Holding Lies (17 page)

“It's why we're together.” Caroline laughed. “I always wanted to date a rock star.”

They lunched in the shade beneath Eagle's Nest, and after, they sprawled out for a little siesta. Annie took a book up the bank and sat in the moss, and Caroline rested her head on Hank's shoulder. After a minute, he realized she was watching Annie.

Her own daughter was grown and out there somewhere. In the years they'd been together, he'd twice seen Caroline come unhinged, both times in the winter when she wasn't working much. The first time, he'd found her locked in the bathroom, shaking and speechless. The second time was just last December, when she'd become distraught after seeing a film about an orphan who escaped Auschwitz. When Caroline lost it, there was no bringing her back. She didn't even want solutions, he'd come to understand; she simply wanted him to take her in his arms and share the burden. Now, he passed his fingers through her hair and told her he loved her.

“What a blessing,” she said.

He wanted to say,
Yours will come too
, or something else optimistic, but he knew better. Caroline would never meet her daughter. And even if she did, neither of them would know.

Caroline stood and pointed to the top of the cliff. “Come on, Annie. Forget that book and follow me.”

Annie laughed. “You're kidding.”

“Don't be a siss. It's a thrill.” Caroline grabbed her hand and all but pulled her up.

Hank called out, “It's a big jump, Caroline.”

“She can handle it.”

Hank pulled himself from the ground and hurried to catch up.

Eagle's Nest was a massive slab of granite that teetered over the river. From the lip to the water was easily fifty feet, and downstream was a torrent of
white water
. According to Walter, the native Ipsynihians had once used the place for a coming-of-age ceremony that concluded with a headfirst dive. “It'll be fun,” Caroline called.

Hank caught up with them near the top. Annie was laboring for breath and shaking her head. Beads of sweat were tracing down her back. “Really, I'm not sure.”

“But you've climbed this far,” Caroline said. She was smiling that smile of hers, the one that was meant to dare its receiver into being as carefree as she was.

“She's not interested,” Hank said. “Carrie, stop it.”

Caroline laughed. “Ah, Hanky-Jo. Always worried about your women.” She stood higher on the hill than either of them, her hands on her hips as she caught her breath. Her muscular arms were ripe from the day's rowing. “Come have a look, Annie.”

This is what Caroline did. She challenged people into contests of resolve—contests they probably wouldn't win. Caroline had leapt from Eagle's Nest a thousand times; to her it was known risk. To Annie, it was probably five times higher than anything she'd jumped before. And with that rapid downstream, this was for real. This wasn't just some lake jump.

Hank touched Annie's shoulder. “You don't have to do this.”

“At least look,” Caroline said.

Annie climbed another step. “I'll look, but I'm not much of a jumper.”

As Riffle, she'd been a fanatical jumper. Hank had always stopped the boat by small cliffs and large boulders, places in still water where a person could jump in safety. And Riffle had charged off these places again and again, only quitting when Hank insisted they move on. As she grew, he actually became a little concerned, concerned that he might have created a person without a healthy dose of fear.

So he was pleased when Annie peeked over the lip at Eagle's Nest and shook her head. “Jesus. People jump from here?”

Caroline said, “You'll feel great after.”

Annie backed away from the edge. “I'm not a big free-fall person, actually.”

“You'll feel so alive.” Caroline backed her heels to the edge. “Let's do it together.”

“Leave her be,” Hank said. “Caroline, enough already.”

Caroline took off her baseball hat and her sunglasses and tossed them to Hank. “We're not your responsibility, Hank.”

Annie walked one more time to the edge, her toes a little closer to the lip this time. “Really? You think I can do it?”

Caroline smiled. “I think you should do it. I think if you don't, you'll regret it rest the day. You'll regret it on the flight home. I'll wait for you below.” And with that, Caroline backflipped out of sight. A moment later, the splash echoed off the far shore.

“Holy fuck,” Annie said, looking down. “She went in headfirst.”

She always did. In diving and elsewhere.

Hank nodded toward the trail. “After you.” But Annie was still looking down. “Annie?”

“I'll do it if you do it.”

