by Mary Emerick
Six
Just as spring began to loosen winter’s grip, sneaking past it on cat feet, just when the sedges in the estuary turned green overnight, the bay itself losing its last layer of ice, Isaiah returned from outside where he always met the barge. He held a piece of paper with writing on it as familiar as my own. His mouth was set in a grim line.
“Trouble up the coast,” he said.
I had learned long ago that lives changed in simple ways. A trickle of water from the sky becomes a torrent, a puff of breeze, a gale. A man falls from the sky and is gone forever, the skin of his airplane collapsing into land or sea. Like the games of chess that the clients played when weather pinned them down in the lodge, one tiny move could mean disaster. “Who is gone?” I asked.
“He’s alive,” Isaiah told me. I didn’t have to ask who he meant. He sank into the scarred leather armchair, his face deep in midafternoon shadow. “Got jumped by a bear in Enchantment Bay, but he lived.”
Our uneasy truce with the bears had been broken. I had always thought that the bears tolerated us because they knew what was in our hearts. Bread and butter. We took their highways, our feet sinking deep in the moss where generations of bears had passed, each stepping in the same places. We fished the same streams, dipping our nets beneath the waterfall to catch sockeye as they jumped skyward. We hunted the same valleys, filling our buckets with blueberries that tasted like sunshine. Even though we heard the stories of the unlucky, it was easy to believe that we were somehow special and that the rules did not apply to us.
I struggled to make sense of it. It was hunting season again, early spring, when the bears emerged ravenous from their dens. They scoured the avalanche chutes for early green-up and wandered the estuaries, easy targets. Bears were everywhere, grouchy from lack of food. It was when we had to be the most careful of all.
“Enchantment Bay? But he didn’t hunt the bear tunnels. He wouldn’t, even though the biggest bears lived there. He told me so.”
“He never would,” Isaiah agreed.
“So why was he there? How badly is he hurt?” And what mistake did he make, I wondered, because for this to happen, something must have gone wrong. There had been a blunder, some misstep, even though it was impossible to imagine. A client, missing a shot? That happened all the time. That was why Sam was there with the backup rifle, to take the killing shot. But in Enchantment Bay? Never in Enchantment Bay.
Isaiah wrenched his boots off his feet and moved them close to the woodstove. He took his time about it, carefully positioning first one, and then the other. He regarded them for a moment and then moved them again.
“Ernie said something about a timber sale in that bay,” he said finally. “Cruisers were in there, something like that.” He glanced at Birdman and some spark flew between them, some old understanding forged by years of friendship.
“Tell me everything,” I said. I still could not believe it. My father had been more like a bear than anyone. He stepped in their steps, sometimes even slept in their beds for quick naps. He sat for hours with binoculars trained on bears as they splashed in the salmon streams. He could not have been surprised by a bear. And the trees, what if the loggers took all the trees? The tunnels would disappear, dredged and filled in to make a landing for the barge. The clear waters of the river would be muddied by boat engines. The salmon would circle, confused by the changes to their map. Loggers would swarm like ants, taking out every tree marked with light blue cruiser’s paint.
The bay would be scalped like I had seen in the woods near town, lighter patches of impenetrable alder taking the place of ancient trees. It would take more lifetimes than we had in us for the big trees to come back.
Ernie had cataloged all the details and relayed them to Isaiah with the grim amusement of the bored. Mangled leg, face scored by claws. I knew there had to be things he did not see that the bear had left behind: Anger. Disappointment. Betrayal.
“Ernie didn’t know anything else, and he won’t be back this way for a month, maybe longer. The trees may all be cut by then.”
“Maybe they have enough trees,” I said. How many could they need? There were so many, enough to build a million houses.
“They never have enough,” Birdman said.
“Want to go back there?” Isaiah asked. “We’ll make the old flat-bottom boat go if we have to, if that’s what it takes.”
