The Leaving Year

by Pam McGaffin

  With no houses or roofs to contain them, our voices fly straight and true up to God, who has to know where my father is. The hymn starts people sniffling. Aunt Janet takes out a package of tissues and hands me one. I crumple it in my fist. Dad come home. Dad come home. Dad come home.

  A wail from a woman behind me makes me stop my silent prayer and turn around. She must be one of the fishermen’s wives. I’d probably recognize her if her face wasn’t buried in a handkerchief. Dena glances back too. She gives me a private eye roll and grabs one of my hands in hers. Her fingernails were painted red at one time, but almost all of the polish has chipped off.

  The stars come out as we walk home. There’s no moon. I find the Big Dipper and draw a line to the North Star like Dad taught me to do. The same combination of stars is on the Alaska state flag, which Dad says was designed by a thirteen-year-old Aleut boy.

  When I turned fifteen June 20, Dad had been gone almost two months.

  Before he left, he kissed my forehead. “Happy almost-birthday, Ida Rose,” he said.

  The weather was beautiful that day, clear and calm, and all the fishermen were in good spirits as they made their predictions from the decks of their freshly painted boats. With their outrigger poles in the upright position, trollers remind me of scrunched up daddy long-legs spiders. It’s like they want nothing more than to stretch out and get to work. I suspect the fishermen feel the same way when they leave Annisport each spring.

  The last time I saw Dad, he was waving from the wheel-house of the Lady Rose, his “good-bye” lost in a blast of boat whistles. He and the other trollers left the marina as a fleet, carving white Vs in the water as they picked up speed down the channel. The families watched them until they disappeared and all that was left were lapping waves and the smell of diesel.

  I’VE ridden on the Lady Rose many times, taking that same route to the west, going far enough for Dad to tell me some interesting bits of maritime history or a new folktale. He loves the Native Alaskan myths, with their wild explanations of how things in nature came to be.

  I was little enough to fit on his lap, even with a bulky life preserver, the first time he told me how Raven brought light to the world. We’d gone out on the Lady Rose, just me and him on a clear September night after he came home. His clothes smelled of tobacco and brine, and his words vibrated in my ears.

  “Raven was a sly, crafty fellow who used trickery to get what he wanted, and he wanted that box of stars.”

  I asked him lots of impossible questions that night. Did Raven know God? How’d all the stars fit into a box? Why doesn’t the North Star move? I kept asking him questions, not to hear the answers so much as the happy sound of his voice when he talked about the things he loved.

  CHAPTER 3

  Adrift

  A loose boat that’s at the mercy of the wind and current

  Today—August 23, only five days after Dad was reported missing—the Coast Guard called off its search. Dad is presumed drowned. A Foss tug returning from a fuel run to Alaska reported an oil slick west of the Dixon Entrance, his last known location, but that was all. There was no body, no boat, no pieces, nothing.

  That word presumed bothers me, but not as much as drowned. Drowned can only mean one thing: he suffered. First the cold, like a thousand electric shocks, then the struggle to keep your head above the waves and the horror of knowing you can’t. I bury my face in my pillow, cutting off my air. One Mississippi, two Mississippi … At twenty-eight Mississippi, I gasp for breath. What was he thinking as he went under? Did he pray for himself? Did he pray for Mom and me?

  People have started coming to the house again, but not all at once. They come in twos and threes, to comfort and be comforted. One lady who says she knew Dad in high school gets so blubbery talking about him that Aunt Janet has to hug her for five minutes. After she leaves, my aunt tells my uncle to take over so she can go to the bathroom to “freshen up.” Pat walks in from the kitchen, grumbling and rubbing his lined forehead.

  Mom doesn’t come out of her room, so it’s hard to know what she’s thinking. Is she cursing the Coast Guard like I am? Is she wondering how they could just give up? Five days is nothing. In all that water, you could easily miss a small boat … or a man. Oh, God, what if he was floating around in a life preserver waiting to be rescued? How long could he have lasted before dying of exposure? I try to stop the awful thoughts by squeezing Boo, the giant stuffed bear Dad got me when I was smaller than his gift. The dusty smell of Boo’s fake fur pulls up my tears, and I cry into his soft middle until I can’t cry any more.

