Last Ferry Home

by Kent Harrington

  “No. They didn’t have to make me. They just wanted us to be together. Photos. I was attracted to you the moment I saw you.” She turned in her seat and looked at him so he would see she was telling the truth. “On the ferry. That first day — I was ashamed of it. It had never happened before like that. I loved Rishi, you have to believe me. I did,” she said. She turned back and looked out the window.

  They were approaching the Golden Gate Bridge. He’d looked west and saw the spot where he thought they’d capsized. At the same instant he remembered what she’d felt like. The smell of Asha’s body mixed with the sweet smell of Blue Jasmine incense. Her small breaths in the dark as they made love, the way she’d held his neck, the wonderful feel of her sculpted against him. He’d felt completely alive in her arms.

  “But they —?”

  “They took photos of us. That was the deal. I’m sorry. I betrayed you, if that’s what you’re asking. But I had no choice at all, do you understand? None, Michael. Nirad is a monster, and I couldn’t have my girls in the same house. It is unthinkable.” She spoke without looking at him. They passed Vista Point on the north end of the bridge and headed up the hill toward Sausalito.

  He looked out and saw Alcatraz cloistered in cloud scud. A hulking container ship, looking impressive and unstoppable, was passing under the bridge. It was heading out to sea and would pass the North Tower where it all started. All of it seemed to have started there — his long journey — where the Bay met the ocean.

  They passed the throng of cars heading into Sausalito. He swung his Ford into the fast lane, punching the throttle. He felt the cold water of the ocean again, his wife’s hand gripping his tightly. The moment when he spotted Rebecca’s red coat in the fog as he swam toward her. How red it looked, how grateful he was she had put it on.

  “I understand,” he said finally.

  They drove in silence, then all the way to the turn off at Sir Francis Drake Boulevard that they would take them out to West Marin. They left the fog behind. The Marin hills were as green as he’d ever seen them.

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “Limantour Beach,” he said.

  “Is that near Tomales Bay?”

  “Yes, just west. Near Point Reyes. You’ll see the bay. We’ll drive by it,” he said.

  “I always wanted to go,” Asha said. “But then everything happened to us.”

  ***

  Dr. Schneider had called him that morning and asked him to stop by. He thought of not going, but decided at the last moment he owed the doctor that.

  “Are you going to tell me, Michael? I have to end our working together. But I want to hear what happened that day,” Dr. Schneider said.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I just need to know. I can’t explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s because I — I don’t think I can help people. I don’t think I’m any good at it, really.”

  “So you’ll do what?” O’Higgins said, surprised. They took their usual places, sitting where they’d always sat, aware that it would be their last session together.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wanted you to get over something. I thought that your wife’s death, as hard as it was for you, was — how can I say this? That it was just a moment in life’s continuum, something that you could pass by finally, and then go on with your life. I didn’t get it. Loss, what it means; that it changes you forever, that it marks you. I didn’t understand that. Nothing in my training taught me that simple thing about life. Now I understand. It bashes you, there’s dents and nothing can make things perfect again. That’s why I can’t go on with this, pretending somehow that I can fix people. Change anything.

  “Something’s happened?” O’Higgins said. He saw it on her face. Something indelible was now printed there, marked in her eyes, he recognized a life-scar expression.

  “I lost a patient. She killed herself. I blame myself,” She said.

  “That’s not your fault,” he said.

  “Maybe … You were my first patient. I was so sure of myself when you walked in here, so sure I could help you — but I didn’t understand. I think you did, from the very beginning. Somehow you knew It couldn’t be fixed. Perhaps only forgotten.” She was wearing jeans, and she’d boxed up things. The painting of the geese was gone from the wall. Papers on the floor, medical reference books stacked up by the door. It was obvious she was closing down her practice.

  “I want to tell you what happened that day. Out there. I’ve kept it a secret from everyone because it was too much,” he said, ready to tell her. It was a story he was finally ready to tell.

