John Langan: The Fisherman

Consciously or no, Dan followed my lead, by and large sticking to the beginning times, to events far enough removed you had an easier time convincing yourself the pain you felt in your chest was nostalgia, nothing more. He never spoke about the twins, Jason and Jonas, and, to be honest, I was grateful for that. Marie had wanted children in the worst way, and it had been one of her bitterest disappointments to have to leave this world without having had at least one. She and I had spoken about the matter a fair bit, up until the morning of the day she died, in fact, and after she was gone I found I had trouble being around children, seeing Marie’s nieces and nephews at the family events I continued to be invited to. Seeing them, seeing any small child, reminded me of what Marie and I hadn’t had the chance to have that we had wanted to have, and that focused my hurt the way a magnifying glass does sunlight. Over the years, those feelings had silted over. I found it easier to cope with the presence of children. But I guess they weren’t as far off as I might’ve wanted. All it took was the strong wind of me talking, and there they were, a little dusty, but in one piece.

Still and all, I liked to believe that whatever slight discomfort I might’ve felt was worth it if our talking was helping Dan. In fact, when the fishing season was over that fall, I worried a little for him. I’d yet to find my winter substitute for fishing, you see — never have, to this day — so it wasn’t as if I could say to Dan, “Well, now that fishing season’s over, we’ll have to start practicing our curling.” After having fished and talked together as much as we had, we shouldn’t have needed that kind of excuse, I know, but, lacking an activity like fishing, I felt strange saying to Dan, “Hey, let’s get together this weekend and talk.” Stupid, yes. In any event, Dan was expecting company that first fishing-less weekend, his brother and his family. The first anniversary of the accident was rearing its hideous head, and his and Sophie’s families had decided that he shouldn’t be alone for the weeks to either side of it. He was busy well into the New Year.

Although I saw Dan every day at work, passed a few words with him here and there, it wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had him over for dinner. Despite its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks — months, even — until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab in the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Sunday night and saw him standing there, unshaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. I looked at him standing in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and thought, Of course: it’s February.

They say that, for most people, the second year after you lose someone is harder than the first. During that first year, the theory goes, you’re still in shock. You don’t really believe what’s happened to you has happened; you can’t. During that second year, it starts to sink in that the person — or, in Dan’s case, people — you’ve been pretending are away on a visit aren’t coming back. This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long time before she was gone, and so had been using a lot of those same tricks on myself most folks don’t discover until much later. But the theory held true for Dan. He’d made a brave face of things through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, had done his best to be a good host to his various visiting relatives, and once the last of them — a cousin from Ohio — had been gone for going on a week, with no promise of anyone else appearing in the immediate future, the knowledge of how alone he was had crushed him like a truckful of bricks. Until this point, he’d been doing all right sleeping — not great, mind you, but not bad — and he’d been able to distract himself watching old movies on the VCR, one of his passions. Now sleep had fled, chased away by the memory of that huge white truck rushing toward him, its grill like a great set of chrome teeth grinning at him as it prepared to take a bite out of his life from which he’d never recover. When he tried to watch TV, his copy of Red River , say, or one of the late-night talk shows, whatever was on the screen was replaced by Sophie’s face, turning away from him to look at the roaring tractor-trailer, her expression sliding from early-morning fatigue to wide-eyed terror, her mouth opening to make a sound Dan never heard.

He told me this over the course of dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad, in answer to my asking, “So, Dan, how are you?” I didn’t interrupt him, confining myself to making sympathetic grunts. This was the most he’d spoken to me at one time, and the most about the subject of his loss, and once he’d started I knew better than to derail him. He took most of dinner to unburden himself, during which time he ate little — some garlic bread was all — but managed four full glasses from the bottle of red wine I’d set on the table. This was sufficient to start him swaying ever-so-slightly, and to pull his eyelids lower. Once I thought he was finished talking, I said, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”

His voice slurring, Dan said, “No offense taken, Abe — Abraham. You want to know what helps? I’ll tell you. At about four in the morning, when I’m lying on my bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, which is kind of like a movie screen hanging there above me, because it’s white, and because I can see everything that happened played out there on it, again and again — when it gets to be four in the morning, and I think, I’m going to get up in an hour and a half anyway, why not now? I haul myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, doesn’t matter what, make myself a cup of coffee to go — can’t miss my morning cup of coffee — and I go, take the car and drive out to the corner of Morris Road and 299. Morris has a wide shoulder there, so it’s no problem for me to pull off onto it and sit drinking my morning cup of coffee. There’s a traffic light there now, did you know that? Did you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I did.”

“Of course you did: who doesn’t? It marks the spot where the Drescher family — where we — where the happy family of one Daniel Anthony Drescher was forever reduced . I sit at that spot — that historic spot, coffee in hand, and I look at that traffic light. I study it. I contemplate it. I watch its three glass eyes trade off commands. If it’s warm enough, or if it isn’t, I open my window and listen to it. Let’s say the light starts off green. There’s a buzzing, almost like an alarm clock, which is followed by a clunk, and the light is yellow. Another buzzing, another clunk, and it’s red. It’s like gates being opened and shut, like prison gates. The light stays red the longest, did you know that? I’ve timed it. This is looking at it from Morris. From 299, it stays green the longest. After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.