23. Lily
LILY
He took me to a frozen lake to show me something beautiful. He ended up showing me the exact spot where all of it would go wrong.
The days after the soot were the best I have ever had.
I want that on the record before anything else, given what came next.
We fixed the rugs. We ate well. He let me photograph him twice without making me negotiate for it.
A fight you both survive with your hands still open is worth more than a hundred polite mornings, and I had twenty-two years of my mother saying so and had never once believed her until then.
He woke me before the light and would not tell me where we were going.
"Put your boots on," he said. "Wear the good ones, and two pairs of socks."
"Is this a hostage situation?"
"It is an outing."
"You've never used that word in your life."
"I am using it now. Get up."
We took the truck a mile down a track I had not known existed, and then we walked, with Tank plowing a trench ahead of us like a paid guide who has decided the tip is already secured.
The trees thinned. Then they stopped altogether, and the ground stopped, and I came out onto the edge of something that took the argument straight out of my chest.
I have photographed a great deal of country. Nothing I have ever stood on made me feel as small as that lake did.
It ran out flat and white for what looked like a mile and a half, boxed in by black spruce that had given up trying to be interesting.
There were ridges buckled up through the surface where the ice had shoved against itself, low seams of blue running away from us like veins under a wrist. Snow lay over most of it, scoured down to bare glass in patches where the wind had been working, and the bare patches were not white at all.
They were the flat gray-green of something very deep looking back up at you.
"Say something," Sacha said. "You have not said a word in two minutes. It is unnerving."
"Give me a second. I'm having a religious experience."
"Take your time."
"What's it called?"
"The county calls it Kestrel Lake. Nobody else calls it anything.
" He walked out ahead of me, unhurried, testing nothing, which told me he had walked it a hundred times.
"A piece of the glacier broke off here and sat until it melted, and this is the hole it left.
A kettle hole has no manners. There are no shallows to speak of.
You get about nine feet from the bank, and then the bottom simply leaves. "
"How deep does it get?"
"In the middle it is forty feet."
I looked down at my own boots on the bare gray ice, and then I made myself look back up, which took a moment.
"You waited eighteen days to tell me I've been living next to that."
"You were not going to go near it. Now you have been shown it, and you know where the bad ground is, which is safer.
" He pointed with two fingers, the way he points at everything, economically, as though gesturing costs money.
"The whole east shore is spring-fed. Water comes up through the bottom all winter and the ice over it never sets properly, and it looks exactly like the ice you are standing on now.
You do not go east of that pressure ridge. Not with me, not without me, not ever."
"I have it."
"Say it back."
"I don't go east of the ridge. Sacha, I'm a nurse.
I've seen what ten minutes in water like that does to a person's hands.
" I got the camera up and shot the ridge, because it was beautiful and because I wanted my own record of the line I was not to cross.
"Also I've now decided this lake is a person, and she does not like us. "
"The lake does not care about us at all. That is the entire point of a lake."
The ice let out a low groan under us then, a sound that started somewhere out in the middle and traveled off toward the far shore, and then a crack went through it like a shot in a stairwell. I did not scream, but I did get a great deal closer to him in a very short time.
And then he said the thing I have thought about every day since.
"That is the ice telling you it is thick," he said, and he did not move a muscle. "It groans under pressure, and it is under that pressure because it is strong. Ice that talks is ice you can trust." He looked out at the middle where the noise had come from. "It is the quiet ice that kills you."
"That is the most frightening thing anyone has said to me in a calm voice."
"You wanted to know the lake."
Across the water, on the far shore, there was a building.
I put the long lens on for it. It was a lodge, big and dark and shut up for the season, two stories of stained cedar with a wide deck out front and a boathouse down at the water and every window shuttered. There was a dock frozen into the ice at an angle, and no tracks anywhere near any of it.
"That is somebody's money," I said.
"It is, and they come in the summer. They do not come now." He watched me frame it. "You are photographing an empty building."
"I photograph empty buildings the way other people photograph weddings.
An empty building is a whole novel and none of it is written down.
" I got the shot with the shuttered windows and the low sun on the cedar and the dark line of the boathouse.
I have thought about that frame since, and about the fact that I took it for the light.
We had the better part of the day out there.
He built a fire on the bank out of birch bark and dead spruce and made coffee that was much better than it had any business being, and we sat on a downed log with the dog between us and watched all that water do absolutely nothing for two hours, and I have never been happier in my life.
That is when I made him ice fish.
He did not want to ice fish. He owned an auger, which he fetched from the truck bed with the resigned air of a man handing over evidence, and he cut a hole because I asked him to, and then he sat on an upturned bucket beside it and held a short rod in one enormous hand and looked at me with flat betrayal.
"Don't move," I said, lining it up. "This is for the profile."
"What profile is that?"
"It's your dating profile, and I've been building it for a week.
" I got the shot. Then I got a better one.
"It reads, rugged outdoorsman, enjoys long silences and shorter sentences, dog comes first and always will.
