Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  I realized what he was doing. He was building a fire on the beach. We had done this often in the fall when the chill set in but the twilight lingered long and nobody could sleep. We had been just past the manic days of summer, the fishing clients hitting the water early, and the sun barely setting. We turned feral then, sleeping only in quick snatches with quilts hung over the windows to block out the light.

  In fall, though, we felt the hint of what was to come. The days slowed with each passing twilight. There was time between clients. We even moved slower with each minute of lost daylight. Our blood seemed to thicken. Fall was a time sandwiched between the glorious run of summer and the blank white slate of winter ahead.

  We had built beach fires low enough on the stones near the water’s edge so that the higher tides of the season would wash up and smother the flames long after we had gone to bed. My father liked to sit out here listening to the crackle of the flames and the murmur of the ocean. Once he told me that it sounded to him like the land and sea were talking like old friends and that if he listened hard enough he could make out what they were saying. Once he told me that this was the only time that his mind stood still.

  I watched him. He opened a Crown Royal bag and spread out the contents. First there were amber balls of pitch, set carefully below crumbling bark from the underbellies of fallen trees. Then he took out his knife and shaved away curls of wood from a handful of twigs. Finally he sprinkled wisps of lichen over the top and lit it.

  He hunched over the small pile, blowing steadily.

  I had watched him build many fires. He had a knack for starting a fire in the rain, or the snow, or the wind. Either you’re born with it or you’re not, he used to say. He had the patience to wait instead of barging in, to rock back on his heels and contemplate while the fire took its time. That was the trick, the waiting.

  A thin tendril of smoke curled up from the pile. A small flame wormed through the lichen. My father grinned.

  “Still got it,” he said.

  I hovered on my heels, unable to commit to leaving or staying. Covertly I studied his face. I recognized this mood, a step down toward despair, a mood my mother had always hated but that I always kind of liked. In this one he was thoughtful, his words carefully chosen, each one a polished stone falling from his mouth. In this one he was reachable, a spark of recognition lighting between us.

  He had lost the wool hat somewhere and his hair, all white now, spiraled over his head in disarray. He was smaller than he had been years ago, and his glass eye gleamed in the firelight, but otherwise he could have been the same man he used to be.

  “I miss it,” he said, startling me. “I miss the way things used to be.” He pulled his jacket tighter around himself. “Sometimes, out on the ocean, in the boat, I felt like I was riding the back of some sleeping animal, rolling as it dreamed,” he said. “I’d look out at the gray backs of the swells, all speckled with kelp, you remember. And I’d just wonder. Wonder at all sorts of things. Where the waves came from that passed under the boat. What was swimming below me in two hundred feet of water. What would happen if I swam down as deep as I could without ever coming up for air.”

  I swallowed hard. “The way it used to be wasn’t very good. Don’t you remember?”

  He didn’t answer for a minute, poking at the fire with a stick. Then he said, “I cheated death a hundred times on that ocean. It takes you and grinds you up and spits you out. But it’s so beautiful, so mysterious. That’s what kept me going back.”

  He held the stick and we both looked at it. It had caught a spark and was beginning to burn.

  “We came back from the hunt early and you were gone,” he told me. “Weather was closing in. The client was in a rage. Why can’t we just hunt Never Summer, he kept asking. There are plenty of bears here. It was arbitrary not to, he said, he paid plenty for the hunt, and he was going to sue. Go ahead, I told him. We don’t hunt the bears in Never Summer.

  “Sam offered to go and get you. You had gone to Floathouse Bay; we all knew it. Where else would you go? I told him that you were a woman, old enough to know your own mind. If you wanted to come back, you would. You had your own reasons for staying gone.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She always said you would come back. That you had promised her you would.”

  But I had never promised that. Had I? There had been so many promises. It was easier to only remember the pull of the cord, my mother turning to look as I steered the Lund away from the dock. There had been a moment when I had thought she would run toward me. There had been a moment when the boat was not too far away for her to step in. That moment passed. She only stood there, watching me leave.

  In the beginning I had meant to turn back, perhaps only go as far as the red cliffs. I had meant to show her that I could leave, that I was not afraid. But the farther I went from the dock, the easier it was to point the boat straight ahead. After all, you never turned a boat broadside in a following sea.

  “She wanted to name you something different,” my father was saying. “Something light. Fluffy. I said no, that a woman out here needed something heavy to carry with her. Something with heft to it. She could name the next one, I told her. Trouble was, there never was a next one. She never could make a baby stick except for you.”

  If I spoke now he might stop talking. I had seen it before, a sudden clamming up, a brisk dismissal. I sat very still.

  “She lost a couple of babies up at Lookout Point,” he said. “Early enough that she didn’t need a hospital, though. They weren’t even really babies, small as little fish. She said maybe they would come back as salmon someday and swim their way home.”

  There were no babies. There was my answer. Had she ever wished for that so hard that she believed it was true?

  “You’ll find her,” my father said. “You have to find her.” His hair blew around his face. The fire flickered.

  “You know that she may have left for a reason,” I said, choosing my words with care. “Even if all she went to was the lake. She must have known that you couldn’t follow her that far. You must know that maybe she doesn’t want you to find her.”

