The Third Bear (44 page)

Even though it was I who pined for the woman, who so desperately wanted her to come to gasping life, to rise from the sargassum, reborn.

Everywhere I went, I saw those frozen blue eyes.

Once, before I left home, in that time when I was arguing with my parents almost every day, restless with their world and my place in it, there was a pause because each of us regretted something we had said.

Into this silence, my mother said, "You've got to know who you are, and even when you think you've been treated unfairly still be that person."

I said something sarcastic and stormed out of the cottage - to feel the salt air on my face, to look across the water toward distant, unseen shores.

I didn't know that I would one day find so much more so close to home.

The fourth night Lucius refused to go with me.

"It's pointless," he said. "Not only that, it's dangerous. We shouldn't have done it in the first place. It's still a crime, to steal a body. Let it go. She'll be taken out to sea or rotting soon enough. Or put her out to sea yourself. Just don't mention it to me again."

In his face I saw fear, yes, but mostly awareness of a need for selfpreservation. This scared me. The dead woman might have enthralled me, but Lucius had become my anchor at medical school.

"You're right," 1 told him. "I'll go one last time and put her out to sea."

Lucius smiled, but there was something wrong. I could feel it.

"We'll chalk it up to youthful foolishness," he said, putting his arm over

my shoulders. "A tale to tell the grandchildren in thirty years."

She was still there, perfectly preserved, on that fourth night. But this time, rising from the sargassum, I saw what I thought was a pale serpent, swaying. In the next second, breath frozen in my throat, I realized I was staring at her right arm - and that it was moving.

I dashed into the water and to her side, hoping for what? I still don't know. Those frozen blue eyes. That skin, imperfect yet perfect. Her smile.

She wasn't moving. Her body still had the staunch solidity, the draining heaviness, of the dead. What I had taken to be a general awakening was just the water's gentle motion. Only the arm moved with any purpose - and it moved toward me. It sought me out, reaching. It touched my cheek as I stood in the water there beside her, and I felt that touch everywhere.

I spent almost an hour trying to wake her. I thought that perhaps she was close to full recovery, that I just needed to push things a little bit. But nothing worked. There was just the twining arm, the hand against my cheek, my shoulder, seeking out my own hand as if wanting comfort.

Finally, exhausted, breathing heavily, I gave up. I refreshed the preservation powders, made sure she was in no danger of sinking, and left her there, the arm still twisting and searching and alive.

I was crying as I walked away. I had been working so hard that it wasn't until that moment that I realized what had happened.

I had begun to bring her back to life.

Now if only I could bring her the rest of the way.

As I walked back up into the city, into the noise and color and sounds of people talking - back into my existence before her - I was already daydreaming about our life together.

The quality of the silence here can be extraordinary. It's the wind that does it. The wind hisses its way through the bungalow's timbers and blocks out any other sound.

The beach could be, as it sometimes is, crowded with day visitors and yet from my window it forms a silent tableau. I can watch mothers with their children, building sandcastles, or beachcombers, or young couples, and I can create the dialogue for their lives. How many of them will make decisions that become the Decision? Who really recognizes when they've tipped the balance, when they've entered into a place from which there is no escape?

The old man knows, I'm sure. He has perspective. But the rest of them, they have no idea what awaits them.

For another week I went to her nightly, and each time the hand reached toward me like some luminous, five-petaled flower, grasping toward the moon. There was no other progress. Slowly, my hopes and daydreams turned to sleeplessness and despair. My studies suffered and I stammered upon questioning like a first-year who couldn't remember the difference between a ligament and a radial artery. My friends stared at me and muttered that I worked too hard, that my brain had gone soft from overstudy. But I saw nothing but the woman's eyes, even when Lucius, without warning, while I was visiting her, moved out of our quarters. Leaving me alone.

I understood this, to some extent. I had become a bad roommate and, worse, a liability. But when Lucius began avoiding me in the halls, then I knew he had intuited I had gone farther, gone against his advice.

Finally, at the end of an anatomy class, I cornered him. He looked at me as if I were a stranger.

"I need you to come down to the water with me," I said.

"Why?" he said. "What's the point?"

"You need to see."

"What have you done?"

From Lucius' tone you would have thought I'd murdered someone.

"You just need to see. Please? For a friend?"

He gave me a contemptuous look, but said, "I'll meet you tonight. But I won't go down there with you. We meet there and leave separately."

"Thank you Lucius. Thank you so much."

I was so desperately grateful. I had been living with this secret in my head for almost a week. I hadn't been bathing. I hadn't been eating. When I did sleep, I dreamt of snow-white hands reaching for me from the sea. Hundreds of them, melting into the water.

I no longer think of my parents' bungalow as a trap. It's more of a solace - all of their things surround me. I can almost conjure them up from the smells alone. There is so much history here, of so many good things.

From the window, I can see the old man now. He seems restless, searching. Once or twice, he looked like he might come to the door, but he retreated and walked back onto the beach.

If I did talk to him, I don't know where I'd begin my story. I don't know if I'd wait for him to tell his or if mine would come out all in a mad rush, and there he'd be, still on the welcome mat, looking at this crazy old man, knowing he'd made a mistake.

Lucius at the water's edge that night. Lucius bent over in a crouch, staring at the miracle, the atrocity my lantern's light had brought to both of us. Lucius making a sound like a crow's harsh caw.

"It's like the movement of a starfish arm after you cut it off," he said. "It's no different from any corpse that flinches under the knife. Muscle memory."

"She's coming back to life," I said.

Lucius stood, walked over to me, and slapped me hard across the face. I reeled back, fell to one knee by the water's edge. It hurt worse than anything but the look in the woman's eyes.

Lucius leaned down to hiss in my ear: "This is an abomination. A mistake. You must let it go - into the sea. Or burn it. Or both. You must get rid of this, do you understand? For both of our sakes. And if you don't, I will come back down here and do it for you. Another thing: we're no longer friends. That can no longer be. I do not know you anymore." And, more softly: "You must understand. You must. This cannot be."

I nodded but I could not look at him. In that one whisper, my whole world had collapsed and been reformed. Lucius had been my best friend, but I hadn't been his. He was leaving me to my fate.

As I stood, I felt utterly alone. All I had left was the woman.

I looked out at her, so unbelievably beautiful floating atop the sargassum.

"I don't even know your name," I said to her. "Not even that."

Lucius was staring at me, but I ignored him and after a time he went away.

The woman's smile remained, as enigmatic as ever. Even now, I can see that smile, the line of her mouth reflected in everything around me - in the lip of a sea shell, or transferred to a child walking along the shore, or leaping into the sky in the form of a gull's silhouette.