Seven Loves

by Valerie Trueblood

  They had been looking for him all afternoon. Ever since she convinced them he had not gone for a hike as they insisted, had not left in the morning but much earlier, some time between two, when she slept, and four, when she woke. And that he had gone out under heavy clouds, with the moon hidden, no moon, really, to light him. He had left his coat. He was not a hiker. No, he did not know the terrain.

  He had left his glasses.

  A couple from Vancouver planned to take her with them in the morning. The plan was for the wife to drive Olga; the husband would drive Olga’s husband’s car to Vancouver. He thought he knew someone who would then drive it, and Olga, down to Seattle. If she would go. There was some question. Then what? They weren’t responsible after that. They were hoping her passport was in order for the border crossing.

  She couldn’t understand what they were saying but she could get the shape of it. She had her own plan. Trails led up into the mountains but she didn’t think he would take a trail. He would be sheltering somewhere on the long, rocky beach bordering the lake, trying to think. In her mind she said, Don’t think. Earlier, in the night, he had been crying, something he had never done, never, saying things she thought at first he had made up, in the confusion that had come over him in the United States. He tried to make her listen while he described a house he had occupied with a girl, his student, a young girl, a whole impossible existence in this one year without Olga, causing the university to let him go.

  Now the lake itself, the water, came into her mind. Spring fed, he had said, like the pools. Why had she not asked how he came to know about the place? Had he been here? She had not known to ask. He had taken her to see the black pool a quarter mile from the hotel, enclosed in a little metal pagoda, fenced away from visitors, who might have jumped in. At one hundred forty degrees Fahrenheit, it sent a slow steam through the bars of the enclosure. You could dabble your hands in the spring water, in a little stone basin with a stainless steel spout, a graceful crook rising out of it, that never stopped running. You could plunge your hands into the dark little basin but you couldn’t leave them there: a woman with knobbed and deviated fingers told Olga this, with gestures. Olga did not put her hands in, but now she would never see hands in a sink without thinking of this basin.

  That you could love until organs inside you twisted like those crooked fingers, that you could do this and yet not go out unerringly and find him—this bewildered her.

  They were showing her a map. A Japanese man was trying to speak Russian to her. See, mountains all around them, lake before them, a lake like a vast, stunted river, sixty-four kilometers in length. Room in it for two islands, room for the sunken possessions of departed Indians, she could see from the pictures on the map’s border. Room for those who might take a boat out, one of the boats from the little basin in front of the hotel, without knowing about the lake winds, drawn on one area of the map in brisk, terrifying lines.

  She had not gone with the couple from Vancouver; she had stayed on past the three days the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had suggested, causing those in the office behind the desk to inquire about her funds. Everyone in the hotel knew her now, and cleared a space for her around the front desk when she got off the elevator.

  When the organized search resumed after lunch someone reported that she had gone off by herself. She had been seen on a grade too steep for an inexperienced climber. A group of young men from the Japanese bus tour, who had been on the beach with binoculars all afternoon, had seen her on the mountain twice, once on the trail already searched by rangers the first day, and once far above it.

  The young men were going out themselves to bring her back. For them, that would be the end of it. But she had almost a month ahead of her, to go out and back and never find him.

  May found her way down the yellow-lit corridors into a causeway chilled by open windows, to the echoing rotunda that housed the pools. The lights were very low, coming from under the water of the two pools and lighting from below the dozens of faces and the steam playing on the surface of the water. In the dark she saw a ceiling painted with stars. There was a din of talk in the room, amplified by the water. Foreign languages. It was foreigners, people from older countries, who saw the need of these pools. Even in the dim light she felt the presence of mottled, heavy flesh, limbs that had to be hauled up the wet steps with the aid of rails. She did not see Cole.

