by Daniel Knapp
He suddenly remembered her as a girl—in the barn in Ohio, dark-haired, laughing, long-legged, and beautiful. Then silver-haired and still lovely, her leg over his in bed, giving as much warmth and security as she received. His eyes filmed over.
She always had the time, never denied him anything within reason, had been a fine companion and friend during those last thirty-six years. Secretly—people simply wouldn't understand—he had felt himself blessed to be married to a woman whose strong sexual appetite had carried through into her early sixties. He knew that somehow that had kept him young. And if she was a bit domineering at times, occasionally reminded him of things even a fool could remember, well, she had more than made up for that, too.
Among other things, she had given him two more children. He tried to picture all three of them when they were young, but the memory faded. He saw them instead in their present surroundings. Todd (whose name they'd legally changed to Todd Carter Todd; known to one and all as "T. C.") on the floor of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, barking out an order. Alex, Jr., in the cloakroom of the U.S. Senate, wearing the scar from a Mauser bullet along his jawline like a badge—a memento of the Spanish-American War that had helped get him elected. And Eliza, as she liked to be called, whirling on the dance floor of an ostentatiously oversized ballroom in a mansion on Russian Hill. He wondered about her. She was as headstrong as Esther and, Alex guessed, just as sexed. She was married to the deputy mayor of San Francisco. But rumors that the child she gave birth to on the day Esther died was not the deputy mayor's were almost too substantial to be ignored.
Well, it is her life, he thought. And whatever Eliza gets herself into, she'll have to travel a far piece to match the one Esther lived. He sighed. Glancing eastward, he saw the first hint of light over the mountains. Getting up, he tested the ice to see if it was firm, then walked out to the middle of the fall carrying the urn containing Esther's ashes. He waited to make sure it was not a false dawn, then looked at the antique gold pocket-watch that Esther had unexpectedly left to him… 5:13. He wondered about the antique watch for a moment—where it had come from; how long it had been in the desk drawer with Esther's diary. No way to know or ever find out, he thought. Shrugging, he tipped the urn, and the second line Esther had written in her diary, at Bent's Fort sixty years earlier, rang in his mind:
"I did not know one could love and miss another human being so."
As the last of the ashes disappeared in the water of the fall and his eyes became moist again, he felt the tremor in the ice beneath his feet, saw the earth along the riverbanks ripple. For a second he thought it was just the tears, or that he had lost his senses for a moment, but then the trees shuddered and waved slightly again as the second tremor rocked the ice and he heard it began to crack behind him. For an instant he had the impulse to scramble for the safety of the bank. But then he decided he would rather stay where he was.
The ice crumbled, falling away in huge shards as he plunged downward. He smiled as the shockingly cold, rushing water enveloped and swept him downstream, knowing that Esther could not be far ahead, that nothing could ever separate them again. He did not hear the sound of the great earthquake as it reached the South Fork from San Francisco two minutes later. Like the dark, satisfied laughter of Miwokan's sun god, it echoed between the sheer cliffs flanking the fall, then raced on toward the crest of the Sierras.
About The Author
Daniel Knapp was born in New York City where he attended public and private schools before becoming a scholarship athlete at North Carolina State and New York Universities. He has written and edited fiction and non-fiction for such national publications as TIME, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Life, The New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, West Magazine, Performing Arts, People, Show, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. His Esquire profile of Mao Tse Tung, “A Day In The Life Of The Chairman,” has been translated into a dozen languages, and included in anthologies and university textbooks. He is the author of the bestselling “as told to” biography Going Down With Janis, a scathing look at the underbelly of the early rock world and the life and times of rock star Janis Joplin. He also wrote Baccarat, a study of the high roller game and the man who brought it to Las Vegas after escaping Cuba’s civil war. When the print edition of his novel, California Woman was originally published, it sold approximately a half million copies. He is presently at work on a stand alone sequel to California Woman entitled THE WOMEN IN TYLER’S WILL. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife of 34 years, Leslie, and their two Burmese cats, Bodhi and Mandalay. Formerly head of the division of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge, his wife is now the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. They have travelled the world together pursuing primate research and new subjects for fiction.
