by Cynthia Hand
I’m wearing the purple jacket.
I come back to myself to find Mom sitting next to me on her bed, her arm around my shoulders. She smiles sympathetically, her eyes worried.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be, silly,” she says. “I know what it’s like.”
Sometimes I forget that Mom had a purpose once upon a time. It was probably a hundred years ago if she was my age at the time. Which (I do the math quickly in my head) would put her at sometime between 1907 and 1914, approximately. Which means ladies in long, white dresses and men with top hats and big, bristly mustaches, horse-drawn carriages, corsets, Leo DiCaprio about to win his ticket on the Titanic. I try to picture my mother in that time, reeling with the force of her visions and lying awake in the dark trying to put the pieces together, trying to understand what it was she was meant to do.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
“I’m going to wear that jacket,” I say shakily. It’s lying on the floor near the bed. It must have slipped out of my hands when the vision struck me.
“Good,” says Mom. “I thought it would look good on you.”
“No. In the vision. I’m wearing that jacket.”
Her eyes widen slightly.
“It’s happening.” She calmly smoothes a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Everything’s aligning for you. It’s going to happen this year, this fire season, I’m sure of it.”
That’s weeks away. Just weeks.
“What if I’m not ready?”
She smiles knowingly. Her eyes are twinkling again with that strange inner light. She lifts her arms and stretches them over her head, yawning. She looks a lot better. Not so tired. Not so worn down and frustrated about everything. She looks like her old self, like she’s ready to jump up and get started on my training again, like she’s excited about my purpose and determined to help me succeed at it.
“You’ll be ready,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” she says firmly.
The next morning I sneak quietly down the stairs and get myself a quick bowl of granola cereal, stand in the middle of the kitchen eating it, and wait for the familiar rattle of Tucker’s truck in the driveway. Mom startles me by appearing as I’m pouring a glass of orange juice.
“You’re up early.” She examines the new woodsy version of me in the hiking boots, water resistant shorts, sports polo, the backpack hanging off one shoulder. I’m sure I look like I walked out of an Eddie Bauer ad. “Where are you off to?”
“Fishing,” I say, swallowing my juice quickly.
Her eyebrows lift. I’ve never been fishing in my life. The closest I’ve come is marinating salmon steaks for dinner.
“With who?”
“Some kids from school,” I say, inwardly wincing. Not quite a lie, I tell myself. Tucker is a kid from school.
She cocks her head to one side.
“What’s that smell?” she asks, wrinkling up her nose.
“Bug spray.” Mosquitoes never bother me, but apparently they eat Tucker alive if he forgets bug spray. So I wear it for solidarity. “All the kids wear it,” I explain to Mom. “They say the mosquito is the Wyoming state bird.”
“You’re really fitting in now.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly friendless before,” I say a little too sharply.
“Of course not. But something’s new, I think. Something’s different.”
“Nah.”
She laughs.
“Nah?”
I blush.
“Okay, so I talk more like the kids at school,” I say. “You hear it so much, you pick it up. Jeffrey does it too. They tell me I still talk too fast to be from Wyoming.”
“That’s good,” she says. “Fitting in.”
“It’s better than sticking out,” I say nervously. I just caught sight of the rusty blue truck snaking its way through the trees in front of the house.
“Gotta run, Mom.” I give her a quick hug. Then I’m out the door, down the driveway, jumping into Tucker’s truck while it’s still moving. He yelps in surprise and slams on the brake.
“Let’s go.” I flash him an innocent smile. His eyes narrow.
“What’s with you?”
“Nothing.”
He frowns. He can always tell when I lie. It’s annoying when there’s so much I have to hide from him. I sigh.
“My mom’s back,” I confess.
“And you don’t want her to see you with me?” he asks, offended. I glance over my shoulder, out the window of the truck where I clearly see Mom’s face in the front window. I wave at her, then look back at Tucker.
“No, silly,” I say. “I’m stoked to learn fly-fishing, that’s all.”
