Free Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek Page B

environmental changes to the rivers since he had fished them. He’d fished the nearby Black River, but his famous story “Big Two-Hearted River” is set in the Upper Peninsula, and actually it was the Fox, not the Two-Hearted, that he’d fished there. The story wouldn’t have been the same had he called it “Fox River.”
    I’d packed a beer box of books for the cottage, including Dawn Powell’s collected stories and her novel A Time to Be Born . After supper, Lise would read aloud from Powell’s diaries. They were set in the New York City of the 1930s, but even to the trill of night noise from the woods around us, the words sounded as if composed fresh that morning. I’d packed Hemingway’s collected stories, too, which I hadn’t read since school, in case I needed to refer to them for a feature. The rest were books on ferns, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, Native American tribes. A subject search revealed a surplus of magazine articles on Hemingway in Michigan, so I went with loons. Their presence on a lake is an indicator of its health. I could taste the clarity of our lake water in the pike I hooked at dusk, fishing from my kayak at the edge of an acre of lily pads, and in the hand-sized bluegills I caught at the end of the dock when they fed at sunrise. I’d fry them with bacon for a breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and ice-cold Heineken that Lise and I would have at the picnic table beside the scorched, lopsided fieldstone grill after our swim across the lake.
    We swam early each morning in the company of loons, through smoldering mist that hid the shore. Invisible in mist, the loons glided near, their manic bolts of laughter reverberating through a veiled forest. By the time we were swimming back to our dock, the mist had burned off. The only other cottage on the shore was shuttered, and Lise swam naked. She taught summer school during midweek and would drive up from Hyde Park for long weekends. I’d already be missing her when I watched the dust hanging behind her retreating blue Honda. On the day she was due back, I’d work at the picnic table, listening through birdsong and the thrum of insects and frogs for tires on gravel.
    When she didn’t arrive at the start of the Labor Day weekend, I figured she was held up in holiday traffic. We had gone without seeing each other for two weeks while she finished grading at the end of the summer semester. That morning, I’d caught three brook trout in the stream that ran through the culvert, I’d bought homegrown tomatoes, sweet corn, and giant sunflowers from a roadside stand, and I’d started a low fire on the grill so the coals would be ready when she arrived. By the time the third round of coals had burned to ash I was afraid she’d had car trouble on the road or worse. Twice I drove the nine miles to a gas station where there was a pay phone, but got only her voice message. By midnight, I couldn’t stand the wait and decided to drive the three and a half hours back to my place to retrieve any message she might have left. I worried we’d pass each other in the dark, that she’d get to an empty cottage. I’d left a note and the key beneath the step where she’d know to look, and watched the headlights coming toward me, wondering if they were hers.
    There was no message waiting. I almost set out for her apartment in Hyde Park to make sure she was all right. What stopped me was an inescapable flashback to another panicky drive to Chicago when, shortly after moving to Michigan, I had found a letter from Felice forwarded to my campus mail—a suicide note postmarked from Chicago a week earlier. I had been kayaking on a river that morning, and without stopping to cancel classes or to remove the kayak from the rack on my car, I found myself speeding down I-94 as if, despite the postmark, I could get there in time to stop her. I drove through sun showers; an incongruous rainbow, washed out beside the glistening, flame-wicked September trees, spanned the