For All the Obvious Reasons Read online

  Undertow—novel—1993

  Fata Morgana—novel—1995

  Pipers at the Gates of Dawn—novella triptych—2000

  Because a Fire Was in My Head—novel—2007

  Copyright © 2016 by Lynn Stegner

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-641-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-642-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Sam Chase, for all the obvious reasons.

  — acknowledgments —

  The following stories first appeared in:

  “Catch and Release,” The Best of Carve Magazine, Volume Five, 2005; “The New Sister,” New West, May 2011; “The Boat on the Lake,” Five Points, Vol. 14, No. 2, January 2012; “Mona’s Coming,” Stoneslide, Autumn 2012; “Rogue,” The Tusculum Review, Vol. 9, 2013; “For All the Obvious Reasons,” Gival Press, 2014; “Twins,” december, Volume 25.2, Fall/Winter 2014.

  — contents —

  For All the Obvious Reasons

  Catch and Release

  The New Sister

  Mona’s Coming

  The Anarchic Hand

  Rogue

  In the Not-Too-Different Future

  Twins

  The Boat on the Lake

  FOR ALL THE OBVIOUS REASONS

  What you heard were the hooves of the three horses with the mule at the end, clattering through the rounded stone along the river, the first and the third horse steady, carefully picking their ways, but the one in the middle, a small dark Arabian, skittering and taking too many steps to cover the same distance, some of the steps sideways and even back, one jump ahead of a fit, as the man downriver who had saddled her remarked.

  “You can handle her.” He nodded toward Harry. “Your man says you can handle a horse.”

  “Sure I can,” Charlotte had said.

  Harry believed everything she told him. He could afford to believe things and he was generous with that endowment, extending it to everyone. He had had the kind of upbringing that fostered commendable attributes like trust and courage and Honor, capital H. It was what she liked best about him, how clean-swept his life had been. Harry Fairbanks. How could she lose?

  Of course it was easier to be honorable with nothing much to challenge those limits.

  “I’ve ridden my share of horses,” she had added.

  But the other one, the Indian, probably knew better. The Indian hadn’t looked at her as she mounted, as she snugged up the reins, slipping her ring finger between the two strands of leather, her right hand clenched and holding the slack off to the right, her posture perfectly trained and the mare already jittering beneath her. The Indian, a thoroughly plausible individual who did not watch but who could assuredly hear the animal snorting and huffing—she knew that he knew the horse was too much for her. Already dark bands of sweat were spreading like ink along the Arabian’s shoulders and inside her flanks, her skin twitching, and not from the flies. Abra was her name.

  It was just another one of the things Charlotte had probably lied about. All those years of riding lessons, keeping her heels down and her eyes up, and she had never sat a horse well. Mr. Purdy had said that she wouldn’t let herself become one with the animal—it was the sixties, and people had begun to say things like that, even riding instructors at fancy clubs—but now, seven years later, she knew it to be true. She had kept herself above and separate from the horses she had ridden, which had not been that many, all told. Horses had been one of her youthful infatuations, and to her thinking infatuations demanded mastery, not union. Mastery, she thought, was a trick of the mind. Something you might try to sell yourself at the end of a long day when it was harder to believe that you knew what you were doing and were in charge.

  They made a strange procession, the Indian, the girl, and then the tall man leading the mule, as they set off up the Fraser River, keeping close to the water where there were fewer mosquitoes and deer flies. For a while there had been sandy bars and shores and plenty of open sunlight, with the wet belt of alder, birch, black cottonwood, and willow standing back and letting them proceed without trouble or interference. It was early June, the peak of spring runoff, so the broad banks were often wet from a recent surge, and the wildrye or mugwort or reeds flattened and muddy from the flood water’s scouring rush. In the wide swaths of river rock, silt girded the larger stones, and there might be pockets of water warming in the sun from which the bugs lofted as they passed. On the drive up from Vancouver the smells had been of pulp mills and new asphalt where the Ministry of Transportation had been paving over one of the roads the map still indicated was dirt, and of course the smell of the peanuts Harry ate with compulsive intent—“Protein?” he asked, offering her some. Foodstuffs had been stripped of their individuality and trained into conforming ranks of dietary requirements. It was all very scientific. Protein was the thing in 1970, the superstar. VIP-for-protein, Harry once told her. Protein and the wonders of frozen vegetables, though they had conceded to cans for part of the trip.

  Now in the midday heat along the river the smell was of rotting vegetation, and at random intervals, when the new obscure tension in her chest became too much, she clicked the mare into the shallows where Charlotte felt she could breathe again. Somehow it reminded her of what had happened, that smell. She could not yet bring herself to say “happened to her.” She was not ready for that claim that would invite something for which she was not ready, some form of psychic catastrophe, a free-falling departure from the high mastery. She was not ready for much of anything yet, in fact, maybe only this trip, one week long, with Harry and the Indian guiding them up through the system of waterways and lakes that veined interior British Columbia.

