Fly by Night

by Andrea Thalasinos

  Blaring beeps from the TV station’s weather alert made them all turn. Radar flashed as the image recalibrated, now showing dozens of blue and white fingers stretching east toward Lake Superior to gobble up the entire Bayfield Peninsula. Red-banded warnings crawled across the TV screen about blizzards, wind-chill, whiteout conditions.

  “Well?” Amelia looked up at Bryce.

  “Well what?”

  “Keep on going?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “Well, hell yeah, Am.” Bryce turned on her as if she’d lost her mind. “You’re not getting soft on me now—no way we’re turning back; we’d be driving back into the worst of it.”

  “He’s right, you know.” The attendant nodded somberly as he caught Amelia’s eye and then looked out the storefront window up at the sky. “Hittin’ the city limits just about now. Better leave if you’re headed east—roadworker guy left right before you got here.” He pointed toward the door like a hitchhiker. “Plows’r already out.”

  As the three of them studied the TV weather storm coverage, Amelia’s stomach jumped. She looked at her phone, nothing from TJ.

  “Is there cell phone reception in Bayfield?” she asked the attendant.

  “Ooo—can be pretty spotty up there even when the sun’s shining. Lotsa hills, that old Iron Range is up there, you step twenty feet, your bars disappear and you’re in a dead zone.”

  It made her feel better to think that maybe that’s why TJ hadn’t called.

  Just then a white Jeep Grand Cherokee with Wisconsin plates whipped into the parking lot just shy of bumping into the storefront’s plate-glass window. Amelia noticed the same rust pattern along the bottom edge of both doors like a Rorschach inkblot.

  “Here’s Darlene.” The attendant motioned to the window and then stepped out from behind the register, past the roll of Lottery Quick Picks and 5-hour Energy drink displays. “She’ll update ya ’bout the roads.”

  A dream catcher dangled from the woman’s rearview mirror. A youngish woman hopped down, cigarette dangling from her lips, an unzipped camo-patterned sweatshirt with hood hanging off her shoulders, a Packers T-shirt underneath. She had long dark hair strewn as if not having had a comb-through in days, not a stitch of makeup as she trudged toward the door. The woman took one long pull from the cigarette, yanked open the door, and ditched the butt into a snowbank without breaking stride. Amelia nudged Bryce.

  “BFW.” She whispered as the woman entered.

  “Too young,” Bryce said, his eyebrows rising slightly as he checked the woman out. They played this game: BFW meant Bryce’s Future Wife. And then there was AFH, which for some reason was always funnier.

  The woman stomped snow off on the rubber mats by the front door.

  “Hey, Darlene.”

  “Hey, Kev.” She rushed toward the soft drinks, slowing ever so slightly past Bryce before opening the refrigerator door and grabbing a couple of Red Bulls.

  “These folk’re heading out to Bayfield.”

  The woman approached the register, the cans tucked under one arm.

  “If you ain’t leaving now better get a room.” She croaked out a smoker’s laugh. “Picking up Grandma before all hell breaks loose.”

  Bryce stood up straighter, looked at Amelia, and raised his eyebrows, his head tipped toward the door.

  The woman’s face was deeply lined with that leathery look that comes with hard living, too much sun, bad luck, and bouts of heavy drinking to make it all feel better.

  Amelia strolled up to the storefront window. To the west the clouds had already changed. Thicker, lower, and an even darker navy blue. Everything was still. No birds flying, even cars looked quiet.

  “Looks freaky,” Amelia said to Bryce as they headed toward the door for the last leg of the drive.

  “You wanna see freaky, stick around,” the woman called after them, croaking out a laugh.

  It was different from a New England sky—rawer, like the atmosphere of another planet or unexplored region of Earth. The clouds had traded celestial citizenship for earthly residence as they continued to lower to encase houses on the steep hills. The fear in her gut was exhilarating. It always was when diving in a part of the world she’d never been; where the angle of sun, soil, and water color are so unlike anything she’d seen that it’s never really clear if they’re friend or foe. Her eye could never take in enough differences, always teased by thoughts that these might be the last scenes she’d see.

