Seasons' End

by North, Will

  It was all there in the album, the mounted photos fading like Solveig’s memory: Robbie’s freighters unloading Quonset huts, steel Marsden mats used to make instant runways, and other materiel for the Aleutian Theater of War; ship captains and military officials with arms around each other’s shoulders, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their grinning faces, leaning against half-tracks hauling cargo from the docks. New construction everywhere.

  But there were no snapshots of those same boats “back-hauling” hundreds of uprooted, confused, terrified native Aleuts to dark, dank, forest-choked internment camps in Southeast Alaska where, as the territorial governor had feared, many had ultimately perished.

  Solveig, who was the daughter of Seattle-based fishing fleet owner Ole Sorensen, had been married to Robbie at that point for four years. In the midst of the Aleutian Campaign, their first son Harlan, then three, gained a baby brother, Justin. Years later, after Justin took the company’s helm, old Robbie would boast, “That was Bering Sea water in his mama’s belly, you know; floated in it nine months before he reached shore!”

  It was a salty amniotic fluid to which the young man would return all too soon. In 1973, not long after he came home unscathed from his tour of duty in Vietnam and once again took charge of the family shipping company, Justin was swept overboard and lost while struggling to secure deck cargo during a storm south of the Pribilof Islands.

  Old Robbie never recovered; his heart failed a year later.

  In his will, Robbie left the shipping company to his wife, Solveig. Day-to-day management was by then in the capable hands of Solveig’s nephew, Soren Sorensen, the youngest of Robbie’s captains but the only one with a business degree. Robbie’s elder son, Harlan, was named chairman, but apart from signing occasional legal documents, he had few duties. If Harlan was disappointed with these arrangements he never let on. For one thing, he was too busy becoming the Episcopal bishop of Seattle.

  ***

  THE SEA HELD no magic for Harlan Petersen. It took his father away for months at a time when he was a child and it drove a wedge between him and his younger brother when it became clear Justin would be the heir-apparent. By then, however, Harlan, armed with a Doctor of Divinity degree from Princeton’s Theological Seminary, had distinguished himself as a battlefield chaplain in Vietnam with two Purple Hearts. The church acknowledged his heroism by hastening his rise through the hierarchy, and soon Harlan had become one of the most senior teaching elders serving in Seattle. There was something deep within him that sought honor through service. An even moderately competent psychiatrist would have understood instantly that this was his way of distinguishing himself from his more colorful seagoing kid brother, and of seeking his father’s approval and affection, but by then it was too late: Robbie and Justin were both gone.

  It was in the church, and especially as bishop in the cathedral church of St. Mark’s on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, that Harlan found his place in the world. And it was his wife Barbara, whom he met at a service mission one night in Pioneer Square, who made that place feel like home. Though Barbara had never taken vows, she devoted her life to serving and saving the homeless, the disaffected, the hungry, the abused, the desperate of central Seattle. It was her street ministry that turned the cathedral’s weekly Compline Service into a haven for the lost and searching. Every Sunday evening throngs of them filled the cavernous gray stone church, packing the pews and sprawling across the floor and up the altar steps. At precisely 9:30 p.m., fifteen robed men filed into the nave and took their places in the northeast corner. There was a momentary pause and then, following a single note from a pitchpipe, they lifted their voices into plainsong liturgy, the soothing chants rising up, up into the shadows of the domed vault where each note hung in the air for what seemed like an eternity, as if immortal. And in that great, darkened space, for one echoing half hour, those who gathered there found a measure of peace.

  But as a mother, Barbara would be as evanescent as the fading notes of plainsong. When their only child, the girl they called “Pete,” was only ten, her mother sickened and succumbed to a virulent form of pneumonia contracted, her physician suspected, from one of her indigent converts.

  Harlan was devastated. But instead of drawing closer to his young daughter, instead of becoming the new center of her motherless world, he effectively orphaned her, retreating into the ritual certainties of his church. It was as if, after the death of his wife, his father, and his brother, he could not bear to risk giving his heart to his child for fear that she, too, might perish.

  It was Pete’s grandmother, Solveig, who stepped in to care for the girl. She moved into the bishop’s residence and saw to the child’s needs while her only son buried himself in church administration, never to emerge fully again. They barely spoke. It was Solveig’s decision to make her granddaughter heir to the shipping company Solveig herself wanted nothing to do with.

  During Colin’s morning walks with old Solveig that first summer, she never mentioned Harlan. Robbie was always “my husband” and Pete was always “my girl,” as if Harlan was lost to her as completely as her younger son, Justin.

  six

  AS EDWINNA’S ELDERLY CADILLAC RUMBLED up the hill toward his house, Colin looked over his shoulder at the woman who lay unconscious on the back seat. It seemed to him that this was how he’d always viewed Pete: at a remove. And from that distance, what did he really know about the woman he’d long cherished?

  At the beginning, in London and then later during summers at the beach, Pete had been the most vivid feature in his personal landscape. There was an incandescence about her that seemed to energize everyone who came within her orbit. He’d watched, mesmerized, as Pete organized potluck dinners around some exotic culinary theme, or led children on beach expeditions to find the baby crabs that sheltered under rocks at low tide, or organized driftwood fort-building projects, or invented contests, like who could amass the greatest fortune in washed-up sand dollars in ten minutes.

