My Three Husbands (22 page)

And that's when I saw, far in the distance, almost at the base of Lightning Ridge, a house. Or a cabin. But it was hardly more than a speck; if I left the bushes, the bear might see me or smell me and give chase.

I stood there in a rising tide of panic, not knowing what to do. The bear stopped and stuck its snout into the blackberry thicket. Then it pulled back and looked in both directions. As if to say,
Who's been eating my blackberries?

It was brown. Maybe six feet long.

The bear seemed to be hesitating. It lifted its nose and took a couple of pigeon-toed steps in my direction.

The glint of the sterling-silver bear whistle hanging around my neck brought me to my senses. It seemed like a dangerous thing to do. Wouldn't the sound identify my whereabouts, anger the bear, and bring him running?

In college, Daddy washed dishes at a lodge somewhere in the mountains of Montana. I suddenly remembered the stories he'd told me about bear attacks. The woman who came in carrying her own ripped-off arm.

At first I blew softly because I couldn't quite catch my breath. The bear didn't respond. When it began walking in my direction I blew as hard and loud as I could. The sound was high, sharp, piercing. I stayed in the bushes, shaking the branches. I blew until I was light-headed.

The bear stopped. Looked all around. Stood up on its hind legs and sniffed. Then turned tail and lumbered up the bank and across the meadow.

 

 

In a sweat, weak-limbed and gasping, I slowly crawled out from the bushes. I kept the whistle in my mouth, like a traffic cop. My eyes were as sharply focused as an eagle's.

The bear was loping toward Lightning Ridge, in the general direction of the house or cabin or whatever the distant building was. I lost sight of it in the long waving grasses of the meadow.

I stood up. My hands were trembling and I could barely concentrate on the map. It indicated that I'd find Dead Horse Canyon by following the river. I couldn't miss it.

I set off again.

 

 

The sky gleamed like hard blue enamel. I felt like I was high up and walking very close to the sun. The light flowed down in a bright golden sheet. It was getting hot. I shucked off Marielle's jacket. The heavy knitted sweater weighed on me like soft armor. I held it open for the breeze as I trudged along the riverbank.

Moving at a snail's pace through a gigantic landscape is a strange experience. Things you'd never bother to look at become charged with mysterious importance. You realize that everything's alive in its own way. “It's so quiet,” I said to myself, but it wasn't quiet at all. The liquid rush of moving water was always there. Dry grasses hissed softly in the wind. Leaves rattled on shrubs and on the tall lanky trees growing on the opposite shore. Birds hidden in the meadow sang the same sweet-sad notes over and over again. Big fat flies buzzed. Every once in a while a fish jumped.

It made me sad that I knew so little about this world. I didn't know the names of the trees, or the shrubs, or the fish in the river, or the birds in the trees. I couldn't identify the wildflowers in the meadow, or the butterflies, or the stones on the shore, or even the kind of bear that had scared me half to death. I could identify things only by the coarsest terms: tree, shrub, rock. It was humbling and frustrating.

Tremaynne would have known what everything was. This was the kind of world he knew and wanted to be in all the time.

Any future we had together would have to include this world, and that scared me. Because it took work to live in this world. There were no conveniences, no short cuts, no ways to distract the mind. Tremaynne's goal was to be outside, in a vast unspoiled landscape, as much as possible. His goal was to save this, and the forests, and the free-flowing rivers, and even the bears and elk. Things I'd never thought about, or that I'd only seen on TV.

I remembered how he'd ignite in fiery rage when talking about developers and developments, about “sprawl,” about the endless assaults made on land and water and sky, so that the animals were forced into smaller and smaller habitats. “All humans do is confiscate,” he'd shouted once. “All we do is take and destroy.”

I wondered, trudging along, where his rage came from. You had to have really strong beliefs to do the kinds of things he did. That's why I admired him so much. He was out of the ordinary. Above the ordinary. In his own world.