  “That’s not true,” he said quickly. “She had no reason to leave. Although perhaps I had a bit of a heavy hand at times. In the past,” he added quickly. “Before.” His hand indicated the chair.

  I couldn’t stop myself. “A heavy hand? Is that what you call it?”

  “There were no broken bones,” he said. “I wasn’t that kind of man.”

  “But you hurt her. I saw it. I saw all of it. She showed me what you did.” I saw another ghost of the old anger in his face and I shrank back just a little. Then I remembered the bruises around my mother’s wrist like a bracelet. My mother’s hand, a washcloth in her fist. Her voice, making excuses. It was an accident. He works so hard for us, out in all kinds of weather, his hands splitting from saltwater, his body twisting from early arthritis. I make it happen, my mother would say. It is always me who starts it. Don’t start it, I would howl, but my mother shushed me by turning on the tap, the water so hot it curled my toes. What would we do without him, she would say, not a question but a statement, difficult to refute.

  My father said, “I don’t know what you think you remember. It was a long time ago. But we were happy. Everything was perfect. Until last year, the cruisers. The helicopter. They are going to ruin it for us. For us and the bears.”

  “But that’s not the way it was. That’s not what happened.”

  “It was, for me,” he said. “It was perfect, until the accident. It changed everything.”

  I could not speak, a deep flush of anger rolling over me. How could he say that? Didn’t he remember?

  “Winnie, you were young then. You misunderstood things.”

  I scrambled to my feet, kicking at the pile of rocks he had collected, wanting to hurt him. The cairn toppled, rocks scattering. One rolled onto my foot, a brief jolt of pain. I shook it free.

  “She told me everyth
ing,” I said. “Everything.”

  My father drank deeply from the bottle. He coughed. “No,” he said. “Not everything.” He winced as he tried to straighten his legs. “First time I saw her in the Hell and Gone, she reminded me of a little bird, unable to fly. A bird that had lost her wings. They do that, you know, if they’ve lived on islands long enough. Forget how to fly.

  “Curled up in the corner, fishermen circling like vultures, no money, no way out. Her skin was so pale I could see blue veins through it. You’re coming with me, I said, took her hand. She came with me, I didn’t make her come. She would never leave me. Not in a million years.”

  I thought of what Isaiah had said. “Did she ever tell you about where she came from?”

  He set the bottle carefully beside him, the liquid glowing in the light of the fire. “She followed some loser who brought her to Alaska, the same type of guy who comes up here every summer, going to live off the land with a handful of matches and an ax. Bag of rice, maybe, if he was one of the smarter ones. He ditched her once he got the offer from the pipeline, realized easy money was better than squatting in some waterless cabin at forty below or living in a canvas wall tent. Didn’t want anyone to tie him down, just left her flat, jumped on a plane. The day I walked into the Hell and Gone and got her, that was the best decision I ever made. Dean said I had gone off the deep end of the ocean, letting someone wrap herself around me like that. He hated it that she chose me. Thought she would pick him, the women always had. Plenty of fish in the sea and birds in the air, he said. Can’t you go find yourself another one and let me have her, he asked.” He laughed, but it had a bitter undertone.

  This was the same thing that Isaiah had said, but as I thought back through the years I only saw the handing over of a cup of tea, a casual glance. There had been nothing to indicate anything smoldering in Uncle Dean. If anything, he had been the kind of person trouble ran off of like water on a coat. Never able to sit still, he bounced on his toes as he waited for storms to pass.

  What else had I missed?

  Above us, the clouds thickened into soup, any clearing long gone to the east. “Rain, maybe, before long,” my father said. “Winchester, your mother is like a puzzle. She will give you one piece, and then another, when she feels like it, and it can take a lifetime to put them together. I didn’t ask her what she wasn’t willing to tell me. I liked how there was always more to know, and I figured if I waited long enough, I would learn it all.”

  The light left his one good eye and it became blank and opaque, matching the other. If I didn’t know better I would have said he had begun to cry.

  Impossible. My father hardly ever cried.

  “Do you think it’s true, Winnie? Do you think she’s really left me?”

  Words tumbled from my mouth before I could stop them. “Why were you always so angry? Did you know that I used to think that was how everyone was? But Isaiah and Birdman aren’t that way. I don’t think Sam is that way. Maybe that’s why she left. She got tired of the angry.”

  The words hung in the air, impossible to take back. I had never spoken to my father like this. What had I done? I stood there, my hand to my mouth. He sat silent for a minute, looking away from me and out to the ocean. I expected a flash of anger, but he seemed thoughtful instead. “I came to Alaska when I was seventeen. My father said he would sign the paper to spring me from school early if I took Dean with me. Thought Dean would keep me out of trouble,” he said. “I had an itch to be someone other than Dean’s kid brother, and still I couldn’t get away from him. You need me, he said, to fly the plane, and he was right. I didn’t think he would last up here. I wanted to make it hard for him so that I could shine for once. But I needed him up here. This coast was like nothing I had ever seen before. You can’t be soft here, Winchester. Alaska takes people like that and chews them up. You’ve got to be like stone, not like water.”

