“Are you down in the bay, then?” I asked.
“Why? Do you miss me?”
“This isn’t the time for that.”
There was a pause. I watched a phantom of mist coil up through a colossal black pine out in the yard. It was the hour before full light, a lost time between night and morning, and my favorite time of day. At the base of the ridge the lake would for the smallest of moments lie solidly black before the rising day painted it with color. The ice had only been out for a few days. All the ghosts who slumbered through winter on the bottom were surely still waking up.
“I suppose I’m trying everything I can to avoid this conversation being real,” Wren said. “I’m home in Montreal. I know I need to leave. It’s just that I can’t seem to leave. Picking up the phone almost killed me dead.” I choked on a laugh at the timing of the phrase, and Wren said, “This is no time to start being polite. Let it out.”
“Should I come up?” I asked. “I could travel down to the bay with you.”
“That’s not what I want. I was thinking I’d rather come to you.”
“Come to me.”
“Yes.”
“I’m over in East Grand.”
“I know. Despite the fame and fortune of being a good country doctor, you don’t have many places you go.”
This was true. I spent most of my time between downeast Maine, where I lived and worked, and the cabin in East Grand. I had some money in bank accounts from a horrendous five years spent as a resident physician in a large Boston hospital. The only things I really much cared about were my patients and of course Cricket, who traveled everywhere with me via a cozy horse trailer. “You want to come to East Grand?”
“This is the part of the conversation you find difficult? Yes, I want to come to East Grand.”
“You sound like my mother,” I said, aiming for an insult and a compliment all in one.
“One could do a lot worse,” Wren said. “Remember how you always used to tell me you loved East Grand because it was between two places, how it was like being everywhere and nowhere at once?”
“Of course.”
“I need to be between places for a bit. Even just for a day or two. Even if it’s a bullshit illusion.”
I understood then and was ashamed. She was not ready to move forward and face what waited for her back home in Penobscot Bay, which was the reality of a death.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll have a bit of time. The funeral’s Monday.”
I remembered that today was Good Friday. “That’s the day after Easter.”
“I guess it is.”
“Are you bringing Harold?”
“I’d not deprive you. He’s already planned a route. He wants to drive.”
“Isn’t he fourteen?”
“Almost fifteen. Not that it much matters. There isn’t much between here and there, and any dummy who can reach the pedals and see over the dash ought to be able to make it alive. I’m in no rush, really. Lyman’s already gone.”
I was amazed at her composure. I thought for sure she was posturing. “You don’t have to perform for me.”
“That would be the male ego speaking. I don’t perform for anyone. Sometimes life forces you to get used to the idea of someone being gone long before they actually go.” Wren’s voice had become a whisper over the line. “So I’d been preparing.”
“But the reality of it,” I said.
“Hurts like hell. I’ll be there tomorrow,” Wren said. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t get arrested. Don’t marry anyone. Don’t get anyone pregnant. Don’t die.”
“Don’t change,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said and hung up the phone.
I felt a great yawning emptiness spread through me. It was a feeling I had not known in years. Death, I thought, looking out at the still lake, beginning now to gain its fire as the light broke overhead: there was nothing more confusing than a death. The wind was down and the water as undisturbed as glass, and I was reminded of what I had first realized years ago as a young child—a lake is simply a window into the earth. Some see through it, some don’t. I believe my father had seen. I believe Lyman had as well. Prison had been hard on Lyman. He had tried to commit suicide once, after my mother bitterly launched a merciless stream of opinion pieces about him and the leniency of our justice system. Of course there were other factors. He lived in a place that was a hell. Each day a procession of dehumanizing defeats tore him further down. My mother didn’t help things. Lyman’s defense of temporary insanity wasn’t enough, and he was convicted of second-degree murder. My mother wanted more. People cut the articles out and mailed them by the dozens to Lyman. He tried to die by hanging himself with a bedsheet. But he lived. Of course he smoked too much and didn’t work out enough, and when he was finally nearing the end of his sentence, it appears he developed lung cancer.
