The Northern Reach

by W. S. Winslow

  My gravedigging complete, I return to the task at hand: opening up the cottage after the long winter. First there’s the water, which has been off since last fall. After starting the well pump, I listen to be sure the water heater is filling. Next I flush away the antifreeze in the upstairs toilet and reattach the showerhead. I think what an unimaginable luxury this endless, effortless supply of hot water would have been to my ancestors when they arrived here in Maine nearly three hundred years ago, how inconceivable a daily shower would be to them, how mine is only the third generation to pee indoors on anything but a chamber pot.

  I’m turning the mattresses when, outside, the rumble of an engine rises, then stops. A car door slams. Through the bedroom window I see my favorite cousin, Earlene, Tupperware bowl in hand, striding from her pickup toward the house. At sixty-four she’s nearly ten years my senior, and though her back is as pike-straight as ever, she’s thicker around the middle and grayer than last time I saw her, two years ago it would be. I run downstairs bird-calling her name.

  “Earlie Earlie Earlene!”

  She’s through the screen door before I get to the bottom of the stairs. Her hugs still smell of spray starch and drugstore toilet water, a blend of stiff and soft I trace all the way back to the nights she babysat for my brother and me. On the way to the kitchen, something crunches under her sneaker.

  “You had ladybugs wintering here, Suzy.” She bends down to clean up the remains with a tissue from her sleeve. “They always find a way in, but seems like they never can get out.”

  “There was a whole houseful, all dead.” I don’t mention I buried them. She’d think I was out of my mind.

  “Too bad. If there’s one thing this family could use more of, it’s luck,” she says.

  I put the beef stew she brought in the fridge, which is empty but for half a dozen wine bottles and a tub of chocolate pudding. Peering over my shoulder, Earlie says, “Still eat like an eight-year-old boy, I see.”

  “An eight-year-old with a drinking problem,” I reply. This makes her smile, even as it occurs to me how often there is more truth than humor in a joke. I offer to split my can of room-temperature Diet Pepsi with her, and we take our glasses outside to the picnic table under the beech, where we settle on opposite benches. The tree won’t leaf out for another few weeks, so the sun picks its way through the buds and bare branches, the light broken and weak. Across the reach, to the south, the rounded hills of Acadia roll across the land like swells on the bay. It’s warm for Maine in May, but cold by any other standards, so I zip my fleece up to my chin. Earlie, in shirtsleeves, dismisses my offer of a sweater.

  Most people would ask how I’ve been doing since the divorce, but Earlie dives right into local gossip and Baines family updates: she starts with her husband. Millhouse is working too much, as always. Their third grandbaby’s due any day. Victoria Moody had a tumor the size of an avocado—California, not Florida—removed from her ovary, but she’s fine and being looked after at home. Who knew Dougie Lemay would turn out to be a half-decent husband after all? Poor Sarah Norden (young Doc’s wife) died last year and Doc followed not three months later. Broken heart, what else could it be? Sheriff Largay finally retired to Daytona Beach and took his deputy, Stumpy LaVallee, with him, peeling one hundred and forty years off the collective age of the local law enforcement staff and finally confirming the existence of the love that dared not speak its name after decades of the whole town whispering it. Besides a touch of sciatica and the occasional bout of heartburn, she says, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I do anyway.”

  It’s my turn, so she waits. I tell her about my son, his job in New York, his horrible beard, and the eyeglasses that look just like the ones our grandpa Baines used to wear.

  “Milo’s become a hipster, has he?” Earlie says. I shouldn’t be surprised she’s familiar with the term. The whole wide world, hairy or smooth, brought to this remote corner of Downeast by cable TV and the World Wide Web.

  I give her the skinny on my brother, Philip, his wife and kids, which I picked up recently during an extended visit with them in Paris.

  “And you?” she asks.

  “Okay, you know, not bad for an old broad.”

  “That’s good,” she says, tells me the family is glad to have me back home, which I know is not uniformly the case, and asks how long I intend to stay. I tell her the truth, that I have no idea, no plans beyond the summer. What I don’t say is this: I’ve run out of places to run, there’s nowhere to be but here.