It says he will retrieve your camera from a blizzard with no questions asked, though he will lecture you about hypothermia the entire way home. "
"You will burn that one."
"Under interests I've put fortifying, brooding, and cooking for one." I checked the frame. "Under looking for I've put nothing, because you'd never fill that in, and honestly the mystery is doing a lot of work for you."
He held the rod. He held the expression of a bear that has been put in a party hat and told to hold still for the children. And then a corner of his mouth went, and he looked out at the ice and said, "The fish are not going to come to a man being photographed."
"No fish is going to come to that face under any circumstances."
I got that one too. It is the best photograph I have ever taken of anybody, and it is sitting in the camera on my chest, undeveloped, and at the time that struck me as a small and temporary problem.
Somewhere in the afternoon the conversation went where I had been steering it since breakfast.
"Can I ask you an unfair question?"
"You will ask it regardless."
"What would you do if the clock stopped?" I kept my eyes on the lake because it was easier. "Say the man with the number on your head falls down a stairwell tomorrow and the whole thing is simply over. What do you do with the rest of it?"
He was quiet long enough that I thought I had lost him. Then he said, "I would like to be bored."
"That's it?"
"That is the whole of it." He turned the empty cup in his hands.
"I would like one year in which nothing happens to me.
I would like to find it dull. I would like to complain about it out loud to somebody, at length, about how little is happening, and to be told that I am tiresome.
" He shrugged with one shoulder. "Men in my trade do not retire into something exciting.
If we are very lucky we retire into a Tuesday. "
I did not trust my voice for a second.
"That's the saddest and best answer anybody has given me."
"You asked. Now you answer it." He looked over. "The question is the same, and do not tell me a city."
"I'd build a darkroom."
"That requires a wall you intend to keep."
"It'd be a little one. I'd use the back room, the cold one, with the bad window you'd have to black out. I'd need a tank, a tray, a safelight, and a line to hang things on." I was talking too fast and I let myself. "And then I'd develop her last roll."
He went very still beside me.
"I've had it two years," I said. "I've carried it through eight sets of keys.
I keep telling myself I can't do it, that once it's developed there's nothing after it, and that's true, and it's also a lie.
The real reason is that I have never had a room I was going to be in long enough to hang a wet print in.
" I made myself look at him. "So that's my answer.
If the clock stops, I want the back room, and a line, and enough time to find out what my mother was looking at. "
He did not say anything comforting. He has never once done that, and it is the single most reliable thing about him. He put his hand flat on the log between us, palm up, and left it there until I put mine in it.
Here is what I understood, sitting on a dead spruce log in the cold with forty feet of water in front of me and a man's hand around mine.
I was done. I was not merely tired of running, which I had been for the better part of a year.
I was finished with it. Two years of aiming a car at the next town had been something I did in order to survive, and it had worked, and it was over now the way a course of treatment is over, and what I wanted instead was small and exact.
I wanted a back room with a blacked-out window.
I wanted four holes on a south slope. I wanted to be in one place until I had become tiresome about it, with him, in a house where the dog is not allowed on the bed and gets on it anyway.
I did not say any of it out loud. I remember deciding that there was time.
Something crossed his face while I was sitting there being happy.
I caught it in the corner of my eye and turned to look and it was already gone, packed away wherever he keeps the things he has decided not to say, and when I asked him what it was he said the fire needed wood and got up to see about it.
I told myself he was working the perimeter in his head, which is what he always does, and I let it go.
I have gone back over that hour more times than is good for me. He was not calculating the perimeter. He was doing sums about a road and a car and a man in another city, and he had been doing them since the night of the fight, and I was sitting there planning a darkroom.
The light started going gold and then orange along the ridges, and I got up to shoot the last of it, and that is when the day ended.
There was a man out on the ice.
He was a long way off, three or four hundred yards toward the middle, a dark upright shape beside a low dark one, and it took my eyes a full second to make the low shape a sled and the upright one a man standing over a hole. He was not moving. He had been there a while. He was fishing.
I brought the camera up out of reflex and the lens brought him close, and the flannel was new and the boots had never once been wet, and I lowered the camera and heard myself say a word I do not use.
"Sacha, look."
"I have him."
"He's on the lake. He's on this lake. You told him about the springs. You told him two men went in and only one came out."
"I made it as ugly as I could."
"So he didn't believe you."
"He believed me about the ice," Sacha said, and his voice had gone somewhere I had not heard it go before, flat and low and entirely unhurried, the voice of a man reading a page he has already read. "He came anyway. Do you understand what that means?"
I did. My whole body understood it before my mouth caught up. A man who takes a warning about spring holes and walks out onto the ice regardless is not a man looking for fish. He is a man who has decided this is the right lake, and who wants to be seen deciding it.
Across the whole white sheet of the lake, the friendly fisherman raised his hand and waved at us like a neighbor. Sacha waved back, easy as anything, and said through his teeth without moving his lips: "Get to the truck. Do it now. Don't run."