But one can’t waste a life! One can only live it a day at a time. Claire knows that now.
She goes to the room where Don sleeps and finds the bed empty.
She pictures Don, suddenly, crying at the top of the ridge, where the waterfall begins. She feels as if she can almost hear it. And then, in her mind, she hears Don saying something he had said to her so many years ago, one night, their last spring in college, after they’d sneaked into one of the academic buildings and fucked in a book-lined alcove across from Gill Gulliver’s office—she hears Don saying, as he did that night, sweaty and crumpled on top of her: If you ever love another man, I think I’d kill myself.
Now, she knows that he knows. In her mind’s eye, she pictures Don hurling himself off the cliff and into the waterfall and she gets up from her chair, spilling some wine on Merrick’s sheepskin cushion, and she walks, in her boots, in the dark, toward the slick, rocky ledges that lead to the falls where Don Lowry has gone hoping to find that bear.
Just as ABC is going back up to the guesthouse, walking from Charlie’s cabin across the beach, a meteor streaks across the sky and she swears she sees it splashing into the lake. It’s so startlingly bright that she says, “Fuck. Fuck!”
She’s glad to finally see the meteor because she can take it as a sign. A confirmation of the dream she just had. Anybody would take it that way, she’s sure of it.
It is Philly. Philly has come for her and Philly is going to lead her out of this world. ABC enters the guesthouse as quietly as she can, but finds Ruth awake in a chair, staring out the window.
“Fireflies,” Ruth says, though ABC sees none of them.
“A meteor shower,” ABC says, and then covers Ruth with a blanket and kisses her on the forehead. “Good night, Ruth,” she says. “You need your sleep.”
“You feel it too?” Ruth says.
“I feel what?”
“Tonight. It’s tonight,” Ruth says.
“Yes,” ABC says. “Good-bye. Get some sleep.”
They embrace for what feels like a long time and they feel the tears in their eyes are not enough, and they say something like this to each other. At the same time, they say, “These tears are only half of what you mean to me.”
ABC startles, jumps back. How had that happened?
“The spirit world,” Ruth says, “gives us the words we need to leave this world.”
ABC rolls a joint for Ruth, lights it for her, then gets her things and goes back outside to the porch of the guesthouse. A pleasant night, but turning colder. And so many stars, and meteors every few minutes in front of those stars, and the wind picking up enough so she feels that the lake will be rough in the early morning, which is what she wants.
She believes in the morning, once Ruth tells them what has happened, that everyone will understand. How easy it would be right now to go back to bed with Charlie—to crawl beside his naked body, to make love again in the dark cold air. Or to go and find Don, taking comfort in his warmth, feeling his desire, which was a desire, yes, for her flesh, but also for something more, something he seemed to want but that he and she could not name.
She is dressed in her layers. She has, per Ruth’s calculations, taken two sleeping pills and two Advil PMs. She begins to drink a beer. Stars spread out over the sky like scattered bits of glass and the glowing cloud of the Milky Way seems to hover just above the canoe.
It is time for ABC to go into the big water and find Philly.
In her pocket, she has a small baggie of Ruth’s heaviest painkillers, morphine, essentially, which she will take in the boat. Twenty of the pills, just in case. She has the Xanax too, twenty of those. She has a six-pack of beer and a pint of bourbon that she puts into the canoe with the folded-up blankets, and she sips on these to keep her calm while she waits. It’s not the best way to go, Ruth has said, maybe, but as long as you can fall asleep on that water, by dawn you will be waking up in another realm. The lake will take you. By wind or by water, your soul will enter the lake.
The idea, of course, seems suddenly absurd; though rather than discouraging her, this realization strengthens her resolve. She has no other choice but to do this. She trusts Ruth. Ruth has grown up here, and if ABC looks back on the last year, did it not all seem like fate, like it was all meant to be: coming back to Grinnell, being hired to take care of Ruth, meeting Don, watching Don lose his home, having Ruth offer money to be taken to the lake, the fireflies abundant as ever that summer, and even the comfort she had taken from loving Charlie.
And now, understanding how things are meant to be, she has given herself over to the idea that life will be better elsewhere. She worries that she won’t be able to find Philly right away. She worries she’ll have to journey through the spirit realm alone. At least Philly is out there, somewhere, she thinks. She can search for her if she needs to search for her. Love is worth it. Love is worth all things. To live a life without love is foolish. If Philly could not come back to the world, ABC would never love again.
If one could choose a last evening on earth, she would choose this very one. A meteor in the sky above her seems to confirm her resolve to push herself out into the frigid waters, to get lost there and pass out and eventually fall out and drown. Or maybe she will just have to throw herself into the deep. She will take the painkillers first if that is the case. It will not be a pleasant way to go. She understands all of that. But it is a way to go.
The doubts begin to grow, pushing back the whole idea of it, but then she notices that Ruth has come onto the beach, and suddenly over the lake, in the cold wind, there’s an ecological impossibility: hundreds and hundreds of fireflies come hatching up out of the waves, floating and blinking up to the moon and the stars and all of that meaningless, feckless heaven.
