Lisa Risager

People see my sun-cracked neck and arms, also the pale skin sliding out of my sleeves, and think day laborer, truck driver, field worker. True, I’m not the tweed and beard prototype of my chosen profession, but people have me pegged all wrong, and I don’t mind telling them so. My classes meet in vineyards and orchards more than in air-conditioned rooms—hence the farmer’s tan. My office is in the corner of a corrugated metal shed, a sign over the door reading Dr. Wayne Heinrichs, Agricultural Science: He Grows On You.

I’m known as a good guy around the university, despite my looks.

Of course, we are not on campus, but on faculty retreat, here in a coastal paradise. And my wife, Eve, instead of showing a little gratitude for being invited along and getting into the spirit of the thing, she’s treating me like jailor or devil—got me which is which. Her hair hangs in long wet ropes down the back of the hotel robe. She’s filing her nails, and bottles of polish are out on the vanity, and now and again she bounces icy stares off the mirror.

“You remember the drill,” I say. “Johnson will hand us a party schedule. 9:07, dancing; 9:31, cease dancing, drink cocktails. That man’s rectum and head are growing closer together. He wrote a thirty-point agenda for tomorrow’s meeting. Did I tell you? Be glad, honey, be thankful you’ve got a day free.”

“By myself,” says Eve.    

She lifts her suitcase onto the bed and unzips the lid, but stares, suspended, perplexed by the clothes folded inside.

“Remember how last year Johnson and his wife wore matching outfits?” I say. “They tried to play it off like it was a coincidence, all cute, remember? I was thinking, wouldn’t it be a riot if we dressed alike?”

“Wayne.”

“I took some liberties,” I tell her, lifting a shirt identical to my own from her suitcase. I drop a pair of tan slacks, around her size, on the bed. I say, “Did you know you don’t own any white socks?”

“You went through my things,” she said, crumpling down on the quilted bedspread.

“We’re playing a joke here. All you’ve got to do is walk through the door wearing these and the roof will come down.”

“All so you can laugh at Jackson?”

“Johnson. I’ve worked with him for ten years. You’ve been coming to his shindigs all this time.”

“I know his name,” she says, leaning to the mirror, strumming with one finger the wrinkles crowding her eyes. I put the slacks back into the suitcase and spread the shirt on top. She says, “That will make you happy, that little get-up?”

“I’m not going to force you to do anything. I’d never live that down, Eve.”

“Last time I’ll do this,” she says. “Promise me.”

I raise my hands, promise, say, “Stick a needle in my eye.”      

***

Next day I watch out the window as breakers eat the sand, stare at the foot-trafficked boardwalk along the bluffs, listen to the call of seagulls through the walls, and where am I? In faculty meetings, bludgeoned with Roberts’ Rules of Order. Retreating. Eve does not appreciate the fact that afterwards I’m ready for some yuks, that I must stretch my legs or die. Her long tan coat is wrapped around her clothes and the wind presses the edge against her legs as we walk. The breakers start way out, and the ocean looks platinum against the horizon. So it’s not the prettiest day. The boards give a little underfoot and the air’s fresh and I admit, I wouldn’t mind being out here alone.

We pass a little gravel lot where a few cars are parked. The ground slopes away to a boat launch, and I hear things happening but we’re running late already. Next thing I’m walking by myself. I turn and see Eve frozen in her steps, watching. A gang is dragging a pair of motorboats—rafts, Eve calls them—into the water, the words Surf and Rescue emblazoned on the sides. Black wetsuits. Yellow helmets crowning their heads. They sprint the boats into the waves and lower the screws and become white lines toward the horizon.

On the beach, two kids squat around tide pools. Their parents balance beam on the slick rocks, stepping over the white pools and broken surf. In the lot, there’s a surfboard jutting out the back of a Subaru; a man is asleep behind the wheel. Pedestrians are moving up and down the boardwalk and cars continue rattling the short bridge over the inlet. No one seems aware that rescuers have taken to the water, that there are only a handful of reasons for doing so.

Eve and I, we’re too aware.