I shook my head, and they let me go to my room. I could hear them talking as I sat there watching the rain streak the windows. I could not go back there despite what had happened, and Isaiah and Birdman knew it. They had escaped old selves too. They both had tales of ill-fitting lives they had shrugged on like too-small coats after the war. Everyone back home was still the same, they said, while they had irretrievably changed. Alaska, they said, was where you went when there was no other place left to go. Don’t ever go back, they said, forgetting their promises. Once you leave, make it for good.
I thought about my father on many nights after that. Not the man who had stormed through the lodge, blazing with a fire I could not only see but feel, a man who could burn us, but the man who had taken me to Enchantment Bay the year I was ten. That memory was almost enough to make me go back. I lay in the single bed where another woman had once dreamed, her wet face in a sagging pillow, listening to the creak of ropes as the floathouse strained against the tide. Some of Honey’s sadness seemed to stick to the plywood walls, and it was at night that I most often thought about Never Summer Bay.
I read my mother’s letter over and over, trying to understand it. It was like a swift river of words without any shallow place to catch a breath.
Dear Winnie:
I write to you from the place you left. Do you remember it? Are you ever coming back, do you think of us in this bay? Nothing here is the same. Nothing here has been the same for a long, long time. It all began to change the day your father went up the coast to Enchantment Bay. The forest has swallowed him up in its big teeth. By now you have heard the story and what happened to him.
I do not know this gray-faced ghost, who needs his sheets changed from his night sweats, who wakes screaming, who needs me so much. He whines, he sobs, he clings to me. His gnarled hands, grasping at me, pulling, insisting. Juice, water, hot tea, this is not hot enough. Go do it again. Then there are the days, the horrible days, the days he sits staring out the window, his face wet.
Winnie, sometimes I think that I need you. Then sometimes I think that it is best if you don’t come.
The loggers, he says. He cannot forget or forgive. He is consumed by it, the casual strike of saw against wood.
Of course they will not stop with the trees in Enchantment Bay, he says. They will move farther down the coast in a unstoppable advance. They will cut them all, cut them skinless and bleeding, gather them in huge rafts and send them south. We will see them as they pass the entrance to our bay, bundles of logs floating by. A forest in the water. Sometimes I think that you must stay far away from here.
I tell him if he wants to die, he must do it himself. But I know he will not. Another thing he has lost is his courage. He says that I need to be the one. This is the only thing he has ever asked of me, he says. If I truly love him, I will do it.
On those days, those rainy, dark days, I think of how I could kill him. A kitchen knife, slid between his ribs like butter. Rat poison, mixed with his food. A shrimp pot, cast deep in the ocean, a simple cut of the rope. There are a hundred ways to kill someone.
But I don’t do any of them. Instead I bring him gifts from the forest that remains. A clump of orange fungus, a heart-shaped burl, mountain goat hair. I hope the forest will heal him. I hope that the things I bring to him will return the man I love to me. Each day I go farther and farther, past where I have ever been before, trying to find the cure.
He grows angry. “Why won’t you do this one thing for me?” he asks. He ticks off ways: A pillow over the face. A hand pressing down in the bath. Not eating is too slow, he says. It has to be fast, he wan
ts it over. Don’t pay attention if I struggle, he warns me. Just keep doing it.
You need to choose, he says. You get to pick which way you want it.
Will you do it today? He asks. Is today the day?
No, I say. Not today.
Tomorrow?
Yes. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow it will start again.
I cannot talk to Sam; his face is turned away to see his idol brought to this. Sam does not want to know. He works instead, patching up things, long hours so he does not have to face this. Sam wishes for the old days even more than I do. He is lost too, a boy in a man’s clothes.
I cannot share this with anyone but you.
The whales are back in the bay. I have waited for them for so long. It seems years since I last saw them. Their rounded backs are like big gray stones that I could step on, a pathway over the ocean. I can hear them breathe, a long sigh. I can see them breathe, a cold smoke.
