They lay in silence a short while—he apologized; she said nothing, only squeezed his hand.
They got up and walked on toward the light, the blood sticky across both of them. Sissy could taste the clean air. It seemed that a rain shower had passed during the time they had been beneath the mountain—there was that smell in the air, as well as the scent of flowers and wild strawberries—and the sunlight looked washed, scrubbed.
The opening was now its full size, its full self. The light was fully upon them. Sissy was afraid Russell would want to pull her down yet again, but instead he followed her out into the sunlight where the tracks ended. They turned around and looked up at the forested mountain above them, having no idea where they were. Sissy felt like weeping, so strange and beautiful was the sight of the real world.
They studied each other for the first time in the full light of late afternoon: blood and semen splattered, red grit and coal-dust caked, wild haired, but beautiful to each other.
They bathed by wading through the brush, which was still wet from the afternoon’s shower. They scrubbed themselves with leafy green branches, then began walking carefully on bare feet through the woods, contouring around the mountain, hoping to somehow stumble across the piles of their clothes.
The sunlight seemed different—as if they had been gone for months, so that now they had emerged into a different season; or that perhaps they had been gone for centuries, even millennia, so that the tilt and angle of things was slightly different—the sunlight casting itself against the earth in some ancient or perhaps newer pattern.
They moved through the bronze light carefully, searching for where they had been. They could hear no roads below. They passed beneath sun-dappled canopy, through beams and columns of gold-green light where the sun poured down through sweetgum, beech, oak, and hickory. They could taste the green light on their bodies. It was a denser, more humid light—almost as if they were moving around underwater. Sissy saw that Russell was becoming aroused yet again—that he was like some kind of monster, in this regard—and she hurried into a trot, only half-playing, to stay ahead of him.
Later in the afternoon, they found a patch of wild strawberries and crawled through them on their hands and knees, sometimes plucking the tiny wild berries but other times bending down and grazing them straight from the plants.
They kept contouring around the mountain. They surprised a doe and fawn, who jumped up from their day bed and stood staring at them for the longest time before finally flagging their tails and cantering off into the woods.
…
The pieces of the puzzle began to come together slowly. They heard the faint sound of a road. They found a skein of rock, an outcropping, similar to one they had seen earlier in the day. They followed the strike of it a little farther up the mountain, believing themselves to be too low. The sound of the highway grew closer, disturbingly monotonous and familiar, yet they moved toward it, knowing their clothes to be somewhere in that vicinity, and when they finally found them, having come full circle around the little mountain, they sat down on a boulder in the last angle of light and stared for a while at their crumpled and folded clothes, not wanting to climb back into them, and they studied the cleft, the passage, beneath which so much had happened.
They marveled at the notion that if, or when, they walked away from it, the memory of it would be held bright and strong within them for a long time, but that after a longer time—after they were gone—the memory would begin to fade and lithify until it was all but forgotten, invisible: that even an afternoon such as that one could become dust.
They dressed only because they had to and walked slowly down toward the sound of the road. Soon they could catch the glimpses of cars, colored flecks of metal, racing past on the road below, caught in glimpses between the limbs and leaves of the trees. Their own car, with the green canoe atop, waiting as if resting, ready to rejoin the unaltered flow of things. Descending, again.
Presidents’ Day
JERRY AND KAREN WERE two weeks shy of their seventeenth wedding anniversary when an acquaintance of Jerry’s, Jim, called to say that he had fallen down while splitting wood and detached a retina, losing sight in one eye. He had driven himself to the emergency clinic, where he had been referred to an eye specialist in Spokane, four hours away. Jim had been an officer in the navy but was retired now; he was forty-eight. He was old-school, unaccustomed to and uncomfortable asking for anyone else’s help. On his drive to Spokane, the retina had occasionally shifted back into a rough approximation of its proper position and, for a few seconds, Jim would again be able to see out of that injured eye, a vague haze of gray-white light, before everything went black again.
In Spokane, the examining surgeon, a twenty-year navy man himself, Dr. Le Page, had canceled the ski trip he’d planned with his teenage son to perform the emergency reattachment surgery. Unable to find a nurse on such short notice—it was Presidents’ Day—he’d had his son fill in, still attired in his bright skiwear, complete with bob-tasseled jester’s hat.
That had been four days ago, and Jim was supposed to lie on his back several hours of each day, perfectly still, while the retina, that thin filter between the brain and the outside world, tried to reattach itself to the back of the
