Bone River (45 page)

I went to the trunk, unlocked it, opened it. She was there, still and sleeping in a pool of shadow. She was still there and it had only been a dream. Her voice, her call, only a dream. I closed the trunk again, turning the key in the lock, putting it back into my pocket. And then, led by something I didn’t understand, I went off the porch and toward the river.

I don’t know what made me turn and look toward the bay. A sound, a movement, and there he was, the shadow of a man against the moonlight playing on the water, walking along the riverbank. He was hatless, and the moonlight glinted in his hair, making it look bright gold instead of the darker color I knew it to be. He stopped short when he saw me. He was like some alien creature standing there, gilded by moonlight, limned by shadow, all the softness in him cast away, leaving him hard-edged, as sharply beautiful as a forest after an ice storm—danger and damage disguised by sublimity—and my need for him rose mindlessly, until I felt I was drowning in it.

I brought him for you.

But he was a liar, and he had betrayed me, and I was afraid of my own desire, of what I feared he was. I turned away, moving quickly toward the house, breaking into a run when I realized he was coming after me. He was on me before I was halfway to the porch, grabbing my arm, swinging me back to face him, and I tried to jerk away, but he was too strong. I pounded against his chest with my other hand. “Let me go, damn you!”

He caught my wrist and pulled so I fell into him, and then his mouth was on mine, relentless and demanding, pleading without words for what he wanted: forgiveness, redemption. The scent of him—cold night air and the river, salt and wool—was in my head, on my skin, the taste of him bitter and sweet. I fell into the kiss. My fists went slack. When he drew away, I was crying. I buried my face in his coat, and his arms came around me, holding me close, letting me cry.

When it was over, I didn’t move, and neither did he. The night was not quiet, a rising wind, the ceaseless rush of water, our breathing. He said softly, “I meant to leave you alone, as you asked.”

I heard the rumble of his voice in his chest, and I pressed my cheek harder to it. “You lied to me.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Would you ever have told me the truth?”

Hesitation. Then, “I like to think I would have, eventually. But I don’t know. I’ve been looking out for myself a long time. This—what I feel for you—it’s new. It takes some getting used to.”

Honest enough. I asked, “That day I found you with her. You meant to take her that day. In the canoe.”

He flinched. “Lea, I—”

“You did.”

A sigh. “Yes. What he said was true. There was a bargain. A share of the profits.”

I leaned my head back to look at him, but I did not move from the warm circle of his arms, nor did I back away from how closely I was pressed to him. “I believed you understood.”

“I do understand, Lea,” he said tiredly. “Better than you know. I know what she is to you and...it’s why I delayed so long. Because I was falling in love with you, and I couldn’t see a way to take her without hurting you.”

“Am I to believe that?”

“It’s the truth.”

I didn’t want to say the next words. “Was it really what I felt that dissuaded you? Or was it something else?”

“What else would there be?” How carefully still he was.

“The whacks, perhaps? The oysters are a gold mine. That’s what you said. You said you wanted a piece of them. And then, today, when you said we should stay—”

“Because you don’t want to leave,” he said, and I heard desperation in his voice.

“I suppose it’s all worth seducing an older woman for,” I said.

The words settled in around us, louder in their past, in having been said, then any other sound. “Is that what you think I’ve done?”

“I don’t know,” I said, pained by the admission, burying my face in his chest again, afraid of what he would say, of another truth. “You said you took what you wanted. Like your father, you said.”

“I can’t blame you for thinking it,” he said. “But it isn’t true. I know you’ve no reason to believe me, Lea, but—”

“None of it worked out as you wished, did it?”

“Not as I’d
planned
, no,” he clarified. “But I didn’t know you, did I? How could I have foreseen this?”

I pushed on. “And now she’s rotting, and she’s useless to you.”

He looked at me. The moon had lit him, and now when he bent to me it shadowed his face so I could not see his expression. “You were right when you said I was happy about it. I am, for my sake.”

“The loss of all that money—”

“I don’t care about the money.”

“But you cared enough to mean to take her before yesterday, didn’t you?” I asked coldly. “What we were to each other—”

“Please don’t put it in the past tense.”

“—wouldn’t have stopped you.”

“It
was
stopping me, Lea. I was delaying. Waiting for the story was just what I was telling myself I was doing.” He sighed. “In any case, it’s done. It’s over. Whatever decision you make about us, I’ve made one of my own.”

“A decision?” I didn’t try to hide my alarm or the quick fear that came with it.

“I’m not going back to San Francisco, even if you decide you don’t want me. I don’t want that life any longer. I’ve already sent Eleanor a letter—and her father too—breaking our engagement.”

I drew back, surprised, but his arms tightened to keep me there. “You’ve done
what
?”

“I was writing it the night you...came to me. I knew it then, even if nothing ever happened between us.”

“The letter you posted in Oysterville,” I said.

He nodded. “I want to live my life my way, not as other people have planned it. My life. My decisions. Just as your life belongs to you.”

“It’s not so easy as you make it sound.”

He shrugged. “My mother thought I could be a respectable man. She thought I could become a
minister
, for God’s sake, when I’d already spent a lifetime proving I didn’t care about God. She was wrong, but it took me until I met you to see it. I wanted to live as she wanted, but I’d already spent twenty-six years doing that. You’ve done the same, Lea. I wish you would see it.”

“I’ve made promises, Daniel.”

“Promises to the dead. What if now that they’re gone they realize they were wrong? How would they tell us? We have to live our own lives, Lea. Others haven’t the right to dictate it for us.”

