And with that, Marcus exited back out into the night, swinging his bag over his shoulder. He approached his car, keys in hand, and imagined walking in the door of his empty home, falling atop his empty bed, and waking in the early hours of morning when the world was still quiet and the day was unwritten.
EPILOGUE
THE LAST TIME MARCUS had been to Michigan, he was in high school. It was during a particularly frigid winter. His stepfather, Corn, had made good on his suggestion that he and Marcus go bird-watching in the Upper Peninsula. Each morning for four days, they set out before sunrise to a tree blind that overlooked an expansive frozen valley sparsely populated with a few wind-stripped trees and dense thickets. Corn brought with him a pair of binoculars, a thermos of coffee, four peanut butter sandwiches, and a field notebook. Marcus brought with him a copy of Oliver Twist and two pairs of gloves. Whenever any bird fluttered into view, Corn shook Marcus’s arm gently and pointed discreetly at the fluttering creature. Corn passed the binoculars to Marcus to show him whatever bird had crossed into their observable range—a hawk, eagle, turkey buzzard. When Marcus was done pretending to admire the sight, he passed back the binoculars to Corn, who was smiling so widely Marcus barely recognized him. It wasn’t even smiling, so much as it was beaming, his tongue clenched between his teeth to contain a primal yelp of delight.
“Isn’t it just beautiful, all of it?” Corn asked in a barely audible whisper as he watched a gyrfalcon bury its head into its shoulders on a tree branch. His breath curled around his freshly shaven cheeks like a ghost escaping the boredom that Marcus was tasked to endure for several more days. “My God, my God. You can see pictures of these birds, yes. You can see them in zoos, yes. But to see them in their context, their natural habitat, to know of their existence beyond the pages of a book. It is like seeing the face of God in the mirror. Don’t you think?”
Marcus, these many years later, pulled off onto his exit for Lake Walton, and followed the narrow highway to a gas station, nestled in a clearing of ash trees. A single light pole radiated a white glow against the pitch-black surroundings. Marcus felt himself turning the car in to the parking lot before consciously deciding to do so. He still had a notch more than half a tank, but he caught sight of his reflection in the rearview and his eyes looked even wearier than they felt. It was ten o’clock at night, and he needed to know if there was any place he might stay for the night. He tried to remember the details he’d worked out in his head during the four-hour drive, but they had evidently slipped out the cracked car window.
May sat in the passenger seat, her hands pressed between her legs. She stared out the window, as silent as she had been throughout the entire drive. She wore a floral dress that came down to her knees. She still had the stitches on the crown of her head. She wore a wide-brimmed hat to hide them. But Marcus knew she wasn’t hiding them from him.
The parking lot of the gas station was strewn with gravel. A few small puddles scattered haphazardly. The night’s rain hung in the air, a frozen tableau.
“I’ll be right back,” Marcus said.
May stared out the window.
Inside, rows of packaged junk food, beer, coolant, and air fresheners in the shapes of pine trees. A small, bearded man wearing coveralls leaned on the counter with his knuckles, midlaugh with the cashier, a woman with her long hair, gray at the roots, tied into a bushy ponytail. She managed a “Hello,” through laughter, when Marcus walked in. The other man turned, nodded at Marcus, and then turned back to the woman. “I told Jake, I told him you can’t expect to pull a dog’s weight with that thing.”
In the back of the store, Marcus found a single coffeepot simmering on a warmer. Its surface was gilded with an oily sheen. He poured it into two Styrofoam cups and grabbed a small sleeve of doughnuts. He carried them to the counter and the bearded man stepped out of his way. As he checked out, he asked if they might know of a man who lived on Lake Walton, which was just half a mile away. He said the man was an old friend whose name he had forgotten. Stood over six feet tall, powerfully built, probably the quiet type. But neither of the two seemed to know of anyone matching the description.
Marcus nodded politely, managed a thank-you smile. He hadn’t had any expectations to disappoint. It was a long shot that he would find the Kingfisher at all, much less at the same lake where the Kingfisher had told May he’d spent his childhood summers. But it was the only place Marcus could think of. He wasn’t sure what he would tell May. When he asked her to accompany him here, she had agreed without any further clarification. She wouldn’t say it, but he knew she hadn’t come here to look for him. She had come here to find him. She had come here to see if it was really true that the Kingfisher had not died those many years ago. She had come here to see him and to know him and to say whatever words can span the length of thirty years. She stared out a window looking out over a highway always receding into the distance.
Marcus left the gas station. His windshield was speckled and each drop shined beneath a single light suspended at the top of the pumps. He saw May sitting exactly in the position she had been in throughout the entire drive. He began fueling his car and as the counter clicked the gallons away slowly, slowly, Marcus walked around to the other side of his car and leaned against its slick hull. All the stars were out tonight. In elementary school, they’d been taught a few constellations and he searched for them now, but he couldn’t find a single one. And he wondered if perhaps the stars had shifted at some point in the past sixty-odd years since elementary school or if he had simply forgotten or if there was some excluded middle he was too tired to see.