  * * *

  Before leaving, Earlene helps me unload my crated paintings from her truck and carry them into the living room. I had them shipped up from Brooklyn two years ago, after we sold our place there, and they’ve been cluttering up her attic ever since.

  Back behind the wheel, she invites me to her house for the annual Baines family Memorial Day cookout. “You’re looking a little peaky, Suzanne, but we’ll get you fed up. Promise me you’ll eat that beef stew, now.” I do, and she waves, throws the truck into gear, and backs down the driveway, disappearing around a tangle of hawthorn in a splatter of gravel.

  After Earlie goes, I make good on my vow, heat up the stew and take the steaming bowl to the sofa, where I plop down without bothering to remove the sheet that covers it. New England soul food, my dad called meals like this: baked beans, fish chowder, Jell-O, macaroni and cheese. My French mother never made such things, looked down her nose and called it “nursery food,” but I always loved having it when I visited the relatives. Earlie’s stew is just like I remember, root vegetables and beef cooked almost to mush, thick broth, plenty of salt, no pepper.

  Under the kitchen sink, I find more ladybug corpses and brush them into a paper towel. Lacking the energy to dig another hole, I fold it up and slide it into the pocket of my jeans, grab a beach chair, and walk down the long slope of lawn to the shore. The slate-blue bay shudders beneath a gusting wind, foamy whitecaps breaking here and there. The high tide has just started to turn, and in a few hours, the waterline will have retreated twenty feet from where it is now, leaving behind a wet moonscape of barnacle-crusted boulders, mounds of ocher seaweed, and even the odd starfish clinging to rock. When we were kids, my brother and I would “rescue” them at low tide by pulling them off the exposed rocks and pitching them out into the deep water. It occurs to me that between our manhandling and the impact, we probably killed more than we saved.

  As I’m about to settle into my chair, I remember the ladybugs in my pocket and fish the paper towel out. At water’s edge I drop them into the reach, a burial at sea.

  Buried at sea, just like my father, except he wasn’t dead when he went in. He wasn’t oblivious to the frigid water or sewn up cozy in a sail and slipped overboard with prayers and a salute like in the movies. Not buried at all, he was lost. Lost in a winter squall that sucked him, and my grandfather, overboard. Somehow Uncle Eldridge, the third man on the boat that day, managed to hold on to the hull, but my father, or what remains of him, is still out there in the bay, unburied at sea with dead ladybugs and murdered starfish for company.

  * * *

  Thoughts of my father pull me back to the house I grew up in, a barn-red saltbox two coves up from here on a knoll overlooking the water. It’s February 1976 and my mother is sitting at the kitchen table, frozen in place despite the heat from the furnace and the scream of the kettle. My dad’s oldest friend, Caspar Titcomb, ancient and palsied in his too-big clothes, is making hot whiskey: a quarter of a lemon studded with cloves, a double shot of Jameson, and boiling water. The untouched cups of hot chocolate he made for my brother and me have already gone cold.

  Aunt Margery just called to say the coast guard is airlifting Uncle Eldridge to the hospital in Bangor and that they’re still searching for the others. Philip and I are in our usual chairs between the table and the wall, but nothing is usual tonight. My brother is holding my hand, something he hasn’t done in a very long time. We are teenagers, long past such things, now suddenly not.

/>   Agnes Juke sits across from us. Her arthritic hands cover my mother’s clenched fists, and I’m struck by how much they resemble the ball and claw feet on our dining room table. She murmurs something I can’t make out over the clatter of dishes. A cup appears in front of Maman and Agnes tells her to drink, but she says she can’t. Philip and I translate because she’s speaking only in French. For her this is the language of grief and loss. Many years later she will tell me that in her mind she was back in 1940 with her own mother at their house in Saint-Rimay, reliving the moment they got the news that the Battle of Sedan had claimed her father, that the Luftwaffe’s bombardment had been so heavy, the devastation so complete, there was no body to return to them. Her father had been blown to bits and scattered along the Belgian border, the first member of our family to be left unburied. Soon after, France would fall, ushering in four grueling years under the Nazi jackboot.