  “Why now?”

  “Maybe you did help me. I think you did. A lot of things. I came here, that first day, to tell you what happened to us. From the first session. I wanted to tell someone, but I wasn’t ready to.”

  Schneider reached for his hand and across the divide that had separated them for months. The two club chairs were only a few feet away from each other, but a universe apart until she touched his hand.

  “Okay, tell me now. I want to hear it. I need to hear it,” she said.

  He looked at her. Her expression was one he’d never seen before, something lost about it. The doctor, too, was struggling to hang on to something now.

  The water was ice cold and a shock. The shock forced him to involuntarily inhale saltwater. He saw the sail under him, pearl white covered by water. He was looking for Rebecca. He was holding Jennifer’s hand. She’d fallen in a moment after he had. They’d landed near each other and were lying on the boat’s sail, inches above the ocean, until the torn keel came up out of the water and they were thrown into the freezing water.

  He pulled the inflation ring on his wife’s life jacket. It immediately inflated around her.

  “Where is she?” Jennifer was trying to control her breath, but like him she’d swallowed salt water from the involuntary cold water’s shock and was coughing. The sailboat’s hull was sinking, disappearing, the red line he’d painted across the waterline that summer vanishing. He saw it covered and then the broken keel rise up again, dirty and ugly.

  He saw something maybe twenty yards away, a shark’s fin. The look of it evil and frightening. He turned away looking for Rebecca, but still couldn’t see her.

  “There she is, there!” He got the words out. Waves were breaking over the hull as it sank, foaming over it, but he’d caught a glimpse of Rebecca floating in the water, wearing his red jacket, just off to their right.

  He started to swim and felt the strange tug of his life jacket holding his head up. Jennifer held his hand, trying to go with him toward where they saw the red jacket bobbing in the foamy grey, the waves pushing Rebecca away from them. He saw their daughter’s shoulders lift near the disappearing hull, the last of its broken-open wood hull finally covered over by the ocean.

  “Get her, Michael, God please!” Jennifer said.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  The boat’s emergency life raft, designed to employ once it was submerged, popped up suddenly making a terrific noise. Its hydro-static release having worked as intended. He knew he had a decision to make between getting Jennifer to the life raft, and to safety, or swimming towards his daughter who he knew wasn’t wearing a life vest and would be carried away by the current quickly.

  He hesitated a moment, the taste of salt water in his mouth. He looked for Jennifer in the chop while the life raft finished inflating, building itself; its canopy mushrooming up now. It looked huge.

  “And what happened?” Schneider said. She was still holding his hand and she was crying, but it was as if he was back in the ice cold water, the waves hitting him in the face, the cold making it harder and harder for him to swim. A terrible numbness had come over his arms and legs. The hull moved up, reappearing like some kind of weird Moby Dick, like a living creature fighting to live. The broken keel nearly hit him.

  He
saw Jennifer behind him now, she was looking at him, Her face locked between the yellow life jacket’s bulk. He felt helpless but instinctively moved off towards his daughter, swimming as best he could.

  “When I got to Rebecca, Jen was gone. I never could tell anyone about seeing the shark. I knew what had happened. I had to make a choice between the two of them you see.”

  It was moments before Schneider could speak, as if he’d punched her in the stomach. “Does anyone else know? Rebecca?”

  “No, And I’ll never tell her. It’s our secret—I guess. Thank you, Doctor,” he said. “You’re wrong, you did help, you see. I had someone to tell it to, my story … Don’t give up on my kind.” He got up and left the office, not looking back closing the door behind him.

  The doctor sat there for a long time, her life hanging in the balance, her years of medical school and her youth holding her up as she finally walked across the office to her desk.

  They never spoke or saw each other again. But she realized she’d helped him despite feeling horribly inadequate in the face of her patient’s suicide. She’d made a difference to the detective’s life. Her feeling of hopelessness left her as quickly as it had begun because she believed him. She decided to go on, that it was important.