Don Lowry has seen a meteor brighter than any he has ever seen before, brighter than any of the previous August meteors he has seen in his life. He feels as if he has changed somehow, and as he finds a place among the rocks near the waterfall, he nestles in and waits for the bear. Why he wants to see it again, he cannot say, he can only say that he has not felt so alive in years and if he can see the bear, if only he could see the bear once more—he waits in the dark there, watching the stars. Does he really want to die? Is that it? The thought stays with him for a moment—it is possible, it is possible that he wants to die. He is struck by the oddness of the thought and he shivers with cold and huddles against the rocks and pulls the watch cap lower, so it covers his ears. This dulls the rushing of the waterfall, the sound, perhaps, of oblivion, which is why it is a sound that calls to Don Lowry right then, and calls to all of us, at some time, in our twisted lives, in a dark wood. Oblivion, Don thinks. If you say it’s never called to you, you’re lying.
But even with the rush of the falls, and the watch cap over his ears, he can hear the snapping twigs and the breathing of something not human. The air smells of dead fish and a heavy musk, which comes and goes with the breezes off the distant lake.
ABC drags the canoe to the water’s edge. It is not heavy but its metal is cold and her hands sting. She wrenches her back somewhat, but she’s already taken two of the painkillers and if she has hurt herself at all, in any significant way, she will probably never know.
She has dragged the canoe near the shore, near the fire pit where Don Lowry likes to sit. He is not out there staring at the fire, which she takes to be a good sign. Of course, he would try and stop her if he knew what she was doing. The fire is all set for lighting—Don has already made the wood stack he needs to light a fire, has stuffed paper and birch bark and scraps of driftwood beneath it, but must have fallen asleep before he’d gone through with it. She takes a lighter from her pocket and lights the kindling. It seems the thing to do. It seems there should be flames. Earth, wind, fire, water.
A signal she will leave behind, a way to summon Philly perhaps, though she can feel Philly as soon as she lights the fire. Philly is already here.
She begins to think of Philly, and she calls to her soft
ly, a singing whisper: Phillllllly!
ABC stands alongside the canoe and looks out toward the water. She has no life jacket. If she had one, she might decide to wear it and change her mind. She wonders if she will die of hypothermia while swimming or if she will simply drown. They will probably find the boat before they find her. She doesn’t want any of the Lowry children to find her so she tells herself that such a thing is unlikely. Didn’t she hear once that Superior never gives up its dead? Where did she hear that? She may never be found.
It is hard to picture her earthly body gone, and she wonders how it will work. Will she be dressed in white too, like Philly? Where had Philly found the white clothes, since ABC remembers very clearly that when Philly died, when she’d been thrown from her bike by that recklessly careening delivery truck, she was wearing cargo pants and a blue tank top that said VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS.
It is a bear, of course, Don knows that much, though he cannot be sure if it is the same bear. He doesn’t know what to do. Move, or stay still, as if asleep.
The air fills with the scent of musk, of dead fish. He might die here, near the river, and his body, by morning, would float into Superior, would it not? He wonders. His stomach sinks and he tries to swallow hard to keep himself from shaking. The bear is on the bank above him, maybe ten feet away. He can see the bear snuffling the ground, coming toward him.
It is this thought that gives him another thought: he thinks of the old Gordon Lightfoot song, the line “Superior, they say, never gives up her dead,” and he begins to hum it softly to himself, and then he has another thought, not one about death, or the pain he is about to endure but about his son, Bryan. When Bryan had been four, they had all gone to Lake Superior, and Don and Claire’s old college friend Ryan Dawson, a forgettable person to Don now, had come to the cabin, and he had brought his guitar and he had played a song for Bryan, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Bryan had been transfixed by the tune. He had asked to hear it four times that night, and in the weeks and months afterward, after Don and Claire and the kids were back in Iowa, his son would sing in his soft small-boy voice as he played with Legos that song, that ballad, over and over. He would sing the lines he knew and he would hum the lines he didn’t and Don Lowry remembered one morning as he made breakfast, his son had sung the song, the almost so-maudlin-it-was-silly song, and loudest of all he had sung the line, “‘And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.’”
Don remembers all of it now. How his boy had been playing with Legos as he sang it, how his boy had been wearing a long-sleeved shirt, with yellow stripes against a blue background, how the family room had been a mess that morning, the children having destroyed it the day before—they were then four and two—and Don thinks back to that, to that time, and he looks back down the river path but he cannot even see the lodge where his family is now sleeping. He’s wandered too far into the timber. It is too dark and there are no lights on back at Merrick’s. Or perhaps trees obscure the light.
He begins to sing the song aloud. “‘And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.’”
It will either anger the bear or scare it.
It is coming closer.
Don just waits.