I pulled away from him. This time he let me go. The night air was cold; I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering a little. “I don’t know. Perhaps that’s true. But what do we become if our promises don’t matter?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and glanced back at the river. We were both quiet for a moment. Then he said, “What does Bibi have to do with anything? Why are you going to see her?”

“Because I need to know if the mummy’s spirit is real. I need to know what she wants from me. I need to know if it’s all just my own imagination. If these are only my own desires.”

“Do your own desires mean nothing?”

“I don’t know what they mean. I’ve never...I’ve never felt anything like them before. I...I’m changing, and I’m afraid. I need to understand.”

“And you think the widow will give you the answers.”

“I hope so.”

Very quietly, he said, “Lea, you can’t stay with him. You’ll become no better than that mummy. Is that what you want? A living death?”

The way he echoed my dreams...it was uncanny and strange. It made me shiver. I looked away. “I was doing fine before you came along.”

“Were you? You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be
both
fate and coincidence that brought me here. Which is it?”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know what to say. I turned away from him and walked slowly back to the house, up the stairs to the porch. He didn’t follow me, and when I got to the door, I turned back to see him, still standing there, silhouetted against the moon.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, when I told Lord Tom where I wanted him to go with me, he said, “Why do you want to see that
pelton-woman
?”

“Because I want to know what she knows,” I said.

He gave me a long, slow nod and said nothing more, but I knew he thought I was a fool.

Daniel and Junius came downstairs just as we were leaving. Junius stepped to me, kissing me quickly, another show of possession, which annoyed me. “Hurry back.”

I glanced at Daniel as I went to the door, and he said nothing, only gave me a thoughtful look that made me remember everything we’d spoken of, and for a moment I was afraid of what this journey would tell me. But I went outside. The wind was increasing, my skin prickled with the charged air of an impending storm—not just the rain I’d sensed would return. The river would flood; it was already too high. For a moment I remembered the last storm, the fall into icy water, drowning. But I could not delay, not another moment. It was time to decide, and I needed Bibi for that, so Lord Tom and I went to the canoe and pushed off into the silver bay, choppy and stirred, dark gray clouds scudding
over the overcast, double-layered clouds, the firs creaking and singing.

The wind was strong enough that it was hard to talk, words seized the moment they left our lips and blown away. The tide was out, and we followed the deeper channels crisscrossing the flats, and I felt the strength in my arms as I plied the paddle, the smooth, easy pull of my muscles, motions I’d made a hundred times before, and I felt consoled and comforted by the bay; I felt my own soul expand to absorb it. My father’s voice:
You only think you love this place because it’s the longest we’ve ever stayed. You don’t remember the others. You liked them too.

He’d never understood. Junius didn’t understand. I wondered if Daniel truly did, or if it was only something he said, if the poetry he saw in this place was only for my benefit. And then I thought,
What if I were alone here?
Just me and Lord Tom and the world consisting only of the Querquelin and the bay, and I realized this place could encompass me. That I could be alone here, that I would never be lonely. The spirits of the world surrounded me—and that made me laugh, to think what my father would have said to that, how he hated it when I spoke that way.
You’ve spent too much time around the Siwash. I’d take you away from here if I could.
As if he could determine who and what I was.

But he had tried, hadn’t he? And he had set my feet to my future path, one I had trod blindly, so sure of him, and yet—he had wanted to bury the parts of me he didn’t like. He had wanted to exorcise them.

I paused in my rowing, overcome by a resentment I could not remember feeling before, and Lord Tom called out, “What is it?” and I shook my head and went back to rowing.

We were in Bruceport before I knew it, rounding the bend and there it was, plungers and bateaus that had keeled on the mudflats in the minus tide, the deep swallow created by the hulls of the big schooners, Dunn’s saloon tottering on the edge of the beach and a slew of houses turned driftwood gray. We took the
canoe as far in as we could, and then pulled it ashore several yards—the tide was coming in now. We traipsed awkwardly over the flats to the barnacle-covered rocks and the maze of driftwood on the beach proper. The wind had come up more strongly. I still had not replaced the hat I’d lost, and it blew my hair loose from its pins to whip around my face.

I did not pause or hesitate as I made my way to the far side of town, to the salt marsh crossed by a slough where Bibi’s dilapidated shack sagged. The drive to know was too strong, even in the face of Lord Tom’s obvious reluctance.

When we arrived, I pounded on the door. I heard creaking inside, the straining ropes of a bed or a table bearing a sudden weight, and the door opened, and Bibi looked at me without surprise or concern. I said, “I have some questions for you, Bibi.” When her glance went to my wrist, I held it up for her to see. “The bracelet broke yesterday. I wore it until then.”

She nodded and glanced beyond me to Lord Tom. “Then it is good. It has done what it was meant to do.”

I was puzzled. “What it was meant to do? But...you said it was to protect me from Daniel. It didn’t do that at all. It—”

“Did I say that?” Her brown eyes were limpid as she turned them to me. She frowned. “That cannot be right.”

“You did,” I insisted. “You said I must wear it. That I would regret it now that he was here. Those were your words—”

“The words of a
pelton-woman
,” Lord Tom put in from behind me.

“
Mika kahkwa pelton-man
,” Bibi spat back. “
Mika wawa halo delate wawa.
”
You are a foolish man. You deny the truth.

“
Klaksta delate wawa?
”
Which truth?

“
She
knows,
nah? She
tells me.” Bibi poked her chest with her thumb, her oddly flat face screwed with vehemence. “
Nika kumtux itka mika mamook
.”
I know what you did.

I listened to them in confusion. Now I turned to look at Lord Tom. “What is she talking about?”