  They often thought about one another the detective and the doctor, almost as if they’d been lovers. The detective was her first patient and she’d learned a great deal. She kept all the notes about him at her home in a bookcase, by a window that had a view of the Golden Gate and the Pacific Ocean beyond it. For some reason she’d written at the end of O’Higgin’s notes: There is no science that will ever change the nature of life, which is to suffer. I do what I can to help. She accepted the fact that there was no escape. No Brave-New-World Soma. No mind-numbing drug. No conversation with white-coated shamans, even, could alter that horrible truth about life.

  CHAPTER 22

  They drove through Fairfax, full of aging hippies, mountain-bike shops and redwood fences hung with weather beaten and sad-looking Tibetan prayer flags. O’Higgins drove over White’s Hill, heading due west toward an iron bar of fog in the distance. The populated end of Marin County was well behind them now. Here the old California took shape, looking the way it had been before any white men ever saw it. The hillsides were clean, oak-studded, greenish with flinty rock outcroppings scattered across fields, ancient.

  O’Higgins looked up on the ridge where he had hunted deer as a boy with his high school friends. A huge oak tree stood near the ridgeline west of White’s Hill, massive. He recognized the spot where he’d fired his first shot from a long rifle, his shoulder pressed into the wooden stock of his .30.30.

  The buck had been making his way to the shade of the tree and stood a good sixty yards in front of him. The animal was taken down after the first shot. Its death came stumbling and terrible at the end of a long hot summer afternoon in late August. The tall Johnson grass smelled of star thistles, and the ocean. He and his friends had run down into a golden-grass ravine toward the kill. It was a good clean heart shot, his hands steady—his first shot. Cocking again, he’d waited for the animal to get up, finally lowering the hammer, the deer not moving and a second shot unnecessary. Later, and during the war, he’d thought about that first shot often, how it would help and hurt him.

  The oak tree was craggy now, twenty years later, but still a solitary and living reminder of his youth, of his high school days. They’d been good, even idyllic. It was a time of innocence, as it was with all youth, he imagined. He was glad to see the landmark still signaling something about world-time always going on, stopping for no one.

  He wondered what would happen to his daughter. What kind of world would she become a woman in? Would she be a mother? A wife? Certainly. A career as a dancer, perhaps? He was optimistic for her happiness. He knew she had that one thing people need to succeed: she was committed to her dreams, selfish about them and brave. Without bravery, he knew, nothing could be had of life.

  He understood, from the moment he turned on the car and pulled away from his house, he might not be there for her. He’d driven through San Rafael toward the freeway looking at everything. All the magnificent details that were so familiar and been so ordinary had appeared different as he drove through town. They seemed important—the homeless guy and the businessman. Everything seemed to stand out as if he were on some kind of mind-expanding psychedelic. Death didn’t frighten him.

  “You shouldn’t come,” O’Higgins said, speaking again after a long silence. He sped up as the battered Ford headed down into the San Geronimo Valley and toward the ocean. The valley’s hillsides were dark, almost steel blue, the redwood trees dismal and beautiful, a kingdom of fog and Redwood trees. Their trunks were black from the rain.

  He’d crept along the ridge line here, hunting past abandoned summer shacks from the 1920s, their roofs mossy green, his rifle’s barrel wet from the fog. He’d enjoyed the loneliness of the Coast Range as a young man. It was different from any place else, singular with its views of the Pacific, its redwood trees magnificent and lonely in their grandeur. Often he would take his rifle and hunt alone, stopping to eat lunch under a redwood, the food—sandwiches made in haste— tasting good, the loneliness of place revealing something about himself. He was bookish, with the short rifle he loved between his legs as he ate.

  “You should go home, to India. To your girls,” he said finally.

  “The US authorities won’t let me. It’s too late, anyway. Rishi is gone and I have to do sati.”

