Holding Lies (15 page)

“You guys do it right,” Annie said.

“Anything worth doing.” Caroline's mouth was full of cobbler.

As the sun set, they walked Samson and Delilah up the old skid trail to the ridge top and looked east. The last rays were sending orange streaks through the smoky air, and the few clouds above them seemed to have been placed there with pink pastel.

Caroline sent the dogs into the meadow to run loops and tire themselves, and they went straight to the thicket in the far corner, their noses to the ground. “Must be a raccoon over there,” Hank said.

Caroline called once, and when the dogs didn't return, she shrugged and said, “Old Mr. Raccoon has nothing to fear from those pacifists.”

Pacifists they were, despite a combined weight of hundred and seventy pounds. Hank had once seen them chased up the shore by a mother duck, just sixteen ounces of waddling quack. He turned to tell Annie the story, but found her typing a message into that little device. “Now?” he said instead.

She didn't look up. “I know. Can't believe there's service here.”

Caroline tossed him a glance:
Let it slide
. She put her arm around his waist and called again to the dogs, who were now obscured by the brush.

“I remember when we couldn't get a landline,” Hank said. He and Rosemary had tried in vain for a year to convince the phone company to put a line up to their house on Rock Creek. He'd had to organize most bookings by mail then. Despite the inconvenience, he was sure the world was better off then, when a place equaled a headspace. Now cell phones and these newer gadgets meant you could transpose one place, one set of concerns, over another—a place could vanish even though you were standing on it.

Caroline sparked a joint and passed it to Annie. “Rosie and I smoked a few of these in our day.”

Annie looked from the device to the weed. “Oh wow.” She typed a couple last words, and tucked the thing in her purse. “Really? Mom?” She pinched the paper and brought the joint to her lips. As she exhaled, “Hank?”

He waved the joint away, but Caroline said, “Come on, stud. Everybody's doing it.”

Caroline could handle her pot in a way Hank could not. She tried to tempt him every now and then, often while naked, but Caroline's dope, like Danny's, was too strong for an old bugger like him. This time, though, it was Annie handing him the joint. “Come on, it'll be fun.” What it was, was a chance to bond with his daughter.

He inhaled shallowly, just a little, but when he exhaled, hardly anything came out, and so he took one more. That one tasted pretty good, so another couldn't hurt.

“Look at this!” Annie said, effervescing now with the stoke of it all. She spun and said, “I mean, it's fucking beautiful out here!”

Caroline laughed. “In love with the ground under her feet.”

“But the sky!” Annie said. “And look, there's the first star! Holy shit,” looking back toward Caroline now, “you can touch the stratosphere from here!”

Caroline took Hank by his beard and pulled him toward her and wrapped her arms around him and said, “You.”

Annie smiled at them, and for a moment, Hank imagined what it might have been like if he was hugging Rosemary now, if this glowing soul dancing before them was the Riffle they'd raised together. He imagined it so clearly that he felt it.

They'd spent their lives together in the valley and she'd grown to value the place above any career, and that vacuous feeling that kept him up nights had never existed because his greatest accomplishment lived a short walk away, and Riffle said, “You two are so cute together. So adorable!”

The dogs erupted. Hank was slow to turn, slower than Caroline and Annie, but he turned in time to see Samson and Delilah sprinting across the meadow, howling in fear. Behind them, a fat old skunk lumbered up the shoulder of the meadow.

*

IT WAS SOME
time before Hank felt comfortable to drive. The weed had affected him profoundly. He hadn't just felt high, he'd felt altered: He'd touched a parallel world, a place where things went like they should have. But what had spooked him, what had left him ataxic and dislocated, was that in this other world, things hadn't been any more right. There hadn't been the warm satiation, the soulful abundance. It was just as distressing, only differently so.

