Drowning Instinct

by Ilsa J. Bick

Page 25

 

  ?Where did you live before??

  ?Kenosha. I wasn‘t supposed to be a teacher. My dad‘s company was down there.

  They manufactured electroless nickel, the stuff they use to coat hard drives, automotive differentials. I was supposed to take over right out of grad school. I did, for about three years. As soon as my old man retired from the board of directors, I sold the damn thing and made more money than God. ? He chuckled. ?I thought my father was going to have a stroke, but I got the last laugh: money and my freedom. Well, most of it. I would never be young again, but . . . I guess you could say I got back at him for yanking me out of Stanford. ?

  No adult had ever talked to me so frankly before. ?You couldn‘t have stayed? At Stanford, I mean??

  ?Sure, but I didn‘t think I could at the time. ? He tossed the sugar packet back into its little wicker basket. ?That‘s one thing you learn as you get older. Parents expect they‘ll have the same influence when you‘re thirty as when you‘re ten. Some parents, the good ones, are able to let go. Others don‘t like becoming obsolete and do their best to convince you that you can‘t get along without them. That‘s where I made my mistake. I was afraid, pure and simple. I bought into my dad‘s idea that I couldn‘t make it without his help. True, things have worked out okay. Anyone looking would think I have this perfect, fairy-tale life: money, land, a lovely house, a great wife. But all that‘s surface stuff. It‘s like watching someone on the water who you think is fine because there‘s no fuss, no screaming, when, really, the guy‘s about twenty seconds away from drowning. ?

  ?But if you‘re rich,? I said, ?you could do anything. ?

  ?It‘s not that simple. ?

  ?Why not??

  ?For one thing, you can‘t turn back the clock. For another, we‘re not talking just me anymore. I‘ve got a wife and responsibilities. There comes a point, Jenna, where you have to let some things die. ? He shrugged. ?Anyway, that‘s where I figure I can help people younger than me avoid my mistakes. ?

  I wanted to ask him how many he‘d made, other than abandoning his dreams of becoming a marine mammalogist. I thought I had an idea. And now I knew something else, Bob: despite everything he had—in spite of his wonderful wife—Mr. Anderson was unhappy. He had regrets, things he wished he could do over. I wondered if that included getting married.

  He straightened out of his slouch. ?Enough about me. What are your plans for the rest of the day? Other than doing your English thing. ?

  ?Nothing,? I said.

  ?Terrific. ? He grinned. ?How do you feel about glass??

  c

  Glass turned out to be rooms and rooms of paperweights, different shapes, different sizes, some antique and others contemporary, in a riot of colors. The museum was in Neenah, housed in a limestone Tudor mansion squatting on a tiny peninsula off the northwest shore of Lake Winnebago, not far from Appleton. I‘d never been past Fond du Lac, which was down south, and I‘d certainly never heard of a museum devoted to nothing but paperweights. An informational display at the entrance said the museum had over three thousand, more than six hundred from this one lady whose husband was filthy rich or something and so had all this money to throw at his wife who‘d been obsessed with paperweights since she was a kid.

  Most of the glass was beautiful and the art of how you made a paperweight was pretty interesting. Mr. Anderson found me staring at a rectangular weight perched on a lone pedestal. Suspended in the glass, honeybees hovered over four clusters of multicolored flowers. The flowers floated in the glass, their roots trailing in graceful swirls. The bees were so lifelike their hind legs bulged with yellow pollen sacs. But there was something odd about the roots and when I looked more closely, I realized why.

  ?They‘re people,? I said to Mr. Anderson. ?The way he‘s positioned the legs and arms, they look like roots, but they‘re really. . . bodies. ? (I hadn‘t wanted to say naked, but they were: a confusion of swelling breasts, round buttocks, large bellies, and, well. . . . Come on, you don‘t need me to draw you a map, right, Bobby?) ?Like that painter who does all those people tangled together. ?

  ?Hieronymus Bosch? Hunh. I never thought about that before but now that you mention it. . . . ? Mr. Anderson smiled. ?You have a good eye, Jenna. ?

  Afterward, we browsed the gift shop but didn‘t linger long. They did have a paperweight by that artist who did the root people, but it was something astronomical, like over three thousand dollars. Besides, I felt a little weird shopping with Mr. Anderson. Like it was too close, if you know what I mean. But it was also exciting. People who liked each other shared things: what they enjoyed doing, their interests, stuff like that.

  Mr. Anderson treated me to lunch a half hour south in Oshkosh at a restaurant with its own microbrewery and about two dozen slips where boaters could dock and come ashore. On nice days, you could eat outside at picnic tables alongside the water, but it was late in the season and very cold for October. The picnic tables were stacked, the umbrellas folded and only a few boats trolled back and forth on the slate-gray water. Mr. Anderson eyed the tables and then scrutinized my jacket (which was nowhere near warm enough, not if you also counted the breeze lifting off the water). ?Here,? he said, shucking out of his coat and holding it out to me. ?Put this on. ?