Ruth Manetti is still awake, as she has been all night. She has found in the darkness an incredible resolve, an ability to stay awake that she has not had in years. She has smoked the joint ABC rolled for her, but she does not fall asleep. She has a will and her will is iron, even in old age, and she knows that about herself and she takes comfort in that. Everything has gone well. ABC is on the beach, prepping for her journey, which is how Ruth has planned it. She has known, she has felt it in her bones, as they say, that this night will be the night that ABC will want to leave for the spirit world. She will, Ruth knows, see one of the Leonid meteors—they are abundant every August in the second week; Ruth knows this from childhood. But ABC will see these meteors and believe they are telling her something. ABC will think everything about the North Shore is a sign for her escape, for her transition into the next world. For months Ruth has had to pretend to hear voices and see fireflies and to have visions and answers to ABC’s persistently weird dreams, but really she has no answers, because nobody is allowed to have answers, you only get the answers after you die, and nobody has ever come back from death and told the answers to anyone.
Ruth takes her lawyer’s business card from the ancient purse she has carried with her to this shore and she leaves it on the table with a note for Don. “It’s your house,” she says. She has told Mendez of her change in plan but not about what she is going to do, for that might get him in trouble. But somehow she knows tonight that he loves her still. Thirty years ago, Mendez wanted to marry Ruth. Briefly, she loved him too; when the ache of losing Gill and the shame of her children’s scorn was great, he was tender with her. He was her second lover, her second affair. He would handle everything the way she wanted him to.
Ruth pictures Don asleep in the lodge. Maybe he is sleeping with Claire. She pictures him sleeping with Claire. It is not a lost cause. She has been around long enough to know that; maybe they simply needed to breathe awhile, and not feel the shame of breathing, the way so many people do.
Nothing but darkness on that beach, a million fireflies up on the lake. These she doesn’t need to pretend to see; these are real and she always knows she will see them when the time comes to leave. She does believe in slipping out of the world, does believe in the portals that open up for us when we need them, does believe, has believed for years, that Lake Superior would be her portal—but she has lied, sometimes, to ABC. It is part of what she wanted to teach her. Pay attention. See the things nobody else sees. Ruth has lived to be an old, old woman. She has learned to do just that, those things.
On the beach, there is almost no light at all except for the moon and ABC’s small fire, and the stars, and the swell and rising up of fireflies from the lake, and on occasion, overhead, a meteor. She has grown up with the stars and the sound and smell and feel of this lake and she will leave the world surrounded by them. She feels suddenly warm and attentive, as if someone is whispering in her ear an ancient, ancient story where none of the contemporary concerns of the day matter at all. Now, there is almost nothing between her and the canoe but ABC. Ruth has been shuffling along in the dark a long time, wearing her blue jeans and boots and silk thermal underwear and two sweaters and now she has on a knit cap. She has her medicines with her, all of the painkillers she’s been given and told not to abuse over the last five years. She has taken five now and the five sleeping pills already and she is sipping from a coffee mug of ABC’s bourbon, too harsh for her, though she has had a lifetime of sweet wine, and she doesn’t mind that her last drink will be one that burns a little going down. She has missed the North Shore. She has thought about it so much in the last few weeks, knowing she would see it again.
It is Claire, not a bear, who appears on the ledge of the cliff and who grabs Don Lowry’s hand, while she clings to the trunk of a tree with her other hand, and who hoists him up from the abyss, even though maybe he doesn’t actually need the help, and then they embrace like that, their hearts mad with thundering beats, their faces drenched in adrenaline’s acrid sweat, and Claire holds Don and they go to a safer place, to the footpath away from the edge of the ridge and she holds on to Don, and in his ear, she says, “It’s not as terrible as you think.”
“It’s not?” he says, breathless himself.
“Wild horses,” she says. And then again, “Wild fucking horses.”
Above them, on the path, near the berry patch, huffs a startled black bear.
In the middle of the night, Charlie’s cell phone rings.
“It’s about your father.” Someone whom he doesn’t know tells him this. “He’s dead.”
Outside, something like the green embers of fireflies glow and fade, glow and fade, and Ruth begins to walk up to
the canoe, sans flashlight, with a cup of whiskey and with the pills in her pocket, and she walks over the rocks, afraid of falling but knowing, somehow, that there is no reason to save her strength anymore, that this will be the last thing she will need to do in a lifetime of doing things that require strength. She has not said good-bye to anyone but ABC, but how many good-byes does one need? She has been at the age, for years, where people always say good-bye as if there may not ever be another farewell. And she has letters, in her desk drawer, that she has written in her moments alone, painstakingly clutching the pen with her arthritic fingers and trying, somehow, to make conversation with a few distant friends who also write letters.
Ruth finds ABC asleep on the rocks, near the boat and the fire, just as she had hoped. Ruth had told her to take four pills, plus a Xanax—not a lethal dose for someone so healthy, but enough to maybe make you pass out in the middle of an elaborate plan.
In her drugged hesitation, ABC has not gotten into the boat. She’s fallen asleep next to the boat. Ruth covers her with one of the blankets from the canoe. Her plan has worked, but now she has work to do, so that she too doesn’t fall asleep beside ABC.
She tries to push the large metal canoe into the water. But it will not budge. She is too weak. The pot and the wine and the pills and the nearly nine decades of exhausting life have worn her out. She needs to get the canoe into the water. She does not want to go back to Iowa and wait to die in front of a television in a house she never really liked, in a town, if she admits it, she never would have lived in if not for her husband’s work. She has not done much on her own terms in her life but she will die on her own terms. She crawls into the canoe.
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