  Her attention was caught by a couple in the larger pool, which was the size of a swimming pool and brimmed with floating people. It was the boy and girl they had seen in the lobby, the honeymoon couple. They stayed at the edge, with their arms on each other’s shoulders. The girl pulled herself up and sat dripping, wringing out her ponytail and extending her leg for the man, the boy, to take. She kept pushing him with her foot. They were completely different without their clothes, at ease and confident. May had to marvel at the girl’s skin; it had the sheen of rubber, but with an unarguable, almost sedative beauty added, in the dimness, by the luminous heat it gave off. As the boy pressed his muscular arms along the sides of her leg she gave a low laugh. When he came out of the water to sit beside her he displayed abbreviated black trunks, pouched shamelessly. Across his belly and around his side ran a long, meandering, puckered scar, still red, as if he had been sawn halfway through and pressed roughly back together. The girl leaned on him, locked her eyes on his, and ran her finger along the scar.

  He dropped back into the water and the girl slid down his body, having given up the laughs and little pushes. May refused to imagine what had happened to the boy’s torso. The way they drove cars—with his learner’s permit, Nick already drove that way, fast, unsmiling. They couldn’t use the car to influence him because he didn’t care whether he drove or not. From here she could see that all of his promises didn’t matter, either. The problem was life. He, their son, was not bound closely to it. When they got home they must explain to him, much more clearly than they had, the obligation of life.

  She felt herself watching the couple in the water with the fixed smile with which people who are not dancing watch dancers. The steam, and the fact that she was wearing her sweater in the heat, made it difficult to breathe. All around her in the dark she heard German and a language she thought must be Dutch. Steam, blasts of cold air when children ran in from the dark courtyard where there was an outdoor pool, loud questions and answers between pools, with a harsh rebound or echo caused by the vast room.

  A big woman got into the water with a sturdy, jowly baby in her arms. She dragged it in slow loops through the water as though she were writing with it. She spoke the German-sounding language, which was not quite German, to a woman with dewlapped arms who seemed to be her mother. The baby appeared to be asleep. But then she tossed it into the air and caught it under the arms. She and her mother laughed with that European assurance, that unfastidiousness. The baby neither laughed nor cried. Fat as it was, it looked ethereal. Its fists were loose, its eyes were drowsy, its attention turned inward in a state May recognized as having belonged to babies of her own. She had a sudden conviction, gathering everything under its reproach, that she too should be able to take a baby into the water. Why was this not possible? Why was that time gone, unfindable with a baby belonging to anyone else? Why know it only now? The woman pulled the lagging baby through the water again, and brought it up dripping against her ribs and cradled it. All right, all right, May thought. She remembered feeling in the afternoon that she must make the honeymooners understand something. But it was not right to try to make anyone understand it, after all.

  Where was Cole? She felt her heart begin to pound. She was about to run back to the lobby when she saw him. Suddenly, toward the middle of the circular pool, she saw his back.

  It was Cole. There was a florid darkness to the back of his neck, with the blond hair plastered helplessly on it. By the time she got there he had gone in deeper, up to his chest, and she knelt down at the edge and called him softly, but he had settled himself on the third step down, with people crowde
d shoulder to shoulder behind him, and he did not hear her above the echoes.

  She reached her arm through and tried to tap him on the back. A pale man saw who she wanted and spoke to Cole, and he turned with a dazed, unseeing expression in his eyes, looking all around him like a man being awakened from sleep and finding himself in the water. When he saw her his face took on firmness, pleasure.

  She had forgotten this look of his, and that was her own doing, misplacing it along with so much else in the merciless forgetfulness, the oblivion of marriage, for he always showed this pleasure when he had been waiting for her and she appeared, did he not?

  He called, “Are you coming in?”

  “Come with me,” she mouthed, almost falling against the damp, broad, water-beaded backs in front of her. “Come. Come back to the room.”

  “What? Now?”

  Men and women looked up at her—they were elderly Europeans, nothing surprised them—stirring the water with their hands, on their faces the benign foreign expression that said everything had its solution, yes, everything, once the first youth was past.

  “Come, will you please?”

  “Is something wrong?” He was doing as she asked, getting to his feet, water sliding off his shoulders, forming runnels on the loose skin where the arm branched off the chest.

