Holding Lies (28 page)

He fumbled for an answer, finally settled on one. “The word the native Ipsynihians used for salmon meant ancestor.”

“Danny says,” Annie surprised him, “that every population of steel-head is unique, that every stream has—or had, really—its own genetically distinct group. Big fish, small fish, red fish, green fish, fish that enter in spring, others that enter in fall. He says it's the stream's unique features, the power of its rapids and the length of its course and the temperatures and shit that make them what they are.”

He thought of Danny as a fire-haired boy, pointing to a spawning redd in the tailout of a hidden tributary. The conclusive clank of grown-up Danny disappearing through the fly shop's back door. “It's true. Every generation, they become better at living in this world.”

“But that's my confusion,” Annie said. “That answer is really just another question: Doesn't every species operate this way? So what's the point? I mean, I'd understand if you were all addicted to gambling or something …” She trailed off, seemingly having thought better of this.

“I don't know what to say.” Rosemary had once called fishing “harvest gambling,” a “disease worthy of a twelve-step.”

“So we're back where we started,” Annie said. “What makes steelhead so special that you all would sacrifice your lives for them?”

Sacrifice their lives? It was Rosemary's logic, and he could have broken a rod over his knee.

“Because,” he said instead with inflated confidence, “they're the river and the river isn't going anywhere.”

But maybe, he realized now, it was because they were a safer fight to lose.

*

T
HE MORNING PASSED
and they were four hours closer to her departure, and they'd all but stopped talking.

She was exploring, he reminded himself, stepping on stones she'd never before walked. Maybe that was why she remained pensive, because she was so taken by this place.

When he looked her way, when he saw her blue shirt stamped against the white rocks, he felt nothing but her absence. So many years had passed since little Riffle left, but the feeling remained like a smell that the deepest folds of memory can't forget. Now, though, there was something else too. She wasn't simply the tearful girl anymore—she was also the cold and confident grown-up driving her child self away.

They had lunch on a sun-drenched slab of basalt, a hulking thing the size of an A-frame home. The river swirled below over a bottomless blue hole. Juvenile steelhead were rising freely in the eddy. Caddisflies, it looked like.

He laid out the wraps and the lox and the flatbread and the pistachios and a bottle of pinot he'd brought as a surprise, but Annie wanted none of it. “I'm not hungry,” she said. He took a few bites, but burped fire and put the food down.

She had taken off her waders and was now lying beside him. She had her arm over her eyes. It was like she was on this rock all alone.

A breeze came up the canyon now, a breeze stronger than the typical afternoon thermal. He opened a hand to it, feeling its chill, feeling the potential in its gusts. “We should probably get a move on.” Winds, if they became too strong, could strand a drift boat, the river ferrying one way, the wind ferrying the other. In those cases, an oarsman could have real trouble lining up on a rapid.

She didn't sit up. A moment passed and he started packing up the food. Then, “How should I do it?” she asked. “How do you find the courage? That's what I need to know.”

“Courage?”

“Yeah, I mean, that's what it boils down to, right? Thad is a kind man, and he's never done me wrong, but I can't go on with him. It's bleeding me.”

“Bleeding you?”

“I don't know,” she sighed. “Maybe I'm just too young to be married. Or maybe I'm just not made for marriage. I'm thinking it's that one.”

He lit a cigarette, thought of that ring in his pocket, the other one on her thumb. He understood something of this. He remembered what it was like to feel shackled by a relationship. And he also realized what this was: a last chance. “I wasn't made for it either,” he said. “But then something changed in me.”

She sat up, and found her sunglasses, and looked off downstream. “Did you come to know yourself better? Is that why you realized you needed it? Maybe if I understand myself better, I'll see why Thad and I should stay together?”

He sat up a little straighter as if that might facilitate honesty, and said, “I came to realize how selfish I'd been. How I'd disappointed the most important people in my life. That I'd blown it. And that made me not want to blow it again.”