He still doesn’t believe me, but he lets it slide. He tips his Stetson at Mom through the windshield. Her head vanishes from the window. I relax. It’s not that I don’t want Mom to see me with Tucker. I just don’t want to give her the chance to question him. Or question me about what I think I’m doing with him. Because I have no idea what I’m doing with Tucker Avery.
“Fly-fishing is easy,” Tucker says about two hours later, after he’s shown me all the elements of fishing from the relative safety of the grass along the Snake River. “You just have to think like a fish.”
“Right. Think like a fish.”
“Don’t mock,” he warns. “Look at the river. What do you see?”
“Water. Stones and sticks and mud.”
“Look closer. The river’s its own world of fast and slow, deep and shallow, bright and shadowed. If you look at it like that, like a landscape where the fish live, it’ll be easier to catch one.”
“Nicely said. Are you some kind of cowboy poet?”
He blushes, which I find completely charming.
“Just look,” he mumbles.
I gaze upriver. It does seem like its own little corner of paradise. There are golden motes of sunlight cutting through the air, deep pockets of shade along the bank, aspen and cottonwoods rustling in the breeze. And above everything else is the sparkling river. It’s alive, rushing and bubbling, its green depths full of mysteries. And supposedly full of wonderful, tasty fish.
“Let’s do it.” I lift the fly rod. “I promise, I’m thinking like a fish.”
He snorts and rolls his eyes.
“All right, fish.” He gestures to the river. “Right there’s a sandbar you can stand on.”
“Let me be sure I’ve got this right. You want me to stand in the middle of the river?”
“Yep,” he says. “It’ll be a bit chilly, but I think you can handle it. I don’t have any waders your size.”
“This isn’t another one of your ploys to have to rescue me, is it?” I tilt my head and squint at him in the sun. “Because don’t think I’ve forgotten the Jumping Tree.”
“Nah,” he says with a grin.
“Okay.” I take a step into the river, gasping at the cold, then another and another until I’m standing up to just above my knee. I stop on the edge of the narrow sandbar that Tucker pointed out, trying to get a firm footing on the smooth river rocks under my feet. The water is cool and strong against my bare legs. I straighten my shoulders and adjust my hands on the rod the way he showed me earlier, pull the line through the guides and wait as he wades out next to me and starts to tie on the fly.
“This is one of my favorites,” he says. His hands move quickly, gracefully, to fasten on the bit of fluff and hook meant to look like an insect on the water. “Pale Morning Dun.”
“Nice,” I say, although I have no clue what he’s talking about. It looks kind of like a moth to me. To a fish it’s supposed to look like prime rib, apparently.
“All set.” He releases the line. “Now try it like we practiced on the grass. Two beats back to two o’clock, one beat forward to ten. Pull out a little line, and back again. Once you cast the line forward, relax it to about nine o’clock.”
“Ten and two,” I repeat. I raise the rod and cast th
e line backward, to what I hope is about two o’clock, then whip it forward.
“Gently,” coaches Tucker. “Try to hit along that log over there, so the fish thinks it’s a nice juicy bug.”
“Right, think like a fish,” I say with an embarrassing giggle. I try it. Ten and two, ten and two, over and over, the line looping around and around. I think I’m getting it, but after about ten minutes no fish has even looked at my Pale Morning Dun.
“I don’t think I’m fooling them.”
“Your line is too tight—your fly is dragging. Try not to cast like windshield wipers,” says Tucker. “You have to pause on the back cast. You’re forgetting to pause.”
“Sorry.”
I can feel him watching me, and frankly it’s wrecking my concentration.
I suck at fly-fishing, I realize. I don’t suck because I’m holding back; I just plain suck.
“This is fun,” I say. “Thanks for bringing me.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of my favorite thing. You wouldn’t believe some of the fish I’ve caught in this river: brook trout, rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, some brown trout. The native cutthroat are getting rarer, though; the introduced rainbows breed them out.”
“Do you throw them back?” I ask.