  She took his hot hands and pulled him. He splashed her, getting out. “I’ll get dressed,” he said, almost humbly. “I thought you were coming in.”

  “No, come with me,” she said, staggering up, breathless at having found him alive.

  FOUR

  Happiness: Nick

  May was first; she put her head out into wet grass and drew a breath of ecstasy. Spring. Her hair clung to the spears of grass and stuck on her cheeks. She was crawling out of the car window, into fine rain and the smell of wet earth.

  Nick had moved; he had already said he wasn’t hurt. It was just going to be getting out and resuming life, which was flaunting, on this green wet spring day, its power to go on without them. If it had wished, it could have ejected them. They were in a ditch at the foot of a big timber company sign. Above them the company had left a line of trees standing so as to screen a meadow of stumps from the road, and as May got to her feet the trees started up a flickering of all their pale green leaves. It was because they were aspens, it was the aspen’s calm applause.

  Aspens. Sweet air. Spring.

  There was a giant blunderbuss in the ditch with them. May closed her eyes and when she opened them again it was a tree stump, four feet across, spiked with hacked-off roots. Nick was halfway out the car window. “Is it gonna”—twisting himself to see her—“catch on fire?”

  “Maybe,” she said, hardly concerned. She pushed at the hair stuck on her forehead. Her palms came back slimy and red.

  They both hung forward over gouged mud, getting their breath, waiting to see if something more would follow the bashes and thuds still echoing, strange prolonged embarrassment, under the low gray sky.

  May caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. From underneath a heap of stumps squeezed an animal, an animal with a bright coat. It shook itself and dropped into a creeping run. At first she thought it was a fox but it was a cat, with its jaws around something large enough to cause it to run a little sideways. It disappeared into the dense firs at the upper border of the meadow.

  “See? See the cat?” Breath in her somewhere, if she could get at it.

  Nick squinted at her, going down on one arm on the steep bank. “You have blood all over your head,” he said—tenderly, she thought.

  “Not you.” That was a relief. It was a relief, the purest happiness, to have her son with her on the grass, safe. “Did you see it?”

  “What?”

  “The cat.”

  “Cat? Where?”

  “Up there, in the woods. It looked like Keyhole.”

  “You’re kidding, where?” Nick cried, but May found she could not point. The old station wagon lay butted over on its back, not even spinning a tire. She thought, I’ll wait and then lie down on my back. I’ll wait just a minute. Let the rain fall on her face.

  She wanted breaths deeper than she could get, but there was a live material in her, an enzyme, and she recognized it: it was happiness.

  Ribs, somebody was saying, as she sat shoulder to shoulder with Nick on the ground, and she could feel a jolting in his body as if they were being ratcheted to the top of a roller coaster. She thought if he was crying she should explain, describe her own carefree feeling, but now there were noisy people all over the place. Cars. “I don’t know,” Nick rasped. The voice wasn’t right. She tried to reach past whoever it was to get him by the hand, but they were pulling her away from him, lifting her. She was the one getting the attention. Nick was so alert he had remembered to get the keys out of the ignition; he was jingling her big school keyring on two fingers.

  “I don’t know.” His voice farther away. “What next?”

  “You the driver?” another voice, mean, said to him.

  Nick didn’t answer, but he did say again, “What next, that’s what I wanna know.”

  “Yeah, the kid was at the wheel.” Another mean voice. “Passenger seat,” and with her eyes closed May could tell the man jerked a thumb at her. “Came off the overpass. Saw ’em go.”

  A long, busy silence. “Age?” This was said by a woman, who was arranging May’s arms along her sides as if to measure a sleeve.

  “She’s fifty . . . five,” Nick’s voice said, closer now. Ha, May said to herself, complimented. She was older than that. Nick had come in beside her where she was lying; he was picking through her muddy hair, holding her head still with fingers that had the car keys hooked on them. It was inappropriate, as Nick often chose to be, but he was picking something out of the top of her head. It didn’t hurt her because her scalp was numb. She felt perfectly happy.

