The Deepest Water

by Kate Wilhelm

  Already, in just a few days, the landscape had changed: the scarlets and golds were gone, many of the deciduous trees were bare; from now until spring the dark firs would reign on this side of the high pass, then pines, and finally junipers. The front that had brought rain to the valley had been harsher in the mountains; there was snow at the higher elevations.

  At the lake, after parking the van and carrying their supplies to the ramp, Abby started to pull the rowboat from the shed, and Christina stopped moving.

  Tm not getting in that little boat," she said. "It's too small. Where is the cabin?"

  Abby pointed. "We go by boat, or we don't go at all." She worked the boat down to the water and tied it to a tree stump, then got the backpack and their groceries from the van. She tossed the backpack into the boat, added the bags of supplies, and took Christina's suitcase from her.

  Christina was staring at the boat in horror. After a wild look all around, she moaned, and fearfully climbed in. Abby motioned to Spook, who leaped in and sat down, and then she released the rope and pushed off, rocking the boat more than she needed to. She stepped in at the last second, sat down, and took up the oars.

  Christina clutched both sides of the rowboat desperately all the way across the finger, and by the time they pulled up at the ledge, she looked as if she might become seasick, she was so gray. Abby held the boat steady while Christina gingerly stepped out. Spook jumped out and raced around the cabin.

  "My God!" Christina said then. "I thought it was just a cabin on a shore somewhere."

  Exactly, Abby thought. She tied up, and they walked around the cabin to the front, where Spook was standing, wagging her tail furiously; Abby unlocked the door and pushed it open. Spook darted in, whining. "I'll turn up the heat and then bring in our stuff," Abby said. "This is it." She knew Spook would be tearing around inside, upstairs, down, searching for Jud. And she knew she couldn't bear to watch.

  She tended to the thermostat, unlatched the dog door, and went back out; Christina didn't offer to help, but stood huddled in her coat as her color gradually returned.

  Then, everything unloaded, they both went up the stairs. "His study, the aerie," Abby said.

  "Good God! How many boxes are there?" Christina said inside the doorway. She walked to the desk and put her hand on the stack of manuscript. "Is this the novel?"

  "Yes."

  Christina gazed about the room, frowning. "He must have kept every scrap of paper for his whole life. What's in the file cabinets?"

  "More papers, manuscripts, correspondence. I don't know what all."

  "Well, we'll have to have a division of labor, won't we?" Christina crossed the room, pulled open a file drawer, and glanced inside some of the folders. "Warranties, things like that. And computer stuff." She opened a carton and looked at the top sheets of paper. "More of the same, it looks like. And what's this?" She pulled out a few pages paper-clipped together. "A story? Could be." With a sigh she dropped the papers back into the carton.

  "Why don't you take the novel manuscript downstairs, and I'll start going through things up here," Abby said, trying to keep her hostility buried. She could admire Christina's cool efficiency, she thought, but not in close quarters. Watching her drop Jud's papers like that had sent a cold blast through her, and she realized she did not want that woman to handle Jud's private papers at all.

  "My idea, too," Christina said. "The dog won't be darting in and out a lot, will it?"

  "I doubt it," Abby said in a tight, strained voice. "She'll probably come up here and hang out with me after she's had a good look around."

  "Well, let's get started. If you can separate out the stories, essays, things like that, and make a stack, I'll start with the novel. Oh, and the advertising copy he wrote, that might prove useful, too. But no warranties or computer programs." She picked up the manuscript, then paused. "Correspondence should be in a separate stack."

  Silently Abby agreed. That was exactly what she intended to do, separate out everything personal and private. Christina carried the novel manuscript downstairs, and Abby sat on the floor; after a minute or two, time needed to loosen the knot inside, she opened a carton of papers.

  Presently Spook came up the stairs and, after sniffing everything in the aerie, lay down with her head on Abby's leg. The only sounds were papers rustling, the wind outside the windows, and occasionally Christina's cell phone. When her voice intruded, Abby got up and closed the door.

  She had emptied one box and had piles of like papers in a semicircle around her—fanfold computer stuff in one pile, advertising copy in one, papers clipped together in another, some miscellaneous things she hadn't decided about.... The papers clipped together were on fanfold paper, too, but they had been torn apart, many of them edited in pencil, bits of stories, sketches, ideas, even complete stories, she thought, but she had read little so far. Now she stopped moving altogether as she looked over the next paper-clipped set.

  Jud's first novel had been a coming-of-age story about a boy named Lincoln Colby, called Link. In it Link came to understand the adults around him, their affairs, betrayals, heartbreaks, and their generosity. Link had a dog, Sport, that got mauled so badly by a bear, he couldn't be saved; Link had shot him to end his agony, then carried the body up into the forest and buried him. When she first read the novel, Abby had realized that he had written her into it, it was her reaction to Mindy's death and burial that he had written about, and it had confounded her that he had been able to get inside her head so completely, that he had understood so thoroughly.

