Where we’d climbed it the spur was a couple of hundred yards wide, but it narrowed steadily as it approached the meadow and the river. Very little vegetation grew up there. A few low shrubs had found a hold in the hard ground and there were some clumps of dry stringy grass, but that was about it. There was a light breeze and Stan and I cooled quickly from the exertion of our climb.
We were about sixty or seventy feet above the surrounding land and below us the forest rolled away in green waves. Looking straight out over it, scanning the mid-distance, there was very little sign of man-a segment of Rural Route 12, the occasional power-line pole, a few isolated dwellings, a thin column of smoke way off to the west…
We passed the meadow on our left. I could see our cabin, and Rosie and Millicent’s house. Washing hung on a line behind it but the breeze we felt did not reach the meadow and the clothes were still.
The end of the spur was not a vertical drop but a series of ragged steps that formed a steep broken slope, as though at some time in the past this leading edge had grown tired of holding itself erect and had fallen to its knees, exhausted.
Here, there was nothing to block our view on three sides. Ahead of us the forest stretched out to a spine of hills, and beyond these hills there were more in ragged lines. The trees were mostly evergreen but there was a scattering, too, of those that autumn had colored.
From our right, on the other side of the spur to the meadow, the Swallow River came toward us in a long straight line. Miles away it would have boiled through Oakridge, broken by low rapids as it passed under the road bridge that led into town, but here it flowed smoothly. The river was aimed directly at the sloping edge of the spur, but fifty yards out it twisted from this course and began the pronounced curve that skirted the spur and became the Empty Mile bend.
I tracked it from right to left, turning slowly on my feet, running my eyes along the trail of water. The river might always have run this course. The troughs and hollows of the land and whatever else makes rivers run as they do might naturally have made it bend this way. But it was not difficult to imagine another scenario-that the slope of the spur was a newer addition to the landscape, one that had thrust itself into the river’s original path, forcing it to swing out and around and become the curve that now existed.
I had brought the aerial photo with me and I compared it with the landscape around us. Stan looked over my shoulder and did the same, then shrugged disinterestedly and went off to stand at the very tip of the spur, shading his eyes like an explorer scanning the distance. Empty Mile and our land were on the left of where I stood. I peered down on the trees that separated the meadow from the water. From this moderate height they seemed at first to be a solid mass, without much to differentiate one area from another. By using the photo as a guide, though, I was just able to see a lighter pathway running through them, continuing the straight line of the river from the other side of the spur.
I thought about the lecture Marla and I had endured at the Elephant Society on what sometimes happened to rivers, the lecture Chris Reynolds had said my father and Gareth had been so interested in. And I wondered if what I was thinking could possibly be true.
Stan and I left the spur and tramped our way back down to the meadow and our cabin. I didn’t say anything to him about the photo or the river or the trees. I didn’t say anything to Marla about them either when she came home that evening. Because although I would have liked nothing better than to give them something to hope for, I did not want to be responsible for snatching it back again if it turned out that I was wrong.
But while I avoided that particular pitfall, while I did not set them up for disappointment, that night, as so many days and nights during that time seemed to, brought its own unique portion of unhappiness nevertheless.
It is a strange thing to cause physical pain to someone you love, to watch as your arm sweeps down and welts appear on the body before you, to see the muscles clench and the spine twist as the reflex to escape is bitten down on by some greater imperative, some dark need for atonement that will not be ignored. But that was what Marla made me do to her for the first time that night.
She had found a slim bamboo rod somewhere in town and hidden it behind the dresser. When we went to bed she took it out and begged me to use it on her. I refused, of course, but she walked out to the kitchen and came back with a knife and said she’d start cutting her arms if I didn’t do it.
How had such emotional horror come to be part of my life? How was it that a woman could feel so bad about herself? I’d known since my return to Oakridge that she was a long way from happy. I had stolen eight years from her, she felt terribly responsible for the death of Patricia Prentice, and she lived in daily fear of Gareth’s pimping. But needing to be caned? None of it seemed a basis for such an extravagant act of penance.
Yet I did what she wanted. She was so insistent, so crazy with need, so determined to self-harm if I did not play this role that it seemed a safer option than leaving her to punish herself.
It wasn’t until it was over and we were in bed together that I hit upon a possible motivation for her behavior.
The roller coaster photo.
My father and Marla together in San Diego.
Had there indeed been something between them? Was it this that drove her to fits of depression so black that her only escape was the distraction of physical pain?
It sounded like something from a daytime soap opera. But it was possible. My father was a handsome man. He was in his mid-fifties in the photo, not too old for a fling with a girl at the end of her twenties. And Marla? Could she have done something like that? I figured if she could be a hooker she could probably do pretty much anything.
I turned on the light and lifted my wallet from the nightstand. I took out the photograph of Marla and dropped it on the covers in front of her.
“Maybe it’s time to stop feeling guilty.”
She pushed herself up from her pillow, wincing as her back pressed against the wall, and picked up the photo with an expression of puzzled query on her face. Her eyes, though, I saw, carried a sheen of fear.
“It fell out of one of the trash bags when we were cleaning out your place.”
“Oh. Yeah, I went to San Diego once. I didn’t tell you, did I?”
“No.”
I took the second photo from my wallet, the one of my father, and showed it to her.
“My father had one too, in his things. Just like yours.”
Marla put a brittle smile on her face. “Well, yeah. It was kind of a coincidence. It was… It was…” She stopped and swallowed and tried again. “It was…” Her face crumpled and she began to cry, huge wracking sobs that tore through her chest as though they carried small pieces of her soul with them. For a long time she could do nothing else and I held her and felt her body shaking. Eventually, though, there was nothing left in her and she was able to force words into her broken voice.
“Three years ago we had an affair. It lasted six months. Sometime in the middle of it we went away for a few days, not even a week. Ray paid someone to take care of Stan.”
Marla wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. She didn’t look at me.
“I thought you were never coming back. I’d waited so long. I’d waited for years. And then I just gave up and it seemed like it didn’t matter what I did anymore. There wasn’t any right or any wrong, there was just… nothing. I didn’t have anything left to lose. But even then I knew it would turn to shit. You can’t do something like that and get away with it. It doesn’t change anything, I know, but we both felt terribly guilty about it. In the end the guilt was all Ray talked about. And I knew you’d find out. I didn’t know how, but I knew you would. The only good thing was that no one else ever did, we were very careful. Stan never knew.”