The hours it took to clean the dogs gave him a chance to get a grip. Caroline had a stash of V8 in the pantry, and they lathered a dozen cans into the dogs' fur and then, while the freshly washed mutts rolled
in the dust, two more cans on their own arms. The smell of skunk would follow them for weeks, a surprising whiff here and there and a steady sourness under all their midnight dreams.

“That smell,” Annie said, sniffing at her fingernails as they rumbled off Caroline's land back toward River Road, “I think it'll always bring me back to this moment.”

Once at home, Hank went straight to the Internet, to the one place removed from all places. He was squinting through his reading glasses and pecking at the keys when Annie put her arms around him. “Slave2chrome” had posted a technical question on Speypages about matching lines to a specific rod. He owned the eighty-one thirty-four with the stiffer tip pattern and was looking for a Scandinavian line for throwing dry flies. “If this guy follows the line charts, he'll end up with a five-forty, which he won't even feel on that rod. He won't even feel it! A five-seventy, that's what he needs. This is important.”

“Are you all right, Hank?” Annie's breath smelled of toothpaste and she was wearing her pajamas.

“Of course.” She looked like she had something important to say, something on the tip of her tongue. He asked, “What is it?”

“Caroline's great. I like her. How long have you been together?”

He told her and explained how they met. But he didn't tell her that he'd wanted to marry her or that she wasn't inclined to share her life with a man. He wanted to say all this, he wanted a moment of perfect honesty, a moment without any of the filters he'd been maintaining since she arrived. He was exhausted by worrying all the time what she thought of him. And yet, he couldn't stop.

Annie said, “Do you remember the last summer I was here?”

The question caught him off guard. He looked to the computer screen, to the images of rivers on his screen saver. “Umm, boy, that was a long time ago.”

“I think about it,” she said.

And of course he thought about it too, so much so he didn't know where to begin talking about it, and the moment grew awkwardly silent. Finally he found words: “What do you think?”

“Oh … ,” she said, like she was about to say more. But then she leaned in and kissed his cheek and said, “I'm glad you're happy.”

He forced a smile, because he wanted her to believe he was happy. Then he said, “I'm glad you're happy too.” And watched her walk down the hallway and into her bedroom and shut the door in her wake.

H
ANK LAY AWAKE
most of the night. Any time he dozed off, the drowning rushed in and he shot upright gasping, the adrenaline coursing to his hands and feet, turning them to needles.

Annie's arrival had thrown him, his routine, out of whack. He felt dislodged, in a way, from himself. Here he was trying to impress her, trying to be someone or something that was remarkable. He had repeatedly caught himself shoehorning facts or details into casual conversations, looking for any chance to prove he hadn't wasted the last thirty years. There was the Guide of the Year Award from the Wild Steelhead Coalition, the River Steward Award from the Ipsyniho River Trust, the Lifetime Recognition Medal from the Native Fish Society. But what did any of these slips of paper mean to a doctor of philosophy? From that height, his accomplishments must look like specks of dust. But of course Hank didn't see these awards as accomplishments, he never had; they were the cairns marking his real accomplishments: successfully lobbying the Board of Forestry to protect the headwaters of Steamboat Basin; identifying a lingering population of winter steelhead in Feather Creek, a population assumed extinct for forty years; petitioning the state fish and wildlife board to abolish the catch-and-kill regulations for wild fish in the Ipsyniho Valley. These were the successes of his life, the things that made him a household name in
the households of Ipsyniho steelheaders. But what could they mean to her, a cosmopolitan woman for whom the Ipsyniho and its polite residents were little more than an amusing stop on a backwoods vacation? To her, the Ipsyniho and its troubles would look insular, peripheral, obsolete. Maybe that's how she saw him too.

It wasn't that he felt any resentment toward her, that wasn't it. She had brushed aside his life's work: “wasteful.” And there was that device, how she longed for it even when he was right there to keep her company. And there were the little things, like the phone at night, how she didn't brag to Thad about the river or the hikes but instead rushed to ask about the goings-on back home.

