The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(124)

He reached out a hand, touched nothing, yet he felt her. Her jaw in his palm, her hair through his fingers. Her shoulder rising and falling with her steady breathing. Inhaling him. Exhaling herself. Staring through his eyes.

I want it, he thought, gripped by desperation, a fire in his belly. I want this. I lost this. Why can’t I find it again?

He rolled over and looked at Melanie. His wife, this woman he had married because he loved her. His heart ought to leap at the sight of her, or be filled with a soothed peace. He should look at her with a vision of the future, a common goal, a mission. She ought to be the love of his life.

She wasn’t.

I love her. But my heart never stopped at the sight of her. My fingertips don’t ache when she is not there. I don’t look in her eyes and want for nothing. And I don’t want to fill her questioning hands with my answers.

I never wanted to ink her into my skin.

An aching, wailing pain in his heart then, and a sickening sense of shame. He had to get out of bed, physically back away from Melanie, with an ever-growing dread. What have I done? His back bumped against the wall. He was trapped. He was mourning. He was grieving. He was a shitty husband, a heartless son-of-a-bitch who had f*cked up badly.

He was not where he was supposed to be.

I’m lost, he thought, stumbling down the stairs, stumbling around in the dark of his mind. I lost everything. I can’t find it.

He wandered the house, trying to wear himself out. He sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, Harry’s muzzle on his knee.

Where are you, Dais, he thought, projecting his yearning self out into the ether. To the far north and a dark Canadian night where Daisy might be awake, too.

Where is your home? Are you sleeping?

Who is holding you tonight?

“Who loves you now?” Erik whispered to the kitchen cabinets. “Who is the man you love?”

Harry yawned, making a high-pitched keen.

When Erik finally came back to bed and slept, the dreams, dormant for so long, came to him again.

First he was up in Daisy’s room, in a caramel haze and they were f*cking each other senseless, safely savage within the structure of their love. Then he was in the theater, and James sent a bullet into Erik’s chest with a dull thud. He could not get up to stop James, who was shooting Daisy dead. The blood was rising up over Erik’s head. A wave of it pouring over the edge of the stage. Blood like a river in the aisle, blood in his hair, blood on his hands, blood on the stage floor.

It was Daisy and blood and sex coming back to him in the night again. And when he woke up coming, coming and dying in a gasping, heaving sweat, heart pounding in his ears and a name half-formed in his mouth, Melanie slept on.

Or pretended she didn’t hear.





Your Father’s Tree


The final papers were signed on an unseasonably chilly autumn morning, the day before Halloween. Erik walked his now ex-wife out of the courthouse and they looked at each other.

“I’ll get you a cab,” Erik said.

“Why don’t you get me a drink?” she said. “Let’s go to a bar.”

Erik stared at her, not understanding.

“Where was our first date?” she asked. “This isn’t a trick question.”

“At a bar.”

“Right. And after we got married at city hall we went to…?”

“A bar.”

“I think it’ll be all right if we go to a bar to mark the occasion of our divorce. In fact, it seems fitting.”

Still bewildered, Erik nodded, gesturing down the street. Melanie took his arm and they walked without talking to a small Irish pub. They sat at a little sunlit table in the window, ordered drinks, looked at each other.

Melanie was wearing her hair in cornrows again, letting the grey come in at her temples. New lines creased her forehead, but when their beers came, she raised her pilsner with dry-eyed serenity.

“Cheers, baby,” she said.

“Sk?l,” Erik said, touching his glass to hers.

They drank deeply. Melanie put a finger to the bit of foam at the corner of her mouth. “You will stay in touch with me, won’t you?”

“I… If you want me to.”

“I do. Does it surprise you?”

Erik shook his head. “I don’t know what surprises me anymore. I don’t know anything anymore.”

Melanie had asked for a divorce ten months ago. Erik conceded. She wondered if she might have the upright piano. He agreed. She asked if she could take the dog. It killed Erik, but he let Harry go.

Then she threw a plate at him.

It went wide and smashed in pieces against a far wall but the intent behind it was unmistakable. “You are emotionally retarded, you know that, Erik? Goddammit, you won’t fight for anything you love,” she said. “You spineless victim.”

And she moved out. With the dog. It was the ugliest moment in an otherwise smooth, no-fault divorce that took less than a year.

Now Melanie leaned forward and began tapping her index finger on Erik’s left hand. He looked at her, looked down at his hand as her tapping grew more deliberate.

“What?” he said. His wedding band was gone. So was hers. They had sold the diamond and used it for lawyers’ fees. But she wasn’t tapping his ring finger, she was tapping down by his wrist, flicking with her nail, nudging his hand to turn over. When it was palm up, her fingertip came to rest on his tattoo.