Thief (20 page)

He wasn’t the only one who said things like that, either— learning about my rape just seemed to immobilize some men. I guess
I didn’t blame them. But hearing a man’s response was a torturous thing in
itself, and I often didn’t tell men at all. If I felt I had to explain some of my strangeness about not being able to sleep
beside them, or the weird, visceral response I had when I smelled someone’s unwashed hair, I just said it was one of my idiosyncrasies.

And yet, what did I expect from men, really, when I myself had such confused feelings about the rape? Sometimes I felt like
the rape had marred me and shaped me, and other times I felt like I was exactly who I was meant to be. In any case, the experience
was mine, and it was mine to deal with as I could.

After I swam, I came back to the cabin. Made myself eggs and toast. After I ate, I climbed into bed. Let myself stop thinking.
Let myself sleep.

THERE WAS A COOL STILLNESS
to the lake in September. I could feel the quietness as I swam and floated, and it seemed to go many feet down. Certainly
fewer boats churned the lake, forcing wave after wave against the shoreline, but it wasn’t just that. The water itself felt
heavier on my hands— the difference between silk and velvet. I swam every day after I came home from school, and by the time
I got in the water, the sun was usually low on the horizon. As the month went on and I kept at it, Merle told me I was crazy.
Yet even if I’d tried, I don’t think I could have explained how I liked the deep quiet I felt in the water, or how swimming
slowly helped me put the day behind me.

On this particular afternoon I was thinking of a student who had such difficulty reading that, at fifteen, she was still puzzling
over
was
and
saw
. I knew from her records that she was special ed and dyslexic, but today I’d handed back a paper in which she’d written
I was a bird
instead of
I saw a bird
, and I could not stop thinking of the beauty of that particular error. One sentence observation, the other being and experience.

“I think you may be a poet, Cher,” I told her when I gave her the
sheet of notebook paper. She smiled, and it was the first time I’d seen her do that since classes began.

With the start of school and the rush to shape lessons and learn names, it was easy enough to push away thoughts of Breville.
But of course I did think of him. In the days after that last visit, he hadn’t tried to call, but a couple weeks later, a
slender letter finally arrived. I waited a day before I read it. When I did, I went as far as the sentence that said,
I think I am now ready for a relationship with you
, and then I stopped. I didn’t know if Breville was asking for something or telling me what he had to offer, but it didn’t
matter. What ever his definition of good pussy was, I didn’t want to meet it. I didn’t need his particular brand of sickness
in my life.

I hadn’t seen the cowboy since the night he left the beer bottle by my door. But if he was per sis tent, as able to sniff
me out as he seemed to be, he’d have no trouble finding me once I moved to Merle’s. Or maybe I’d never see him again. I didn’t
have a phone number for him except for the one in Blackduck, didn’t even know how to spell his last name. I wasn’t sure we’d
know what to do with each other when we weren’t inside each other’s bodies. And as much as I craved him, his destitution scared
me. Of all the things about him to be scared by, I thought it was telling that I chose his lack of money. But at least something
about him scared me.

When I got out of the water, I pushed myself up onto the dock, going from weightlessness to gravity. But instead of hurrying
back to the cabin and dry clothes, I decided to stand still. There beside the dock, dripping lake water, I stood motionless
for five, fifteen, thirty minutes.

No boats went by and no car came down the gravel road.

Birds resumed their flight.

A heron came to land on the bank not twenty feet away.

A muskrat swam out from the shoreline, making a V-shaped wake.

I stood so long that my skin began to warm, and my blood heated the water that kept dripping from me.

When I made my way back to the yellow light I’d left burning in the cabin, it was already going dark. But the furnace of my
heart kept me warm, and I passed through the air like air.

Thank you to: Nicole Aragi, who is beyond compare; the Bush Foundation, which gave me a Bush Artist Fellowship that helped
change my life; the Mill Foundation and Santa Fe Art Institute, for a crucial writing residency.