  It did not take more than an hour or so for Charlotte to give up trying to post, which anyway had been mostly to demonstrate that she knew how. The Arabian’s trot was so fast, so frenetic, everything about her distracted and ready to bolt, that Charlotte could not settle into anything rhythmic. It would not have done to let Abra take the bit, but neither did Abra give Charlotte any indication of reliable consent. They were in some kind of standoff without having the least provocation. She was a beautiful little horse, spirited and athletic, big anxious eyes; and Charlotte, at 110 pounds, could not have been more than the lightest of burdens, insubstantial as a toy up there, or dismissible erratum. The standoff felt uncalled-for. They ought to have liked each other, made a pair—that seemed to be the idea back at the outfitter’s. So Charlotte simply endured it, her bum, her spine jarred and twisted, Abra’s hindquarters suddenly bounding out from under her, her head thrown down, her graceful neck swinging sideways. What a week it would be, battling this four-legged tempest. And yet Charlotte could not help admiring her defiance, her anger, so free and absent of cause. Abra was all heart.

  On the first night they camped along the Mighty
Fraser; Harry liked to call it that, liked to indulge in small flourishes of speech. The rest of the week would be spent east of the Fraser, in the area between Kamloops and north to 100 Mile House. The Indian was one of the Shuswap, an interior Salish tribe, and he knew the area well enough that even the man with the horses had called him by his Salish name, One-See, because he was the only one left who had seen each of the rivers and creeks, the lakes without names, the trails that vanished into the high timber. Harry’s father had used him when Harry was a boy, and later, the boy grown, had tracked him down and hired him for fishing trips with his buddies. This trip was different, because of the girl and what had happened.

  At twenty, Charlotte was not technically a girl any longer. But she was so petite and so well proportioned, so big-eyed and doll-like, that everyone treated her like a naïf. Or like something not quite real yet. On campus some of the guys referred to her as Harry’s trinket, and there had been two occasions on which strangers had mistaken her for his child. He was ten years older, about to finish his degree in medicine at UBC. His mother had taken ill and he had had to leave school for three years to help care for her. It had devolved into one of those eerily satisfying romantic stories—she had died of cancer, and thirty-two hours later, Harry’s father had up and died of a disease no one even knew he had, but which everyone decided was grief, pure and simple. They were a poor couple from the mountain town of Revelstoke, and Harry was the family star.

  Charlotte was convinced that it would be the same for her and Harry—they would go more or less together. She did not think that she could bear it otherwise. People left: they broke down and were carted off, or they moved away, or they up and died. But not Harry, not this time.

  The Indian unsaddled and staked the horses, then he offloaded the grub boxes and staked the mule too, graining them with hands cupped while Harry and Charlotte leveled out a tent site and gathered armfuls of wood for a fire. There was plenty lying about from the runoff and it did not take long.

  “Reuben,” Harry said to the Indian, for he would never know him well enough to call him by his Salish name, “shall we try our luck?”

  Reuben was studying the surface of the river. He turned and nodded toward the rods, jointed and ready, propped in the crook of a cedar. After he had watched the water and the bugs skimming or dancing off the sheen, he came back and fingered up some flies from the box, then the two of them worked their way downstream while Charlotte put up the tent she and Harry would share. They were four months married but it still felt funny to her, spending all of the night hours with him. Even now, it was exciting to wake up and find him beside her, like a holiday morning surprise with its sudden extravagance of joy that sent a hum through her breast, anticipatory and guilty, as if she were getting away with something. Still here, she thought, still right here. She had developed a secret habit of happiness, trilling the sheets with her toes, before conceding that the day must end or begin. As a child there had been too many mornings when, awakening, there was no one there.

  Charlotte’s father was a G.P. in Ottawa. After her mother had been institutionalized, and then the years of him trying to conceal the women he saw (because he was still a handsome man, after all, a vital man with needs, was how the maturing Charlotte came to understand the situation, his beard nicely trimmed, his shirts professionally pressed, no one could blame him, really), he moved to Ottawa so that he could see the women openly. In the tidy little city of Penticton where they had lived, people would have talked. Divorce was out of the question; one did not divorce someone who had had a mental breakdown. One did not abandon the elaborate beauty and comforts of social form for content, no matter how authentic. This was not America, after all, where messy realities throve.

  That same fall when her father joined a practice in Ottawa and Charlotte began her freshman year at UBC, her mother was relocated to a Home in Vancouver. In the two years since, nothing had changed for Mary, and Charlotte’s visits had dwindled to once a month. But a week ago, just after what happened, Charlotte had gone off-schedule to see her. Ignoring the rest of it, Mary was her mother, and this was the sort of thing you brought to a mother, something only a mother might be able to fix, or at least soften.

  “Where are the bruises?” her mother had asked her.

  It was a reasonable question. Where were they? Why hadn’t she fought?