  “What’s that?” O’Higgins said.

  “Do you like Tomales Bay?” Asha said, not answering his question.

  “Yes. I sailed there a lot when my wife was alive.”

  She turned to him. He hit the heater and let the hot air blow in, not finishing his sentence. He had the desire to make love to her again, to take her up some fog-bound fire road and escape their awful predicament, disappear in the cold mists like high-school kids. Why should they accept death?

  “I saw a painting of the bay in Richard’s gallery one day. I must have been thinking of you. No, it was before we met; but I must have felt something. That you were near? Do you think the person you really are meant for — that you can feel them, that they might be close by?” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I had a fantasy about meeting the painter. Robert thought, perhaps, I was reacting to him and that’s why he fixated on me — but I was thinking of someone who I could share something that was deep inside. I can’t explain,” she said. “The thing that was truly me, something beyond the good Indian girl, the A student. The Cambridge graduate. I never showed it to Rishi, really. Not really. I don’t know why. I thought maybe he would be put off by it. But I think that’s the person you’re meant to be with; it’s the person you want to show your real self to, and you know it when you’re making love to them because you show it then, I think. I felt it with you last night.

  “I was meant to come here, and I was meant to meet you. I’m sure of it. That’s what the guru told my mother. I told my mother I’d fallen in love with someone, and she wasn’t shocked — I mean, shocked because it was too close to Rishi’s death, of course. But my mother is a blessed person and she understood that love could happen that way, despite tragedy, or because of it. Maybe only an artist could understand that. What is this place? Where are we?”

  “Lagunitas,” he said. “I lived here, when I got back from Iraq.”

  “It’s — dreary,” she said, and smiled.

  “Yeah. Lot of redwood trees in the fog.” he smiled back. Were they really traveling toward their death?

  “Was it difficult, when you got back?” she asked.

  “Yeah. But I liked it out here. It was always wet and foggy. After Iraq, I wanted to feel the cold again.”

  She reached over and touched his thigh. He felt her touch go through him the way he had
with his wife. Electric. Sexual, compelling and something else that was indescribable, as if the universe itself had reached out and touched him.

  She smiled again at him. It was a girlish smile, and authentic as if they were on a first date and hadn’t a care in the world.

  “It looks cold. Like Scotland,” she said. “And it’s like the Lake Country, too.”

  “The house I rented, if you could call it that, was a summer place. Old. No heat. I would light the potbelly stove and read and try and figure it all out. What I would do next. I decided to be a cop sitting by the stove reading Hemingway and Jack London. Sounds trite, but it’s true,” he said.

  He remembered the decision that would lead him to Jennifer and to Rebecca. The sides of the stove had turned orange. The potbelly stove was full of coal he’d buy on the cheap in San Rafael, by the train tracks. It was about two in the morning and he could not sleep. The big summer house felt empty and ice cold if he stepped away from the stove.

  “Do you think I was wrong, sleeping with you?” Asha said.

  “No. I’m glad it happened, really. That’s the truth,” he said.

  “Even if I deceived you about — about Nirad. What he wanted. You have a right to hate me.”

  “So what? I didn’t tell you the truth, either. That I was — pursuing you selfishly. Since the ferry, maybe. When I saw you, I felt something powerful. I wanted you then,” he said.

  “It’s all so strange, isn’t it? I mean, that we ended up falling in love. Or that I will do sati today.”

  “What’s that? And tell me this time.” He took his eyes off the road and looked at her.

  “It’s what Indian widows do,” she said. “Good Hindu widows.”

  She turned and faced him. They were heading toward Samuel P. Taylor State Park. They’d entered a part of the valley that was very narrow, dark on the west side, with Samuel P. Taylor Creek to their right. The two-lane country road seemed made to fit between the hulking redwoods. The fog had seeped up the road from Bolinas, lying in all the low spots, covering the sky in places, making mysteries in the trees.