  She sat back on her heels, stunned again, after skimming through a few pages he had written about that day, about Mindy's death and burial, from his viewpoint and from Abby's. No names were given, but the details were all there: her feelings, a description of the deepened bond between father and daughter their shared grief had brought about, all there.

  She closed her eyes, recalling the scene from the novel. After burying the dog, Link had taken his rifle out into the forest to track the bear and kill it, but when he scanned the surrounding area with binoculars, he saw a woman on the jetty at the resort. Temple, that was her name. Temple something. Temple had been Link's first love, an older woman who had seduced the fourteen-year-old boy and taught him about sex, taught him about betrayal when she laughed at him later and sent him away. A man joined her on the jetty, and they struggled; she fell into the water, and the man turned and ran back to the resort. She didn't resurface. When Link was able to move again, he came across the tracks of the bear and realized it was just ahead, a certain shot, but he simply stood and watched it amble off into the woods; he went back to the resort, where boats were out and people were in the water searching for Temple's body. They said she lost her footing and fell, she must have hit her head. Link stood with his rifle and gazed at the man he had seen struggling with her, then he turned and walked away without saying a word.

  The final image of the novel was of the adolescent boy walking away with his rifle, but in the background the war drums were beating in Vietnam.

  Abby had been so shaken by finding herself, in the guise of a teenage boy, exposed, open to the gaze of the world, that she had paid little attention to the last few pages, but now she recalled them vividly. She stared at the many boxes around her. Had her father written scene after scene from real life, later to be fictionalized, disguised only to those unaware of the reality he had written about?

  "Oh, my God," she said under her breath. She remembered how disturbed Jud had been about the drowning death of a woman out by Siren Rock. When? She had still been in high school. It had happened in the fall; she had stayed in town that weekend, and he had come out alone for a few days, then returned haggard and more upset, and curiously more energized? driven? excited? than Abby had ever seen him. She had not understood then and she didn't now, but he had been different, fervid and absent. That was it; he had withdrawn, lost in a way she could not comprehend. He had said only that someone had drowned. Temple? She shook her head. Teri
. Teri Frazier.

  Had he seen that, too? Had he witnessed what happened that day? Had he written about it in the same way he had written about Mindy's death?

  She began sweeping the office with a searching gaze, looking for a place to hide the papers she was holding. They were not for Christina's eyes, or anyone else's. He had published what he had chosen to tell; this was personal and private. She found herself regarding the pile of other papers clipped together, and she realized she had to read every bit in that stack before she turned it over to Christina.

  Deliberately she upended the box she had been going through, and put the Mindy papers back in it, topped them with pages of computer code, and leaned back. What else had he written about in that graphic omniscient style? Reluctantly she pulled the stack of paper-clipped pages closer, picked up the top one, and started to read.

  Soon after that Christina called up the stairs. "Let's have lunch now. Take a break."

  Neither spoke as they ate sandwiches in the living room. Christina had spread out the novel chapters on the kitchen table. She looked drawn and pinched.

  "It's hard, isn't it?" Christina said after finishing her coffee.

  Abby nodded.

  "Is there any way we could have food sent in for dinner?" Christina asked then. "Abby, I confess I'm terrified of that little boat, and we'd be coming back in the dark, wouldn't we?"

  "For heaven's sake, there's no take-out place around here," Abby said, sharper than she had intended. More moderately she added, "Let's make a list, and I'll run over to Bend and shop. We can cook in for the next few days."

  "Thanks," Christina said. "Nothing elaborate—frozen entrees, TV dinners, I don't care what we have. I'll do the cooking," she added, surprising Abby very much.

  This would work out better than breaking and heading for Bend for dinner, Abby decided. There was no way she could get through all of Jud's papers by Sunday morning unless she stuck with them every waking hour. She didn't understand how Christina was accomplishing anything at all, since she seemed to be on the phone most of the time.

  She went back upstairs while Christina started making her list, and she gathered all the papers she did not want anyone else to read yet and hid them under computer stuff in the carton she had started to fill. Then she went down and looked over the list. Dinner for two, four nights, bagels and cream cheese ... Vodka and wine. Orange juice. They debated briefly whether she should take Spook or leave her, and although it was clear that Christina did not care for dogs, it was also clear that she was afraid to stay in the cabin alone. Afraid of the lake, the boat, afraid of the silence, Abby thought darkly; what had Jud seen in this woman? She left Spook to guard the house and shoved off in the rowboat. Christina's cell phone was ringing again.

  It was dark when she returned. She had been stopped many times in town by people who wanted to express their sympathy, their grief, try to give her comfort. Jud had been well known, admired, liked; he had been one of them. Then, on the black water with the light shining on the other side, she found herself blinking back tears.

  Other times when she had come in after dark, looking over her shoulder at the emerging cabin, at the welcoming light, she would see Jud standing, waiting for her, to give her a hand with the boat, a big hug and kiss, with Spook at his side, wagging her tail furiously. That night the cabin looked small and lonesome. The aerie was dark, invisible against the black trees. When she got closer, she whistled, and Spook appeared on the lowest ledge, her welcoming committee.

