The Fisherman by John Langan Read Free Book Online Page A

if our talking was helping Dan. In fact, when the fishing season was over that fall, I worried a little for him. I’d yet to find my winter substitute for fishing, you see—never have, to this day—so it wasn’t as if I could say to Dan, “Well, now that fishing season’s over, we’ll have to start practicing our curling.” After having fished and talked together as much as we had, we shouldn’t have needed that kind of excuse, I know, but, lacking an activity like fishing, I felt strange saying to Dan, “Hey, let’s get together this weekend and talk.” Stupid, yes. In any event, Dan was expecting company that first fishing-less weekend, his brother and his family. The first anniversary of the accident was rearing its hideous head, and his and Sophie’s families had decided that he shouldn’t be alone for the weeks to either side of it. He was busy well into the New Year.
    Although I saw Dan every day at work, passed a few words with him here and there, it wasn’t until late February of that next year that I finally had him over for dinner. Despite its abbreviated length, February’s always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain. In February, all the big, happy holidays are gone, and it’s weeks and weeks—months, even—until Easter and spring. I suppose that’s why whoever decides these things stuck Valentine’s Day smack dab in the middle of the month, to help lighten its load. To be honest, though, even when I had a reason to celebrate the fourteenth, I still thought of the second month as a bleak time. I think this was part of the reason I invited Dan to join me in a meal, and why, when I opened the door that Sunday night and saw him standing there, unshaven and obviously unshowered, wearing an old track suit reeking of mothballs and mildew, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been, especially considering that, when I’d seen him on Friday, he’d been his usual tidy self. I looked at him standing in the doorway, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and thought, Of course: it’s February.
    They say that, for most people, the second year after you lose someone is harder than the first. During that first year, the theory goes, you’re still in shock. You don’t really believe what’s happened to you has happened; you can’t. During that second year, it starts to sink in that the person—or, in Dan’s case, people—you’ve been pretending are away on a visit aren’t coming back. This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long time before she was gone, and so had been using a lot of those same tricks on myself most folks don’t discover until much later. But the theory held true for Dan. He’d made a brave face of things through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year, had done his best to be a good host to his various visiting relatives, and once the last of them—a cousin from Ohio—had been gone for going on a week, with no promise of anyone else appearing in the immediate future, the knowledge of how alone he was had crushed him like a truckful of bricks. Until this point, he’d been doing all right sleeping—not great, mind you, but not bad—and he’d been able to distract himself watching old movies on the VCR, one of his passions. Now sleep had fled, chased away by the memory of that huge white truck rushing toward him, its grill like a great set of chrome teeth grinning at him as it prepared to take a bite out of his life from which he’d never recover. When he tried to watch TV, his copy of Red River , say, or one of the late-night talk shows, whatever was on the screen was replaced by Sophie’s face, turning away from him to look at the roaring tractor-trailer, her expression sliding from early-morning fatigue to wide-eyed terror, her mouth opening to make a sound