"Oh, so it's all my fault?"
After which it had gotten ugly fast, Caryn finally admitting that she was sick of the sham marriage between them. Kymberly, their incredibly high-maintenance daughter whose birth had forever altered the dynamic of their life together, was gone off to college now. There was no reason to stay together.
She wanted a divorce.
Stuart had slammed out of the house. Yesterday he'd walked for miles in the grip of an incoherent rage that seemed to grow with each passing minute. Last night, he drank off most of a quart bottle of vodka that had lain untouched in the cabin's freezer for five years. This morning he found that he'd trashed his cabin, thrown dishes around, broken two chairs and smashed the framed family photos. He woke up still mostly drunk and with little memory of what he'd done. But today, monstrously hungover, feeling ashamed and sorry for himself, he'd hiked for a grueling six-hour loop before taking a long afternoon nap and then walking up here to Tamarack, hoping the evening peace would soothe him.
He wasn't really interested in tracing all the roots of his anger, though the strength and depth of it left him in a kind of shock, and exhausted. God knows there had been reasons enough. The last few years Caryn had all but abandoned him emotionally and physically, but he'd stayed on because he believed you should fight to save your marriage, even when it looked impossible. He'd stayed on, too, in order to carry the vast amount of the load of raising Kymberly because his wife didn't have the time. He'd stayed on in all of his own good faith, trying to get to compatibility with Caryn, from which he hoped they might again approach affection. Until Friday-just two days ago!-he'd repeatedly told her that he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. In these admissions, he realized that he was probably culpable of dishonesty, but he thought it might help, might bring her back. And if he said it enough and she came around, it might even become true.
Now, after all that sacrifice and despair, all the hope and commitment, all the pain and constant work, she wanted to end it anyway. He had been such a fool, and he hated himself for that almost as much as he hated her.
Tamarack Lake had grown dark and still again. The hatch and the bite were over, and the only sound off the lake was a whisper where the water met the shoreline.
Stuart forced his stiff body to its feet. He could get back to his cabin by the moonlight, to his car and back to the city by midnight- have it out with her one last time on his schedule for a change, and not hers. It would be great to wake her up, which would make her miss a day of her precious work. It would do her good to see him in the full flower of his outrage at how she'd used and abused him, his naive belief, his basic good nature.
He broke into a jog, in a hurry now to get on the road and finally give her the real piece of his mind he'd been holding in for too long while trying to be fair, to be patient, to give her and their marriage yet one more chance. To be a good guy.
What an idiot he was. What a loser. What a goddamn pansy.
Well, all that was over, he thought. Now and forever. If she was done with him, he was done with her, too. And good riddance.
As he ran, his footsteps crunched on the granite. Riding the wave of his anger, he wasn't consciously aware that he was saying anything, but to the rhythm of every footfall, he fell into the mantra and let it escape into the night on every exhale: Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.
The fish that Stuart heard breaking water at the first sign of the hatch was very large for a Sierra Nevada alpine lake-a fourteen-inch rainbow trout. It rose to the sight of a mosquito larva shimmering off the surface of the lake, slurped at the insect in the gentle way of all trout, then exploded in sudden fury out of the water as it felt the set of the tiny barbless hook.
Gina Roake, a forty-seven-year-old attorney, fought the fish on very light 6x line for about five minutes-a really nice fight with at least four good runs-before she netted it. She stood in her moss-green hiking shorts on a shallow, submerged ledge that reached out about fifteen feet into the lake. When she saw the size of the fish, she whistled in satisfaction, then turned and, dipping the trout and her net into the water, walked back to the shore. There, grabbing the fish through the netting, with a humane efficiency she slapped its head hard once into the side of a large granite boulder.
Besides her shorts, she wore a long-sleeved buttoned shirt of some space-age fabric that wicked out perspiration and then dried almost immediately. The clothes were functional in the extreme. Over her bare feet her legs were well-muscled and tan, her ankles slim. She had stopped dyeing her hair a couple of years before, and now the wisps that showed from beneath the red handkerchief around her head were a shining, silvery gray.
Laying the now-still fish in a small concavity at the top of the boulder, her movements bespoke a temperament of brisk competence. Removing a six-inch Buck knife from its sheath on her belt, she picked up the fish by its gills and turned back to the water, where she paused for a moment to appreciate the setting. In the dying sun she saw another person, small in the distance, sitting on a rock across the water.
Returning to the task at hand, she inserted the tip of the Buck's blade into the trout and slit up its belly to the gills. Pulling out its guts, she threw them out beyond the reach of the ledge, where they sank into the lake's depth and disappeared from view. After she'd scraped the dark line of gunk along the backbone, she pulled off and threw away the gills, then dipped the trout in the water and rinsed it clean.
She'd pitched her tent on a level spot back a ways into the trees. Campfires weren't allowed here, but previous campers had left a clearing surrounded by large rocks for seating. As the far eastern end of the lake grew into shadow, she touched a flame to her small gas stove.
For longer backpacking trips, Gina tried to keep her pack to under thirty-five pounds. Besides her portable stove, she'd carry a Girl Scout-style mess kit and a bear canister filled mostly with dehydrated fruits and ready-to-cook meals. But she'd planned this trip to be day hikes out of this base camp. She'd come up on Friday and would go home tomorrow morning. Beyond that, the camp was only a couple of relatively level miles from the Echo Lakes trailhead. She didn't need to worry about her pack's weight for this type of trip, and she'd loaded up her canister with GORP-good ol' raisins and peanuts (and added M &Ms)-for quick energy, then for her lunches a couple of small loaves of San Francisco sourdough, a block of cheddar cheese, a chub of Italian dry salami.
Heaven.
For dinner tonight, she had even thought to carry a half-bottle of decent white wine. Using the mess kit's covered pot, she'd boil her fresh green beans in a little lake water, finishing them with fresh minced garlic, pepper and salt, and olive oil. The trout was far too big for the mess kit frying pan, too long in fact for the ten-inch Cal-phalon from her own kitchen, so though the concept offended her, she was forced to cut the trout in half. A squeeze of olive oil from its little plastic container, salt and pepper, mixed Italian herbs, a few drops of Tabasco sauce.
Beat that, Farallon, she thought as she laid the halves of trout into the oil and spices. Eat your heart out, Boulevard-Farallon and Boulevard being two of San Francisco's finest restaurants.
When she finished eating, she took some boiling water and the dishes she'd used down to the lake to wash them. Back at the camp, she settled against her rock and sipped at the last of her wine from her Sierra Cup. The moon was up, and so was Venus, in a wine-dark sky.
The diamond in the ring on her left hand caught a glint from the bright moon and for a second she looked at the thing as though its presence there surprised her. There was no rational explanation for this reaction-she'd worn the ring now for almost three years, but in truth she didn't often think of it because it was too painful.