  ?I. . . I. . . I can‘t. . . ? I didn‘t know what to do.

  ?Take it. Come on. I‘ve got a sweatshirt in the car. The turtleneck‘s Under Armour, so I‘ll be fine. We‘ll pretend we‘re skiing. ?

  Uhm . . . okay. Considering that I‘d never been skiing and didn‘t have a clue what he was talking about . . . But I let him push the coat into my hands. It was the same sheepskin he‘d worn the night he saved me from Dr. Kirby, and while he was jogging out to his car, I put my nose to the collar and inhaled. It had a. . . a man’s smell. Like if I closed my eyes and had just that scent to go on, I would know that the only man I would see when I opened my eyes again would be him. I can‘t explain it any better than that.

  When I slid my hands into the pockets, I found folded slips of paper, three nickels, seven pennies, and a half-dollar piece in the left—and a small Swiss Army knife in the right.

  At that, I felt a little prick of guilt. He must be missing the kissing knife, which I always carried in my knapsack now, like a good luck charm. Probably he wondered what the hell had happened to that knife.

  Or maybe . . .

  Maybe he did know; had put two and two together, how that knife had disappeared the first and only morning I‘d been in the back room—but had decided not to do anything about it. To let it go. To let me keep the knife. Kind of like a present, I guess. It was a nice thing to imagine, anyway.

  d

  We huddled at a table in a splotch of sunlight but out of the wind, and had burgers.

  I‘m sure the waitress thought we were insane and maybe we were, but I felt free and decadent, like this is what adults did. When we were done, we just sat and watched the water. There was a drawbridge just off the slips. A bell began to clang, and then the bridge split as some kind of big white boat approached.

  Mr. Anderson had his feet up on his bench. His chin rested on the points of his knees as he stared at the boat floating by. ?I used to boat all the time,? he said, a little dreamily. ?A walkaround. ? A brief glance my way. ?The kind Quint had in Jaws. Kathy never liked it, just never got into it, but I‘d be on the water for hours, sometimes a few days. Fishing sometimes, but I was just as happy not. When I was in California, I used to dive. I even dove Lake Tahoe once, this place called Rubicon Point. I‘d never seen anything like that. The wall‘s very steep, goes straight down eight hundred feet, so far you can‘t dive to the bottom. The water‘s green at the surface and then it gets colder and bluer as you descend and you‘re still feeling okay, like what‘s the big deal, just a bunch of rocks.

  Only right around seventy feet, the bottom just goes away. ? His hands pulled apart, carving out an expanding cloud. ?Just . . . gone. There‘s no bott
om and you‘re floating over this abyss. For a minute, you think you‘re going to fall. There‘s an anvil of water above and water below, and you‘re just there. Then you follow the great wall, this massive jumble of boulders and vertical rock, straight down. You go deeper and deeper and it gets colder and colder until you‘re at a hundred and ten feet, and it‘s below forty and the light‘s completely grayed out, and you can‘t believe you‘ll ever be warm again. ?

  His back was to me. His voice was hushed. I barely breathed. I waited.

  He finally let go of a long, sad sigh. ?Lake Michigan is too cold, too dark, and has too many wrecks. I never got into that kind of diving, never saw the point of gawking at all that death. The only wreck I ever did was in Belize, about a hundred feet down, but only because I wanted to see the continental shelf. I remember looking off to my left and seeing how the white sand bottom went on for a ways and then it just stopped. Like you‘d come to the edge of the world. The ocean beyond wasn‘t even blue. It was black. We were following a guide rope and pretty far back because the currents at the shelf will sweep you away if you‘re not careful. There, you really will fall into the abyss. ?

  ?It sounds scary,? I said.

  ?It is. Most things worth effort like that are, but what‘s the point of never taking chances? I don‘t know if I could stand living my whole life afraid. I‘ll tell you what did scare me at first, though: night diving. The idea of voluntarily slipping into the dark was really spooky. But it‘s . . . magic. At night, when you swim, the water sparkles with these bright green flashes, like stars, from these bioluminescent organisms. Cold fire, divers call it. ? His tone turned wistful. ?It‘s like visiting another galaxy. ?

  He sounded, I thought, like Alexis. I wanted to tell him that if he missed that and had the money, he should just go. I should‘ve said that he should do what made him happy.

  But what came out was: ?You make it sound like something I‘d like to do someday. ?

  He turned to stare at me. ?Maybe we will,? he said.