I have a patient who spent thirty years of his life in prison. I treat him for a variety of physical ailments—diabetes, angina, gout, macular degeneration—and he swears that none of those things are what’s actually wrong with him. “I’m afraid they’re symptoms,” he once told me, “of a deeper ruin.” The man’s name is Anders Hines, and he was a Norwegian carpenter. When Anders first came to see me, he was struggling to continue his work. His comment gave me pause. For weeks I lived with it turning around in my head. Anders had been a concert pianist in his youth and somehow got it in his head to rob a Halifax bank with a group of other young men. A guard had died of a heart attack during the robbery. After that moment, his life was never his own again. First he became a prisoner of the correctional system, and then a prisoner of his own body and lingering despair. One day I watched him slowly remove his clothing in my examination room, marveling at just how gray he was. His skin and his hair and his lips, even his fingernails, were all the color of ash. When he saw me looking, he said, “They don’t let you take much back out with you.” A few nights later he swung by my house with a flank of venison for me—he never had much money to pay for his care and always felt bad about that, though I swore it didn’t much matter—and stayed for dinner. He talked about his growing belief that the death penalty was the only humane solution to the problem of incarceration. The moment one is imprisoned, he argued, he or she ceases to be human. It had gotten quite late, and the cabin had become a balloon of darkness. When Anders rose to turn on a light and take our plates to the sink, he slid so fully into a mode of stealth that it was almost as if he ceased to exist in the room. I knew he was there, but I could barely see the shape and weight of his body. When he returned to the table, he asked me if I lived with a variety of emotional registers attached to my memories. Some being sad. Others joyful. That sort of thing. I thought about it for a time and then said I did. Anders told me I was one of the lucky ones. He said fear had become his only emotional association to memory. Even the memories from his boyhood days, long before he went to prison, were accompanied now by a shaky terror. “Guards move up and down all of my memories, jumping locations, jumping decades, morphing from my jailer one moment to my mother the next and back again, and they are always black-eyed and unhappy and provocatively swinging clubs or rifles down around their hips,” he said. After, I was consumed by a despair I had not felt since I was a child. I fell asleep shaken, and I have thought every day since then of how little was left of Lyman Creel after all his years in prison.
Twenty
I put the phone down and was struck by the overwhelming and somewhat abnormal urge to be surrounded by people. East Grand was a place where people came to pursue the opposite impulse, and there simply weren’t many spots to toss one’s self among the living. So, full of old and new heartbreak, I grabbed a wool jacket and an empty green thermos and left the cabin without cleaning up a thing.
Cricket was waiting for me in the corral above the cabin. I’d cleared an acre up there, abutting the long granite ledge that overlooked the lake. Though I’d fenced in the area, fearful Cricket might spook and plung
e over the cliff, I mostly left the gate open, and for years she’d followed me around at the hip, showing no hint of accidentally plunging to her death. I cracked a scrim of ice from the water trough and spread fresh oats for her breakfast. Then we walked out to the ledge, Cricket nuzzling into my side with each step, sensing, I suspect, as only animals can, the strangeness of the morning. I’d left a row of tall pines as a windbreak between the pasture and the ledge, and we passed through the trees like this, two beasts nearly enjoined. The ledge extended north-south for one hundred feet. Pines at its back, straight bedrock drop at its front. I’d set a bench out there and a rough table made from an old shed door and some scrap lumber legs. Far below was the wide expanse of East Grand. Cricket leaned in to me. I pressed my face to her warm body and felt my fear leave. “Thank you,” I whispered.
The wind was blowing the mist about the lake. Long blue tendrils rolled over the water. They struck the shore and then scaled the cliff. They swallowed the paddock and the stable. They broke around my truck below us in the yard and swept about the cabin, so all the world became for a moment soft and blue and vague. I imaged Lyman Creel in the bardo, wondered where he was in his passage between this world and his next. The news of his death had taken me deep into the past, and I shuddered at the realization that my world had become a field of ghosts.