What about my own beliefs? What did I believe in? Did I have any beliefs at all? Or was my life about nothing more than seeking love, sex, and comfort?

Instead of feeling like a strong, confident, responsible woman, I felt like a silly little girl.

A silly little girl on her way to becoming a silly big girl.

 

 

Sweating and light-headed, I stood as close to the precipice as I dared and looked down into Dead Horse Canyon.

Horses walking along the narrow trail must have slipped and plunged down the steep rocky slope to their deaths. Or maybe they drowned trying to cross the river, which boiled and leapt through the canyon in whitewater rapids and waterfalls.

The air roared from the gigantic force of the water. The river came pouring down fast and furious to the canyon, where it was cinched tight like a thick waist in a whalebone corset. The water didn't seem to flow so much as explode, hurtling past boulders and spraying out from rock ledges.

I'd been following the trail, climbing up Smartypants Peak, for almost half an hour. I was burning and freezing at the same time. I shivered violently as the sweat dried on my skin. Marielle's sweater was soaked.

My mouth was parched, but there was no way to get down to the river and back up the canyon walls again. Or maybe there was, but I couldn't envision myself doing it.

I panted on until the log bridge materialized like a nightmare before my eyes.

I was supposed to cross that?

It was nothing more than a tree that had either fallen or been cut to span the chasm at its narrowest point. It was maybe twenty-five feet long. Ferns had sprouted on its sides and underbelly, kept damp by the constant mist rising from a waterfall roaring forty feet below. The log was unsecured. But someone had rigged two guide ropes from giant trees on either side of the canyon, so there was something to hold onto as you crossed.

“No,” I said out loud. “I can't.” I almost peed in my pants one time when the dads took me to Cirque du Soleil in New York and I watched the tightrope walkers.

I weighed my options. I didn't trust my footing, or my sense of balance. Instead of standing, maybe I could straddle the log and inch across that way. Still, my greatest fear was that I'd get halfway across, freak out, lose my balance, and plunge into the rapids and be swept into the waterfall.

I tugged on the guide ropes, checking how tight they were. Pretty tight.

I edged closer to the precipice. Even if I got down to the river by sliding down the slope, I'd still have to cross over to the other side. And given the belligerent force of the water, that was impossible.

It was either cross the log bridge or give up. The choice was that simple.

I could be a lazy coward and give in to my fears, as I always did. Or I could test myself . . . repudiate the helpless Venus who thought only and eternally of herself and her narrow comfort zone.

Faced with this choice, my thoughts turned brutally honest. Did I really want to risk my life for someone who'd maybe given me genital herpes? A husband who didn't want me to take his name in marriage? A man who'd probably deliberately stolen Whitman's cell phone for some purpose I couldn't fathom? A groom who'd inexplicably left his bride on their wedding night?

The choice was really about Tremaynne. It was about trusting him. Accepting him. Loving him.
Saving
him. If I turned back at this point, it meant the end of us and the little we'd had. Because it meant that I really had no faith in the power of our love. It meant that I didn't believe our love was worth the effort.

All my fears chimed in like a chorus of boogeymen. If he'd been kidnapped by a cult or the terrorists, what could I do? They'd get me, too. What if guns were involved? I had no weapon. I might be walking into a trap.

It would be easier to continue my search for Tremaynne back at the lodge, enlisting the police. It was the coward's way out, but it would save me from having to cross Dead Horse Canyon balanced on a log.

I remembered Kristin's hopeless declaration: “I'm a coward. I'm not like you.”

She said that because she thought I was Godiva. And Godiva was not a coward.

I looked at the map for the hundredth time. Devil's Spring was so close. The trail on the other side of the canyon was even called Devil's Spring Trail. The trail left the river and wound up past Moccasin Lake to the hot springs. It was impossible to judge distance or gauge time, but it looked like it wouldn't take more than an hour if I was able to keep up my pace.

Oh, why couldn't I be Wonder Woman? She had no fears. She'd be able to leap over this canyon.

