Free The River Wife by Heather Rose Page B

away from believing in anything. I thought there was more assurance in no reassurance. But here, in the forest, I want a symbol. I want something that makes me feel safe again.’
    I took the plate and dipped my finger and turned his arm over. I drew first one flowing red line and then beside it another flowing from the skin inside his elbow to his wrist, two lines that were not hard but soft and moved as the river moves into the palm of his hand. The mark of a river wife. I felt the warmth of him beneath his shirt and I wanted to rest my hand against his chest and feel the beat of his heart. I wanted to tell Wilson James that when a new bird flew down into the forest, sat upon a branch and watched me, that my heart leapt to think it was my daughter returned. That the knock I thought I heard at the door, the sound of the silence bringing snow, the white flash of a creature in the forest, that all these moments I imagined her come home again, though always as the child she had been.
    I had no picture of her grown and I imagined her in countless ways.
    I said, ‘They are never far from us, the ones we lose.’
    ‘No, you are wrong,’ he said, drawing me to him. ‘They are so far and I am still walking and he does not get any closer.’
    ‘I have no life beyond the river,’ I said suddenly, and wondered at my courage.
    ‘You mean you are afraid?’
    ‘No, I can never leave here.’
    He held my face and kissed me. His body was like a cave I wanted to curl up in, his mouth a pool where I could taste sunlight.
    ‘I want to make love to you.’
    ‘It won’t help,’ I said.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘We cannot.’

I lingered in rain as it settled on my arms and nose, and licked the mist from my fingertips. I ran my fingers over bark. I touched the hairs of unfurling ferns and the skin of new leaves. I rested my cheek on vivid moss. I thought of how Wilson James had looked before he kissed me. I thought of how the lines that marked his forehead were deeper than any other lines on his face, and when we laughed together it was as if we were young and saplings.
    ‘What is unseen has always been the greatest challenge to humans,’ my father said, and I understood him as I never had before. Wilson James had drawn a thread across my skin and it pulled me towards him. I resisted.
    As a fish I did not think about skin and touch. I was a creature of watchfulness. I was absorbed by movement. I sought food. I sought shelter. To live in water is to understand submission. As a woman I was consumed by the need to touch. I felt the rush of yearning, the flow of desire, but I would not submit to it.
    After some days his face receded. I stayed upstream and focused again on ripples and whorls caught in water, and the weaving and folding of stories before the river flowed on, carrying with it the alchemy of told and untold things. The moon filled and emptied and Wilson James did not rise up except when I chose to think of him. Then I found myself quite still, as if listening, but instead I was watching the pictures I had gathered of him.

    I had not tested the visibility I had with Wilson James upon another human. But I had to know if others might see me too. If others could reach out and find my skin. Had the years of living with none for company called up in me the capacity to slip beyond my domain and enter at last the world of humans? Is this what my loneliness had made? A pathway to others who were like me?
    I darted and tumbled through rapid and rock fall, over waterfall and through crevasse, until I was carried into the greatest lake. The mountains were fired by dawn. I swam across the lake and slipped into a quiet finger of river. There I stepped from the water and took my woman form and waited to test this Wilson James effect. I smiled for he would like to think that his name had another purpose. The James effect —to see people from the world just beyond the reach of human sight.
    The heat of the day had passed before a man came