Free Silent Retreats by Philip F. Deaver Page A

she said. Then she was crying, her head down on her arms, which were resting on her knees.
    I sat next to her. I couldn't think of a thing to tell her.
    "I thought we might reach Karen," she said after a while. "I really loved her. She was my best friend. My best friend. I'm definitely coming apart."
    There was nothing to say. I ate a pickle and regretted it. I rolled a couple of hedge apples down the bank into the water. Finally I stood up and kicked my shoes off, dropped my wallet on the ground next to them. I tested the rope to see if the limb would hold me.
    "What if Karen had talked tonight?" I said. "What would she say?"
    "Don't tease me. It was a nutty idea. Karen would talk to me if she could. You're going to bust your ass swinging on that thing. I'll tell you what, that woman was a complete fake." After a while she said, "Didn't you think so?" She didn't move. "Kelly says a medium like this one helped her contact her father."
    "Kelly wishes," I said. I swung out over the river, a warm wind in my ears. "One thing I know is that Karen and Marie aren't sad. You are, but they aren't." I grabbed a hedge apple, and I swung out over the river, dropping it straight down. It was hard to tell how far above the water I was. I told Rhonda, "There's not anything to say, is why they didn't talk. They died, and that's all."
    Her head was down. "I just don't believe your friends can die like that," she said. "Not your friends." By now it seemed to me like she'd been crying off and on for hours.
    "It's a real pretty night, you know it? You ought to try to relax."
    "Ha. Relax," she said.
    I swung out again and again on the rope. I realized it would have been better if she could have been left to herself. "Lucky I'm here to keep you company," I said. At the far point of the arch, I could see all the way to the iron bridge. Out there, the moon broke through the trees, and I could see the movement of the water downstream. Sometimes I could hear a carp break the surface.
    "I didn't want to go dancing anyway," I said. When I swung, I could hear the rope grating on the big limb high above. At one point while I was far out on the rope, I heard Rhonda slip into the water. I swung back to the bank, took a run and swung far out again, trying to spot her in the inky black be low. I could hear her swimming.
    "It's nice and cool," she said.
    At the far point this time I let go of the rope and dropped. En route to the water, in a moment when I was anticipating splashing hard into the Black River, in a turning and falling motion in the dark, I happened to glimpse Rhonda's clothes in a little moonlit pile on the riverbank.

Why I Shacked Up with Martha
    Even though she'd been with the company a couple of years, Martha seemed to emerge from nowhere, talking to me a lot, leaning over the desk at work, asking questions. She was very thin and tall—the bones in her legs long, her arms long and luxurious in how they hung at her side. Visually, she reminded me of an airline stewardess, only less metallic. Her eyes were wide and deep, harbors of secrets, deeper than the deep blue sea. Somewhere down in that well of blue, you knew, was her precious little girlhood, her past, and her grown-up, secret, rambling sense of womanhood, currently preoccupied by "liberation." Her laugh was quick and strong; she moved forward, or she waited, standing back a little too far—the eye contact always held a shade too long, the laugh a little too appreciative. Had she always behaved this way and I was only just noticing?
    Anyway, I began to get the picture.
    "Why don't you join the Chiefs?" my wife had asked about that time, during dinner one evening when one of the silences had lingered longer than usual. "It'll bring you and Scotty closer. Take your mind off work."
    "What do I have to do?" I asked her. I felt another increment of my minimal leisure about to evaporate.
    "Just be with him. What you do is, you make a vest with him, a vest for each of you. Sew them