The thought of an hour-long drive out through the woods to a population center like Fredericton gave me the urge to walk into the lake with an armful of rocks, so I left the ledge, took Cricket back to her paddock, and turned the truck down the two-track toward Duster, nothing more than a handful of rough buildings thrown up for hunters and fishermen, but a town nonetheless.
Green needles shagged the pines and hemlocks, but the hardwoods were still leafless. Driving through their bare, skeletal spires, I thought of my father and our road through the woods to the Little River. I could remember his voice more clearly now than when he was alive. Yet I struggled to recall his face. The news that Wren was bringing Harold was a balm. The young can be an anodyne to the greatest sorrows. Harold has a dad, but no one really knows where he is these days, so the boy, to his benefit or regret, gets all of us. It had been eight months since I’d seen him, but I always thought fondly of Harold, this tall and stocky kid who carried a peculiar openness to people, a bit like his uncle Galen before the crash. First seeing Harold, one might perceive disdain and contempt, a boy with long hair falling into his eyes, a boy who kept his head down and turned his body away and seemed to melt back into the walls. Until you spoke to him. In an instant the boy’s posture would right, and his attention would swivel to you like a beacon. Harold’s problem was that he enjoyed being somewhere else, in his imagination, in his dreams, until there was a person directly in front of him. Nothing fascinated him more than that. “He likes people who are passionate about things,” Wren once told me, shrugging. “He wants to hear them talk about all the things they love and why they love them. That’s what makes him happiest.” Very few people are as curious about other human beings as they claim. Even fewer are more curious than they claim. Harold, who claimed nothing, was at fourteen years old more curious about other people than anyone I’d ever met.
In town the lights were on in Tripp’s windows. Four cars were in the parking lot: a rust-bucket pickup truck with just a cab on the frame, no bed, an El Camino that seemed lost in time, a Toyota sedan, and a flashy new one-ton pickup. I pulled in beside the new truck and did a double take when I caught sight of a dog in the cab. It was a hulking, shaggy black-and-white thing, surely a Bernese mountain dog, with ears that flopped down around its massive square head and a brown patch around one eye. It was lying on the passenger seat, shaking. Its ribs showed through the heavy fur. When I spoke to the dog, it buried its head beneath its paws, breaking my heart even further.
Over the years Tripp had managed to nudge the roadhouse toward respectability. An actual bar now extended across the front, though I had to admit I missed the old plywood one that had for so long sat up on sawhorses. The lighting had been brightened. Beer no longer lingered all over the floor but was promptly mopped up. The pool table was gone, and the Keno machine as well, but an old dartboard and a jukebox remained. Tables, chairs, real menus, ceramic plates, and metal utensils had been added in the pursuit of becoming a proper restaurant. Tripp was older now, but he still ran breakfast, lunch, and dinner wearing his leather blacksmith’s apron, his silver ponytail tied back with gutstring.
“Who’s the jerk with the new truck and a thing for animal cruelty?” I blurted out when I walked in.
All the faces came swinging around. Only Tripp’s was grinning. I supposed he was proud of me, having watched me come, or fall, depending upon who you asked, a long way from being the bookish kid he’d first met all those years ago.
“That’s a rude way to say good morning, Doc.”
“Call me Doc again, and I’ll shit on your floor. Then we can talk about rude mornings.”
Tripp did a little mock bow, took the thermos from my hand, and started filling it with fresh black coffee. “Belongs to some guy up from Connecticut,” he said. “He’s here to fish and drink and fuck pine trees for the weekend because there aren’t any women around and the ones who are around are smart enough not to fuck a man from Connecticut with a new big-dick truck. He stumbled in earlier wearing about five grand in freshly bought Orvis gear and reeking like piss and Wild Turkey. Can’t say we encouraged him to stay long, and can’t say we’ve seen him since.”
