I get down on the ground and peer under the thicket. There, hidden by the overgrowth, is the old abandoned house. The house Jonas and I found when we were kids. All that’s left now is a foundation and two stone walls; the rest has been devoured by blackberry brambles and catbrier. Indigo weed climbs up the crumbling walls, strangling them in beauty.
“How did you find this again?”
He lies down on the ground beside me. Points to a hole where a door once was. “Remember the kitchen? And that room in the middle was going to be our bedroom when we got married.”
“Of course I remember. You promised to get me a double boiler. I feel kind of cheated.”
He rolls on top of me, pulls the string of my bikini top with his teeth so that it falls away, licks my breasts like a big sloppy dog.
“Stop that.” I push him away, laughing. But I can feel my sex swelling.
“Sorry. I have to.” He stares into my eyes, intense, never once looking away, as he spreads me wide, open. Enters me. When he comes, I can feel it pulsing out of him, filling me.
“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Stay inside me.” Without moving, he reaches down and, like the slightest breath, barely touches the tip of me until I sob, cry out, aching in eternity.
We lie like that, enmeshed, two bodies, one soul.
I wrap my legs tighter around him, trapping him, forcing him even deeper up inside of me. Food and water. Lust and grief. “You should never have left me,” I say. “This is a disaster.”
“You said you wanted Peter.”
“Not then. After that summer. You never came back.”
“I left for your sake. So you could start your life fresh.”
“But I didn’t. I had no one but you to talk to, no way to get any of it out of my head. Even moving to another country did nothing.”
He looks away. A steadying sadness between us. The wind has come up, ruffling the trees. A speckled alder sways, raining miniature grass-green pinecones down on us. Jonas plucks one out of my hair. “Have you ever told Peter about Conrad?”
“Of course not. We swore a blood oath. You practically cut off the tip of my finger.”
“I only meant to say.” He hesitates. “You’ve been married a long time. I would understand.”
“I wish Peter knew. I hate that there has always been a lie between us. It isn’t fair to him. But he doesn’t. And he never will.” I listen to the silence of the woods, the subtle seeping away of the day. Syrupy light spills across the forest floor, turning pine needles into splinters of copper. My words fill me with remorse. I roll free of Jonas, sit up and re-tie my bathing suit top. A dog tick makes its way up a piece of grass. It looks like a tiny watermelon seed. I put it on my thumbnail, crush it in the middle, and watch its legs splay out until I am sure it’s dead. I dig a hole in the soil and drop it in, bury it, pat the soil firm. “Anyway,” I say.
Jonas sits up, wraps his steady arms around me. “I’m sorry.”
“I have to get going. Peter will start to worry.”
“No.” I can hear my own pain in his voice. He takes my hair in his fists, kisses me. Rough, hard, unhinged. I don’t want to give in, but I kiss him back with a love that feels like drowning. The breathless desire to breathe. Moonlight and sweet junk and sharks and death and pity and vomit and hope all combined. It is too much. I need to get home to my children. To Peter. I break away, scramble to my feet, desperate.
“Elle, wait,” he says.
“Conrad ruined everything,” is all I say.
Book Two
◆
JONAS
13
1981. June, the Back Woods.
There are snapping turtles in our pond—massive prehistoric creatures lurking on the bottom, beneath the cool mud. Late in the afternoon, they dig themselves out and make their way to the pond’s glassy obsidian surface, where swarms of water boatmen zip around like quick, febrile catamarans. From the screen porch, you can see the snappers rise: first the ugly black fist of a head, then the cusp of a carapace floats into view. It’s the distance between the two silhouettes that tells you whether you are seeing the Big One—the grandfather of snappers–or just one of his smaller, Galápagos-sized progeny. Few people have ever seen him. Back Woods people say he’s a myth, or long dead—and anyway, snappers are harmless. In a hundred years, no one has ever been bitten. But I’ve seen him. I know he’s out there, living off bullfrogs and baby birds, praying for the quick flash of an orange webbed foot, the soft crunch of duckling.