Our Joey was four years old when he slipped out of the yard, in our little town of Caruthers, where things aren’t supposed to happen. Eve grew hoarse from calling his name. Her legs, rubber from walking the neighborhood, high-stepped at last through the plowed field behind our house, following tracks punched in the soft dirt. She found him in the irrigation canal, near the end of his tracks, wedged against a flow gate with a nest of sticks and foam gathered around him. She pulled him from the sour water, but didn’t hold him and cry into the sag of his neck—she stretched him on the dirt and then couldn’t touch him again, that heavy sponge wearing our son’s dinosaur shirt, his shoes with flashing red lights. She didn’t call an ambulance or the police or a fireman or even pray. She called me at the college and told me to come home, that she needed me. I drove forty-five minutes not knowing a thing. Then she led me to the body. I had to scare away the crows tearing him down, and Eve? She stood behind and watched. She followed as I carried Joey to the house. All she could have seen was our boy’s slack feet and lolling, heavy head, and she was barely even weeping. Since then, I don’t know what she sees.   

Now Eve retrieves a pair of sunglasses from her purse. There’s no ring of thrashing water or boat sinking behind the horizon, but she won’t look away. Her toes are at the lip of the sandstone bluffs and her coat wrinkles like a sack. I tug at her sleeve.

“Don’t paw me.”

“We’re already late.”

“Go on without me,” she says—but how can I do that?

She doesn’t move until two white lines are drawing fast toward shore, and then she’s hurrying down the ramp. I follow her past the truck and the trailer parked on the launch, my smooth-soled loafers sliding across the sand-filled treads in the cement. I can already read Surf and Rescue on the wet hulls coming our way.

The first one beaches and the rescuers dismount and pull the boat up the shore by crisp routine, in perfect reverse of departure. Two men carry a black bag up the landing ramp and toss it into the truck bed. The second raft lands on the beach. One of the men has a surfboard under his arm, a strand of kelp saddling the edge. He trots up the ramp, lays it in the truck bed, wipes a slick of water from his wetsuit and climbs behind the wheel. The others remove their helmets, hair spiky and wet. No banter between them, no laughter or grins.

The rescuers pass us with turned-down faces, except for one man whose eye Eve manages to catch. His hair is gray around the temples and I can smell the ocean on him. He puts a hand on her elbow. “Everything is okay. Just a little trouble. You go on, you have a good time. Let us worry about it.” He lifts himself onto the tailgate and offers me a reassuring smile as the truck pulls away.

Eve turns back to the waterline. “Wayne, look,” she says.  

One of their yellow helmets, imbedded in the sand like a shell. She picks it up and wipes the grit with her palm, wet and coarse and clinging.

“Probably should leave it there,” I say.

“Why would they be so careless?”

“You should leave it where they left it. They’ll realize it’s gone and be back.”

But she hurries to the roadside, calling out and holding the helmet aloft in the air, to the rescuers already out of sight.

“Did you see how exacting they were? They were machines.” She holds the helmet to me like proof. “Whatever they found rattled them.”

She wants me to take it, inspect it, offer a real opinion.

I say, “Mistakes, Eve. That’s all. They happen.” 

She looks at the helmet like it’s an impossible thing, a souvenir brought back from a dream. She arranges the chinstrap so it curves along the top of the yellow shell and holds it before her, as if she means to put it on, as if one could know the unknowable by wearing it.

***

At the party, I pull one professor with a sense of humor aside, name of Davidson, the sleeve of his jacket kiting between my fingers. He’s looking at me sideways, thinking—what? That he’s thinking is enough. The whole point of a retreat is to get us all to stop thinking our usual things. To retreat from our thoughts. He shakes Eve’s hand. The bangles she wouldn’t leave behind slide on her wrist, swatches of bright color in the otherwise khaki room. “How are you?” he says, with an odd smile.

“I don’t know. My feet hurt.”

“Honey, show him,” I say. “Give us a turn, show him the outfit.” Eve opens her arms and the cloth spreads like fins. “What did I tell you? Aren’t we twins?” I repeat her motion but with flourish, spreading my wings like I could fly to the ceiling. I say, “Remember Johnson last year?”

“What’s with the helmet?” says Davidson. Eve carries it pressed against her hip, a holster.

I thought they’d be rolling, seeing us. A pair of my old work boots are lashed to her ankles and her hair’s pinned in back, parted along top like mine. The shirttails nearly touch her knees and the short sleeves hang wide, past her elbows. She would need three, four of her to fill it.   

Davidson is a lost cause. I start toward another group by the ocean view window, but Eve catches my arm. “Why don’t you stand here and talk to me,” she says. “You’ve been pointing me out to all these people but haven’t introduced me to a soul.”

“You know all these people. For chrissakes, ten years, Eve. Christmas parties, gift exchanges, the goddamn honors night. You’ve been friends with these people.”

