by Josh Emmons
Elaine’s feeling returned that this was wasting valuable teaching time. “Steve and I are separated.”
“Oh, Elaine.” Gale’s eyebrows rose and her fingers relaxed. “Now I’m the one who doesn’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“How long has it been?”
“A couple of months.”
“Is one of you filing papers?”
“I’m hoping it won’t come to that. We’re seeing a good therapist.”
Elaine got up and shook Gale’s hand, which was warm and held hers tightly for a moment, and then walked out. She heard Gale downshift into a stentorian voice to summon Usman, Darrel, and Roderick. Back in her classroom, she picked up where she’d left off, explaining pitch-perfectly the beauty of legislative, executive, and judicial power sharing. It could be abused, she said, as could everything, though in the end fairness would prevail. In the end it had to.
When it was time for physical education with another teacher, Elaine’s students were up and out the door, every day the same amount of energy, the same boy/girl intrigues and breathless resumption of yesterday’s softball or basketball games, with kids pairing up or forming groups of three and four. Some were blessed with beauty and physical coordination and a certain playground wit that made them, for a time, life’s victors—just as there were their counterparts, the kids who looked wrong and couldn’t catch a fly ball and said extraordinary things, and then the children in the middle who felt neither anointed nor damned because sometimes they were in one camp and sometimes in the other but mostly in between, unremarkable, a position they strived for once they learned they were not the prettiest or most graceful or cleverest. Let us simply exist, they said at a certain point. Although, and Elaine was unwrapping her cucumber and avocado sandwich now, they would never get their wish. At its simplest, existence was complicated beyond description, so why ever tell herself that she was working toward a state of tranquility when tranquility was a chimera that, if ever attained, would undo her?
Her sandwich was bland. Reaching into her purse for one of the salt packets she stole from fast-food restaurants, she felt and took out the letter she’d gotten from Leon Meed. Written on recycled brown paper in a light, steady hand, it had come in early December, been misplaced without being read, and then been found a month later when she was sifting through the remains of her house. Although she’d almost memorized its contents, she read it again.
Dear Elaine,
You may not remember me, but we met ten years ago, once at Muir Elementary School and once outside your home. I want to apologize to you for those unwarranted and strange interruptions into your life, but also to tell you they were accidental.
Two weeks ago I was released from Kimbote Psychiatric Hospital, where I received treatment for many years for what was called a “brief psychotic episode.” I have moved into the cabin on Neeland Hill where I lived before I was institutionalized and plan to return to sculpting burl art soon if my health allows it. This brings me to the second reason for this letter. The people I troubled ten years ago will someday receive statues I made of them while at Kimbote. But you won’t—I’m not able to sculpt you. Although I tried to sketch your face as I remember it, and then to translate your two-dimensional image into three dimensions, I had to stop when it became clear that I was in fact sketching and preparing to sculpt my dead wife. You don’t physically resemble her—your nose is thicker and shorter than hers, your brown hair more hazelnut than her chocolate, your eyes wider apart and your lips paler—but I couldn’t help conflating the two of you in my attempt to carve you out of wood.
This letter, therefore, besides an apology, is all I have for you. There is no sculpture, and although a letter is inadequate, I think for you it might be enough. At both of our meetings you demonstrated a resolve—in protecting your students and carrying on in the face of what I presumed was a bad divorce—that reminded me of my late wife. She always went directly through her losses, confronting them, instead of going around them.
I know what the truth is—that we lose everything we’re given. Even our own lives. But some of us can act beyond that inevitability—like my wife, like you. So you see, I can’t carve you, because there’s no need for you to be carved.
Sincerely,
Leon Meed
Elaine looked at the clock and had four minutes before her class returned. She removed the instructor’s edition math book from her bag and checked her makeup and saw a minor disturbance, as a momentary breeze would alter a sand portrait, which she repaired with a tissue and eyeliner. Better. She heard children in the halls, parading as quietly as their chaperone could make them. The sky visible through the room’s windows, cut into boxes by the panes’ dividers, turned partially overcast.
The door to her classroom creaked open. Her students spidered in to their desks and there were carryover smiles and looks and assessments. When they faced forward Elaine knew: children led dangerous, thrill-seeking lives because they needed practice for what came later. And as she walked to the front of the chalkboard with its clean erasers resting along the bottom sill, she said, holding open her book, with a confidence bolstered by all she’d lost and might yet recover, “Let’s begin.”
Epilogue
According to the Coast Guard information service, it was an abnormally calm day on the ocean when Rachel and Adeline Meed decided to go whale watching. That’s what Rachel told her husband in the morning when he asked: “Abnormally calm.” The three of them sat around the breakfast table, and when they finished eating Leon stood up and said, “Have fun out there.” He blew kisses at them from the door.
