As Waters Gone By

by Cynthia Ruchti

  Light touches of color. Wildflowers in odd-shaped vases. Pillows for the sofa and chairs.

  She’d seen an image on the Internet of a lit-from-behind shelving unit with colored glassware. It would be perfect for the narrow wall between the kitchen and the stairs. She’d remove the doors from the upper cabinets and leave open shelving.

  The opposite of the home she’d shared with Max in Lexington. Sleek, shiny, metallic . . . What had seemed modern and polished then sounded cold and closed off now. What happened to her? To them? Derailed in every aspect of their lives, including their taste in habitat?

  How could they have stayed the same when their dreams died in a pile of broken glass, crumbled bricks, and twisted metal with Max behind the wheel? With Max responsible? Or, as the courts deemed, “irresponsible.”

  If the homeless man had died, the sentence would have ratcheted to life. Life. Because the man survived—broken, incapacitated, but without family to demand restitution—Max’s crime was logged as drunk driving causing bodily harm. With an eyewitness who claimed he’d fled the scene.

  Max hadn’t fled anything his entire life. Hadn’t taken a drink since college. But the courts pointed to the unanswered questions. Where had he been for those twenty-four hours, after which a blood alcohol test was meaningless? He’d called Emmalyn from a bar. The eyewitness. What else could they conclude? He didn’t remember stumbling from the wreckage, but that’s what the traffic cam showed. He didn’t remember anything, he said, until he woke up the next day under a bridge a mile away.

  Emmalyn had followed the nationally publicized court proceedings of the woman who claimed she’d taken a sleep aid by mistake. A bizarre side effect explained away her reckless endangerment issue. She walked out of the courtroom a free woman. Max had been prescribed the same sleep aid months before the accident. Could that have been it?

  Not that it mattered anymore. He was only months away from having paid his dues, no matter what the root of his mistake.

  “Mrs. Ross?”

  Emmalyn clambered to her feet and brushed sand and leaves from her backside. “Finished already?”

  “Do you want me to paint those cupboards in the kitchen, too?”

  “I thought I could do that.”

  “I’ll throw them in free of charge.”

  “Done.” Emmalyn had enough other projects to keep her occupied. “Those five gallons aren’t going to be enough, are they?”

  “Can I call you with what I estimate we’ll need and what I figure for labor costs?”

  “Good idea. I should have your number, too, in case I need to reach you.”

  “Mrs. Ross?”

  Should she ask him to call her Emmalyn? M? Somehow the “Mrs.” in Mrs. Ross grounded her to a concept that had escaped her grasp for too long. “What is it, Nick?”

  His gaze fell to his feet. Or his ankle. “I know I messed up.” He raised his head, eyes level with hers. “I’m not going to mess this up.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  “That means a lot.”

  “It means a lot to me, too, Nick. More than you know.”

  He turned to leave, then turned back. He waited, staring into the space several feet to Emmalyn’s left. “Your place looks pretty sad right now.”

  She sighed for both of them.

  “I think once I get the painting done, you’ll see it in a whole new light.”

  “Life? Or the cottage?”

  His eyes met hers then. The sterling silver ring in his eyebrow bobbed when he smiled. “Maybe both. Times two,” he said, pointing to his chest. He drew the small book from his back pocket. “This is part of the rules of my release.”

  “A Bible? Your parole officer can do that?”

  “The other kind of probation. The one Boozie has me on.”

  That’s the book that kept his attention when Emmalyn arrived. “Getting anything useful from it?”

  “Whole new light.” He slapped it shut and repocketed it. “Anyway, I’ll go see what I have for trim paint and exterior back home, do some calculating, and give you a call.”

  “Sounds good, Nick. You take care.”

  “If you like the numbers,” he called from the side of the cottage, “I can start later this afternoon, after my P.O. meeting.”

  “Boozie or court appointed?”

  “Boozie.”

  The rngh-rngh-rngh-rngh of the dirt bike engine signaled his departure.