  Caspar says, “There’s still hope, Lil. The tide’s dead low and if they found Eldridge, they can find Mason and Henry.” Agnes agrees, says our father and grandfather are tough SOBs, that they know every inch of this bay, every buoy, ledge, and harbor.

  For a long time it’s quiet in the kitchen. Finally Maman speaks. Her voice is low, lacking inflection or emotion, which scares me more than if she were hysterical. “Il est mort, j’en suis certaine.” I choke out the translation: “He is dead, I’m sure of it.”

  Silent tears run down Philip’s face. I open the quilt I dragged off my bed and cocoon him, my arms around his neck. She is right, we all know it.

  We begin the next day in darkness, to sunflower-covered drapes drawn over the living room windows where my father liked to stand, looking past the ramble of rugosa and Maman’s tidy vegetable garden to the water, staring at it in a way he never did my mother or us. Maman will not open the curtains again.

  Bad luck, the investigators tell us, that’s all it was. Our father’s lobster boat was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not luck, but “that murderous bitch of a bay he loved more than me,” Maman says. The following summer, when Philip tries to take Orion out for a sail, she runs screaming to the dock, grabs my brother by the scruff, tells him she’ll set fire to our father’s little sloop if either of us ever gets near it or that bloodthirsty ocean again. The next day, Reynard Fletcher shows up towing a boat trailer behind his pickup and winches Orion out of the water. It’s the last time we ever see the boat that was our father’s great joy.

  As grief-mad as Maman is, our grandma Baines is worse. With her husband buried and her son lost, she sits and stares out the window for days at a time, hardly speaking, inert, crumbling, a skeleton with a cigarette in a dirty brown cardigan. I want to run away from her, from this, and in less than a year we do. As soon as Philip goes off to college, Maman sells everything and the two of us move south to Portland, where she has friends, a small group of fellow expats, and George Lawson, who will become her second husband.

  In our new house, I comfort myself thinking that I will never see the like of that again, never have to wait for news that doesn’t come, never hold out hope when there is none. And I don’t, not until many years later: twenty months after the dawn of the new millennium, under the New York City sky. In my beach chair I shudder despite the warmth of the sun; I am powerless to halt the tide of memory.

  * * *

  Holding the line against gentrification and newcomers like me, the old Italians in our Brooklyn neighborhood make wine from the grapes they grow in their backyards and fly homing pigeons from rooftop coops. It isn’t uncommon to see the birds flocking overhead, their pinfeathers shimmering white in the sun.

  This fine September morning in 2001, I am on the way home after dropping my son at school, rushing and fretting about the deadline my client just moved up. To pay for preschool when Milo was a toddler, I started peddling my art in the lucrative, ridiculous world of greeting card companies. At some point, the goof became what passes for my career. I still paint seriously, just not very often.

  We returned from our summer vacation in Maine at the end of August and are settling back into city life. Ten years before, as a wedding gift, my husband, David, bought a couple of acres on the southern end of my family’s property in Wellbridge with the goal of building a cottage one day. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the place; neither my mother nor my brother ever went back after my father died, but I always felt a pull from my hometown. It matters to me that my boy grows up knowing as much about where my people came from as he does the East Village where his father was raised and France where his cousins live.