Nothing changes here, not ever. The bears come and go with the salmon runs. The spring snow falls sweet and slow, melting in the warm breath of the forest. Nobody comes to the bay; it is only us with our old wounds.
I am like a seashell, curled up in a spiral. I am bloodless, drained, a pretty thing on a shelf. I listen and I try to understand. Soon I will know what the whales are trying to tell me.
I thought that I would never send this to you. But I want you to know what has happened to us. There is so much more I want to tell you, but it is too late now. The barge is coming. Ernie doesn’t like to wait. The tide, he says. The tide is my mistress, he says, and laughs.
I long for you, Winnie, the days skin to skin, the days when you loved me. Come back. Do not come back.
I do not know which to choose.
There was no signature, and the words crowded the page as if she were eager to be done with them. Reading the letter, I saw what I had not before. The boundaries of mother and daughter had never been clearly defined. Instead my mother had wandered all over the map, taking me with her.
I had loved my father at times, despite the flashes of anger in the night, like lightning, unexpected and terrible, but gone the next day, nearly forgotten. Wasn’t this the way life was? An avalanche could sweep down from the cliffs, sweeping a hillside clean of trees, but we grew used to the shorn mountain in a matter of days. The bears tussled and fought in the salmon streams, but the next day they pawed fish from the same water, shoulder to shoulder.
Reading the letter by flashlight, I felt a tug to my heart. Tomorrow would be the day that I would go back to Never Summer Bay. I would save them both. But then in the morning the eagles began their shrieks as the first brush of light touched the windows. Isaiah hummed in the kitchen, fixing cowboy coffee over the propane burner. On shore Birdman would be in the greenhouse because he said that being among young growing things made him hopeful. A cap of rain and fog lay tight over the bay. “What’s the plan for today?” Isaiah would ask, smiling, and I would think: One more day. I deserve one more day of this. One more day with two old men who allow me to believe that all the anger in the world could be swallowed and never spit back out. One more day where I could decide who I was going to be—not Winnie, the girl from Never Summer Bay, but someone else, someone who never had to hide, ever again. And all of the one more days added up like flakes of snow added up to the immense weight of a glacier until it was nearly two years before I left Floathouse Bay.
Seven
I had been in Floathouse Bay for two winters, going on two springs, when the first boat came. Because nobody ever came in the bay, we had no time to react. In a minute it was upon us, a silver Lund moving like a bullet, sending a wash of foamy water over the dock. I did not expect to see the man who got out.
Isaiah and Birdman flanked me as Sam tied up the boat and got out. He nodded at them but fixed his eyes on me. “Buddy,” he said, then corrected it. “Winnie. Long time.”
Thoughts scattered like crabs on a beach. The same eyes, dark blue where sky met the sea. Same shaggy blond hair nearly covering those eyes. Same long fingers holding the rope. The same tingle that started in my toes and worked its way up.
“It has been,” I managed. Had Sam come to bring me home? Had my father finally convinced my mother to do the impossible? No, I told myself. She would never do it.
For a second before he started to speak, I allowed myself to believe that he had come for me across five miles of rough water. He had come to rescue me, the same as in the old stories. On a few nights in Floathouse Bay I had spun an elaborate tale of how this would happen. But as soon as he spoke I felt the cold dash of disappointment. He had not come to rescue me. There was more trouble in Never Summer Bay.
Here in Floathouse Bay I had allowed myself to believe that nothing ever changed. The day slipped into night until months had passed without notice. Now I realized that outside of our sheltered place, life marched on at dizzying speed.
“Winnie. Roy sent me. I need you to come to Never Summer with me.”
Immediately I thought of the sly low tide and its mate, the flood, and suspected a trick. I thought of the woman on the tide flats, seduced out farther and farther on the wide sweet expanse of beach, the water pulled back like a curtain to reveal what had been there all along.