  Mary was having a bad day, they told her, and so the visit had taken place in the special room that was divided by a half wall, with heavy wire mesh rising from the low counter, their two chairs positioned on opposite sides. Her mother pressed her face against the wire, squinting at Charlotte’s visible body parts, her face and neck, her forearms, searching for the bruises Charlotte had not thought to earn.

  She had been hitchhiking. She hadn’t ought to have been hitchhiking.

  In a little while Harry and the Indian returned. She watched them coming toward her, their heads bowed in conversation, their boots sinking slightly in the wet sand and gravel. How she liked seeing him come toward her, like a marvelous and improbable piece of news. He brought the whole billowing world with him. And he walked like a man who knew he owned a place in that world. Harry, tall and lithe as poplar, wearing the bright eager expression of a boy convinced he’s about to figure out something grand, or very likely already has. His thinning hair was something she liked, confirming his seriousness of purpose. He took her seriously, too, her compact body, her moods, the things she said that often surprised him. Harry did not think that he was easy to surprise, but as it turned out, he was.

  Beside him, shoulder-height and still black-haired despite his age, the Indian paced along with a great and serious fortitude, every step somehow both difficult and destined. The sun was down behind the broad canyon walls and with it, the wind had dropped too, so that all she could hear was the water coursing over the river stone, and the hollow knocking of an oil drum that had washed downriver and eddied between a gravel bar and the place where they had made camp; and then once, she heard Harry’s laugh, cool, clipped and easy, as if he were trying to draw out a reluctant child. Harry was going to be a pediatrician and it seemed to her that he had chosen the perfect field, one that suited his encouraging nature.

  “You didn’t catch anything,” she remarked.

  He shrugged. “Wasn’t the point.”

  Without quite looking at her, the Indian gave a languid side-wary acknowledgment and paced over to where the grub boxes sat beneath a stand of cottonwood and began rummaging through one of them. He was unknowable, moving with a slight stoop that did not appear to come from any weariness but from contemplation to which, so far, he had given neither of them access.

  She turned to Harry. “Aren’t we here to fish?”

  He squatted beside her, offering her a swig from his flask. “This is a salmon river. Sockeye, coho, chinook … mostly sockeye. Steelhead if you’re lucky. But steelhead run at night. Reuben noticed a pool downriver, a pool with watercress where steelhead like to hide.”

  It irritated her, his mini lecture. Sometimes Harry knew too much. “So what was the point?” Lately it was important to her that things have a point, a specific and well-defined objective, and it helped, too, to know just how long things would take, each task, each job, so that every bit of every day would be used up doing something good and productive, something worthy that an imaginary presence who was always watching you might tick off a list. She had become a furious housekeeper; she balanced the checkbooks to the penny; she completed and then went back over her homework. Charlotte did this, Charlotte did that…. Industry stitched the day together, and so far nothing vital had bled through the open wound that morning seemed to expose.

  He placed the back of his fingers against her cheek and gave it a feathery possessive stroke. “Oh, just to try it out, set the mood. We’re after trout. That’s inland, where we go tomorrow.”

  “I like it here,” she said, tossing a pebble into the river, not wanting to belong to anyone at that moment, not even Harr
y.

  In the flat light of dusk the river stretched away from her to the slanting and distant canyon wall, gray-brown, the water too, gray-brown like tea with milk, but cold, the surface a moving slick of indifference as it slid downward to the sea. The way the water moved, not flowing but huge and muscled from underneath as if it were pushing something impossible out of its way, and that one couldn’t see but knew was there just around the next bend—that was what she liked, that pushing, that deep, heavy determination to shove the unseen thing down the canyon and out of the way. Lakes were motionless; lakes did nothing but lie there looking pretty and inviting and stupidly susceptible.

  “You’ll like it at the lakes too,” Harry was saying just then. “You can swim.”

  “I might not want to swim.”

  “You love to swim.”

  “I don’t want to swim. Not anymore.”

  “Sure you’ll swim, Char. You’ll do everything you were going to do. Nothing’s changed.”

  She tossed another pebble in the water. “Everything’s changed.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not going to swim.”

  “Don’t be this way, Charlotte. Give it some time. Your feelings will change.”

  “I’m never ever swimming again.”

  He sighed, considered the flask in his hand, and then took another swallow. “The lakes are beautiful. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t care about lakes or how beautiful they are or how much you think I’ll like it or won’t like it, or hate it. I’m tired of swimming.”

  He seemed about to take her hand but thought better of it. “You’re in a mood.”

  “That’s right, Harry. It’s just a mood. Nothing you have to think too long or too hard about. Call the next patient, order up another tray of animals to dissect, make notes in your notebooks, schedule a follow-up.” A mosquito bite on her forearm had made itself known and she was scratching it down to a dot of pulp to put a quick end to the itching. “Consult with Alex,” she thought to add.