He wasn’t sure it mattered either way.
The pump clicked, finished. Marcus got back in his car and handed May a coffee. She put it in the cup holder.
“They don’t know,” Marcus said.
“OK,” she said.
“But we’ll look around, OK?”
“We don’t have to.”
“We will.”
“OK.”
As he drove out of the parking lot, he saw in his rearview the cashier standing outside of the gas station, waving her arms over her head, and he heard her muffled shouts. The man stood with her, fumbling to light a cigarette in the wind.
Marcus turned the car around and pulled up beside them. He rolled his window down.
The cashier smiled and pushed a stray hair behind her ear. She gestured at the man. “Chester remembered something.”
The bearded man cursed his lighter, his back to the wind. Once he finally got a light, he turned back to them and smoke punctuated his words.
“Yeah, there’s a guy who lives down the road a ways. I’ve only ever seen him once or twice. Only reason I thought of him now was that my buddy lives next to him on the lake. He’s an odd one, though. Keeps mostly to himself. Doesn’t have what you might call a ‘friendly reputation.’ But I think he might be the fella you’re looking for.”
“Do you have an address?”
“No. I’m not sure he has one, matter of fact. But just drive down that road right there for a mile and a half. You’ll see a tin mailbox at the end of a drive. That’s my buddy’s place. Keep driving to the next driveway. There isn’t a mailbox, but you should see it anyway. Just keep your eyes peeled. That’s the place you want. Good luck.”
They drove beneath an arched canopy of mature birch trees, Marcus’s headlights wandering across the luminescent eyes of deer tucked beneath the dense walls of foliage. He spotted a tin mailbox and drove slowly past it, squinting carefully for the hint of a driveway amid the lush overgrowth of ferns and trees.
He nearly missed it—a gravel path leading into a forest wall. Marcus put the car in park. The hotel was in the other direction. He could turn around, buy both of them separate rooms, and come back in the morning. The light of day. Or he could turn around and sleep and maybe never come back at all. He could drive home all through the night and wake up in the morning and write all of this off as some unwanted fever dream. Even if by some imp
ossible chance the Kingfisher was still alive and this was indeed his home, what would he think of some old journalist pulling in to his driveway at twilight with a once-lover?
And there was May, seated next to him. The patient fold of her body, knees bent to the door. She did not belong in a place like this. But she didn’t care.
But maybe, Marcus thought, he needed someone like Marcus to fill him in on everything he had missed. It’s a different city than you last left it, he would say. It’s a different world. Do you remember May? Of course you do. She’s here with me. She’s in the car. Why didn’t you save her? She said she called out for you, but you did not come. She would forgive you, though. But maybe you don’t care about forgiveness. Actually, I don’t know what you care about at all. That’s why I’m here. I just want to understand you. No, I need to understand you. I have to know why.
He pulled in to the driveway. His headlights sharpened the indistinct shapes of hanging branches, overturned stumps rotting in their own shadows, the reflective eyes of animals in the periphery of the conical light. Marcus let his foot off the gas to be as quiet as possible.
He turned off his headlights as the car followed the soft blue impression of the gravel drive, glowing like Italian marble in the moonlit night.
The driveway led to a clearing, occupied by a double-wide trailer, the tin siding rusting and slanted. The windows were covered by wooden particleboards. Two camping fold-out chairs sat in the small front yard, surrounding a burn pit, which was smoldering. An ember pulsed beneath the charred wood. Barely alive.
Marcus saw beyond the trailer, down a slight embankment, the reflective surface of a lake. He parked his car in the driveway, and when he got out, stood next to it, unsure what should happen next, if he was supposed to wait here or go to the door. He drank from his Styrofoam cup and listened. Somewhere, a woodpecker was pounding furiously away, working overtime long into the night. Maybe there were two or three, or maybe it was just a reverberating echo bounding from the hollowed-out trees.
To his surprise, May opened her door and got out.
Marcus decided to approach the door of the trailer, feeling clumsy in the motion. The gravel grated loudly with each sinking step forward. He held the coffee up near his heart, a calculated pose. A way of saying, I’m not a threat. Just a passing traveler with a question that won’t take very long. Maybe you know who I am? My name is Marcus Waters.
May stayed standing next to the car, taking it all in. He wondered what she saw.
Marcus came to the door and knocked, a motion that surprised him. He thought it would take him all night to work up the courage, but here he was with three solid knocks—one to be heard and two more for good measure. He practiced an innocuous smile, and for the first time he became aware of his heart beating like a waltz that was steadily falling into some anarchic time signature.
He listened and heard nothing. No soft rustling. No footsteps. Nothing. He knocked again and still nothing.
He wondered if maybe he ought to wait for a minute longer, and so he did. He consulted his watch and at the end of the minute, he waited for another minute. If he drove fast, he could be back in Chicago before the sun rose. The city would never know he had left.
