Catch & Release Read online

  Odd was released from the hospital a few days before me. He wasn’t there to hear the smattering of applause from the nurses when the orderly wheeled me out of the quarantine unit. I could have walked—I’d been getting up and pacing the halls for days—but it’s hospital policy. So they rolled me down the wide hall and into the elevator and out the doors, past the oversized aquarium full of not-very-healthy-looking rainbow trout to the passenger pick-up zone. The sunshine was very bright. The world looked funny. My mom marched along beside my wheelchair, clutching a red-white-and-blue Mylar balloon in one hand and stack of disposable bedpans in the other. The bedpans were unnecessary. I’d been able to get up and walk to the toilet for weeks. They were also a very bad sign that my mom wasn’t ready for any of this.

  My happiness is essential to my mom’s happiness. There is nothing weird about that. As long as my perfect future was moving along on schedule, we were both fine.

  We had always been close. She supported me in all my extra-curriculars. She was my number-one fan who attended every play, every recital, every game (even though I was only there myself to sell pop and crap at the refreshment booth). But during the hospital stay, while I was delirious and tippy-toeing toward death, she morphed into a mom-bot. When I got home, she followed me into the bathroom—just to make sure I’d be OK. She hovered over my shoulder while I spooned up applesauce and chicken-noodle soup, which was always my favorite—when I was five. And I let her, because it was just easier. She quit her job and spent all her time taking care of me. She became my parasitic twin, or I became hers. Same difference.

  A couple of days after I got home, I took the mirrored door off the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. What was the point of looking in the mirror while I brushed my teeth? Or after I washed my face? It isn’t like I needed it to put on mascara. Just trying that would probably leave me blind in the only eye I have left. So I got a screwdriver and adapted my environment to my new condition, as was suggested by some handouts I received in the hospital.

  One of the screws fell in the sink, and I knocked it into the drain because I still don’t know how to reach for things, exactly. I was still in the process of developing coping skills and new strategies for my new condition like the rehab handouts said I needed to do. Then, when I was taking the mirror downstairs to stash it in the basement storage closet, I heard my mom in her room.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed with a wad of soggy tissue pressed over her nose, crying. So I sat down beside her, and we hugged each other like two stray kittens drowning in a flood. We were there for I don’t know how long; then, when we were both starting to be able to breathe without little sniffling sounds, Mom said, “Do you want to watch The View with me, babykid?”

  That’s how I ended up on the couch with the clicker in my hand. It turns out, unlike playing ping-pong or putting on mascara, a person only needs one eye to watch TV. The TV never blinks or looks away. It accepts a person unconditionally and is generous with its love—all it asks for is a little bit of attention in return. My mom came and sat beside me during The View. I laid my head in her lap—good face up—and she stroked my hair. Then, when lady-TV was over, I rested my head on a pillow with my scar side up and watched monster movies. Between ladies and monsters I was learning a lot about myself.

  A few months later, Odd Estes showed up in the middle of Mega Shark vs. Giant Squid and said, “You want to go fishing?”

  I stood up, wearing the flannel underpants of the guy who didn’t love me forever and ever after all, and I said, “Yes.”

  It was not the last of my bad choices.

  I am ready and waiting to go at the butt-crack of dawn.

  I have my rod and vest. I checked on the local hatches and fly-pattern advice online last night. I have the right bugs in my flybook—probably. I don’t know for sure where we are going. I have a little blue cooler full of peanut-butter sandwiches, snak-paks of applesauce, and three bottles of iced tea. Thanks, Mom.

  Mom is very concerned that I not get thirsty while I’m fishing because she doesn’t trust me to avoid temptation. Temptation in this case being water, which there is usually plenty of wherever trout are found. Beautiful, sparkly water. Trout are seriously picky about where they will live. They like water that is cold and clear—purer in some ways than anything that ever comes out of a faucet. Considering all that, it might seem completely reasonable to flop down and guzzle right out of a trout stream. Wrong. Unless a person wants to lose weight overnight with raging diarrhea caused by beaver fever. I am not in a position to lose weight. Thanks to MRSA, I weigh exactly as much as when I was twelve, boobless and scrawny.