A newspaper sat on the counter, loosely folded and stained with coffee. I noticed a story about the Cassini space mission to explore Saturn and its moons. The satellite images of the ice and rock rings of that strange leviathan of a planet pulled me through the pages. The shuttle had launched in the late 1990s. Now NASA was asking the world to “wave at Saturn” as Cassini peered back at our tiny planet from hundreds of millions of miles away and took a picture of Earth. We would all be nothing but a bright dot in a dark sky, not unlike a star. On each page the images of Saturn’s moons were more stunning. Polar storms and the scarred and cratered surface of Hyperion, a moon that had refused to be made ovular by gravity. The underground sea of Enceladus. The mesmerizing surface of Iapetus, which was half black and half white. I imagined both Lyman and my father, whose feud so long ago had escalated against a backdrop of celestial objects, sitting in a diner much like this one but nestled on Penobscot Bay instead of the remote boundary between the United States and Canada, bent over a coffee-stained newspaper and putting their differences aside long enough to receive with awe the news of this far-off space mission’s progress through the cosmos. I very much wanted things to have been that way, if only for an instant. I was suddenly weary beyond belief, and I folded the newspaper under my arm, took the filled thermos back from Tripp, and turned for the door without offering a word.
I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes, rereading the space story and debating the plight of the Bernese mountain dog jailed beside me. I thought about Wren and Harold again. I tried to envision where they were, what the road looked like around them. I remembered how Link used to sit at our kitchen table, full focus, drawing pictures of where he thought our parents were whenever they were away. I thought too of the principle of indeterminacy, which Wren had first explained to me years ago when she was doing her doctoral work. It posits that you cannot know both a particle’s velocity and its position. The more accurately we identify location, the less accurate becomes our measurement of momentum, and vice versa. And so the world around us stays slippery.
Seeing no other option, I got out and grabbed a pry bar from the toolbox in back. I wedged the bar into the top of the truck’s window. I put all my weight into the lever and worked it up and down, listening to the glass give and crunch, until the motor released and the window dropped six inches. The dog eyed me curiously, then put its head back down under its paws. I went back inside and filled an empty milk jug with water and dumped it through the cracked window until the driver’s
seat, which was of course leather, was pooled up nicely. The dog came over and cautiously lapped at the water before curling back in his spot. Patches of fur were missing all over his haunches and stomach. One of his teeth was badly chipped.
“I’m sorry you lost the human lottery,” I said, and dumped more water onto the seat.
Though I spend much of my time here at East Grand, I live farther down the border, not far from Passamaquoddy Bay, the rugged place where my father’s life began and my grandmother’s life ended, and it seems my path of living between things continues. If you follow East Grand south through the rest of the Chiputneticook Lakes—Mud Lake, Spednic Lake, and Palfrey Lake—you’ll eventually spill out into the St. Croix River, which drains into the Bay of Fundy. There in the wooded highlands a bit west of the river, you’ll find the family practice center I run with two other enterprising doctors. We still do things like house calls. Sometimes we go to people by boat. Sometimes by snowmobile. Sometimes there’s a treatment. Sometimes we just sit and listen. The goal is always to follow the grand rule of medicine: first, do no harm. And to remember its equally important partner: all people deserve equal care. About half my patients are white, and about half are Passamaquoddy. In some of them I imagine my French grandmother, in others my grandfather. Every so often a patient reminds me I’m living along the wrong river, cocking a thumb west in the direction of the Penobscot. I’m never very easy with the joke, which cuts a bit too close, I suppose. My house is a simple log structure built by Anders Hines, the Norwegian carpenter patient who left his spirit behind in prison, and it sits on the western side of Porcupine Mountain in the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, near the town of Meddybemps. The country there is eighty-three percent forest. With a population density of about ten people per square mile, more bear and moose exist than people. While it’s perhaps a mad way to live, I’ve been doing it nearly a decade now, since Lee and I went north together after our residencies, seeking to escape Boston, which we thought, rather unjustly as it turns out, was ruining our marriage. Lee left, and I stayed behind. I wanted to help care for a rural community with a desperate need for medical services, but I couldn’t muster the courage to do so back home along the Penobscot. I wanted a big family. Dogs and goats and horses and all manner of trucks and tractors and gardens and things. And the clinic. I realize now my desire to carve out something of a homesteader’s life in the middle of nowhere was my parents’ dream, which I had blindly tried to repeat. Such is how disasters are born.
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