The Fisherman Read Free Page A

it, there was the better part of a better year—one of the best years. If I had searched the shoeboxes around me, I could have put my hands on pictures of most of its highlights, from the Christmas dinner I’d eaten with Marie’s family to the Halloween party that had been our third date—and that we’d attended dressed as Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton—to the early spring weekend we’d taken up in Burlington. I don’t know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same. Some days, it seems to me that, once you duck your head beneath the surface details, you find yourself in pretty much the same sequence of events. Other days, I think, No, it’s those details that are the point. Either way—or both, even—that was what happened to us in the space between those pictures. We’d fallen in love, and shortly after that second photo was taken, I was down on one knee, asking her if she’d marry me.
    There was another year and a half from that picture to the next one. In that time, the darkness that had thickened the spaces among the trees in that second photo had gathered about us, swallowed us the way those trout had consumed the water-skimmers. The week after we returned from our honeymoon in Bermuda, Marie found a lump in her left breast. From the start, things were bad. The cancer was pretty well-advanced, already storming her lymph nodes, and it resisted the radiation and the chemo like some kind of unstoppable beast in a low-grade horror film. I’m not sure when we knew that Marie wasn’t going to survive this, or when we accepted it. Maybe a month before the end, a change came over her. In a way it’s hard for me to describe, she became calm; I don’t know if I’d say peaceful so much as still . It was as if she’d moved into the lobby of the long, dark house she was heading towards. She wasn’t morbid, or listless—if anything, she relaxed, laughed more than she had in months. I didn’t see what was happening. I thought the difference in her might be a sign that things were turning around, that she was finally getting the upper hand on the creature that had rampaged through her system. I went so far as to float this idea past her, one Saturday afternoon. I’d driven her down to the Hudson, to a little park she liked a few miles south of Wiltwyck. We’d found it one of our first weekends together, when we’d gone for a drive just to have another way to spend time together. This day, there was a breeze off the river, which made it too cold for her to leave the car, so we sat watching the water and I ventured that maybe her recent improvement was an indication that things were looking up. Did I sound as desperate as I fear I must have? Marie didn’t answer; instead, she took my right hand in her left, lifted it to her lips, and kissed it. I told myself she was too overcome with emotion to reply, which I guess she was, just not the one I thought.
    The third picture was taken right around that time. In it, Marie’s leaning forward on the kitchen table, looking up and to her right, where I’m standing with the camera, telling her to smile, which she is, but there’s a year and half’s struggle behind that smile, a deep weariness eighteen months in the making. She’s wearing a kerchief around her head, dark blue with white flecks. She was never happy with the wigs they provided her. Her skin has pulled tight against the bones of her face, her arms; it’s as if she’s aged at an accelerated pace, as if I’m getting to see what she would have looked like had we seen our thirtieth anniversary. Behind her, the morning sun is spilling through the windows over the sink, outlining her in gold.
    Two weeks after that photo, she was gone. In a matter of two days, the bottom fell out from beneath us; there was barely enough time to rush her to the hospital bed she died in. What followed: the endless phone calls to tell people she’d passed, the visit to the funeral home (which we’d both put