  I dream of dark water. It pitches and churns as it collects into a huge funnel, running down, down, taking everything. The dock, the boats—

  I wake up with a start and pinch myself, hard, just to make sure I’m still here. Then comes the second shock: my father really is gone, not down a giant funnel, but gone. The jolt of that truth steals my breath. I gasp and roll over, curling into myself. My chest feels as if it’s been hollowed out, leaving a sharp pit at its center. Is this what it’s like to have a broken heart? It’s not really broken; it keeps right on beating. But each beat hurts, really hurts, like pounding on a bruise.

  The sudden roar of our Hoover vacuum cleaner rips me from my quiet cocoon. It fills the house like a swarm of angry bees, back and forth, back and forth. I throw off my covers to find that I never changed out of my shirt and jeans. Downstairs, Mom’s going over the living room carpet with herky-jerky strokes that threaten to suck up the corners of her long bathrobe. She sees me and turns off the machine, but the noise still echoes.

  I have my cereal in the kitchen and head back upstairs, only to lie down again. This becomes a pattern. Bed, bathroom, snack. Bed, bathroom, snack. And dreams. Awful, watery dreams. Mom is like a passing shadow, her slippers shushshushing across the floor like she’s too tired to lift her feet.

  IT’S been about a week since they called off the search, and today Mom goes on a cleaning binge. I walk past her room—it’s just her room now—and she’s in there, throwing Dad’s clothes on the bed. Some of hers as well. Soon there’s a mountain of discards ready for the Salvation Army.

  “I should have done this years ago,” she says.

  Years ago, you still had a husband and I still had a father. I think it but don’t say it.

  Mom reties the belt of her robe and pushes her hair out of her eyes before diving into the closet again. I take a seat on the edge of the bed next to a green satin dress, still on its hanger, its form-fitting shape collapsed on the heap.

  “This is pretty,” I say to her stooped backside.

  “The green dress? I got that for my eighteenth birthday,” she says without turning around. “There were still ballrooms then.” From the guts of her closet, she tosses out a black satin circle skirt. It slides off the bed and onto the floor. “I hear the Acropolis is a roller rink now.”

  “The Acropolis?”

  “Where I met your father.” She comes out hugging an armload of dress shoes—strappy and rhinestoned—and a single pair of clear plastic rain boots. She dumps them on the bed on top of the gown. Then she bends over to pick up the circle skirt and throw it back on the pile. As she turns toward me, her eyes travel vacantly to the ceiling. She cocks her head as if trying to make out a faint and distant tune, but the only sound I can hear is the cawing of a crow outside. “He sure could dance.”

  She breathes out heavily and turns back to the task at hand. “If that dress could talk … but I’m never going to wear it again.”

  NO speck of dirt is safe from Mom’s wrath. My eyes tear from all the Pine-Sol she’s using. I can’t eat with that smell in my nose—not that I have much of an appetite. Mom isn’t eating either. When she takes a bath, I worry that the warm water will wash away what’s left of her. But she comes out whole, her wet hair combed back, the scent of Johnson’s No More Tears competing with the smell of Pine-Sol. Pine-Sol always wins.

  What will she do when she runs out of house? She’s doing a
lot more cleaning than we’re doing dirtying. If Dad were here, he’d tell her to relax. “Perfection is the enemy of the good,” he’d say. His calm was the cure for her nerves, the buffer for her temper. She’d still get mad at him for leaving his boots in the kitchen or his dishes on the table, but life was allowed to happen. We had meals that messed up the counters, board games and puzzles in the dining room. We had fires in the fireplace. Now our fireplace sits swept and empty next to a perfectly stacked pile of wood that appears to be just for show.

