What Lies Between Us (19 page)

Later that night, when we are lying side by side in sleeping bags, staring into the exuberance of redwoods far above, I say to him, “It's like being a child at a party. The grown-ups are so much bigger than us. They've been here so much longer. We can see only their calves.” I point my chin up at the trees. He laughs. I say, “No, really. Think about how old they are. We're like infants to them.” He falls asleep and I lie there in the magic grove, being hummed at by trees with ancient memories, lulled by their stately breath, held in the embrace of their roots. I feel the sway and pull of the planet, the curve of it under my flesh, that gorgeous, voluptuous roundness. The stars spin circles overhead until I too, lost in this darkness, fall asleep.

*   *   *

He takes me to Lake Tahoe on a certain specific weekend in October. He wants to show me something, he says, and is as gleeful as a child. We stay in a small hotel because now it is too cold to sleep under the stars. We head out in the morning, walk through a parking lot into the woods. It's pretty, with meadows and, just off the path, squelchy wetlands, signs set up here and there to illustrate the life cycles of frogs and water birds. He stops to read each one, and I am bored but humoring him. I don't see why we have made this trip in a month when the sunshine is watery, but then he takes my hand and we round a corner and I gasp at the sight.

Almost at our feet: a creek, narrow and tumbling over rocks, and in the water, hundreds, thousands of flame-colored fish. So many they push into one another, each of them pointed upstream, swimming against the water's flow. I go closer so the fish are directly beneath me, oblivious of my presence, fighting the water to get up, up, up. The stream is narrow but deep, and there are layers and layers of fish. The living flash bright red, and under them, the dead, silver fleshed, flaking, blind eyed. Konakee salmon, he says. They spawn only here in this creek. They come from Tahoe and then swim upstream.

I wonder about this, the obsession with home, with finding their way back to the place they were born. “They aren't native,” he says. “They escaped here from the fisheries.” So this is their adopted home, I think. This place they are fighting to recover, it is not their native place, but still beloved, still worth fighting for, dying for.

*   *   *

We walk around the rim of Lake Tahoe, its cold, perfect blue bowl of water reflecting the sky. A silver line at the horizon. The depth of this lake is unfathomable, leagues and leagues of water, down to the unknowable depths. We hold hands and walk in step, our motion rhythmic and in synch. We walk out onto a pier that stretches long and narrow over the frigid water. At the end of it I lie longways on my stomach, my head dropped over the side so that my entire vision is taken up by blue. He sits cross-legged next to me, talking to my dropped-over head so that his voice comes to me as if it belongs to the lake itself.

He says, “Do you know the story about Jacques Cousteau coming here?” I shake my head, just feet over liquid, the tips of my hair almost piercing the surface. He says, “I don't know if it's true or not, but they say that Cousteau came here in the seventies and dove down in one of his submersibles. When he came out hours later, he was terribly shaken. He said, ‘The world is not ready to see what I have seen.' He left the country and never said what he had saw.”

I say at the water, “What was it?”

“He didn't talk about it till years later. Then he said that it was the scariest thing he had ever seen. The cold, it preserves everything, and so he saw bodies, lots of them. Native Indians, Mafia hits, drowned swimmers. All of them jumbled together, as perfectly preserved as on the day they died.”

I scramble on my knees, leap to my feet, and start walking fast down the pier. He runs behind me, says, “What's wrong? You're shaking. It's just a story. Something people say. I'm not even sure it's true.” But I can't shake the image. Those layers of bodies, just like the salmon, all held unmoving in water, the sins of this land held in perpetual silence like the layers of a grotesque cake. All water is connected, and my father's body was pulled from a river. I remember his closed coffin. Samson, who might be captured in water or not. Nothing is forgotten or finished. All of history is lodged in the earth, in the water, in the strata of our flesh.

*   *   *

We drive to other places. Gorgeous high vistas opening onto unreal views, pine ridges, the lake like an emerald cut askew, shimmering far below. We see silent-footed deer deep in the woods, wild turkeys so large and regal I vow never to eat their domesticated brethren trussed and carved on the Thanksgiving table again. But I'm quiet through it all. A certain cold came up from the lake and dipped a finger into my jugular, and all his talking, all these beautiful sights cannot melt the icy shards in my veins.

