Free Promise Bound by Anne Greenwood Brown Page B

Until you fall asleep. I don’t want your dad to get the wrong idea.”
    We crawled into bed, and Calder pulled the covers up tight around my chin. I pressed my back against his chest; he pulled his knees up behind mine until we fit together like puzzle pieces. He kissed my hair. I waited for him to fall asleep.
    The clock slowly changed its digital numbers as Calder’s body—just as slowly—grew warmer and heavier behind me. When the weight of his arm was too much to bear, I rolled out from under it and waited to see if he’d notice me missing.
    His face was smooth and guiltless. Maybe he really had been cleaning my room, but still, I pulled out
MY SCRIBBLINGS
to see what he might have read.
    I flipped through the pages, finally stopping at a Tennyson poem I’d copied down in an attempt to memorize it. A couple of the lines had hit me hard at the time, and I’d circled them in red ink.
    In vain; a favourable speed
    Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
    Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn
.
    My Arthur, whom I shall not see
    Till all my widow’d race be run;

    More than my brothers are to me
.
    —Tennyson,
In Memoriam
, IX
    Those circled lines echoed things Nadia had shown me in my dreams, though I couldn’t quite piece it together. Just when I thought I could grab on to a coherent thought, it evaporated like the dream itself. I dropped my journal on the floor and fastened Nadia’s pendant back around my neck. A piece of me was missing when I wasn’t wearing it. I knew it would bring on the dreams, but I couldn’t sleep without it. And I was so very, very tired …
    It has been many years since I last saw Tom Hancock, yet I still watch the vacant house, the dark windows, the rotting dock. Grass grows high in the yard and tangles in the wind. A wild and hungry vine steals along the porch railings, threatening to someday overtake it all. If the place crumbles to the ground, it won’t be too soon for me.
    I leave the reminder of all I have lost and swim aimlessly for hours, traversing the great expanse of Gitche Gumee, which burns colder than ever.
    I ignore the dull pallor of my scales, the fragile transparency of my fluke—thin as last year’s spiderwebs. When I surface again, a familiar silhouette perches, knees pulled to chin, atop a rock that sits at the point where the waves meetthe sand. The faint hint of sunken footprints marks the path to her perch.
    The Thin Woman, as I have come to think of her, is at her post again, staring out across the lake. Even as the years have passed and her face has aged, even though her body has softened, there has always been something thin about her.
    We have never spoken—the Thin Woman and I. In part because she is so focused on the one she seeks that I am as invisible to her as the boats that sail through her field of vision, or the butterfly that lands on her knee.
    But mainly it’s because I am to blame for her pain. And I don’t know how to repent.
    Still, I know the Thin Woman because I know loss. Perhaps that’s what makes me brave. Before I can change my mind, I set foot on the mainland and steal a white terry bathrobe from her clothesline. It hangs on my body like an empty sail.
    “Mind if I sit?” I ask.
    She looks up, her eyes unfocused, still not really seeing me. Too many seconds pass before she sidles to her right, offering me a place beside her on the rock. Waves crash at its base, sending spindrift into the air. The sky is a hazy yellow. It’s been a dry summer. There’s a forest fire somewhere in the provinces.
    It takes me a second to find the right muscles to sit like her—humanlike, contorting my body into stiff right angles: ankles, knees, waist. Now we sit in silence, both of us staring at the water, which makes it impossible for me to lookdirectly into her eyes and project the message I want so much to send.
    Finally I say, “Beautiful.”
    “Yes,” she says.
    “And lonely,” I say.
    “Yes.” A silver tear bobs at the corner of her