  The edge of the storm pushed up against Duluth. Snow had begun to fall unbroken by the slightest breeze; silent, gentle, and seemingly harmless all the while portending that something else was on its way. Nature’s early-warning system for all who knew to listen: fly home to roost in the thickest of fir branches, burrow into the deepest dens or under the bushiest of evergreens. Cars parked along the street were already heaped like frosted cupcakes from a day-old storm. Some buried mid-door by the efforts of snowplows to clear the street, looking as if their liberation depended on nothing short of heavy equipment or the arrival of an early spring.

  “Let’s hit it, Am,” Bryce said as he brushed flakes from the front and back windows and then finished filling the wiper fluid.

  * * *

  Highway 13 to Bayfield narrowed to one lane. The surface was snow covered, making it difficult to determine the lanes. Bryce slowed to 30 mph.

  “How you doing?” Bryce asked.

  “Excited, nervous.” She glanced at him. “A bit freaked out.”

  “Me too.”

  Private thoughts and feelings began to seep through. Luckily Bryce was one to respect long silences. It was code on dive projects. Chatty nonstop talkers were never hired back or else sustained a direct “talking to.” The mournful solace of a sunset, the call of a baby seal waiting for its mother to come back with food did not require comment as the limitless ocean caused them to sink into the deepest recesses of beautiful loneliness. Lost in thought, crews would go hours sitting side by side on deck without speaking. The wonder and tragedy of seaside life demanded silence.

  Bryce glanced into the rearview mirror.

  “Look.”

  Amelia turned. A low-hanging storm front was roaring toward them, as thick as a shelf, it tailgated like it knew where they were headed.

  Twinges of adrenaline and longing made her want to park the Jeep and scramble down into one of the steeper ravines. Hunker down, let the storm catch them as they were tucked and sheltered under a bevy of pine boughs, to be in the storm but not of it. To smell the white ozone of its arctic heart all the while hiding with one cheek against the rotting fecundity of autumn’s burnished grasses and fallen leaves, burrowed in alongside white-tailed deer curled up on the safety of the forest floor.

  The houses along the highway looked cozy. Their dim interior lighting and smoke fires evoked sadness and yearning that reminded her of the little cottage in Port Jefferson with its wood-burning stove where she’d holed up with Alex as a toddler. Weathering a few hurricanes and nor’easters, they’d hide under a pile of covers from the sounds of rattling rafters. Back then, all of their belongings smelled of wood smoke. Even after they’d moved up to Cornell for graduate school, she’d pull out something that had been boxed up and the smell of smoke set off a longing that she never knew what to do with—a bottomless hollow for which there seemed to be no antitoxin as one might have for the sting of an Australian box jellyfish. Now life felt so slipshod, so pasted together, so fly-by-night.

  The coastal sections of Highway 13 on Lake Superior were windswept with sculpted snowdrifts with smooth-edged grooves and curves resembling the shoulders of angels. Some reached the Jeep’s wheel wells.

  Bryce shifted into lower gear and powered through. “Gets worse we might have to get out and dig.”

  She tried to phone TJ again but there was no service.

  As the road curved, Amelia held up her phone and saw two bars. She spoke in double time while they held out. “Hi, TJ, we’re getting closer to Bayfield, was hoping to hear from y
ou. Gosh, it’s beautiful up here; I had no idea how beautiful. Sorry to keep calling, was hoping to connect. Do you guys have moose, bears—” She continued talking as if to him.

  “Or polar bears,” Bryce called into the phone. “Wish we’d brought a dogsled, looks like we might need one.”

  She laughed.

  “On our way up to the property, was hoping to meet you up there. Jeeze, I feel like a stalker calling so many times, but if you’re in town and can make it there, though it looks like a storm is coming, would love to see you. Even if you can’t, give me a call and maybe we can make it another time. My, it’s breathtaking up here! Roads are sort of rough, so I understand if you don’t want to come out, but maybe we could come see you at your place.”