“Mostly. That way they grow to be bigger, smarter fish. Better to catch next time. I always release the cutthroat. But if I catch the rainbows I’ll take them home. Mom makes a fierce fish dinner, just fries them up in butter with some salt and pepper, a bit of cayenne sometimes, and it almost melts in your mouth.”
“Sounds heavenly.”
“Well, maybe you’ll catch one today.”
“Maybe.”
“I have tomorrow off,” he says. “You want to meet me at the butt crack of dawn and hike up to watch the sun rise from the best place in Teton? It’s kind of a special day for me.”
“Sure.” I have to admit that as distractions go, Tucker is top-notch. He just keeps asking me to do things and I just keep saying yes. “I can’t believe summer’s going by so fast. And I thought it would drag on forever. Ooh, I think I see a fish!”
“Hold on,” groans Tucker. “You’re just waving it around now.”
He steps toward me at the exact moment that I cast the line back. The fly catches his cowboy hat and jerks it off his head. He swears under his breath, lunges to grab it, and misses.
“Whoops! I’m so sorry.” I draw the line in and manage to snag the hat and free it from the hook. I hold it out to him, trying not to giggle. He looks at me with a little mock scowl and snatches it out of my hands. We both laugh.
“I guess I’m lucky it was my hat and not my ear,” he says. “Stay still for a minute, all right?”
He wades into the river and sloshes over to stand behind me in his hip waders, suddenly so close that I can smell him: sunscreen, Oreo cookies for some mysterious reason, a mix of bug spray and river water, and a hint of musky cologne. I smile, suddenly nervous. He reaches over and takes a strand of my hair between his fingers.
“Your hair isn’t really red, is it?” he asks, and my breath freezes in my lungs.
“What do you mean?” I choke out. When in doubt, I’ve learned from Mom, answer a question with a question.
He shakes his head. “Your eyebrows. They’re, like, dark gold.”
“You’re staring at my eyebrows now?”
“I’m looking at you. Why are you always trying to hide how pretty you are?”
He seems to gaze right into me, like he’s seeing me for who I truly am. And in that moment, I want to tell him the truth. Crazy, I know. Stupid. Wrong. I try to take a step back, but my foot slips and I almost go headfirst into the river but he catches me.
“Whoa,” he says, snaking both hands around my waist to steady me. He pulls me closer to him, bracing against the current. The water parts around us, icy and relentless, tugging and pulling at us as we stand there for a few slow-passing seconds trying to regain our balance.
“You got your legs under you?” he asks, his mouth close to my ear. Goose bumps jump up all along my arm. I turn slightly and get a really close look at his dimple. His pulse is going strong in his neck. His body’s warm against my back. His hand closes over mine on the fishing rod.
“Yeah,” I rasp. “I’m fine.”
What am I doing here? I think dazedly. This is beyond distraction. I don’t know what this is. I should—
I don’t know what I should do. My brain has suddenly checked out.
He clears his throat. “Watch the hat this time.”
We lift the rod together and swing it back, then forward, Tucker’s arm guiding mine.
“Like a hammer,” he says. “Slow back, pause on the back cast, and then”—he casts the rod forward so that the line whirs by our heads and unrolls gently on the water—“fast hammer forward. Like a baseball pitch.” The dun lights delicately on the surface and hesitates a moment before the current swirls and carries it on. Now that it’s riding on the water, it does resemble an insect, and I marvel at its play on the water. Quickly, though, the line pulls it unnaturally and it’s time to cast again.
We try it a few times, back and forth, Tucker setting the rhythm. It’s mesmerizing, slow back, pause, forward, over and over again. I relax against Tucker, resting almost totally against him as we cast and wait for the fish to rise to take the fly.
“Ready to try it on your own again?” he asks after a while. I’m tempted to say no, but I can’t think of any good reason. I nod. He lets go of my hand and moves away from me, back toward the bank where he picks up his own rod.
“You think I’m pretty?” I ask.