  Some time in December of that first year, though, when Colin was in Seattle learning a specialized surgical procedure at a leading veterinary clinic, he met another Pete, one he’d never known. She was home from college for Christmas break. They’d had dinner at a Thai restaurant on Broadway not far from the bishop’s residence. Afterward, they walked through Volunteer Park, the landscape garden designed by the sons of the creator of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted. Snowflakes danced in the dark but, typical of temperate Seattle, melted on landing, as if they’d been an illusion.

  To Colin, Pete seemed somehow deflated, a muted version of the woman he knew and loved from the summer.

  “Did you enjoy dinner?” he asked, taking an indirect route.

  “Yes, of course. Why?”

  “I don’t know, luv; you just seem different…distant.”

  “I’m the very same me as always, Colin.”

  “You’re not, you know…”

  She looked up at him. “Are you a vet or a shrink?”

  “Even a vet learns to observe his patients.”

  “I’m not your patient.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re my dearest friend. I care about you.” More than you will ever know.

  “And what is the doctor’s diagnosis?” They were peering into the grow-light illuminated windows of the park’s tropical plant conservatory, a fanciful glass and steel greenhouse modeled after the Crystal Palace, built in London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition.

  “Depression, I would say—though having done so, I have to confess that I am only qualified to diagnose it in dogs, cats, horses, pigs, goats, and the occasional blue parrot.”

  Pete chuckled and turned to lean her back against the glowing greenhouse window. She crossed her arms and smiled up at him, the light behind her wreathing her head like a halo.

  “I think you’re going to be a pretty damn good vet, Colin Ryan.”

  “Because my diagnosis is so brilliant?”

  “No, because you care and you p
ay very close attention. You’re a born observer.”

  “Thank you,” Colin answered, despite the fact that the passivity implicit in ‘observer’ made his heart hurt.

  “But your diagnosis is wrong,” she said, pushing off from the wall and walking out into the snow-laced darkness.

  Colin caught up with her. “So what is the correct diagnosis?”

  Pete faced him, her face solemn, almost pinched.

  “What you see is someone who’s marking time, okay?”

  “Okay, but I don’t understand.”

  Pete turned on her heel and trudged off. He followed.

  “Colin, look,” she said as they traced the curved lane down toward Federal Avenue East. “Much as you care for me—and I know you do and I cherish that and love you for it—all you know about me is what you saw in London and during two months at the beach. That’s—what—a fifth of my year? That beach is life-giving, and I’ll be honest: it’s all I’ve ever had of happiness. What do I have beyond that? A mother who is long dead and who was more devoted to the ‘down-trodden,’ as she called them, than to her own daughter. A father who loves his damned church more than his own kind, has never stopped struggling to ‘measure up,’ and never will, at least in his own eyes, and certainly not in mine. A boyfriend I’ve known all my life but who sometimes seems a stranger to me. That’s what I have. It’s what I’ve been dealt; it’s what’s left.

  “And let me tell you something, Mr. Diagnostician. What I have to get me through the year is what I get from the beach: the warmth, and the light, and the water, and the birds, and the friends, and the children, all of which is, like a squirrel’s acorns, food I store for the winter. Everything else, every day of my life away from the beach, every day I spend in the shadow of that damned cathedral and its bishop, is as dingy and gray as faded fucking churchman’s cassocks. College helps, yes, but it’s this I return to: lifeless days and nights in ‘the bishop’s residence’ when you feel like you’re holding your breath, waiting. Waiting for the summer. Waiting for the beach. Waiting to breath. So don’t even begin to tell me I’m ‘distant.’ You haven’t the slightest idea. And it’s only December!”

  Colin expected her to stalk off. Instead, she flung herself into his arms, and he held her there, not knowing whether the cold wetness of her cheekbone against his chin was melting snowflakes or freezing tears.

  He stood with her there, in an amber pool of light cast from an ornate streetlamp, for what was, for him, a magical eternity. Eventually, she released him and patted snow crystals, or perhaps tears, from his lapels, as if preparing him for a stage appearance. Then she took his arm and he walked her home.

  He heard her voice again now, as she lay across Edwinna’s back seat: You haven’t the slightest idea…

  ***

  “DON’T STOP. Keep going.”

  “What?”

  “Do it!”

  “I am not use to being addressed that way, young man,” Miss Edwinna snapped.

  “Get used to it; you got this one wrong. Drive past.”

  Edwinna pulled the Caddy into the shadow of a big cedar over the lip of the hill.

  “You didn’t see that, did you?” Colin demanded.

  “See what, you annoying beast?!”

  “I’m only annoying because I catch you being fallible.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Don’t, or won’t? Did you see that bicycle in the driveway…”

  “So there was a bicycle. So what?”

  “That bicycle belongs to Adam Strong.”

  “Pete’s kid? What’s he doing at your place?”

  “Well, Edwinna, I can think of two possible explanations. Either he has your prodigious gift and has figured this all out, or he hasn’t and he’s come to see me, as he often does, because his mother’s missing and because we’re friends.”