  So once again my mom’s anxiety is not entirely irrational, just mostly.

  I have plenty of time to think about that while I am waiting for Odd.

  The sun comes up. All the way up. I drink coffee sitting on the porch step. A lot of coffee. I have time to process the coffee and visit the toilet. When Dad gets up, Mom makes me a second breakfast of pancakes and little pig sausages, which is nice because eating gives me something to do while I’m waiting. The sun swings around the sky. Lunchtime comes, and Mom calls me in to sit at the table so my chicken soup won’t spill.

  Then I go and crash on the couch for my afternoon monster fix. Something that looks like a rogue houseplant terrorizes a girl in a car. She shoots it a whole bunch of times. I doubt that bullets will have any effect, but at that moment I hear tires crunching gravel in the driveway. I can also hear Mom’s half-running footsteps to the front door while I pull myself into an upright position and ready for takeoff. I know Mom was wishing Odd would never show up. I’d heard her and Dad go around about it last night. Mom was against me going. Dad thought I should: “She needs to do something!” That was the last word on the matter yesterday, but today, if Odd hadn’t shown up, that would have been fine with Mom.

  “Well hi, Odd honey,” says Mom, managing to remind me, and probably Odd, that we are only children and she is The Mom.

  “Missus Furnas!” Odd is smiling and charming and able to grease the gears of etiquette with a pound of cool butter. “I’m sorry I’m late. I couldn’t find anybody to take care of Penny.” He opens the door of a big silver-blue car and a squirrelly little dog comes rushing out. It bounds right past him and makes beeline for my mom. Once it gets there, it slithers around her legs a bunch of times before it squats to pee practically on her foot. Mom ignores it mightily.

  My mom is not a fan of little dogs. She is not a fan of cats. She is not a fan of goldfish. She grew up on a ranch and is of the opinion that animals have a place and that place is not in her house.

  “I brought her chow and her bed,” says Odd while he drags those things out of the backseat and brings them to the porch.

  “Hey Polly, since we are getting such a late start, I thought we’d go ahead and spend a night or two out, you know? So we won’t miss the best times to fish. . . . I saw your dad down at the Loaf’n’Jug—goin’ to give some baybeeze to some laydeeze,” Odd says with a wink meant for the whole TV audience, “And he said that sounded like a plan. Did he call you?”

  No, my dad did not call me—or my mom. I can see she doesn’t think this is a plan at all—not at all. But it is kind of out of her hands, and she knows it. Odd has managed to offend her three ways in less than five minutes.

  1) He showed up.

  2) He made a vulgar joke about my dad, the large-animal vet who will spend most of the day artificially inseminating somebody’s cows.

  3) He went over her head to my dad—like my dad made the decisions.

  So, under her perfectly still exterior, Mom is seething. Come to think of it, Odd has offended her four ways.

  4) That damn dog.

  Odd trails after me as I go downstairs to get my sleeping bag and tent from the rec room closet.

  “Shwuuuu, whwuuu, Snow White, I am your father.”

  Odd is staring at the cardboard cutout of Darth Vader standing by the ping-pong table. Behind the villain i
s a mural my mom painted for me when I was little: Snow White and her forest animal friends. Come to think of it, it is a little weird for those two to be together. But I don’t think about that, not really. Things like that become invisible when a person sees them all the time.

  “Shwuuu, shwuuu, shwuuu . . . You don’t know the power of the dark side.” Then Odd asks, “Why Snow White? Why not Princess Leia? You seem more like a Leia—or Princess Peach.”

  “I’m just bringing my one-man tent.” I say. I’m not going to talk about princesses. The mirror I took out of my bathroom is in the way, and it topples over onto the floor when I push it with my foot. Seven years of bad luck—or is it thirteen? It’s neither; the mirror didn’t break. The worst luck happens when the mirror doesn’t break. When I pick it up and move to the other side of the closet I see my face. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the prettiest of them all? Not me, thanks for asking.