  Carrying the bags inside, she saw that Christina was pale, fearful. "I kept hearing things," Christina said. "I kept thinking of bears or wildcats or something. Or someone creeping in from the woods. Let's not leave me here after dark, okay?"

  "Sorry," Abby said. She really was. Lynne had always been afraid up here alone at night, too, or alone with only Abby. "I kept running into people."

  Christina began to take things out of the bags, stashing them away in the refrigerator, on the counter. "I know you think I'm a terrible coward, and I guess I am. I think you're frighteningly brave."

  Abby laughed and shook her head. "We're all afraid of something," she said, repeating what Jud had told her a long time ago. "I'd be terrified alone at night in New York," she added.

  She turned away to take off her jacket and gloves; it was a very cold night, and the warmth of the cabin felt good. "What are you afraid of?" she had asked Jud, and he had grinned and said, "Of being found out. Passing myself off as a writer. They'll find out what a fraud I am and boot me out the door." She was fighting tears again.

  "I intend to have a drink, and then I'll put together some dinner," Christina said. "Can I make one for you?"

  "Thanks. But not now. I'll get back to that stuff upstairs." She fled.

  Late that night, listening to the noisy forest, the wind in the trees, an occasional owl scream, she kept thinking of the bits and pieces of her own life she had glimpsed through her father's eyes, bits and pieces of his life with Lynne, a scene from Lynne's viewpoint where she had been so sympathetically treated that Abby had gritted her teeth and stopped midway through. But he had been able to do that, get inside the other's head and see it from both sides. He had understood both sides, and had become the villain again and again.

  He had blamed himself, she thought bleakly, for all the hurts and the poverty, the quarrels, the bitterness, the divorce, all of it. He had blamed himself, had suffered such guilt, and had not spared himself when he fictionalized the incidents. In the second novel, the boy Link had returned home after a ten-year absence, and it was understood that he had been to Vietnam, had gone to school somewhere, and had married a young woman. Abby knew where the second novel title had come from. She had asked what he would do if there was a power outage and he had to row across the finger to get home.

  "Well," Jud had said, "first thing, always carry a flashlight. Always have one in your pocket or somewhere handy. When you cast off, turn left, keep close to the shoreline, check with the flashlight as you go. It's the long way home, but you'll make it that way. Just follow the shore all around the finger until you bump into the ledge out back."

  "Follow the black shore," she had said in perfect understanding. Lynne had looked terrified at the very thought. He had called his second novel The Black Shore, and the novel was about the boy grown into a man now, groping his way through the blackness of memories, a bad marriage, broken promises, with no welcoming light visible anywhere.

  Abby had read another fragment, a description of her when Lynne remarried and became pregnant, and Abby had asked Jud if she could come live with him. He had used that piece, too, but in a way she had not recognized until now. Link's mother died, and in the second novel he had expressed Abby's emotions perfectly. She had not thought of her mother as dying, but perhaps she had felt abandoned as her mother withdrew into another life, leaving Abby motherless. Jud had known even if she hadn't, and he had used that in his novel.

  Restlessly she turned over, then over again. What else? She had to reread the novels. She felt as if she had read them with the understanding of a child, with eyes that didn't quite focus, skimming over passages that were obscure, emotions that hit too close to home, even if she had not understood why that was so at the time. She had seen only the surface, and the surface was the least important part, after all. She had to reread them.

  She sorted, read, and hid papers all day Thursday, on into the night after a hasty dinner with Christina. The stack she was hiding was growing very large, but there was another growing stack of stories and essays for Christina. Whenever she had any doubt where a particular piece should go, she put it with her own hidden papers.

  On Friday afternoon she came to several sheets clipped together, with the heading Teri. Her hands were shaking when she started to read them. Again, from his point of view and hers, sometimes separately, sometimes merging, running together, starting with one, then without warning switching to the other in mid-sentence. Some of it was incomprehensible. She turned th
e paper over, but the one that followed simply had block letters: SIREN ROCK.

  Once Jud had come to speak to her lit class, and in answer to a question he had said, "It's like being in a ground blizzard with snow blowing every which way, no form, no shape at all, just all the individual snowflakes in motion. That describes how a novel begins in my head, bits of stuff, characters, incidents, scenes all whizzing around, but all at once they begin to coalesce, and I can see a shape forming out of chaos. A snowman, by golly. The novel is born when that happens."

  No one had understood a word of it, including her.

  She started to read the few pages again and found she was not seeing the words, as if her mind refused to deal with them now. Slowly she put the paper clip back on, folded the papers and tucked them under the waistband of her jeans, and pulled her sweatshirt over them. Moving as if in a trance, she stood up and left the aerie, went downstairs to the closet, and pulled out her jacket, a wool hat, and gloves.

  "I need to get some air," she said dully.

  Christina hardly even looked up. She had said she would finish reading the novel chapters that morning and then start the impossible job of putting them in order. Now she stood with papers in both hands, the table covered with other papers, and Abby walked out with Spook at her side.