Chapter 8.
"The Letter to Emily"
Chapter 8. The Colors.
Then there was that dream, the dream of Susie, and she was there across the living room, her pleasant Scandinavian face beaming at him, her silhouette back-lighted.
And the two of them were looking out at the neighborhood, his neighborhood in River Falls, and they were as they had been, college age, and he was puzzled that sleeping in the next room, was his wife.
His school obsession, for sweetheart is not a word a man uses, and his salvation, for that is what is wife was, occupying the same house where he’d grown up, the one conversing in her lighthearted way, the other sleeping peacefully, resting.
The fact that these two women coexisted from segments of his life separated by twenty-five years, did not occur to him. No, he was busy with amusement at the fiberglass deer, the lawn elves and the mirrored ball-on-pedestal lawn ornaments across the street. Icon of some sort whose deeper meanings he never understood. But at least there were no flamingos.
The other slept and the rise and fall of her sheet, the way it draped artfully across her recumbent form, calmed him. A dream girl. His dream girl.
Banting awoke from that dream, years later it seemed, to the stillness, the lazy repetitive spatter of a single rain droplet falling from the same leak. Over and over and over. His ears strained at the absence of other sounds.
No, wait.
There was an annoying murmur from his absent neighbor Jean McDonough’s pool. Machinery. The old neighborhood.
* * *
He never told his parents about it. Had never told anyone and all these twenty-eight years later, it remained clear, and his pulse beat now as it had then.
Was it high school? They had still been in high school. The summer spent apart. All those letters, every day. She wrote all those letters. Apart.
Or had it been later?
The day had begun cool for King’s Point on Lake Champlain in August, and she had driven up from River Falls to see how the excavations were coming along. He had never owned a car, but with two, her parents often lent her the Olds. White car. A big white car.
She would use it to drive as far as her grandmother JoJo’s in Fort Edwin to visit. And he drove a bicycle.
He remembered seeing the car, that big white car, parked above, past the bridge and the roaring of the waterfall. The Depot, they’d heard it called. Deep Hole. But his father’s kin never explained who they were.
It was the only part of the stream flowing east from Penrose Pond deep enough for swimming. Real swimming. Breast stroke, feet dangling.
The roaring echoed from high black rocks which formed a narrow chasm through which the stream fell vertically almost thirty feet.
With the intense delight reserved for adolescence, he held her hand, or she his, as the two giggled and stumbled down the root-studded embankment, slipping down leaves and pine needles, leap-frogging boulder to boulder on the way down.
And further down, to where the cascade plunged to a black pool several dozen feet across, carrying the fresh breeze from the woods deep into its depths.
Icy.
Near the muddy backwaters undercutting roots of a hemlock, he could see the froth and evanescent bubbles floating to where the water was less violent in its rush down mossy rockfields further downstream.
The wood had grown hotter by mid-morning and he was breathing hard, gasping from their steep descent. Her upper lip betrayed the merest sheen of perspiration, the lip that smiled down on him as he reached up to offer her support on her way down. And those eyes. That face. The thunder from the gorge made it impossible to hear what she was saying.
“It’s a hot one,” he recalled. She gripped his arm while balancing on the edge of a rock. A firm grip. Competent.
He didn’t recall she said anything. He seemed less troubled by their stumbling down the trail, and the animal joy in her eyes glistened green with the same pristine rays that lit the surface and penetrated the depth of the pool.
Caught up in the spirit and abandon of the moment, he felt childlike this far from prying eyes, this secret place in the nearly uninhabited countryside, too far from any road to be seen.
“How do you like it?” he shouted, turning in the attempt to cross the brook below, not really expecting an answer.
She was behind, exploring, he thought, rubbing moss from the wet rocks and driftwood.
“Don’t fall in!” he warned as much for his own benefit as hers.
He smiled at the thought of being in this private place with her, the way she looked in the morning with the morning sunlight creeping through the hemlocks. And he looked behind toward the forest. With arms extended for balance, he could not look behind to see how she was doing when he heard the splash.
She was nowhere to be seen.
His heart stopped.
In the black depths of the pool, he caught sight of something pale as he struggled close, to scramble for the bank, dousing shoes and trousers in frantic leaps to where she had disappeared.
Somewhere there, lying in a pile just beyond a tree. He struggled and twisted to see.
The surface of the pool broke, and he was baffled an instant at the echoing, deep laughter seemed to surround him from all sides, from the tree trunks, from rock faces, from the surface of the gurgling pool.
He looked to his feet to see two sandals, a summer dress and some underwear.
Bobbing toward him in a steady swimmer’s rhythm, the face and locks glued to its sides, caught his attention.
Breaststroke.
Her teeth gleamed below, lip peeled back over a fresh gum line, sparkling in the glade against the black rock walls on three sides. The strands of sun-touched blond plastered back. The dewy, long lashes.
Every summer, her tan with all the rest, was unforgettable.
“Well, are you coming in?” she panted.
Breathless.
No; he was breathless.
He looked around, feeling guilty at what he was seeing. Toward the bridge far above. Fully expecting a crowd had materialized from the wilderness above, and were staring at this vision before him. His vision.
But they were alone.
This.
Her.
Pale.
“What are you waiting for?” she called, laughing silently with her grin. That unabashed grin.
Sunshine.
All those years later. The image of that athletic seventeen year-old girl treading water.
That smile.
Those eyes.
Her name. Susie. Susie Sunshine. Echoing off the rock walls, and the blood pounding at his temples.
Etched, sound and aromas of hemlock intact.
A time ago, he thought. A long time ago. Before college. Before the war ended. Before Earth Day.
The colors.