  There is a warm kiss in the September air that day, a chambray sky, the promise of a little extra summer. I am about to turn onto our block when I notice a flock of pigeons high above, flying not in the usual flowing swoop but randomly, in chaos, with no apparent direction or leader. On the corner, a neighborhood guy in an undershirt, suit pants, and house slippers is standing, eyes skyward. He tells me a plane just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

  I don’t understand. How could anyone make such a stupid mistake? I look from him to the sky and am about to ask when I realize those aren’t birds, but swirling papers, hundreds of them that have drifted across the East River from lower Manhattan. David’s office is there, on the twenty-fifth floor of a building on Liberty Street, a few blocks from the Trade Center. Every day my husband walks through the subway concourse under the towers on his way to work. I’m trying to calculate his travel time, to figure out whether he might be there now, but can’t make my brain work. In the distance sirens scream, and I run for home. When I get there, I try to call David, but the circuits are jammed, overloaded by people like me trying to reach office workers, tradesmen, cops, and commuters. On TV, the news swirls in a sickening kaleidoscope. When the second jet flies into the South Tower, the news announcers are frantic, hysterical, and I sink to the floor, fetal, whimpering. I’m dialing David’s office over and over but cannot get through. I lie on the living room rug holding the phone like a life buoy. The announcers say there are more planes in the air, then report one has hit the Pentagon. The phone rings. David shouts, “I’m okay, Suz. They’re telling us to stay put.” Over and over he says this as I scream into the phone, begging him to come home, to run. He says he can’t, tells me to take Milo out of school. He can see the whole thing from his office window. “Oh my God, the tower,” he moans. I hear his colleagues wailing in the background. “It’s collapsing. Go get Milo! Now, Suzanne, now!” The phone goes dead. The school is between David’s office and our house, in the path of the noxious smoke I see on TV. As I run, all I can think about is getting my baby back, and David, my little family, to keep them from being blown up along with our neighbors and friends, all those people going to work or flying home, the parents, the children. Oh my God, the children. How many will there be? All in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  * * *

  Back home, Milo plays in his room, unaware of what has happened to our world, too busy with his Transformers to ask. Or maybe he’s shutting it all out. His school was smoky, so I tell him there’s a fire downtown but Daddy is okay, which seems to be enough for his seven-year-old brain. So far he has seen nothing. Before we got home, a fourth plane crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania, now the second tower falls and I smother my sobs in a pillow. I can smell the smoke from Manhattan, so I close the windows against it, nauseated by the thought of breathing in the ashes of the dead.

  At eleven o’clock the mayor orders the evacuation. David calls again to say he’s leaving the office and will walk home to Brooklyn. I am terrified there will be snipers on the bridges or bombs set to go off once the exodus begins. My hands shake so violently I can barely pour the brandy into a glass. Never in my life have I actually needed a drink, not like this. Our backyard is full of papers now, some burnt, others pristine, the towers’ many fallen birds.

  David walks through the door an hour later, covered with ash, in shock, giddy and dazed at the same time. He hugs me hard and long,
but I am the only one crying. Just before a dinner of peanut-butter sandwiches and tomato soup no one but Milo will eat, I find him in our boy’s room, asleep on the floor next to an elaborate tower of red blocks. When Milo knocks it over, David lurches awake, screaming a single word: no. It will be years before he tells me what he saw: the fires, the falling buildings, the rubble, the people jumping from a hundred stories up, hand in hand, choosing to fall together rather than be cremated alive.

  Even though I grew up in Maine, New York is the only place I’ve ever felt I belonged, where, despite the bigness of it, the anonymity, I fit in. I move easily along its streets, enjoy the tap of my heels on the pavement, the great mirror skyscrapers and garish neon pulse, the feeling that everyone is different, and difference is the norm. Even so, in the weeks that follow September 11, I beg David to leave, to get away from the targets on our backs, the endless grief, our neighbors crying openly in coffee shops and on the street, the tattered, hopeless flyers asking, “Have You Seen This Person?” tacked up everywhere by families who will never get back even the smallest scrap of the people they’ve lost, never bury them. The cruelty of this is relentless, unendurable.

  “Where the fuck would we go?” David shouts at me after days of arguments. “Maine? You hate the winter. France? Milo and I don’t speak French, and even if we did, what would we do there, sponge off Philip, or your mother and George? No place is safe now, Suzanne.”

  It’s clear the thought of leaving New York makes David, now barely able to get out of bed, even more upset, so I let it go; instead, I try to toe the bullshit party line that says if we hide or flee, the terrorists win. But no one is winning here. No one.