I was standing there, smoking my last cigarette, when I looked down the trail and saw someone on horseback far in the distance. The horse was white. It was moving slowly, picking its way up the rocky track beside the river.

Suddenly I wanted to move fast. I wanted to cross Dead Horse Canyon and disappear into the forest on the other side before Marcello reached me.

I got down on all fours and crawled to the edge. The sound, smell and moisture of the racing water rose up the canyon walls. I grabbed the log bridge with both hands. It was wet. I closed my eyes, steadying myself, and straddled it. My body was shaking, my heart pounding.

Keeping low, like a jockey on a racehorse, I inched forward. I was still on the earth. It was now or never. I sucked in a breath and moved forward until I was grasping the log where it left the cliff. It was like holding onto a shaggy beast with a wet coat, only instead of hair it was covered with ferns. My jaws were clenched so tight I thought my teeth might snap.

I couldn't bring myself to rise up and grasp the guide ropes. Instead, I intended to creep along like a blind inchworm. I kept my face so close to the log that I could smell its wet woody odor.

I commanded myself not to open my eyes. There was no reason to. If I held tight to the log and kept moving slowly forward, I could cross the span without once looking down into the raging torrents below.

But of course it was like the gods telling what's-his-name not to look back at his wife. The second you know what it is you're not supposed to do, you want to tempt fate by doing it. That had always been my way.

I tried to compare what I was doing to one of those really scary adventure-park rides that give you a wee-wee tickle just looking at them. The difference was that on a ride you were never the one in control. Someone else was at the switch. And no matter how much you screamed in fear, some part of you knew that you'd come out safe and that it would soon be over.

This was way worse than any ride. I knew that the moment I actually shinnied out far enough so that I wasn't on land anymore.

I squeezed that log like it was my lover. I kept my cheek clasped to its coarse, peeling bark. I wanted to look but I didn't dare. I could feel the airy nothingness of empty space all around me, and the force of the river vibrating up the canyon walls and thrumming through the bridge like current in an electrical wire.

It was like dying. That's how scared I was.

 

 

There was no such thing as time. There was only the next inch of forward movement. As I crept farther out, toward the center, I could feel the tension of the log, its slight bounce. I was soaked by the mist rising up in a cold wet breath from the waterfall.

“Laurie Ann!”

The sound was very faint, almost drowned out by the thundering roar of the river.

“Laurie Ann, stop!”

I tried to look back over my shoulder. But the moment I opened my eyes, I was aware of only one thing: the watery jaws of the river snapping and snarling forty feet below me. The disorienting perspective threw me off balance internally.

“Laurie Ann! Stop! I am coming out for you!” Marcello called.

“No!”

“I will save you!”

“I don't want to be saved!” But screaming was pointless. My voice was sucked out of my mouth and dissipated in the deafening roar of the water.

I felt the log tremble as he stepped onto it. That really freaked me out. “Stay off!” I cried. I inched forward until I could feel the upward heft of the log. It was so long that it sagged in the middle. I'd been going down, now I had to go up. It altered my sense of balance and I had to recalibrate every inch of my body.

I heard a terrifying cry and felt the log bounce. I looked back and saw Marcello frozen in a very weird pose. He looked like a mime taking a giant stride in midair. One foot had slipped, but he'd managed to hook the toe of his other boot around the log. He was clutching the guide ropes, actually pushing them away, as his foot dangled and scrabbled for the log.

His face betrayed no fear. He was intensely focused on saving himself.

I clung there in my jockey position until I saw him regain his foothold. Then I closed my eyes and inched forward as fast as I could. The log was bouncing as Marcello tried to steady himself.

“You must stop!” he called angrily.

Why must I stop? I'd come this far. I couldn't believe how much I'd survived already. It gave me a jolt of pride. For once in my life I felt lucky, even though I didn't know what for.

With a final spurt of determination, I reached the other side. I crept onto land.