“Jump?”

She nodded. She was scared, but she was smiling. “I want to do it.”

Caroline's echo from below: “You'll love it!”

Annie tossed Hank her hat and sunglasses. “I'd rather
we
do it together.”

And so, he pulled off his shirt and set the sunglasses and hats in the shade and joined her on the edge. The water was a mile below. “You're sure about this?”

“One, two”—she jumped and he followed a half second behind.

*

A
FTER THEY SHUTTLED
the truck and cinched tight the raft, Hank and Annie followed Caroline up to her house. Caroline had organized a barbecue that night in Annie's honor, and the guests would be arriving in another hour or two.

Annie said, “I really like Caroline. She's just so alive, you know? So fucking real. She just does what she wants, no bullshit, no conditions. I can see how she and Mom were friends. Mom is like that too, just in a different way.” Then she said, “I'm glad you two have each other.”

“Have” might have been a strong word. Caroline “had” him, surely, but he would never “have” her. “To have” implied a certain degree of permanence, and permanence wasn't something that interested Caroline.

He remembered something she had said one rainy winter day. They were lying on the futon in the loft, watching the water braid down the window, and she told him of a Chinese proverb she'd read and found especially illuminating. Caroline often read Asian philosophies. Did yoga too. “It's about this old twisting tree. It grew itself to have as many limbs and knots as it could, to be as ugly as possible. Why, right? Because only the ugly and useless are allowed to live the life they desire. The beautiful and straight are cut down to be somebody else's lumber.”

“I'm lucky she keeps me around,” Hank said.

“She's crazy about you,” Annie smiled. “That much is obvious.”

A minute or two passed as they climbed the gravel road up from Steamboat Creek. Annie was looking absently out the window. “It must be lonely around here if you don't have someone.”

Before thinking better of it, Hank responded, “No. It's never lonely.” Why say that, he wasn't sure. He also wasn't sure why he was still talking. “With a river like this one, there's always some sense of purpose.”

“Purpose?”

“There's always something to do, a way to stay busy.”

“Isn't ‘staying busy' what people do when they're lonely?”

“No,” Hank said. “People are only lonely when they have no purpose.”

Annie thought about this for a moment. A pensive moment in which Hank imagined her deconstructing his logic, testing his assumptions, measuring his deductions. He was no match for her intellect.

Then Annie surprised him. “I get lonely sometimes.” She was staring at the passing trees.

He wanted her to say more, he wanted to know all about her loneliness, wanted to confess his own loneliness, but he didn't know how to talk to this woman that was his daughter. That's what he had realized these last few days: When near her, he didn't know how to be himself, let alone how to father. “These trees are cedars. One of the last original stands in the valley.”

*

T
HE GUESTS ARRIVED
on Ipsyniho time, driving through the open gate a half hour, an hour, two hours after the time Caroline had told them on the phone. They parked out front of the house, and for several minutes after each truck came to a stop, dust hovered in the calm air, an ethereal mist backlit by the setting sun. Soon adults roared with stories and children chased the blissful dogs. Someone produced a football, someone else a bocce ball set. Yonder Mountain String Band was playing from a truck stereo. And there was IPA being pumped from a keg.

This wasn't the first time Hank had attended a party at Caroline's house, but it was the first time Caroline had hosted a party that should have been, according to the unwritten and unspoken rules that governed these things, hosted by Hank himself. He was considering a public proposal, right here in front of everyone, when a Frisbee came careening by and his hand snagged it out of midair.

“Over here, Hank!” He sent the disc long, and surveyed the crowd.

Caroline was crouched before a little girl of seven or eight, helping her fix a pigtail that had come undone. As he neared, the little girl said, “Thanks, Ms. Caroline,” and bolted after the other kids, now out in the middle of the meadow. Caroline watched her go, before returning to her business with the food.

He busied himself with the meat, waiting for her to finish a conversation with Mildred Harrington, the ninety-eight-year-old widow who lived in a crumbling farmhouse just a mile down the road. After taking the elk roasts from their marinade—he'd get it right this time—and placing them on a rack to drip dry, he leaned too close to Caroline's ear and whispered, “Thank you for this.”

