Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

No one said anything.

“I could tell some stories,” Sandy said.

“We can clean up tomorrow,” Lucy said.

“There’s others,” Sandy said.

Lucy insisted. “It’s bedtime for you.”

Sandy put on a red union suit and climbed the ladder into her bunk, and we tried to resume dinner, but soon she was leaning over the edge of the bed, shouting down at us.

“That’s the difference,” she said.

“Go to bed, dear,” Steve said.

“I want to tell you the difference!”

“Okay,” Steve said. “What’s the difference?”

“You all have stories,” Sandy said. “And we have secrets.”

“Good night,” Mr. Jansen said.

“That’s the difference,” she said.

Before bed, I walked across the Jansens’ drive and stood under the awning of the garage. It was snowing lightly. Firelight lit the cabin windows, and I could see my wife, standing at the kitchen sink, framed in an oval of frost where the glass was too warm to freeze. I fumbled with a book of matches as I watched her, this lovely woman carved like a cameo against the window. I was about to head back inside when Mr. Jansen joined me. “You want a light?” he asked, and suddenly the flame from a lighter flared in my face. He lit a cigarette and said, “What’s your problem with Steve?”

My father-in-law’s face was gray with stubble, as if the long day had aged him. He looked tired and uncertain, and I wondered how he’d react if he knew the truth about his friends. This old man could be shattered with a sentence, but in the blind I had begun to lose my grip on the clarity of my dreams. I could no longer imagine the shape of my revenge, the loss I was trying to recoup, the pain I was trying to stop — Caroline’s, or mine. I had been jarred by the end of dinner, sad for Steve, which surprised me, and sad for Sandy — especially Sandy, the way she lived with the rankling knowledge that she existed in her husband’s affections as a thin anecdote, an illustration of his mediocre griefs. I didn’t want to become the sort of man Steve was, and I honestly believed at that moment, as I watched the snow curl around the cabin windows, that I would never tell my wife’s story, that her secret, what little of it I knew, was safe with me.

Mr. Jansen watched his daughter in the window, her face blurring behind a cloud of steam as she poured boiled water into the sink and began washing the dinner dishes.

“It’s a tough haul, acting,” he said. “But she’s good, isn’t she?”

“Better than you know,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. I used to do some acting. That’s where her talent comes from. Someday she’ll be famous. She’ll be well known.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

For a moment, he seemed to vacate his own face, leaving behind the hollowed eyes and nose and mouth of a mask. He stubbed his smoke in the snow and stumbled across the icy drive back to the cabin. A little while later, I came in and climbed the ladder to our bunk. I lay awake, listening to the subdued voices below. I remember only that my wife used the word “wanker,” and then for a while low whispers were skimming the surface of my sleep until, late in the night, toward dawn, really, I woke and found myself alone.

My heart was racing, pounding with a familiar fear — that Caroline was gone and I would never find her. I hurried down the ladder and opened the cabin door. The temperature had dropped and the snow had glazed over with a sheen of ice. The thin crust cracked underfoot with a distinct breaking sound. I walked along the trampled path, shortening my stride to fit my feet into the frozen mold of previous footprints, losing myself in concentration. At the outhouse, I stood for a moment, listening.

I called her name.

There was no response, and I panicked, as you might in a dream where all your assumptions are not exactly wrong but irrelevant. Far off in the woods, a coyote yipped and howled, and others answered. I leaned my head back and watched the breath stream from my mouth and disappear. The bare winter branches of the alders tangled above my head like a web. Then some black thing raced into the trees in front of me, and I jumped. It crashed through the underbrush and was gone.

The ground was pocked with fallen leaves and pine needles. Bare grass showed in the small circles of warmth beneath the sagging branches of fir trees. Everything that had moved in the woods over the past few days had left a record of its passing; the snow was marked with the tracks of hunters and birds and squirrels and deer and dogs, all the trails crisscrossing and weaving and intersecting, so that, if time were collapsed, you could imagine nothing but hapless collisions, a kind of antic vaudeville.

Caroline opened the outhouse door. She wore only her nightgown. Her feet were bare.

“You must be cold.”

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I am, but I’m going in.”

We looked back through the woods to the cabin. A rope of gray smoke curled up through the chimney, rising, it struck me, out of my simplistic imagination.

“You didn’t shoot that turkey,” she said.

“How do you know?”

She smiled and shook her head. “It’s just not you.”

“I guess,” I said, although I resented the comment, the assumed familiarity. “I’d like to leave early tomorrow.”

“I’m already packed,” she said. “I’ve got a big week coming up.”

I held my breath and waited for the scripted words.

“I got a part,” she said. “A detergent commercial, Monday. We’re shooting in Boston.”

She was a good liar. She knew to look me directly in the eye. You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you. So that she wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, I nodded, releasing her gaze.

“Who did?” she asked.

“Did what?”

“Shoot the turkey.”

“Lindy,” I said.

“I’m freezing,” my wife said. “I’m going in now.”

I grabbed her by the shoulder, turning her toward me. She tried to shrug free, and I dug my fingers into her shoulders. “Tell me,” I said, tightening my grip until I felt bone roll beneath my thumbs. Her teeth were chattering, and she bit a crease of white in her lower lip, trying to stop them. She was trembling, and her frailty in the cold enraged me. I pulled her in close and then abruptly pushed her away, shaking and shoving until she fell back, breaking through the crust of ice the way children do, making angels. The deep powder closed over her face and her mouth was stopped with snow, and she lay still, her dark eyes staring vacantly up. She tried to rise, flailing her arms, and then, dreamily, she stretched out her hand, reaching for mine.

I walked away, now trembling myself, but for some reason I turned, and when I did she called my name. I didn’t answer. She was standing by the outhouse, sunk to her knees in the broken drift, her hands clasping her shoulders so that she seemed to be embracing herself. Wind separated the ragged wisp of smoke from the chimney into several twining strands. Her long blond hair held the moonlight. Her nightgown billowed out, fluttering behind her, and she appeared to be hovering, almost drifting, as through water.

Lance vanished behind the white door of the men’s room and when he came out a few minutes later he was utterly changed. Gone was the tangled nest of thinning black hair, gone was the shadow of beard, gone, too, was the grime on his hands, the crescents of black beneath his blunt, chewed nails. Shaving had sharpened the lines of his jaw and revealed the face of a younger man. His shirt was tucked neatly into his trousers and buttoned up to his throat. He looked as clean and bland as an evangelist. He bowed to Kirsten with a stagy sweep of his hand and entered the gas station. All business, he returned immediately with the attendant in tow, a kid of sixteen, seventeen.