She rose and walked to the edge of the rock and looked down at the water below. The wind was tossing her hair. Her toes were inches from the lip. “Are you saying I shouldn't leave him?”

He pointed at her feet. “Step back from there, sweetie.”

She didn't seem to hear him. “It's the courage that I need. I know what I'll say. But I need the courage to say it. God, it is just so much easier to sabotage a relationship than to exit one properly, isn't it?”

He was desperate to give her some morsel of advice that would put the whole situation in context. And yet, he had nothing. “Sabotage is no good.”

She blocked the sun with her hand. “I almost cheated on him once. That's what a coward I am.” She had turned and looked right at him at the word “coward.” “I always sabotage the relationships that matter.”

“Don't do that, don't cheat.” Again, he pointed at her feet. “Step back from there, Riff. It's a long way down.”

“Annie,” she corrected. “That's my name.”

A gust lifted the flatbread and carried it off the rock and out of sight.

“How did you leave?”

He steadied himself with a long even breath. “Listen, Annie, I've never left anyone. They leave me. I've been left so many times …”

“Because you cheat.” It didn't sound like a question.

He stood, smudged the remainder of his cigarette on his wading boot. “I want to have all sorts of fatherly wisdom, I want to be that man, I'm trying. But I'm a wreck and I don't know shit about how to live in this world. Except you've got to be straight with him. If you're honest, he might come to understand. If you're not, he'll despise you forever. That's all I know.”

She was staring at him with a scary coldness. He put the remaining food back into the cooler. When the wine wouldn't fit, he nearly threw it across the river. “We really should get going.”

“Please stop it,” she said. A horsefly buzzed them, and she swatted at it aimlessly. “How long are you going to hold your lie?”

He saw that the ring he'd given her wasn't on her thumb any longer—it was in her hand.

“When Thad's father died, I realized how little I really knew. About you, and about me. Can't we finally be honest with each other? If not now, then when?

“There's been this lie between us forever,” her voice shook. “You paint yourself as the victim, and you hide behind that. But please. I'm here because I want to start fresh and I want to do right and I want you in my life. Please, stop hiding from me.”

He chuckled, because he wanted to say the perfect thing but was lost trying to find it.

She took his hand and placed the ring he'd given her in his palm. “I can't take this. I can't pretend any more. I love you, Dad, but I don't want a ring. I want the truth.”

The ring felt as light as paper, as flammable too. He closed his hand around it so he wouldn't have to see it. “What do you want to know?”

“Start with then. Start with why Mom moved away.”

“You want to know what happened, Annie?” The anger in his voice surprised him. “Your mom got a bug up her ass that this valley wasn't cosmopolitan enough for her daughter, and she packed the house and put you in the car and drove you away from me forever.”

She turned away from him.

The ring in his hand: “And you'd do the same thing right now.”

She didn't turn back. She wasn't even facing him.

He sidearmed the ring. A shard of light against shade. “‘Sacrifice your lives.' Shit. Where do you come off?”

A long moment passed, and she said nothing, until, “Okay, Hank. Maybe you're right. We should get a move on. As you say, this wind is picking up.” She was gathering her things, and he realized how straight the line was from this rock to tonight's airplane.

He reached for her. “Forgive me. That wasn't fair.”

She pulled away, as if to scoff,
Was any of it fair?

He lit another cigarette. And was struck by a memory of his own father lying prostrate in his coffin, that fuckup of a man who dodged them with a bottle and manipulated their mother and left the remnants of his cheating in the back of the family car, struck by what he felt in that moment when he was supposed to feel rage or pity. Confusion. That was what he felt.
Am I like you?

“You hold on to all these theories and myths about yourself,” she said, “and you don't pay any attention to what you've really done. We're the same that way. And that scares me.”