  She’d finished scraping the main floor windows and doors facing the beach when the first drops of rain pelted her. The sky showed it meant business. Emmalyn’s weather app told her the percentage of rain the rest of the day was high. What could she do inside? Remove the upper cupboard doors. Clean out the fireplace. Set a couple of mousetraps with the single-serving peanut butter she’d purchased at the convenience store on Middle Road on her way out. The list grew.

  The skylight that had made a dramatic difference in the dark back half of the cottage was little help with the sun gone and thick pewter clouds overhead. Emmalyn stood watching and listening for leaks. Cora would be glad to know she found none, not even when the wind kicked up and drove the rain sideways.

  She would set the mousetraps just before she left for the day. No sense subjecting herself to the horror of a snap and squeal. The hollow feel of the cottage was creepy enough. She wasn’t sure she was ready—or could afford—to hire Pirate Joe to do a professional extermination job.

  The ceiling light did little more than throw shadows. That’s all she needed. More shadows.

  Fireplace. If she could get it cleaned out and make sure the flue worked right, she could light a fire—her heart sank—with the firewood now exposed to the driving rain. She walked toward the fireplace. It had to be done sooner or later.

  A crack of lightning snapped off the lights and her last nerve. Done. She was done for the day, if the rain kept up. The dusty wood walls turned suffocating in the damp air. She flipped the light switch to the off position, locked the front door, and made a mad dash for her car.

  She could wait for Nick’s call at The Wild Iris far more comfortably than she could in the cottage that wasn’t yet home.

  8

  October rains can lean either way—short and refreshing or elongated, drizzly, chilling. This batch fit the chilling variety. How different the water looked pockmarked with slanting rain. Battleship gray. Flat in color but hammered in texture. The low ceiling of miffed clouds gave the illusion the world’s walls were closing in like a shrinking room in a thriller.

  Emmalyn watched a while from the safety of her car now parked at the elbow where the two roads joined, the wide spot where the trees parted enough to give an unobstructed view of the weather’s distemper.

  I chose the life here, on this spot, in a soon-to-be-charming cottage. I chose remote, solitary. I chose sun-drenched days and a quiet beach and endless water. And I got this thrown in, too.

  A pencil-thick branch skittered across the windshield, punctuating her thoughts.

  This too.

  How often did Max check the sky? What would it be like to not know or care about the forecast for the following day? How long did it take him to convert from the weather-watcher he had been to weather-neutral?

  That’s the sort of thing Cora expected her to write in the “Letters to Max (until you come home)” journal. As if he would ever read it. As if he’d ever see it. As if it would matter.

  Emmalyn cranked up the heat in the Prius for the first time since early last spring and let the warm air assault her and fog the windows, curtaining her view. She snatched the Cottages book from the passenger seat, grateful it had survived the raindrop dash under her shirt.

  She noted an unusual treatment for a bathroom backsplash. Glass doorknobs on a piece of driftwood for hanging coats and hats near the back door. She liked that. A rustic basket on a low stool near the stairs for items on their way up.

  She skimmed some of the articles accompanying the images. History of the cottages. History of
the island. And the story of how it got its name.

  All along, she’d pictured a three-year-old girl with pink cheeks and outrageous curls, the cherished daughter of a lumber baron, who succumbed to an exotic illness despite her parents’ diligent efforts and the fortune spent on turn-of-the-century doctors. Madeline. Sweet Madeline . . . whose cry could still be heard on moonless nights.

  The article rearranged her thoughts. The original Madeline was an Ojibwa princess who married a French explorer in the 1790s. Her Ojibwa name didn’t suit him, apparently. Equaysayway. He called her Madeline.

  Good idea.

  Before The Crisis, she and Max spent hours toying with unpronounceable names for the children they’d have. Names with no vowels. Names with no consonants. They’d lie in bed late on Saturday mornings, curled around each other as if hope were a real thing, designing imaginary nurseries for imaginary children who kept escaping their grasp despite dozens of in vitro attempts.

