Afloat

by Jennifer McCartney

  ‘Bell,’ he says.

  We both wait.

  ‘Bell. I’m an old man now. I need to make things right.’ He takes an envelope slowly from his corduroy jacket, handing it to me, and it is old. Old stamps and a very old postscript. I don’t understand and feel panic – wondering if I’ve been left behind again.

  ‘There were two good reasons I kept this, at the beginning,’ he says. ‘You were sad and I wanted to help. And I never heard from Blue again. You remember her? I thought if you and I were alone, we’d be alone together, it would be fair. And after that, it was too late.’

  The envelope is addressed to me. ‘It came early,’ he says. ‘To the restaurant. While I was reading the paper.’

  There is no return address, but the handwriting is his. A letter from Bryce.

  Rummy’s eyes look wet and suddenly I am not the only one who has been haunted by what happened that summer. Across borders and time, I have lived wondering why he left me with no goodbye, and Rummy has lived knowing he denied me an answer, or at least some kind of explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Something heavy in me is cut from its moorings and I feel buoyant, light and light-headed all at once.

  ‘I thought he never wrote,’ I say.

  ‘He wrote you,’ Rummy says softly. ‘How could he not?’

  I am now holding an envelope containing a letter addressed to me written fifty years ago by a man who I knew for a few months and who has spent most of his life in prison. It is wonderful. Even now, after everything, there are still things that surprise me in this life.

  ‘I thought it was best for you then,’ Rummy tells me. ‘To think he was gone. To have me instead. I kept it for your benefit, and mine.’

  He pauses, embarrassed.

  ‘But afterwards, it was too late. When I realized it wasn’t a standard break-up letter.’

  He bows his head – the top of his skull showing pale and white underneath the hair. After a moment he looks up, wiping his cheek.

  ‘What if it was a confession? What if he was asking you for help? What if keeping the letter had caused it all to happen? I’d lied to the police, I’d lied to you. I was terrified.

  ‘I never opened it,’ he adds.

  It’s true, the letter is sealed. It could be a grocery list or a request to forward his mail.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘It wasn’t addressed to me,’ he says sheepishly.

  But it is here now. There is a brief moment where I wonder if there is a need to read it at all, if I could put it in the kitchen wastebasket under the sink and be content knowing of its existence. But of course I cannot do this – whether a confession or simply a hello, I must know. Will he mention the murder? The stamp has a Christmas theme, dark night with an angel and a halo and I remember all my island prayers which I believed to have been unanswered until this moment. The envelope is light and thin, and the letters are small, so small:

  Bell (STAFF)

  The Tippecanoe

  Mackinac Island, MI

  49757

  The letter is dated 14th October, and the pen is black and permanent, each alphabet character in the address separate from the last. It has been printed with no clue as to whether it was written in haste.

  I tear open my letter and begin to read. It is very short.

  Dear Bell,

  I spoke with my father on the phone yesterday and please understand I had to come to Grayling. I don’t think I’ll be back – would have left you a note but couldn’t find a pen. Tell V. I quit. Odette took a bunch of pills at my apartment – I guess she’d been sleeping there to get away, but I’m going to put it right. I wish you could have met her, but it’s all gone to hell now, and I guess it doesn’t matter. Most likely I won’t be talking to you for a while. Hopefully you’ll be able to come and visit me though. If you want. But I understand if you feel you can’t. I’m all torn up over this, the past and future, but I think I’m doing the right thing for my family. I’m going to fix everything. I’ll wait to hear back from you.

  Your angel (wearing tights)

  B

  Rev 19: 11–13 (if something happens, please tell them I had to)

  The verses are from Revelations, and I wonder if he didn’t believe in salvation after all. The idea of goodness floating just above our heads, waiting for us to ascend. Waiting for us to sin in order to save others from something worse.

  I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows, but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.

  Delivered after fifty years, the letter is not too late and I tell Rummy so. Rummy looks at me, his entire life dedicated to telling the real and true story – using everyone else’s voice but his own. I wonder if his calling became more urgent over the years when my unopened letter was hidden away in his conscience.

  The mail always finds a way, I guess.

  ‘Neither rain nor sleet nor snow,’ I say quietly.

  Crying might be the thing to do, but it’s too long ago, too old now to mourn the decisions of others.

  ‘Guess I can pass on now, knowing I did the right thing.’

  He pauses for a moment, looking at the letter I am still holding tightly.

  ‘I always wondered why he did it. I suppose that explains it, more or less.’

  I imagine the headline in the Sun, the one which should have been printed all those years ago.

  Vigilante Justice Stops Father’s Reign of Terror.

  Distraught Son Avenges Sister’s Suicide

  Bryce’s last free decision in this world had been an honorable one it seems, though Trainer had been wrong about his craving for martyrdom – he never told anyone the reason why. Until now. Bryce chose to avenge his past, and in doing so forfeited his future. I believe I will see him again. He’ll have to wait in line after Alan, of course.

  ‘When did he get out?’ Rummy asks.

  ‘He’s still in.’

  I lay the letter on the table and remove my earpiece, leaning back in my chair exhausted.

  ‘I’m done now,’ I say. ‘I guess we’ve both learned something.’

  Taking out his own earpiece he puts them both in his pocket.

  ‘Thank you,’ I add.

  He nods, relieved, and we are quiet for a moment. ‘It’s a crime to get this old.’

  But I don’t know which one of us it is that speaks.