She said without looking, “Your place is a shit hole, no offense.”

Annie was laughing out back with Rita and Bridge, two of Hank's oldest friends. Rita was the valley's midwife, had been for as long as Hank had been a guide. She wore a pair of faded Carhartts, flip-flops, her gray hair in two easy braids. When they'd first met, Hank had been madly infatuated with her; this was before she and Bridge had made children of their own, before Hank had met Rosemary. Back
then, she'd been exactly his type: sturdy but luscious, fierce but festive, a mountain momma through and through. He'd made his infatuation known to her in a less-than-sober moment one moonless night, and they'd found themselves kissing wetly and horizontally. There had been a falling out with Bridge, but in time, the transgression was forgiven, and life carried on as before. The river had a way of putting things in perspective.

In the years since, Rita had become, in a way, the valley's closest approximation to a spiritual leader. There wasn't a lot of organized religion between the headwaters and the ocean, but there was an almost universal respect for the power and sanctity of natural birth. In a place a full hour from the nearest hospital, in a place where the year was marked by the birth and death of seasons and species, a midwife was an essential guide between this realm and the former, this realm and the next. Her role was to shepherd the unborn into the dry light and, as the responsibility so frequently fell to her, the dying into the darkness. Few in Ipsyniho asked for a doctor when they were pregnant or a priest when they were dying; these were natural events, not medical or religious ones.

Besides, Ipsynihians had a fundamental distrust of doctors, of the silent control they tended to command over their patients. When at a medical crossroad, you never could be sure if a doctor was telling the whole story or just the simplest one.

Rita had assumed her most crucial role from her mentor, Eleanor Karr, when she passed away some three decades back. Now, there was a monument to Eleanor in downtown Ipsyniho; there were no monuments to presidents or congressmen.

Bridge called himself a contractor, and he had on numerous occasions helped Hank with the house. Just as recently as last week, he had come over with a bed full of tools and supplies, and helped patch a leak in the roof. That was the thing about Bridge; if you needed help, he was there, no questions, no hesitations. That was the covenant by which he lived, community first, a covenant conceived maybe as he hitchhiked away his twenties from Alaska to Argentina and back. It
was Bridge who had, decades prior, taught Hank to quarter, cool, and butcher elk. He laughed now at something Annie had said, his long beard bouncing.

Hank arrived just in time to hear Annie ask Bridge, “So are you a fishing guide too?”

Bridge put his arm around Hank. “Nah. What would you say I do, Hanky-Ray?”

“He'll tell you he's in construction.”

“I farm.” Bridge smiled.

“Oh, of course,” Annie said. “I've seen a lot of blueberry and hazelnut farms along River Road. Is one of those yours?”

Rita answered, “We live just down the road here.”

“Lucky you,” Annie said, turning to take in the view.

“You two actually have met before,” Hank said. “Rita caught you.”

“Caught me?” Annie canted her head to the side, a display of confusion—her mother's mannerism. Hank had always loved that one, in both Rosemary and his little daughter. She mastered the mannerism early, just about the time she started speaking complete, if abbreviated, sentences. He remembered how back then Annie would furrow her eyebrows, an exaggeration of Rosemary's expression, and raise her voice a full octave on the last syllable.

“I attended your birth.” Rita smiled. “But I almost didn't make it. You were quick to get out here and see what all the fun was about.”

“You were small,” Hank said. “Five pounds, three ounces. When the contractions started, we took a walk on the river trail, and at first your mom was stopping and breathing through each contraction, but by the end she was bear-hugging trees and howling something fierce. We still thought you were a boy then. Were sure of it.” It struck him then just how vivid these recollections were, more vivid in a way than his recollections of last week. That was the funny thing about hindsight: As if the whole expanse of a person's time lay in a straight line behind him so that at any given moment if he turned, all he saw was a tiny speck that made him think,
Is that all?
but if prompted just so, part of that distant trail would suddenly climb up and loom larger and
closer than all the rest. There was Annie as an infant, here was Annie now, and somehow there was nothing in between.