  They crawled through each tiny coastal town without witnessing a soul, the dim interior glow of house lights the only evidence it wasn’t a ghost town. An eerie stillness marked each town. The uneasiness was thrilling. As the intermittent scent of birch fires filled the car, she imagined her father. So often her father would remark how the aroma of a wood fire was so comforting, though they’d never had a fireplace.

  Amelia touched the window with the back of her hand to gauge the outside chill.

  Who was this woman her father had married? Why hide such an important part of what proved to be a short life? Had he lived longer would he have come clean? Or else lived to be a hundred without saying a word until that e-mail from TJ?

  She glanced into the snowy woods through her father’s eyes, searching them: an ocean-loving city boy trying to become a woodsman in the far north. Maybe that’s what the Navy and Cold War antics had done to him, made him want to become someone else. Perhaps such identity fraud had caught up with him once he’d realized that swapping one life for another doesn’t work.

  Amelia remembered him stepping out on Thanksgiving, Christmas, thinking it didn’t make sense. He’d claim there was a mechanical breakdown in the presses that required his attention, only he’d leave home and return sooner than it would have taken to drive to the plant, much less make repairs. At eight years old she’d noticed. If Penelope had, she didn’t say.

  “Where’s Daddy going?” she’d ask as her mother wrestled to baste a turkey on Thanksgiving.

  “I don’t know, Amelia,” she’d snap back. “But stop being a pain in the ass and go set the table.”

  “I already did!”

  “Then go find something else to do or I’ll find something for you.”

  Remembering back, there was a melancholy and restlessness about him on holidays.

  “I’ll be back, Pen,” he’d say to his wife on Christmas Eve. “They called me to do a press-check, on the way home I’ll call the Boston crowd,” which was his Boston family that he’d call from pay phones, claiming it was cheaper.

  “Can I come?” Amelia asked.

  He’d looked at her in an odd way. Not angry, not even annoyed by the question. She’d sense him mulling it over.

  “Not this time,” he’d say. “A broken press might take a while to fix,” he’d say.

  “I’ll bring my book,” she’d said. “I’ll be so quiet you won’t even know I’m there and this way I can say ‘Hi’ to Aunt Athena.”

  Then he’d bend down, engulf her in his arms, and squeeze like he’d never see her again or else was counting on her being the anchor that would allow him to drift only so far in the current.

  “Dad.” She’d laugh. “I can’t breathe.” She’d fake being crushed. He’d let go, laughing. “Please let me come?” she’d ask, always feeling unsettled when he’d go off alone.

  “I’ll be good,” she’d say, clasping her hands together in that begging way kids do as she’d feel him teetering on the verge of saying yes though he never did.

  “You’re always good, Amelia, always,” he’d say and kiss the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her hair. “There’s nothing bad about you, nothing.” He’d then smooth her hair with his hand as he set her down. “Tell your mom I’ll be back before dinner.” And he always was.

  It was sadder now as she thought back. Divided and bi-located for most of his adult life, Ted Sr. had inhabited two worlds that bore no connection. Somewhere, he’d become fragmented and maybe even lost. But as a girl, how could she have known?

  * * *

  They passed a stand of old-growth pines that were probably much smaller when her father had lived here in the late 1950s. Just last week was her father’s birthday. He would have turned eighty-six. How could he have a son and not tell her? Yet she’d done the same to Chris Ryan. Never told him how thirty-four years ago she’d had a son. Her stomach sank, with indictment, stunned as it hit her.

  “Hey Bryce?”

  “Hey yeah?” he answered as the GPS flag indicated they were approaching Bayfield.

  “Haven’t I done the same thing as my father? I mean Alex not knowing his father?”

  He glanced at her.

  “No.”

  “How not so?”

  “Because Ryan was a dick who used you. Sounds like your dad loved this woman, I’m guessing, but it all got mixed up. We don’t know.”

  “Yeah, but I never told Ryan, I never gave him the option of knowing Alex.” Here she’d been feeling angry at her father but how easily she’d done it too.

  “Hey—it was your best judgment at the time. He might have messed with Alex’s head.”