  The too-clean house is just another sad reminder in my day. I’ll be numbly going along, not really thinking about it, when the sight of Dad’s empty chair at the dining room table punches me in the gut. I think I can’t go on, but I do. Time somehow passes. I somehow stay alive—but it’s not a good alive. I can’t even lose myself in books. I read the same paragraph over and over. And television just makes me mad. Those kids on American Bandstand, don’t they know what happened? Don’t they care? I stare at my posters for Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady and the pattern of pink blossoms on my wallpaper. I stroke the long, fuzzy hair of my troll dolls; I arrange and rearrange my stuffed animals without making my bed. Sometimes I feel guilty for doing normal things, like eating. Then comes the next reminder that Dad’s gone, the next shock, and it’s a relief in a way. I never knew pain could be so comforting.

  MOM and I would probably go on like this, existing but not living, were it not for school starting. The first day is Tuesday, and ready or not, I must go.

  “You need shoes and school clothes. I think you’ve outgrown your old ones.” Mom stands in the doorway of my room. Her hair is fixed and she’s wearing lipstick, a lavender cotton blouse, and beige pedal-pushers. I even catch the familiar scent of Tabu.

  Normally I’d be excited to make this shopping trip to Seattle, but it takes all my energy to change out of my grimy clothes and into clean ones. When I slide into the passenger side of our station wagon, I realize I’m sitting where Mom usually does. Now she’s the driver, the only driver. Her narrow shoulders seem to sink with the responsibility. She turns to me, her expression pained, like her pants are too tight.

  “I know I’ve been … absent,” she says. “You deserve better. The truth is I can barely take care of myself right now. I know it’s not much, but I’m yours today. Maybe we can have some fun.”

  I smile for her sake. “Okay.” Maybe it will be okay. I’m willing to try.

  She takes the scenic route along the waterfront. We pass the canneries and the shabby homes and dormitories where the workers live. Outside Pacific Packing, I see a group of women in gut-splattered aprons taking a cigarette break.

  “That,” Mom says, pointing, “is why you get a good education. You don’t want to end up on the slime line.”

  But the women don’t seem unhappy to me. Except for the cigarettes and aprons, they could be a group of girls talking at recess.

  “I want to go to college,” I say.

  “Good. Don’t waste that brain of yours.” Mom drives up the hill towards a tree-lined bluff overlooking the harbor. On the edge of the drop-off is a ragged line of dwarf hemlocks. I call them “old man” trees because of their bent, wind-whipped backs. No one knows—not even Dena—about my secret place, my special tree. My heart tugs as the bluff recedes in the side-view mirror.

  We pass the fancy view homes where the mayor lives, as well as a doctor or two. Midway down the street is Marine Heritage Park, which isn’t so much a park as a fisherman’s memorial surrounded by a circle of grass. On top of a pedestal, with names listed according to year, is a bronze statue of a mother and child. The woman holds a lantern, presumably to search the seas for her lost husband. The boy hangs on to the folds of his mother’s skirt. She stands tall and strong, like she will carry on no matter what.

  Reality isn’t so noble. Reality is a closed bedroom door and a mother in her bathrobe, emptying closets. When will Dad’s name be added to that pedestal? Does there need to be a body or a wreck so they know for sure? Do they add the names as they get them or wait until they have a few saved up? I remember visiting the memorial with my elementary school class. Around the base, the ground was littered with wilted wreaths and bouquets that had long since turned brown. Someone must have to pick them all up when the pile gets too big. What a depressing job. I think I’d rather work the slime line.

  The harbor road connects with Main Street just before the spur that leads out of town. We’re on the short end of an upside down L, going east for a while before turning south for the long, straight shot into civilization. Mom has the radio tuned to her station, which is playing “Theme from A Summer Place,” a “pop favorite.” Ugh. I’m so busy trying to close my ears that I forget to roll up the window. The smell of manure from the valley’s dairy farms is with us until we get the sulfur smell of wood pulp in Everett. Then more farms.