  “Just get away, get back,” said the first mean voice. “What have you got there?”

  “Splinters,” Nick said politely. “Just plastic. Not glass.” He had obeyed the man and moved away; he never argued. May thought the man might have pushed him.

  “Nick, go ahead, get the splinters out.” May tried to sit up. “Don’t you stop him!” she commanded the head above her, with its mean mouth clamped on a ballpoint pen. Then that head slanted away and a hat brim with a medallion replaced it, and then Nick. How clear his eyes were today, blue in their zinc whites. Not bloodshot. She got hold of his hand with the keys and opened it. “I knew the cat by its tail,” she confided. “Isn’t it something? Keyhole. Keyhole the cat. All the way out here.” For she and Nick were on the Olympic Peninsula, that was it. The next day Cole and Vera were coming. Vera was home for a while; they were going to camp by the ocean, as they had years ago when Nick was a baby.

  While they were in the ambulance she told Nick a story.

  At the end of the story that had come to her, of Gorky picking the hairpins out of his grandmother’s scalp, she felt Nick’s attention because the trembling had stopped in his hand that was holding hers. Now that she had him right beside her listening, she would have to think clearly. “My mother read us the whole book. I was little, couldn’t read. A grandfather beating a grandmother! But she didn’t think it was strange and we didn’t either! We didn’t think anything was strange. Nick, you can live through anything if you—” If you what? She tried to think. The medic said, “Uh huh. Sir”—that tone everybody took with Nick, because of something . . . something . . . you wouldn’t jerk another kid around like that, saying “Sir”—“you talk to your mom. Keep her on the channel.” Stay on the channel yourself, May thought, but she excused the man. She was able to hold two opposing views. When they saw she was going to give them trouble they had let Nick in the ambulance with her. They had a blood-pressure cuff on her but they didn’t turn on the siren. There was no traffic. Why had the car gone off the overpass?

  Strapped under the blanket you could hear the hum of tires below this chamber all fitted ou
t and performing, as it whizzed along, a series of efficient officey clicks and whirs with a rhythm to them. “Poetry of the machine!” she cried. “That’s Kropotkin. Your grandmother was a devotee of Kropotkin.” Her teeth were chattering and she was the only one talking but that was all right, she wanted to and the medics seemed to want her to. A pleasant static coursed through her body and limbs. Remarkable to have stumbled on this benevolence. “But on the other hand she wanted to organize the poor. Your grandmother. Of course, when it came to war—”

  “Eight five over palp,” the medic said to his phone, watching a gauge.

  “What’s palp?” That was Nick.

  “Can’t hear it.”

  “Oh God oh God,” said Nick.

  “Is he all right?” May plucked at the medic’s hand, trying to raise her head to see.

  “You stay put. He’s all right. They’ll cry, don’t mean they’re hurt.”

  Nick was crying. But the medic wasn’t worried about that, even though he had no way of knowing Nick cried all the time. Routinely. Unstrung, as their doctor said, by the attempt every organ in his body was obliged to make, every minute, to combine incompatible chemicals.

  “If only his sisters were still in the house,” May said to Leah. If only the girls were still there to walk ahead of them, herself and Cole, as emissaries to Nick.

  “Nick isn’t verbal,” Leah had said, very early, for she saw it, the very thing his teachers would say later. But Leah, the math teacher, had expected Nick to shine in math. Years had been spent in search of his learning style, for the something other than language that would reach him. For the extremely nonverbal, something else must be found. And Nick had done that, found something.

  As long as he was clean, the thing to do, Vera advised, was worry about nothing but keeping him that way. “Nick is never going to explain any of this to us,” Vera said. “You might as well give up.” It was not as if he were confiding in somebody outside the family. The same silences fell, after all, in the living room when he sat with one or another of his girlfriends. Sly, tangled girls, but smart, they all were; they had chosen Nick. They didn’t all go to the same school; they found each other, these particular kids.