  Moving to the front door to wait for Erik, the air is colder now, but still there is no storm. Rummy does not shiver in his thin jacket, he looks comfortable, warm. Across the street the old-fashioned lamppost suddenly flickers, bright. Only the best St. Paul neighborhoods are graced with these romantic relics from the past and I realize I’ve earned this neighborhood, this house, my expensive health-care policy, my good bottles of whisky and each scar on my body. But I know enough to value my sadness too – knowing I’d trade this future to have the possibilities of that summer back. Poverty, youth, water, blind faith, and the one man who lived it with me. It was the beginning of a new century then, before the weather had taken over, the skies yellowed, before New York and everything after. Before the clashes of fundamentalists within our own borders, before my sickness and Alan’s death.

  I think of the lighthouse suddenly, not Round Island, the other one. White and solid in the lake, its electric signal too far away to save the ship that broke in two, like a heart. I wonder about those twenty-nine men of the Edmund Fitzgerald and how long they stayed afloat, treading water, believing someone would come before they drowned. I wonder how long any man can stay afloat on his own, alone, before giving in.

  Headlights advance towards us from the end of the street.

  ‘How old is Erik?’ I ask.

  ‘Forty-nine this April. Why?’

  I add the yea
rs slowly in my head, but I already knew. As old as Mackinac. We look at one another.

  ‘Found me when he was eighteen,’ Rummy says. ‘Aileen and I never had kids.’

  ‘Remember the moose?’ I ask at last.

  ‘As real as I am,’ Rummy says.

  He taps his jacket pocket containing the two earpieces with everything we’ve recorded.

  ‘Some good stuff here, Bell.’

  A huge Ford Chippewa with Alberta plates turns into my driveway, the stereo loud. The windows are rolled up, his son nothing but shadow beyond the tinted glass. I don’t know what he looks like, I can’t picture what’s behind the glass.

  With a smile that makes him look twenty again Rummy asks, ‘So, Bell, where do you get virgin wool?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a joke.’

  ‘Fine. I have no idea. Where do you get virgin wool?’

  Rummy turns and waves to his car, then gives me a hug. I breathe in the scent of him, his sweet and gentle odor. He walks to the passenger door and before he gets in the car he says, ‘Ugly sheep.’

  I am still laughing as they drive away.

  At 10:05 the Virgin Mary is tired. Her right hand angled down, palm up, her left points towards the heavens. Two glasses stand empty on the table, both marked with lips, the glow from their contents long faded. Bell is cold, her knees and shoulders stiff, her stomach empty, she feels wonderful. Between the two of them, only Mary knows that he is horribly late.

  10:07.

  The Virgin’s hand scoops time upwards, collecting.

  From a cloudy orange container on the kitchen counter Bell takes three white pills, then one yellow from a dish on the counter, but she doesn’t remember what they are for. She is sure she isn’t supposed to have been drinking.

  In the living room she sits slowly in her reclining chair, the bottom worn threadbare from the past year where she’s slept every night, and she arranges the yellow blanket around her, tucking the edges underneath her body so she is wrapped like a cocoon. Like a dead sailor before they throw them out to sea, Bell imagines happily, one stitch through their nose to make sure they are dead. She goes to sleep. Her last thought before drifting off is that it was nice to see Rummy again, after all this time. She dreams contentedly of a masked avenger, a man on a horse who reveals his pink face only to her. Slowly then, for the first time in fifty years, she dreams of nothing at all.

  In the open sky the black-yellow swirl of cloud is smaller now, the government employees at the digital radar information building on West Avenue recording its dissipation from their screens. The data is relayed to the environmental emergency response team in the basement of city hall, and a call is made. The siren gives five long blasts from its location in the low squat building next to United Hospital. The city has survived.

  First reports indicate St. Paul received eight inches of precipitation over a six-hour period, initially rain, then hail, measuring five inches in diameter. An RWP enthusiast is reported to have drowned in the contaminated waters of the Mississippi while filming the storm. The year-old headstone of Althea Morris in St. Mary’s cemetery was damaged by a falling tree. Traffic accidents were numerous, and fatal.

  The weather helicopters film the remnants of a pile-up involving nineteen cars north of the city, and from the sky the metal shines dull under white spotlights. Three of the license plates are out of state, and one is from Canada. A brown loafer lies in the road, absent of a body. As the temperature warms the hailstones begin to melt, the lights from each ambulance burning red, white, and blue, reflecting on the wet interstate.

  The interlodge lifted at the Sushi Palace, Anna is already on her way. The unanswered phone leading her to imagine her mother wandering the streets during the storm, looking for friendships and relatives that can no longer speak to her. Imagining her past is reality.

  She never knew what her mother was preparing for this morning.

  Bell’s journals lie open on the kitchen table, her last correspondence from a long ago lover beside them. In the morning the envelope and letter will be misplaced, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

  These are her monuments to those many summer months. Built out of bicycle grease and pine gum and horseshit and the paper frail dreams of youth.

  Your right hand, palm inward, thumb out, is the state of Michigan.

  Mackinac Island is off the tip off your middle finger. You can imagine how small it is compared to the rest of your body, the rest of the world.

  She makes the journey sometimes as she lies awake in her chair, more often these days than before. With a carton of icecream or a photograph album or a particular article in the newspaper or with the certain slant of the sun at midday, Bell will stop for an afternoon or an evening, take the ferry over and watch everything coming closer, the houses getting clearer, and see if she can spot the carriages before the ferry docks with the low sound of its horn.

  If she stays until the evening, it is to watch the sun set in the west on the straits of Mackinac, on the lighthouse, on the rocks, on the wide white building called the Tippecanoe. Everything glows pink, gold.