Eve scans the room, not really looking, just glazing by faces, then she’s through the glass doors at a trot, out onto the balcony. I follow, I rest my arms on the iron railing. There’s no moon in the sky, the stars are behind clouds, and a cool wind whistles across the slowly closing door. Below there’s a restaurant terrace. People eating, I guess, like people do on the terrace of a restaurant. A few couples brave the cold at ironwork tables. One woman is breastfeeding, a blanket covering all but the baby’s buggish bare toes. A waiter moves between tables, white apron, black tie, pencil tucked behind his ear. Beyond, waves are rushing the shore, cracking over rocks, hissing back into the night.

“That’s him,” says Eve, whispering sharp in my ear. She’s got a grip on my wrist. With the other hand she points. “The man from the rafts. He was the one I spoke to.”

The woman with him wears an orange dress that almost matches her hair; he’s in a black turtleneck with gray slacks. His face turns up, looking for stars, smiling.

“No more of this tonight,” I say.
 
“Why shouldn’t I wonder, Wayne?”

“So they dragged up a surfboard. So what?”

“So there’s a mother suffering somewhere.”

I feel the corner of my mouth, my lips opening, and my voice booms, coarse as gravel, not really like mine at all. In fact none of this is like me, the colleague that people on the other side of the glass know, or the husband my wife knows, or the good-natured guy I believe myself to be. “To you!” this other voice calls down to the terrace. “My wife saw you this morning. She thinks you boys in Search and Rescue are doing a bang up job.”

Faces on the terrace lift. Stares touch and pass. The rescuer offers a guarded smile, nods, then turns back to the menu. The woman plays with her ear, her hand underneath her long red hair.

The voice says, “She thinks you’re tops, except that you left this behind.” I grab the helmet from her hands. I lift it so he can see what he’s done.

“That’s enough,” says Eve. The party behind us is becoming silent, too, this voice crashing through the windows.

“She’s been going on about this helmet. She wasn’t sure what you brought back to shore today so she talks about a goddamn helmet. So what’s the scoop? Let us in on the secret so we can get some sleep tonight.”

“Please,” she says, trying to pull me around by the shirtsleeve. The rescuer holds my stare, arms folded across his chest, all tough guy but with a bemused smile. I swear, I swear this isn’t me, though who could possibly blame me if it was? If Eve can sleepwalk through life, why can’t I be someone else one solitary night?

“So here’s to you boys in rescue,” I say, lifting my glass. Nothing to drink. I let it fall all the way down, shatter on the terrace. Now people are leaping to their feet and taking notice. I take the helmet and throw it at their smug defensive faces. It hits the edge of an empty table and flips in a manic end-over-end and bounces along the ground. I say, “It wasn’t a body, was it? You stuffed what was left in a garbage sack. It’s all my wife’s thought about since I got home.” Eve claws at my arm. “Honey,” I say, softer, “Don’t you want to stop wondering?”

She won’t meet my eyes.

“My wife,” I shout, “later she’ll say I’m drunk, but I’m not even close. I’m trying to help her, but she’ll say I’m a mess.”

Eve slams her hand down on the rail. I look at her in time to see this: Eve, my wife, shattered one instant, put back together the next. Composed from shards. Weird, defying all laws of space and time, but in the blink of an eye we’ve relived our entire year, ever since Joey. Exhausted from holding the pieces together. Shattered when at rest.

She opens her purse and rifles for her wallet, her tissues, her compact, but takes nothing out, then fastens the clasp and adjusts the strap on her shoulder so the bag lays flat along the side of her hip. She turns and walks. I could see the stiffness a mile away, even in her clown clothes, willing herself to walk not run as she goes through the doors. The murmurs silence as the crowd parts for her, this group that used to know her.  

I catch up in the parking lot and weave an arm through hers. The overhead lamps are coming to life one by one all over us. I can hear the waves from one way, the highway from the other. The headlights string along the hillside. I tell her, “No one ought to get blamed here. All right? I’m just—I don’t know. I’m making it up as I go along. I didn’t mean to get carried away.”

“You think you’re so funny,” she says, standing at the car door, looking out at the water. “You make things impossible.”

“My conscience is clean, Eve.”

She unlocks the door and gets behind the wheel and I stand at the passenger side, waiting. My colleagues and their wives jam the doors of the building, but I’m watching Eve every second through the curved glass. I rap on the window. I jiggle the handle. I say, “So you’re leaving me? We get this far and you’re going to leave me in a parking lot?”

In response, my wife starts the engine. People will have things to say about what happens next, and the question I’ll put forth, professor that I am: what’s going to happen? What, really, are my options? Help would be appreciated. I am in need of answers, and I too am sick of wondering.