was at times like these—when her life snagged for a second, the distractions of the wedding momentarily deserting her—that she felt a vertiginous panic in her chest, as if she were about to leap from a plane.
She reached into her pocket and took out the baggie Garrett Meek had given her. In general, she regarded people who got high before noon as hopeless losers. Why? She had no idea. Anyway, it was a medical thing. She plucked a couple buds from the plastic bag and packed them in the little pipe she’d cleaned out scrupulously before sticking it in her Dopp kit. Then she lit the bowl with a Blue Tip match she found in the bedside table, sucking in the flame so that it looked like a magic trick, the match burning upside down.
She felt immediately calmer. The sun poured through its hole in the clouds, fracturing into crepuscular rays. The silver movie, so vast and luminous it looked like a mirage, was still playing out there on the lake. Cece thought about the Australopithecus, glancing around to see if any sabertooths were on her trail and then forgetting herself for a moment because the sky looked strange and beautiful. Yes. The Australopithecus might die soon, she’s in grave danger, and yet she stops for no animal reason to take in the view. Hey, stupid! the other Australopithecuses grunt. You’re going to get yourself killed! But she doesn’t care. She risks her life to stare at it. Then she runs back to her cave, feeling this new, perilous strangeness inside her.
“Hey, stupid,” Cece said out loud, to herself, then messed up the socks in her drawer.