  “You don’t have a one-princess tent?”

  I have a moment when I agree with what Mom never said: better to just stay home. But then Darth Vader catches my eye, and I remember what my dad said last night: I need to do something. I might as well start with fishing.

  “Should I bring a camp stove? Fuel? Cooking gear?”

  “Naw. Gotcha covered. We’re burning daylight.”

  Seriously, he can say that, to me, after I’ve been waiting for him for seven freaking hours?

  My mom is still standing on the front lawn. Odd’s little dog is still running back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. It doesn’t pay any attention to Odd. It seems fixated on my mom. My mom is basically refusing to look at it. She’s just staring at Odd’s boat of a car.

  It is a very unsuitable fishing car. It has a third of an inch of clearance. It is freshly washed and scratch-free. It looks like it gets about 12 mpg highway. It is exactly the sort of car that dealers declare has only been driven by old ladies to church. Well, if it gets banged up or gets its guts ripped out, it isn’t my problem. I check in my vest pocket for my waterproof box with my phone, I.D., fishing license, and debit card inside. I’m covered in case of disaster—at least as far as taking this dumb car off the blacktop goes. We toss my crap in the backseat. I wave. Mom smiles a pulled-flat smile. Odd’s little dog runs back and forth, but it doesn’t chase the car down the driveway as we pull out.

  I turn my head a little so I can see my mom in the rearview mirror. She’s just standing there like a lawn ornament. Beside her, on the porch, I see I forgot to grab the little blue cooler full of peanut butter and iced tea. I’m on my own. I realize this is the first time I’ve been more than a hundred yards away from Mom since I left the hospital.

  Bye, Mom.

  The driver calls the tune on the radio. No argument there. Just like there is no argument about who has to open the gate.

  There are rules. There is an etiquette. The driver does not open the gate. The other person does—even if the other person is an eighty-six-pound pregnant granny and the gate is one of those half-assed contraptions made out of three strands of barbwire and a couple of unpeeled twisty lodgepoles. It’s kind of hilarious: the same guy who makes a double-quick step to open the door of the Loaf’n’Jug for a stranger will sit and wait for his girlfriend to drag a gate open and closed on the way to a fishing spot. At least that’s my experience when I was Bridger Morgan’s girlfriend. It’s just the way of it.

  The gate question isn’t really in play at the moment because we are enjoying a little wide-open blacktop. It could all be good but, sadly, the driver calls the tune even on the interstate. Odd reaches over and there is about fifteen seconds of serious godly talk . . . static . . . some South-will-rise-again twang . . . static, and he settles on—I wish I brought my MP3 player, what was I thinking?—local sports talk.

  “My brother—he’s on two hours a day,” says Odd.

  “. . . lost just two games last year, both of them against state champion . . .” says the radio.

  “Your brother?”

  “This is his show.”

  “. . . . returns a wealth of talent on both sides of the ball . . .” says the radio.

  “I thought your brother sold equipment at your dad’s . . .”

  “Tsst. I wanna hear this,” says Odd and cranks up the volume. Well that’s my cue. It isn’t essential that I know about Odd’s brother, who I thought sold combines and lawn tractors. I don’t really care. I was just pretending to care because pretending to care is what a nice girl does in a conversation. If that’s not required, hey! I’m warm. I’m in a car with cushy deluxe seats. I can feel the velvety upholstery on my pretty cheek. I shut my eyes. My eye. The velvet carries a whiff of old happiness, of nickels and vanilla perfume and cigarette crumbs like the inside of an old woman’s purse. I go to sleep.

  The crunch of gravel under the tires wakes me up.

  “Where are we?” I’m confused. It doesn’t look like a fishing access.

  “Prairie dog town,” says Odd.

  “You miss the turnoff for the fishing access?”

  “Haven’t come to it yet.”

  OK. I’ll bite. “Where are we going?”

  “Hole below the Natural Bridge on the Boulder.”