  “You went too far toward the stone,” I whispered, softly enough that my words might be covered by the sound of water.

  He threw the stick back into the fire. I couldn’t tell if he heard me. A sliver of moonlight played across his face, a sucker hole in the clouds passing by.

  “I saw that she wrote you a letter. Saw her taking it down to the barge. Told you what I asked her to do, I guess. Because what’s the point, a beat-up old man, can’t fight anymore. Too hard to sit here and be punched in the gut, roads built, trees cut, no way to stop them.”

  “She couldn’t do what you asked. She loves you too much.”

  “I suppose you are right.” He peered at me. “Don’t get that look on your face. I wasn’t going to ask you, either. A man’s got to do his own living and dying. Took me awhile to come to that conclusion, but I finally got there.”

  Grateful for the night that partially shaded my face, I sat down. There was a question I had been waiting to ask. I thought that now, in the dark, he might answer.

  “Tell me. What really happened in Enchantment Bay? I need to know.”

  “Winnie, you’ve got know that it was a rookie mistake. Should never have set foot in that bay. Don’t ask unless you really want to know.”

  Did I want to know? Something had happened, something that nobody wanted to talk about. I could feel the weight of it, and I suddenly felt too young for all of this. I wanted to find one of our old hiding places, but there was nowhere left to hide.

  “Sam might tell you. It’s really his story to tell.”

  “Sam was there?”

  “He was there.”

  “Why didn’t he stop it?”

  My father laughed, a short bark in the darkness. “I told you already, ask him.”

  I shook my head and buried my hands deeper into my borrowed jacket. It still smelled like my mother, an indefinable scent of glycerin soap and the peppermint oil she used to soothe her cracked hands. It seemed that she was still here, close enough to touch.

  I asked the question that had always needled at me whenever I watched the bears in the streams. Their powerful muscles bunched under their skin, their claws longer than my fingers. Didn’t they know how much stronger they were than any of us?

  “At least tell me what it was like.”

  He was quiet for a minute, gathering rocks and rebuilding the mound. Then he said, “There was an absence of pain. Your body protects you, you know. You go into a place almost like dreaming. There was no pain until later.”

  He rolled a rock between his fingers before adding it to the pile. The cairn tilted under the weight of the stones.

  “I’ve been close to bears, close enough to feel their breath on my face. I’ve led a hundred men to kill shots. Maybe this was the way the bears decided to settle the score.”

  I let my mind linger on how it must have been. There would be the crunch of breaking bones, the snap of branches as they rolled in their strange embrace. Growls and screams would be interwoven along with the breaths of both combatants. It was all too terrible to contemplate, even as a thought wormed its way in. Now you know. You understand the sudden betrayal of a blow in the night.

  “That’s all I want to tell you. Ask Sam if you want to know the rest.”

  When I said nothing, he went on. “Here’s the thing you need to know about Sam. He’s not tough, not the way we are, you and me. This country scares him to the bones. It’s too big for some people, and it’s too big for him. He doesn’t really know how to move through it except by following someone strong. If he’s got that, he can go forever. When you go up the red cliffs, you have to be strong enough for the both of you. Birdman I’m not worried about. He’d survive anything; he’s been to hell and back already. But you’re my daughter and you should know this. Understand?”

  My father hoisted himself up to the dock. For a moment he stood suspended between the chair and the ground, almost the man he used to be. Then he slumped down, his shoulders rounded. “Go on now, Winnie. I’ve got things to think about.”

  It felt wrong to leave him out there on the dock, a little fire burni
ng on the beach, soon to be swallowed by the tide. I wavered for a moment. He had never been so honest with me, and I thought that the night might bring more answers. But my father had already forgotten me, his head dipping low on his chest. I thought that he might be sleeping or that he might need help wheeling back up the broken dock to the lodge.

  But as I waited, it was clear that he did not need me. He needed none of us. He wanted instead to wrap himself up in half-truths like a tattered blanket. The chart he had drawn for himself, a vague map of what our lives had been, was not the same one I remembered. In the end I slipped away, leaving him to the fire and the sea.

  Ten

  Upstairs in the bird’s nest, the night ticked by one interminable second at a time. I lay under my mother’s comforter fully dressed, ready for escape.

  Never leave harbor on a Friday.

  Only harvest shellfish . . .

  It occurred to me that there had been other unspoken rules in our bay. Never trust what someone tells you, even if they look you straight in the eyes. What they remember is not the truth that you know.

  Dawn came reluctantly, a shy girl late for the dance. It touched the highest peaks with a shell-pink blush, slowly creeping down toward our bay and settling with an almost audible sigh on the water. The red cliffs held darkness the longest because of the way they leaned in toward the ocean. On some winter days the sun never reached parts of the cliffs at all.

  It would be hours yet.

  I turned the pillow to find a cool side. It was flat from age, and as I punched it down a few feathers escaped from an unseen hole and floated lazily toward the floor. Something else did, too.

  I reached down and grabbed it. A small piece of paper torn from a logbook of some kind, it looked like it had been folded a hundred times. Something was scribbled on it in pencil, but time had erased some of the letters. I sat cross-legged, puzzling it out.