After several unanswered minutes, he started back for the car. A loon called out from the lake in a long, elegiac croon. He stopped in his tracks and turned around, moving beyond the trailer and toward the lake. He heard May following after him, graceful steps. The embankment angled down to the water’s edge, spongy and soft. He came to a dock that reached out maybe fifteen feet into the water. There were posts at either end with white ropes floating in the water. A boat had recently been tied here. He walked to the very end of the dock; each step against the rotted boards creaked.
He heard May approach behind him.
Marcus surveyed the lake, a mirror image of the crystalline sky, giving the illusion that the end of the dock was also the end of the earth, a point beyond which the universe began. The mostly still waters lapped softly against the shore.
He felt dizzy, frightened that he would fall into the water waiting below. Instead, he lowered himself slowly, his limbs stiff and unruly. When he was seated on the dock, he pulled his shoes and socks off and dipped his feet into the water, which was warmer than he expected. He wiggled his toes, feeling the water wrap his ankles.
May sat beside him, unclasped her sandals, and set them at her side. She dipped her feet into the water and watched the ripples span and disappear before her.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Marcus said.
“Then don’t.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, we do.”
“We just don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
“He’s here,” she said. “I know he’s here.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.” She looked back at the trailer atop the embankment and then turned back to the lake. He saw that she was squinting out across the water. “He’s really here, Marcus. I wish I could say I couldn’t believe it.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. But he can see us. He’s out there. He’s looking at us. He can hear us. And he doesn’t know what to think. He’s scared, but he doesn’t need to be scared.” She wasn’t talking to Marcus, and he understood this. “He should come here. He should talk to us. Because we’re only here to talk. We’re only here to say a few things to him, a few things that we wished we could have said a long time ago.”
Marcus scanned the water. His eyes adjusted to the dark, the play of lights against the surface. He could make out the tree line on the other side of the lake. He saw two loons in the middle, weaving beneath the surface and reappearing fifty yards away. The lake wasn’t nearly as infinite as it had first appeared. He could see where it began, where it ended.
“And if he’s here,” Marcus began.
“Then I’ll ask him,” she finished.
“You’ll ask him what?”
“What I’ve asked him countless times before. I’ll ask him what he’s doing here. And then I’ll ask him why he didn’t come back. He left me, he left us, and he left everything. I just want to know why. I need to know.”
Marcus heard a faraway hum. It grew louder. He recognized it as a motor, a small one, whining at an easy speed. It continued to grow louder and he squinted to see where it was coming from, but he could not. It might have been behind one of the several outcroppings of land that projected from the shoreline. Or maybe he was not looking hard enough. Either way, he knew it was coming to meet him at the dock. He knew this the way he knew everything else he had ever known. He sat there. Barefooted, tired. And he raised his coffee cup to his heart as though to say, I am not a threat. I am a friend.
“He’s coming,” May said.
And here in the black-light night of another endless summer, Marcus hears a small splash to his side, just a few feet away. He turns to see reflected in the water’s surface a small, brightly colored bird flying to the shoreline, wings stilled and frozen, picture-book beauty, and he traces its unlikely shape across the water for as long as he can manage until it disappears once more.
May smiles and points out over the lake where there is only shadow and light and the sound of something coming closer, closer, until it is there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My grandmother, Mary Martinson, to whom this novel is dedicated, believes in the transformative power of words, and I am thankful that she displayed for me the magic of books from an early age. My high school English teacher, Barbara Amster, inspired and encouraged me to begin writing, and she taught me to discern in my own writing the good from the bad from the ugly. My mother and father have always supported me in all of my endeavors and encourage my passions, even when I said I wanted to be an English major. My beautiful sisters, Rachel and Lucy, and my average-looking brother, Tad, all go out of their way to keep me grounded, so, thanks for that, I guess.
The incredibly talented aut
hor Ashley Woodfolk was kind enough to read the manuscript; she provided insight and perspective that was extremely useful and very necessary. My friends, Sean Towey and Kenzie Grob, read early drafts of the novel and offered crucial feedback. Maureen McQuillan was a source of endless encouragement, enthusiasm, and Indian food. Steve Nathaniel let me beat him in pool whenever I was stressed out, and I appreciate that. And to my colleagues and professors of the Indiana University English department, thanks for being brilliant and kind; the humanities have never been more necessary than they are now, and all of you give me enormous hope for the future.
My extraordinary agent, Sharon Pelletier, has stuck with me through thick and thin; I consider myself the luckiest writer in the world to have her in my corner. My brilliant editor, Christine Kopprasch, shared in my vision for this novel and helped me develop it into something I am immensely proud of. I also want to thank the phenomenal team at Flatiron Books for all of their contributions.
And finally, I want to thank those who inspired this novel. Though we live in turbulent and frightening times, I am honored to live alongside heroes who, in the face of injustice, speak out and refuse to be silenced. Black Lives Matter, the travel ban airport protestors, the women who marched on D.C. after the inauguration, the counterprotestors at Charlottesville, the Parkland students, and so many others—your bravery will write history.
Recommend The Reign of the Kingfisher for your next book club!
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 38