  “Umm . . . why?” It’s a long way to drive to go fishing. There are easier places. We must have driven past a bunch of them already.

  “Why not? You got a better idea?”

  I got nothing.

  “Come on Polly, let’s see us some doggies,” says Odd, and he pivots around and pushes himself out of the driver’s seat. There is a technique to getting out, I see. Odd has been developing coping skills and new strategies for his new condition. I step out too, into the bright light and dust of the prairie dog town. The wind is blowing the grit around. I stand beside the big interpretive sign like they always have at the state parks, which explains prairie dogs are an endangered species. I’m not really interested in what it says, but it cuts the wind.

  “These guys were here when Lewis and Clark came through. Well, not these exact guys . . .” says Odd, “But there were five billion of the little fuckers. There were prairie dog towns that went for miles . . . miles, Polly, miles. A guy could walk all day and never get out of prairie dog town.”

  “They carry bubonic plague,” I say. My dad is a vet, so that’s the kind of thing I know about prairie dogs.

  “Lewis and Clark caught one. They had all these guys digging and pouring water down the holes. They caught one and kept it with them like a pet. Then they gave it to Thomas Jefferson,” says Odd. That’s the kind of thing he knows about prairie dogs.

  “We could fish here,” says Odd, “Tie some grass or granola bar on the hook and—” He mimes air-casting. “Ga-zing!” He’s got an imaginary prairie dog on the line. “Get the net, he’s a kahuna!”

  I turn my back and walk to the car. I don’t want to imagine a fat, furry animal jerked into the sky on a hook. I can hear the prairie dogs whistling and chirping. They want to keep each other safe from danger. Each other is all they got in a dangerous world. It probably isn’t going to be good enough.

  One good reason not to fish the hole below the Natural Bridge: steep cliffs. Another: fast water that disappears underground into a giant natural drain here and comes blasting out—oh, I don’t know, somewhere over in the invisible there, maybe. Welcome to certain death dressed up postcard pretty. It is the sort of place a person needs to supervise small children and pets. That’s what the interpretive sign says. That list of those who need supervision should probably include amputees and the visually handicapped too, I’m thinking.

  I am so very not happy.

  I never used to be afraid of heights—not like afraid. When I lost my eye I also lost depth perception, and it turns out that the world is scary damn place without it. Now I need to inch along when I’m faced with a sidewalk curb—or a precipitous limestone cliff. Meanwhile, Odd is sort of lurching along ahead of me. My terror is divided equally between the future where I will see him plunge to
his death and the future where I plunge to my death. Those seem to be the only two options.

  There is a third, it turns out. We both make it to the bottom.

  It’s a fine, deep pool, but it would be tricky to cast, to let it drift on the current. The force of the cascade stirs up the water, and it’s just not that obvious what’s going on down there. It looks fancy, but it isn’t the fishiest place on the Boulder. I’m inclined to go a little further, at least until I can set myself up to be downstream from my cast. This is it for Odd, though. I don’t know if it is bad judgment about the water and what he can accomplish or even worse judgment in leading us down here, where the best path is often underwater and the next best alternative is rock-hopping from boulder to boulder. Rock-hopping is a thing a one-legged fisherman probably shouldn’t do.

  I am torn between the need to watch out for Odd and the desire to maybe, actually, fish. Polly-That-Was would definitely choose responsibility to others over self-interest. Post-MRSA-monster me says, “Hey, I’m going downstream.” Then I add, “Remember, ‘This reever can keel you in a thousand vays.’”

  Odd gives me a blank look. I guess he’s not a fan of movies about giant people-eating snakes. His loss. Worst case, I’ll see him when he floats by and I’ll tell his parents he died happy, wild, and free. For now, though, I’m just going to ignore him and go fishing.

  I drink from plastic cups at home because I missed the stream of water coming from the faucet and hit the back of the sink so hard a regular glass shattered in my hand. I was going to sew a button back on, but I couldn’t thread the needle without my mommy’s help. Now I’m going to get a nearly invisible nylon line through the eye of a hook.