I tell him about my father's death that night. He holds me close in our hotel bed as I shake and cry and tell him what water means to me, what the image of bodies in water does to me. There are other memories I cannot speak of, but now I fall asleep in his arms and feel that I have reached safe harbor.

 

Fourteen

In these early days I wonder if it is possible to be heartbroken with happiness. Yes, a cliché, but in the cavity of my chest, in the embrace of my ribs, my heart unfurls. There had been a whorled shell around it, like a ripple-edged, tightly closed clam. My heart had been a pearl in the center of it. He had slid a knifepoint into a crevice and prized with all his strength, and this covering had cracked open. The heart muscle, freed now, expands and fills as if with tide-pulled liquid. The sound of his voice, the silk of his skin—these are the sum of my treasure. I calibrate my days around his presence; I weave my life around him. This is what he does for me: he breaks my heart with happiness.

In some far part of myself, I know that it is dangerous to love like this. I know that this love has meant letting him occupy the space of my spirit. But my spirit was a room I had left long ago. Letting him reside there, letting him be the whole of my interior, is to feel my ghosts rise and leave. Pain retires to the far shores; it is a glorious and complete inhabitation.

*   *   *

We have six months in our kingdom of two. It is everything I've ever wanted and I could have lived like this the rest of my life, but one weekend morning he says, “We should go out and meet everyone!” I don't want to. I haven't returned calls for months, and now my phone barely rings. I have him. Who else do I need? “We need friends,” he says. “You should call yours. I'll call mine.” I don't, but he does, and quickly I learn that there are many people who adore him. We go out with them. They hug him tight and ask, “Where the hell have you been?” and he introduces me and they say “Oh!” with surprise in their eyes.

Now I see the ease with which he fits with these people. I witness their delight in shared memories, the way the conversation rolls off their tongues, the loud laughter. These are folks he has collected throughout his life. There are a few from high school, who escaped the same dreary little hometown and came west; a whole contingent from his art school years; and some other friends he's made in adulthood. They are mostly American, mostly white. They have a kind of perfect belonging, a knowing of where their earth is, where their roots sink. Next to them I feel like a hydroponic plant, roots exposed and adrift.

We go to parties, dinners, bars—a whole series of events to make up for the six months they refer to as his “kidnapping.” A term that makes me feel like the kidnapper. As if those first glorious months had not been mutual, as if I were the aggressor and he the taken. I don't like sharing him; I dread these nights. It never feels easy; there is always some discordant note.

My English is perfect, but maybe too perfect, because when I say certain words they ask me to repeat myself. I say
boot
when I'm referring to where to put things in the car, and there are generally puzzled faces until, laughing, he explains, and then I realize he is my interpreter to these people. In their presence, the word
dance
comes out of my mouth in a way I can't control, clipped and British, and quickly becomes a running joke. “Say it,” they urge, and I shake my head and find a hundred other ways to refer to what happens in a club. “But we love the way you say it.” They say, “It's so proper.” They'd mimic it back to me, making me feel tight and self-conscious. It isn't aggressive, it is perhaps even a sign of affection, but I can't stand to stick out in this way.

At a dinner a woman turns to me and asks, “Have you read that book about Sri Lanka?”

“Which book?”

“Island something.” She snaps her fingers. “It'll come to me. It's about the war there. A Sri Lankan American woman wrote it.”

I shake my head. As if a Sri Lankan in America could write truthfully about that war, or even understand it from this huge distance. As if this woman talking to me about it could understand anything about where I come from by reading a book. I want to laugh, but instead I smile politely.

And yet these women are mesmerizing. Like grown-up versions of the girls spraying mists of Aqua Net in the high school bathroom. But instead of those stiff constructions of hair, these women have smooth, flawless ponytails or bobs that skim their perfect cheekbones. I watch them like an anthropologist. The way they sip their drinks, the way they speak to each other, to the men, the way their clothes hang—all of it crucial knowledge because they have known him before me, because they have access to a him I never knew. And this lack of knowledge feels to me like a crippling disadvantage.