“We're not the same. You're better.” He took her hand in his, and remembered what he always wished his own father would have said to him. “Annie. I blew it. I fucked up and I ruined everything. And I
wish every day that I'd done things differently. I wish I'd been a better man.” She turned from him. “But you're not like me. You have what I'm missing. I can see it—”

“Stop,” she said. “Just stop.”

His own father never admitted the cheating, even after Hank found him with some woman behind a bar. We were looking for her necklace, he had said. Looking for her necklace, as if his father assumed him dumb enough to believe that. Part of the man's myth: that every human being, including his own children, was a peripheral character in
his
story.

Just stop
. “I cheated, okay? That's why she left.”

She wasn't saying anything, so he kept going because this is what she wanted. “We were going through a rough patch, your mom and me, and there was this kayaker from Portland, I can't remember her name, but we really connected, and this led to that.”

Annie put a hand to her sternum, as if standing before a mirror and seeing a terrifying reflection.

“And later,” he continued, “there was a woman from town, a waitress. That one was off and on.”

“For how long?”

“Several …” He almost said weeks. “Years.”

Caroline was right; he loved whichever woman was appreciating him most. He'd never left a woman, but he'd cheated on almost every one of them. It wasn't the sex he was after, though maybe he thought it was in the moment. But now he knew it was the intimacy. To linger in a moment with no past and no future, a moment of contraction and expansion that so overwhelmed the dark loneliness haunting him. The cheating was something he felt bad about, but not something he dwelled on. Back then he considered it part of who he was, a man with needs, a force—just like the river will always return to the sea.

Back then. Who was he kidding?

Because he'd cheated on Caroline. Only two years before. He'd come clean to her, which he'd never done with anyone before. She'd told him to “fuck off and never call again,” as he deserved. But he
hadn't let her go. For once, he hadn't quit. Caroline was different, and he was different then too; O'Connell had died because he told him to stand on that wet ledge. Hank sent her notes with flowers and brought her meals when he heard she had caught the flu. For months it kept up like this, him trying to amend this crime. After she let him back, though, she had always maintained a barrier between them. She might invite him for a night, they might share a bed, but she never again offered what he wanted most: to share her life.

He told himself she was just that way, and found evidence in her past to support this deduction. But really, he knew, didn't he? He'd caused this. He and no one else. She had offered him everything, and he'd consumed it all and gone looking for more.

“But why”—Annie's eyes were wet now—“did you let me go? Why didn't you fight for me? Why have you never, not even once, fought for me? Why only call on my birthday? Do you know what that's like? Do you know how it feels when your father doesn't make an effort? What's wrong with me? Please, tell me?”

He took her in his arms. “Oh god, there's nothing wrong with you. Hear me, Annie: These years, I haven't come to you because I haven't wanted to face me.”

A minute passed, and she pulled away and looked him in the eyes, and he was afraid of what she might say next, so he spoke first. “This wind.”

“Yeah. This wind.”

*

T
HE WIND CARRIED
the roar of the Falls up the canyon, the thunder of water mashing against rock. The gusts were so strong now that he had to turn the boat around and oar downstream to make any progress, and as they neared the rapid, he saw why. The canyon walls opened here, catching the wind and funneling it through the river channel.

He remembered arriving home to Rock Creek after an afternoon of lustful but insular sex. He remembered lifting Riffle and twirling her
in the air and avoiding Rosemary's eyes, especially when Riffle said, “Where were you, Daddy?”

Annie now sat in the front of the boat, the hood of his coat pulled up and blocking any sight of her. He heard echoes of
Cornell '77. Born in the desert, raised in the lion's den
.

Just above the Falls, he backed the boat onto a small patch of gravel and shouted against the wind, “I'm going to scout a line!”

Annie stayed in the boat, unmoving.

There was a Chinese proverb Caroline had told him once, something about water always overcoming. Place any obstruction in the path of water, and it will find a way around. More than that, it will eventually devour the obstruction. “Think of Wikkup Canyon,” she had said. Water always appears to be surrendering, and yet it never surrenders. Water always arrives because of its willingness to bend.