  In the early years, the name game sanded the edge off their disappointment. Equaysayway’s name would have made him laugh. He would have rehearsed it until he could say it without hitching, then use it in those brief successful days after another attempt when he’d lay his warm palm on her flat stomach and ask, “How is our little Equaysayway this morning?” She could picture it.

  Emmalyn would have giggled. And pressed his hand as tight against her abdomen as she could without disturbing any cells dividing in there. But they didn’t divide. Not for long. Her womb was “a hostile environment” for children. One explanation. The fertility clinic offered a bevy of reasons and an ever-narrowing but ever-more-expensive list of treatment options.

  Until Max had enough.

  Until the day he lost interest in children. Or her. Or the process.

  She might never know what pushed him.

  It couldn’t have been her.

  No.

  * * *

  The rain settled into an arrhythmia no longer life-threatening. Emmalyn set the heater to defrost and waited until the windshield and side windows cleared, then swung the car toward LaPointe, the western way. She took Schoolhouse Road until it blended into North Shore Road and took its own sweet time winding back to the village, carrying her past Steamboat Point, Sunset Bay, the airport, and the spot in the road where the fire department sat on the right and the two-story turn-of-the-century home converted to an eclectic library perched on the left.

  Bookshelves. She needed several well-placed bookshelves. She repeated the word, searing it into her memory, for lack of paper on which to write and for fear of a ticket for texting while driving.

  Four or five more blocks. She could hold onto the thought that long.

  Tires from passing cars—both of them—sang a high-pitched song on the wet pavement and threw sprays of water against the Prius.

  When the phone rang, she pulled into a vacant spot along the street and turned off the engine. Nick.

  He gave her an estimate that made her ask for clarification three times. He was selling himself short. If he was as good as Cora said, that kind of labor was worth far more than he quoted. Her quickly dwindling savings from the sale of the Lexington house would appreciate it. But her heart clenched at the idea of a young man so desperate for work, he’d expect so little.

  When they were still in the talking stage, Max told her he’d been given a promotion in his prison job in the laundry. From eleven cents an hour to fourteen. It would help him save for an extra pair of socks. How many humiliations had he known behind bars? And where did the line lie between “You deserve this” and “Designed to break you”?

  Nick waited for her answer. She agreed to his terms, already calculating how she could arrange a merit increase if he only worked for her a week or two.

  When she ended the call, it struck her that she showed a nineteen-year-old thief more grace than she showed her husband.

  But Nick hadn’t crippled anyone.

  Not that Max intended it to happen.

  She should get another key made, so Nick could paint even if she wasn’t there. The building was gutted. There was nothing to steal.

  She sucked in a breath. Maybe she hadn’t grown any more noble after all.

  * * *

  The rain passed, leaving a gray ceiling of clouds that looked like a tent roof bulging downward with pools of unspent water. Emmalyn stopped at The Wild Iris long enough to pick up a thermos of the soup of the day, grateful Nick hadn’t left yet so she could find out his preferences for a sandwich and beverage. He, Boozie, and two people Emmalyn hadn’t met sat at the window table with their Bibles open in front of them.

  “I don’t want to interrupt . . . ”

  Boozie closed her Bible—a purple, go figure, number with a zebra duct tape binding. The others followed her lead. “We have to finish up and get ready for the noon crowd,” she said. “What do you need?”

  Emmalyn invited Nick to place his order and made her own selection. Sooner or later, she’d have to start cooking for herself again. Once she had a kitchen. Until then, whatever came out of Boozie’s kitchen more than met the need.

  “You’ll want to get drinking water, won’t you?”

  She’d gotten by with bottled water purchased at the gas station until now.

  Boozie retrieved a massive plastic handled jug from the back room. “Fill this from the artesian well at Big Bay Park.”

  “The park?”

  “That’s where most of us get our drinking water. Lots of sulphur in what comes out of the tap. I imagine that’s what you’ve found at the cottage. Once you’re hooked on the artesian spring water, you won’t want ordinary.”