“Listen,” he said as I stood waiting, my mind skipping through possibilities. “Your mother, she’s missing. Althea didn’t come back last night or the night before that. I suppose you know things have gotten bad in Never Summer. No more clients, selling everything off that we can, hoping for a turnaround. News gets out, nobody will hunt with him anymore. I was sticking around until next winter to help them out. But she’s gone somewhere, and I need your help.”
I listen and I try to understand. Soon I will know what the whales are trying to tell me.
Wouldn’t I know if my mother had been swallowed up by the country? I would feel it, the snap of the rope. But so much time had gone by. Two years, a lifetime. Had our bond frayed beyond repair? There was this too: This place could seduce you into taking chances, the way it bent out of sight just enough that you wanted to see what was past the next bend, up the next mountain. There were so many ways to die out here. A slip on slimy deer cabbage, arms windmilling as you tumbled down a mountain. A boulder falling as you reached for it, smashing your ankle. Bears waking up from a long sleep. Rivers running chalky with glacier melt. Even the rain, slowly filtering in through your best gear, your fingers growing stiff as you try to start a fire. You never, ever went very far on land alone, not if you wanted to come back, no matter how much you wanted to go on. No matter how much you wanted to put the past behind you and run.
“Are you sure she’s not just waiting out the weather, or high and dry on a beach?” I asked. Both things had happened to us many times.
“I don’t think so. Not this time.”
Isaiah said, “I don’t like the sound of this. Search and Rescue has an office in town. Call them. Radiophone still works up in the lodge, right?”
“No can do,” Sam said. “They won’t come. You’ve heard what they say up and down the coast. Nobody’s going to come here. Not even Search and Rescue. They’ve looked the other way for years. He’s a loose cannon, they say. He burned all his bridges long ago.”
“They would come,” Isaiah argued. But I knew Sam was right. After the search was called off for Uncle Dean, my father had taken the barge around the island to town and stormed into Search and Rescue’s office. Only a set of burly troopers had been able to steer him out before blows were exchanged. My father, returning, had told the story as if he were the hero.
“Nobody would help us,” I said. “We never helped anyone else.” Never veered over to check on fishing boats in trouble, never offered to sell anyone extra fuel like I had heard the other settlements did. In the other small outposts scattered up and down the coast, travelers knew who would come to their aid. From the fish weir, a dip net full of salmon for the hungry. At the field camp, a bunk inside a wall tent for the shipwrecked. But ev
eryone knew to avoid Never Summer Bay or else end up with extra lead in their boats. Nobody would help him now, even the most kindhearted.
In Never Summer Bay, we had always been on our own too. The time one of the skiffs had broken loose of the dock and floated out of the bay on an ebb tide, Sam and my father had to go hunt for it, finding it washed up on one of the Harbor Islands. Nobody, finding it, would have brought it back. Nobody would come help cut beach logs or reshingle the roof. Got what he deserved, the bastard, they would have said, and meant it.
We stood in an unsteady cluster. Glancing up at Isaiah and Birdman, I knew they would not choose for me, although I could feel their words, unspoken, like clouds of unshed rain: Don’t ever go back.
I remembered the words she had said to me.
“I would dive into the water, holding on to your back. We would swim through the ocean, blowing bubbles. You wouldn’t be afraid, because I would never leave you.”
Don’t ever go back.
You must stay away from here.
There was the rush of water under the dock, making the decision for me. Flood tide. Insistent. Stronger than a person could row, stronger even than the push of an outboard. Pretty soon it would drain out from the bay, trapping the four of us for hours as we waited it out.
I saw my mother, her hair the color of moonlight. I saw her in a kayak next to mine near the Trader Islands, our paddles dipping into transparent liquid. I saw her, chin cupped in hand, watching the ocean worry the shore. I saw her as we wandered the beach fringe. Behind us the bears had moved like shadows in the forest. We were part of the bay, she had told me, as much a part of it as the gulls and the otters and the sea stars. You could not see the place where any of it ended and we began. “When I die, don’t put me in a box,” she had told me once. “Scatter me like pieces of the sun in the ocean. Promise me, Winnie. Promise me.”