But I am becoming a master of imitation. I have started to pull my hair high into a ponytail just like that girl Marnie. He says they were best friends in art school. Did they “date”? Has he made love to her the way he does to me now? Has he seen her naked? Has she touched his cock? Have they kissed? He says no, no, they were just friends, close friends, but I don't know. When I see them laughing together, the thought comes splintering into my brain that there was more, that there is more now, that he loves her and feels nothing for me. I smile at her, but on the inside, I am ripping up her face.

If he knew, he would be disgusted. At a party he bends to talk to her and I walk into the bathroom and lock the door, sit on the toilet shuddering for long moments. I get up and stare at the face revealed in the mirror. It slips and slides. I can't make the parts reassemble into familiarity. I have to clutch my hands at my sides to keep from smashing the soap dish into the silver surface. If I could just do that, see the blood snake down my wrists, I would slip back into myself, I would calm down, my breath would return. Someone knocks and I dash away the tears, blow my nose, and slip out past the waiting person.

I smile, I laugh.
I do not let them see me.
The conversation washes around me, and I know I am the cuckoo in the nest. The mother cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of a different species. When the chick hatches, always earlier than its nest mates, it pushes the other eggs out of the nest. The parent birds feed the one hungry baby they have left. They can't imagine that it has killed their young. But the cuckoo chick always gives itself away by growing too large, even bigger than its unsuspecting adoptive parents, and one day it will be seen for what it is and thrown out of the sheltering huddle.

I live with the thudding fear that I will be exposed, that one day one of them will see me watching them, will realize that I am an impostor, will turn to whisper this knowledge into Daniel's ear. Who will it be? One of the men? Or Marnie with her French-manicured nails. She will whisper in his ear that I am not like them, that I am the overgrown, feathered parasite. What will his eyes look like then? What color will they be when the scales fall from them? I am waiting to be thrown out of the nest. I can feel the long fall to the ground, the impact, the agony of lying on the ground in a twist of bones.

I can't lose him. He says, “I love you. I can't believe you're mine.” Joy floods through my body. I kiss his skin in a frenzy. He laughs and holds me away, but I squirm until I am right next to him again.

*   *   *

We cross the bridge for a party in Oakland. I had wanted to stay home with him, alone after long, frantic days at the hospital, but he has insisted. He goes to get us drinks and I walk around and lose sight of him and talk to someone else and then look for him and he's in a corner talking to a woman with striking skin, long, tumbling red hair, and tight black pants. I try to come upon them as if by accident. I try to make it graceful, but still, I see the quick twist of annoyance around his mouth before he says, “Hello, my love, meet Moira. She's an actress.”

I say, “Wow really? That's great.”

“And she's invited us to her new play. On Saturday. Can we make it?”

I shrug. A vague gesture that means maybe yes, maybe no.

He turns to the woman and says, “Tell her the details.”

The women opens her mouth, which is painted scarlet to match her hair, and says, “Well, we're doing a version of
Love's Labour's Lost
, but here's the thing: we're doing it at a bar, so there will be drinks and specials and things. I'm playing a nun.”

I try to keep the acid out of my voice. “Really?”

She laughs. “But you know, a sort of sexy nun. A bawdy nun.”

I say, “But what will you wear? A sexy habit?”

“No. But it's long, so you never know what could be under it.”

I say, “Oh, you should wear black lace panties and nothing else under it.”

He says, “That's hot.” They laugh.

Knives peel my skin, a red mist of rage. I dash my glass at the ground; it shatters, glass and ice everywhere, alcohol pooling on the wood. I spin on my heel, tears coming fast, push past shocked faces to the door, out onto the cold street, fumbling with my car keys. I'm starting the engine when he comes up, bangs his fist against the hood. “What the hell happened? What's happening? Why did you do that?” And then when he realizes I mean to drive away, “Wait! I'm coming with you.”