“We need to stop talking,” he says a little gruffly. “We’re scaring the fish off.”
“Okay, okay.” I bite my lip, then smile.
We fish for a while in silence, the only noise the burbling of the river and the rustling of trees. Tucker catches and releases three fish. He takes a moment to show me the cutthroat, with their scarlet slash of color beneath the gills. I, on the other hand, don’t get so much as a nibble before I have to retreat from the cold water. I sit on the bank and attempt to rub the feeling back into my legs. I have to face the ugly truth: I’m a terrible fisherwoman.
I know it sounds weird to say this, but that’s a good thing. I enjoy not excelling at everything, for once. I like watching Tucker fish, the way his eyes scan the shadows and riffles, the way he throws the line over the water in perfect, graceful loops. It’s like he’s talking with the river. It’s peaceful.
And Tucker thinks I’m pretty.
Later I drag the good old duffel bag into the backyard and try it one more time. Back to reality, I remind myself. Back to duty. Mom’s in the office on the computer, drinking a cup of tea the way she does when she’s trying to de-stress. She’s been home all of one day and already she seems tired again.
I stretch my arms and wings. I close my eyes. Light, I coach myself. Be light. Be part of the night, the trees, the wind. I try to picture Christian’s face, but suddenly it’s not so clear to me. I try to conjure up his eyes, the flash of green and gold, but I can’t hang on to that either.
Instead I get images of Tucker. His mouth smeared with red as we crouch on the side of the mountain filling empty ice-cream tubs with huckleberries. His husky laugh. His hands on my waist in the river, keeping me steady, holding me close. His eyes so warm and blue, reeling me in.
“Crap,” I whisper.
I open my eyes. I’m so light the tips of my toes are the only thing on the ground. I’m floating.
No, I think. This isn’t right. It’s supposed to be Christian who makes you feel this way. I am here for Christian Prescott. Crap!
The thought weighs me down and I sink back to the earth. But I can’t get Tucker out of my head. I keep replaying the moments between us over and over in my head.
“What do you see in a guy like Christian Prescott?” he asked me that night when he dropped me off from prom. And what he was really saying then, what would have com
e through loud and clear if I hadn’t been so blind was, Why don’t you see me?
I know the feeling.
Get a grip, I tell myself. Just fly already.
I tighten my hold on the duffel bag. I lift my wings and stretch them skyward. I push with all the muscle in them, all the strength I’ve gained over months and months of practice. My body shoots up a few feet, and I manage to hold on to the duffel bag.
I pull myself higher, almost to the top of the tree line. I can barely make out the sliver of the new moon. I move toward it, but the duffel bag unbalances me. I lurch to one side, flapping wildly and dropping the bag. My arms feel like they’re going to tear out of my sockets. And then I fall, crashing into the pine tree at the edge of our yard, cussing all the way down.
Jeffrey’s standing at the kitchen sink when I drag myself through the back door, scratched and bruised and close to tears.
“Nice,” he says, smirking.
“Shut it.”
He laughs. “I can’t do it either.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t carry stuff when I fly. It gets me off balance.”
I don’t know whether to feel better because Jeffrey can’t do it either, or to feel worse because he’s evidently been watching me.
“You’ve tried?” I ask.
“Lots of times.” He reaches over and pulls a pinecone out of my hair. His eyes are friendly, sympathetic. Out of everybody I know, Jeffrey’s the one person who can really understand what I’m going through. He’s going through it, too. Or at least he will, when his purpose comes.
“Do you—” I hesitate. I look behind him to the hallway toward Mom’s office. He glances over his shoulder, then back at me curiously.
“What?”
“Do you want to try it together?”
He stares at me for a minute. “Sure,” he says finally. “Let’s do it.”
It’s so dark in the backyard that I can’t see much past the edge of the lawn.
“This would be so much easier during the day,” I say. “I’m starting to hate practicing at night.”
“Why not practice during the day?”
“Um—because people could see us?”
He smiles mischievously. “Who cares?” he says.