  She’d always wondered since the day she’d parked by Chris Ryan’s house, stumbling on the little domestic scene. Fear had made her stay away, fear that he might try and take Alex. Here he was a professor, with a house, a wife, a family and she had the Fish Market.

  “And remember, you did tell Alex when he was twelve,” Bryce reminded her. “Told him you’d look up the fucker if he’d wanted to meet him.”

  She laughed at how he said it. It was true. She’d said all of that and meant it though Alex had so far never taken her up on it or at least admitted that he had. Yet the sting of similarity ate at her the closer they came to Bayfield.

  And while the dead can’t answer questions, often the living share even less.

  “Ah ha.” Bryce pointed to her phone on the dashboard. “Now we’re talking.” There was a full signal.

  Amelia phoned again. “Hi TJ, your stalker calling again.” She looked at Bryce and smirked. “I’m almost to the property and wanted to know if I should wait for you there.”

  The GPS flag indicated they’d arrived in Bayfield. As they descended a steep ridge the harbor opened up, revealing a city embedded into the surrounding hills. The entire town looked bleached white with snow against the backdrop of gunmetal clouds.

  “Looks like Camden, Maine.”

  Bryce rubbed his stomach and nodded. “It is a little déjà vu–ish.”

  The docks and the lakefront were winterized in that nautical way mariners secure a waterfront.

  “There’s Madeline Island.” Her finger pointed from the GPS to the land mass across the bay. The only movement was a large boat she presumed to be a ferry steaming toward it. The ferry’s hull crashed through what looked like icy chunks of rapidly freezing water, leaving an open trail in its wake.

  They passed through a downtown area lined with Victorian-era homes. The GPS directed a right turn up a steep hill. The arrival “flag” was pinned at the top.

  “Shit, it figures.” Bryce mumbled a laugh.

  As they turned, the Jeep’s wheels began to spin.

  “Come on, baby.” She pumped her body forward as if to help the uphill climb.

  As they reached the summit, both sat back and took a breath.

  “This place has got some serious weather.” Bryce braked at the first red metal fire sign that had matching numbers.

  “That’s it.”

  Bryce tried to roll down the window but it was frozen. He banged on it until it loosened and opened. “Honey, we’re home,” he called.

  “Oh please.”

  In the driveway stood a two-foot snow wall created by the sno
wplow. A metal mailbox twisted like a corkscrew leaned over.

  “Park on the street?” she suggested.

  “Road’s too narrow.”

  They looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Let’s take it like we own it, Am,” Bryce said.

  He downshifted, revved the engine, and traversed the frozen barrier.

  They pulled partway in and stopped.

  “Think I’ll leave it ri-i-ght here.” He turned off the engine. “Close enough to rock it out.”

  She felt Bryce studying her profile as she watched the gathering clouds.

  “You know, Am.” He paused. “If it turns as ugly as they’re saying we might have to find a hotel.”

  She shot him a look.

  “Especially if he doesn’t call.”

  “He’ll call.” Her voice was soft with hope.

  The dashboard temperature gage said eleven, Fahrenheit. It was twenty-eight when they’d left Duluth. There was no sign of a house, tire tracks, or any evidence of a structure; it looked like a parcel of vacant land.

  “Let’s walk it in.” Bryce pushed open the car door. The hinge crunched. He stepped down. Snow reached the tops of his boots. “Shit, it’s deeper than I thought.”

  Pushing open the door, she hopped down too. Snow tumbled into her boots as a gust of wind blew her ponytail straight up like an exclamation point.

  “Damn, it’s cold.” She popped up her hood and reached into her pockets for mittens. “Shit.” She’d left them on the kitchen table in the apartment. Pulling up her hands, she balled up her fingers in the sleeves for warmth.

  Snow spilled over the tops of her boots, packing her ankles like beer cans in a cooler.

  “Oh great,” she said. In moments her feet would be cold. Snow would melt against the warmth of her body, canceling out the insulation value of wool.

  Wet feet on the advancing edge of a storm was dangerous. Hypothermia was an odd thing. It came on in unexpected ways. She’d once seen a diver become disoriented and almost die in warm tropical waters.