But there was his overflowing appreciation for her willingness to return, for her eagerness to explore his life and share her own, some of it anyway. That flood of loneliness, which had been undercutting his once-stable banks, had ebbed for the moment. And for that, he was infinitely grateful.

He did mean something to her, that's why she was here.

Poor thing. Imagine her own loneliness in that moment, in all the years of moments since he said he wouldn't move to Chicago. What could she have thought but that her father didn't fully appreciate her, didn't love her as a parent should, as all the other fathers loved their children? He remembered that feeling from his own childhood, and it killed him to think he'd passed that most isolating reality on to her. His greatest failure.

They had planned on collecting crawdads that day so many years before. Hank was to teach her the method he'd learned from Rosemary, a system she'd learned from her octogenarian landlord. Hank had borrowed a half-dozen traps and gathered chicken scraps and fish entrails, and was now busy packing their lunch. “With any luck, we'll have a feast tonight,” he said. Teenage Annie had, in the week since her arrival, remained aloof and pensive. Hank had assumed such behavior was typical for any seventeen-year-old female left isolated from her gaggle of friends, and hence, he hadn't pressured her to divulge her feelings. In truth, he was worried she might have had her heart
broken by some adolescent Romeo, or her virginity swiped by some Chicago Don Juan, or any number of personal traumas he wasn't the least bit qualified to understand. Though according to all those parenting books, her remote demeanor should have been seen for what it really was: an invitation for dialogue.

“Do you even care?” she had said as he smoothed mayo over the sandwich bread. He turned to find her scowling behind him. This was the first he'd seen her all that morning, and he had no idea what she was talking about. He asked her to clarify, but she stormed outside. He found her waiting in the truck, listening to her headphones. She'd stayed listening to her headphones as he placed the traps on the way upstream, as he dropped the boat into the river, as he oared them downstream. She refused to fish, she refused to pull the traps. She just listened to those headphones. He tried to parse the events of the prior days, but he could locate no fight or miscommunication that might have ignited this rage—he figured she must have brought it with her. Only when he handed her the sandwich for lunch did she roar, as if this sentiment had been building for years, the Clark's Fork turned into the Missoula Sea by a quarter mile of glacier: “You're just so into yourself that you can't even see the people around you!” It was exactly the kind of blindsiding comment that he'd come to expect from Rosemary. It was meant to lure him into an argument, and he refused on principle to bite. “I'm sorry, sweetie. I don't know what you mean. But I'm here, and I want to understand.” Was that what he'd said, or what he should have said? “That's because,” she continued, “you don't care about anyone except yourself, you know that? You love this river so that you don't have to love me.” She was crying now, and he reached for her, but she pulled back. “Don't touch me.” And then the clincher: “You left me.” Annie had on her own reduced the situation to the simple but caustic equation: Dad chose the river over me. And what could he say? Caught off-balance and underprepared, he did his best to articulate the reasoning behind his decision to stay. “Ultimately it was about you. It has always been about you.” But his articulation lacked something, confidence maybe, and Annie saw right
through it. He pulled the anchor. “Would you like to oar?” he asked. She turned to him, calm now, and said, “You mean nothing to me. Do you know that? Do you care? Nothing.”

If only that were true, she could have been free from the burden that was her father. Maybe his life had been more than worthless, more than wasteful, maybe it had been
harmful
. He'd certainly harmed her.

Because he was a selfish prick, so selfish it'd taken him fifty-something years to notice.

But back then, he'd still been the hero of his story. And that fight was the first that cut through all his bullshit, the moment when the truth rose through the currents of self-delusion and smacked him as he so deserved. It sent him staggering through middle age. Every time he picked up the phone to call her, he remembered her words. And more often than not, he simply put the phone back on the ringer; she was better off without him.
She'll call when she's ready
.

No wonder she hadn't invited him to the wedding. It was a miracle she was here now.

He couldn't waste this opportunity as he had so many others. If it killed him, he had to make things right with her—with the only part of him that would live past him. If only for her sake.