When he was gone, Rachel and Adeline watched the morning news. A celebrity had moved past the drugs and faux religion that almost killed her. A growing territorial dispute between Russia and Japan inspired a thousand diplomatic speeches. Storms chastened the East Coast. A baby who’d learned to talk at nine months was now, at age two, an accomplished singer/songwriter.
Rachel shut off the TV and pushed away her dirty plate. To postpone cleaning up, she and her daughter read junk mail and catalogues, sharing factoids with each other, before packing a lunch and driving to the Eureka marina. They signed in with the harbormaster and heard that contrary to the Coast Guard’s earlier report, there was now a small-craft advisory in effect. At the dock for their fifteen-foot sloop, they boarded, put on life jackets, and, relying on motor power to start them off, steered out toward the middle of Humboldt Bay. Three crabbing vessels and a salmon trawler passed them coming in.
This was their fourth attempt in two months to photograph the gray whales then migrating south from Alaska to breed off the coast of Baja California. They’d failed to see any on the last three voyages—had spent long, futile hours waiting—but this time, made hopeful by friends who’d spotted dozens of whale backs over the past week, they expected success.
As they came to the mouth of the bay, the ocean spread out before them as a vast expanse of green topped by strings of kelp and curled whitecaps. Rachel asked Adeline which direction she wanted to go. South. The sky was brighter there and would provide better lighting. They shifted the rigging and caught a ten-knot southerly wind. The beaches along Samoa, an old logging company district that Eureka had more or less abandoned, moved steadily past.
“Anything?” asked Rachel.
Adeline, slowly pivoting in her seat with a pair of binoculars for eyes, said, “No.”
“And yesterday there was supposedly an armada out here.”
When they came to the South Jetty, they drew in the sail in order not to go so far that returning would take all afternoon. Adeline hummed a pop song; Rachel massaged a pulled muscle in her left calf. They ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and scanned the water and made themselves comfortable. It became late morning.
“This is boring,” said Adeline.
“Mmm.”
“What if we missed them already?”
“Then we missed them.”
“Do what?”
“Act like something bad is okay.”
“You’d rather have me get angry?”
“Maybe.”
They sat in silence until Rachel said, nodding toward shore, “We should motor away from the breakers.” The boat had begun to rock more pronouncedly as it inched within two hundred yards of the building swells.
“We’re pretty far away.”
“Just to be safe why don’t you start the engine?”
Adeline turned to do it, but before she could pull the starter cord she sat back on her haunches, as though knocked off balance, and pointed up. “Look,” she said.
“What is it?” Rachel craned around, thinking Adeline had spotted a blowhole, and with disappointment saw nothing in the water. In the air, however, a flock of birds, stretched across the horizon, flew toward them in numbers so great they seemed to be refracted through a prism. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, a pulsating sheet of black being pulled across the sky. “Pacific black brants,” Rachel said, dropping the rope she’d been tying.
“That’s the type of bird they are? There’s so many.”
“Hand me the thirty-five millimeter, please. Hurry.”
Adeline passed the camera to her mother, who took a dozen pictures sitting up and then, as the birds flew overhead at an altitude of forty feet, lay flat on her back, resting her head on the prow, to shoot more. “This has the black-and-white?”
Adeline said, “Yeah.”
“Do you want to take color with the eighty?”
“Okay.”
Adeline removed the lens cap from the eighty-millimeter camera, adjusted the development speed, and scooted into a horizontal position beside her mother. From above they looked stitched together, like two swatches of color framed by a white boat on an emerald background. The clicks from their cameras came at a staccato rhythm and sometimes overlapped; the only other sounds were of water sloshing against the boat, waves crashing nearer and nearer, and their own infrequent exclamations at what they were witnessing. The stream of birds flew lower—thirty feet, twenty feet, fifteen—until they were just ten feet above the ocean, and Rachel and Adeline could see details of the birds’ white bellies and long, tapered wings, their retracted legs and narrow black heads. When the women set down the cameras at the end of their first rolls of film, and wind pressed against them from so many beating wings, Adeline asked if they should use the rest of the film or save it for the whales. Rachel said, looking up at the assembly of brants filling the carved-out sky—at the current passing over them without caution or break—that this was what they had come for, that they should not save anything.
Acknowledgments
For their invaluable support and wisdom, I’d like to thank Susan Golomb, Katie Ford, Matthew McIntosh, Bret Johnston, Dan Pope, Amira Pierce, and Rich Green. I am also very grateful to the James Michener–Copernicus Society of America for its generosity. Everyone at Scribner, particularly Nan Graham, Samantha Martin, Erin Cox, and Susan Moldow—and most especially particularly Sarah McGrath—deserves a thousand graces.
About the Author
Born in 1973, Josh Emmons was raised in Northern California and received an MFA and teaching fellowship from the University of Iowa. His debut novel The Loss of Leon Meed won the James Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award in 2005. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
Also by Josh Emmons:
Prescription for a Superior Existence
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