Radio Belly by Buffy Cram Page B

hopeful moms in Lycra pants. Yes, she’s had it with land, with people, with seasons and gravity, and the business of mothering, which is why she flirts with the man who’s rented them the boats just long enough for Stefan to get a head start. Then she pushes off land herself. The man stands on shore, smiling and waving until he notices Stefan leaning dangerously in his kayak, looking like a rag doll stuffed into a toy boat. He walks briskly to the edge of the water and tries to call them back, but it’s too late. They’ve almost disappeared into the bright white fog. Pretty soon the resort, the past, their entire landlubbing lives will shrink to a small dark embarrassment in the distance.
    She saw the ad back in the spring. Stefan had been cooped up for months by then. Adventure tourism it said. Kayaks and canoes, fishing, a high-ropes course winding through old-growth treetops. Old growth: those words lit up in her mind. The website had shown groups of co-workers and juvenile delinquents dangling from harnesses in the cedar canopy, smiling despite themselves, as if all that looking down on the world had mended them. It wasn’t long before her plan took shape. She put the house on the market, started whittling Stefan’s pills with an x-acto knife and booked the cabin for the first two weeks of the off-season.
    Foolish to think a mother and her grown son could start again—she sees that now. But these past months, her hope got the best of her. As his pills shrunk week to week, he started walking and talking and asking for things again—apple juice, spaghetti, a new toothbrush—it didn’t matter what. It had been so long since he’d wanted anything at all. She found a suitable buyer for the house. She even found doctors who agreed with her plans. “Yes!” her alternative psychotherapist, Dr. Bertrand, said. “Burn your old life maps!” Once Stefan was completely off his meds, he said they should both come back for a guided LSD trip. “Your spirit guides are very optimistic about this life change,” said Lynne, her acupuncturist/psychic. Even her life coach agreed: The omens were good; it was time for action.
    It wasn’t until the drive up, though, that she realized how little he’d improved. He was lumped in the seat next to her and would speak only in single syllables, only in answer to her questions. Even then his voice was a growl, dredged up from some bottom she couldn’t imagine. And there was a smell coming off him, like syrup or overripe fruit. She’d had to keep her window cracked open, enduring the screech of wind in her ear the whole drive. Beside her, he was busy keeping a tally, counting moustaches she guessed. There is something about men with moustaches. Not just that he doesn’t trust them, but that moustaches are one of the ways the world is organized: some hierarchy or code—bushy versus thin, or dark versus light—she’d never understood it.
    SHE WATCHES HIS boat lurch left-right, left-right with each dip of the paddle and wonders what she was really hoping to find out here on the water. Escape? Miracle? A beautiful end? He looks squeezed in, and she can hear him breathing through his nose like a fat man. She wonders if he can still swim, if he would even have the will, and then she holds her breath against this thought, waits for the one-two punch of grief-guilt—but it doesn’t arrive. It seems the usual rules don’t apply out here. After all, they’re paddling into a fog so thick it’s as if the sky has fallen. It parts in front of them and draws behind them like damp drapery. Out here everything is secret. Everything is forgiven.
    WHEN THEY’D FIRST arrived, they were told the rest of the resort had been rented out for a “women’s retreat.” Those women were everywhere: in the dining room, in the kitchen, in the hallways, having such strange conversations, at such high