  Emmalyn pictured having to drive someplace for drinking water for the rest of her life. “It’s okay to swipe water from the park?”

  Boozie tilted her head, her tangle of curls following a split-second later. “It’s for the community.”

  “There’s an artesian spring under the lake,” Nick said. “It’s good water.”

  “Okay. I’ll stop there on my way out.”

  “It’s right by the main parking area. You can’t miss the well.”

  Max and Emmalyn vacationed in Colorado two years into their marriage. She remembered filling buckets from a similar well along a creek right in the middle of a small town near Estes Park. What was the name of that curious little village? Hauling drinking water had been an adventure then. Everything had been an adventure. They’d lingered in the luxury of a couple in love, taken with one another alone, unplugged from their work responsibilities, following their five-year plan flawlessly. The lack of children, intentional the first three years. Intentional. The thought sent a shudder through her. They’d wanted children, of course. By their timetable.

  God didn’t get the memo.

  Water. Yes. She needed water. And oxygen.

  Nick took his dirt bike home to exchange it for his mom’s truck. Or rather, his dad’s truck his mom used to keep the roofing business going. Nick was fatherless for the foreseeable future. Why hadn’t Emmalyn made that connection sooner? A young man in trouble. His dad unavailable.

  Boozie helped carry the meal to Emmalyn’s car. She’d included hot-out-of-the-oven apple crisp for each of them, too, despite Emmalyn’s protests.

  With the trunk and backseat still full of the only things Emmalyn felt worth rescuing from her previous life, the passenger seat provided the only hauling option. She tucked the plastic water jug on the floor where a passenger’s feet would go.

  “My one concession to plastic,” Boozie said. “It’s unfortunate, but unavoidable.”

  “How did your family get a name like ‘Unfortunate,’ Boozie? And what’s the story behind ‘Boozie’?”

  Now free of the load she carried, she clasped her hands together. “I wondered how long it would take you to ask.”

  “I didn’t want to be nosy.”

  “Somewhere many generations ago, a grump-a-saurus member of our family line decided Fortunato didn’t fit his personality or his statio
n in life.”

  “And no one changed it back?”

  “Personally, I love the irony. I’m one of the most blessed people I know. I’m not my name.”

  Emmalyn swung the car keys, considering.

  “And Boozie,” she said, “is not my name at all. It’s French. Bougie. B-o-u-g-i-e. Pronounced as if it has zhee for the last syllable. Nobody’s gotten that right since I entered kindergarten. So I let them adulterate it to Boozie. Makes me an interesting character, don’t you think?”

  One of many things.

  Boozie walked her to the driver’s side and gave her a quick hug. “Enjoy this process—bringing light to that cottage. The transformation is likely to take your breath away.”

  “Sometimes all I can see is the work ahead of me. Thanks.” She positioned herself behind the wheel, slid the key into the ignition, then opened her window and leaned out. “Hey, what does Bougie mean?”

  Already halfway to the door of The Wild Iris, the young woman twirled to respond. “Candle.” She courtsied.

  Fitting.

  “Or spark plug.”

  Bingo.

  The car smelled of warm apples and cinnamon as she drove the seven miles from town to Big Bay State Park. Big Bay Town Park connected to it. Between them, the parks shared two miles of sandy beach, Nick had told her. One of the best-kept secrets of the Midwest, he said. Emmalyn quickly found the artesian well with its sign inviting any who needed to come and drink. Or fill a plastic jug.

  She did both, surprised at how cold it was and at the faintly sweet flavor. How much would artesian spring water have cost her by the bottle back in Lexington?

  One other car occupied a spot in the parking lot. A dark green SUV with two kayaks on the roof and two bicycles on a rack at the rear of the vehicle. She hoped they hadn’t been out on the lake when the storm hit. And where were they now? There, under the shelter house, near the massive stone fireplace. An older couple—maybe in their sixties—sitting on the table part of two picnic tables with their feet on the seat part, facing each other. Talking. Couples are supposed to talk.