  The air clears by the time we reach the county line and pass the Krip’s Eats sign. If Dad were driving, he’d ask if we wanted to stop for pie—fresh berry in summer, cream in winter, though he can’t have the cream. I can see him now, one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the seat behind Mom’s shoulders, driving just to drive. If there was something to see, like a field filled with snow geese or the rain-swollen Skagit River, he’d point it out. Aside from that stuff she calls music, Mom hates being distracted when she drives. In fact, she doesn’t like to drive at all unless she has to. It seems selfish to mourn a future with fewer and less-fun car trips, but I do.

  We pass the new Northgate Shopping Center north of Seattle. Everybody’s talking about it, but Mom prefers to go downtown to the places she’s always gone.

  Our first stop is Nordstrom Best for shoes. I usually get saddle shoes one size up, which make my feet look enormous. But today, Mom asks if I want to look around for something different.

  “What?” I’m not sure I’ve heard her right.

  “Why don’t you go pick out the nicest practical shoes you can find,” she says in a voice hushed with drama.

  It doesn’t take me long to settle on a pair of shiny brown penny loafers. They cost a bit more than the saddle shoes, but Mom willingly hands over a twenty-dollar bill.

  Those loafers give me hope as we walk to the Bon Marché. In the girls’ department on the second floor, I see another mother and daughter flipping through a display of miniskirts. Apparently, we’re not the only ones to wait until the last minute. The girl looks familiar, but I can’t remember her name. She sees me and lifts her hand, cupping her fingers in a shy wave. I give her a baby wave back.

  “Can I try on some miniskirts?” I ask.

  “You can try them on, but I’m not going to buy you one.”

  Mom heads to a rack of jumpers and pulls out one in plain navy blue. She also picks out a couple of skirts in dark neutral colors, along with some coordinating blouses and sweaters. I try them on, and, after a few exchanges to get the right sizes (her) and colors (me), we head to the counter with the two skirts, three blouses, two sweaters, one jumper, and four pairs of knee-high socks.

  “What grade are you going into, young lady?” the saleslady asks as she starts ringing up our items.

  “Tenth.”

  “They grow up so fast!” Her eyes peer at Mom over a pair of cat-eye glasses attached to a chain around her neck.

  Mom doesn’t respond. She’s too busy digging through her purse.

  “I could have sworn ….” A blush creeps up her neck. “I seem to have left my checkbook.”

  The saleslady waits with a frozen smile.

  Embarrassed by Mom’s embarrassment, I turn around to see the girl I sort of know coming to the counter with her mother carrying a stack of clothes bigger than ours. My mother pokes me in the shoulder to get my attention. In a half-whisper, she asks me which sweater I want because we can’t get both.

  “Hmm.”

  “Pick one, Ida, or I will.”

  “Okay, the green one, I guess.”

  The saleslady isn’t smi
ling anymore. Her long pink fingernails clack as she pushes the buttons of her cash register. “Sixty-eight-ninety-four is your new total.”

  Mom doesn’t respond. She’s going through her wallet. The blush has reached her cheeks. The sound of someone sighing makes me turn around. The girl whose name I can’t remember is standing there waiting. Her mother adjusts the pile of clothes on her arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom says. “We’ll just get two of the blouses.”

  “Which two?” The saleslady taps a pink-nailed pointer finger on the counter.

  “Which two, Ida?” Mom asks me, as if I need a translator.

  They’re all white so it hardly matters. I point to one of two long-sleeved blouses. “Take that one out,” I say.

  The saleslady goes through the button-pushing process once again. When she gives us a third total, I pray to God Mom has it. Dark crescents of sweat bloom under her arms on her sleeveless lavender blouse. That’s when I know it’s too soon, too soon to go out in public, too soon to deal with snotty sales ladies, too soon to jump back into what grownups like to call the rat race.

  Please, please have the money. Mom takes out two twenties, a ten and five dollars in ones and change out of her wallet and gets back six cents in change. The saleslady folds my new clothes in tissue paper and, noticing that I’m already carrying a bag, asks if we’d like a shopping bag to put everything into.