  “You think you’re so smart.”

  “No, I don’t Edwinna; but I also don’t think I can ‘see’ everything, like you. You didn’t see this.”

  “Point taken.”

  “Good. Now here’s Plan B.”

  “What Plan B?”

  “Plan A is shot. Pete’s not coming to my place with her son there. We agree about that?”

  A truculent pause.

  “We do.”

  “Plan B, therefore, is that you take her to your place.”

  “Don’t be an idiot; that’s right under Tyler’s nose!”

  “Which is the last place he’ll look.”

  Another pause.

  “Correct. Damn you.”

  Behind them, Pete groaned and, for a moment, fluttered her arms before her face, as if fending off something or someone.

  “Miss Edwinna, we need to get Pete to your place quickly.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “I’ll handle Young Adam.”

  Colin got out and retrieved his touring bike from the Caddy’s trunk. As he passed, the passenger side window ghosted down.

  “Colin.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I shall require your help.”

  “You’ve got it, Edwinna. I’ll be over to look after her as soon as I deal with Adam. I promise. Meanwhile, I imagine she’ll be viciously sick when she comes to. So be prepared.”

  “Young man…”

  “Oh, cut it out. We’re in this together.”

  The old woman sighed. “Yes. Yes, we are…Colin?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Thank you for loving her all these years.”

  Colin let his head go as if it were a dead weight. He stared at the ground. “Thank you for ‘seeing’ her, Edwinna. I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to her.”

  “Something has happened to her, dammit; we just don’t know what. I don’t see everything. I wish I did, and then sometimes I hope I won’t, if you know what I mean. And what I do see is getting unreliable now that I’m in my dotage. But don’t tell anyone, will you? They like to think I’m a witch.”

  “Your secret is safe with me, ma’am.”

  Edwinna punched the accelerator and the mossy Cadillac flew down the lane and disappeared into the thickness of the forest that clasped Colin’s narrow lane in a damp green embrace.

  seven

  COLIN COASTED HIS BIKE the hundred yards or so back to his own place. The single-story white house was unprepossessing from the road. He liked that, liked its simplicity. But it had a secret. Inside, it was open, airy, and sleekly contemporary. A kitchen of almost antiseptically white cabinets and gleaming stainless steel appliances opened to an airy dining and living area above which vaulted a soaring, cedar plank-clad ceiling. An overstuffed couch and two big easy chairs rescued from the Salvation Army store in Seattle and slipcovered in natural linen by an island seamstress sat opposite a fireplace faced in sand-colored limestone. Upon the mantle, in a glass case, sat a hand-made wooden model of a bluenose schooner made by an old client who’d bartered it to cover the cost of surgery for his aging border collie.

  But what caught the breath of anyone who walked through the front door was the wall of French doors at the rear and the panoramic view they provided of Puget Sound beyond. The house was perched on a bluff eighty feet above Tramp Harbor. On a clear day, you could see all the way to snow-cloaked Mount Baker, the dormant volcano a hundred miles or so north near the Canadian border.

  Adam had come around the side of the house and was on the deck in his usual position, searching the blue horizon to the north through the eyepiece of the powerful telescope Colin used to spot migrating pods of shiny black and white Orca whales. This morning, the air was milky with moisture, the strengthening sunlight filtered as if through a screen. Colin’s dog was sitting next to the boy and leaning against him at an angle. He’d named her “Eileen” for that very reason. She was an orphan, a rescue dog, and had clearly never received enough attention. Now she was making up for lost time. Thankfully, nobody minded her warm body, redolent of dog, pressed against theirs. Lean and leggy,
she was part golden retriever, part Afghan hound. He remembered learning at vet school that Afghans were brought to the United States from Europe by the Marx Brothers and bred by Zeppo. Eileen was goofy enough to have been one of Harpo’s unheralded sisters. The Afghan genes gave her a long, soft muzzle, Greta Garbo legs, and big feet that seemed disconnected at the joints, so that when she walked they slapped the floor as if she were wearing flip-flops. Her golden retriever genes gave her a sweet and gentle disposition. All you really needed to know about Eileen was that she was the kind of dog that chased her tail without ever quite comprehending it was a part of her anatomy. Colin called her his dumb blonde girlfriend. He was crazy about her.

  Eileen’s head snapped around when she heard him open the French doors and she rose and bounded across the deck, limbs akimbo, jumping and barking ecstatically—a deep and magisterial bark, the effect of which was ruined by the fact that it always ended with a ridiculous squeak, as if she’d been a lifetime smoker and was having a coughing fit. The fact that she invariably hopped on her forelegs while barking didn’t add to her majesty much, either.

  “Adam! What a pleasant surprise!” Colin said as he hugged the prancing dog. “I thought you all were going back to Seattle today.”

  “Mom’s missing.”

  The boy was still peering through the telescope, as if he might find her somewhere out there in the breeze-fretted channel.

  “Since when?”

  “Wasn’t at home when I got up. Wasn’t on the beach.”

  “Maybe she drove to town.”

  “Car’s in the driveway.”

  “What’s your Dad think?”

  “He was still in bed.”