Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  There was no choice. There never had been.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I promised her I would. All of my life I promised her.”

  Isaiah only nodded. “I know,” he said. “Old promises are the hardest to break.”

  I thought that Birdman had disappeared into the greenhouse, the place he went to hide, but he was standing next to me with an ancient army pack strapped to his back. “Hold up. I’m going with you.”

  Isaiah shook his head once. I could tell they were using their secret language, the one where they did not need words. This isn’t your fight. Stay here.

  Birdman knew what Isaiah was trying to say. But he looked away as if embarrassed to reveal his soft interior. “She’s like my daughter now, Isaiah,” he said. “I look at her and I see Angela. Couldn’t live with myself if I let her go off without one of us to watch over her.”

  Something unfamiliar squeezed my heart tight.

  “Birdman, you need to stay here. You belong here,” I said. He was such a small man, so close to bone. How could I bring him to a place like Never Summer Bay?

  He crossed his arms across his chest. “You need a tracker, someone to find sign. How many hours have you spent in the high country? It’s a different world than down here on the beach.”

  It was true. “He never let us go past the muskeg,” I said. “It wasn’t safe, he told us. Stay down by the sea, he said.”

  “Do you know how to find your way through a cedar flat, either of you?” Birdman’s gesture took in both Sam and me. “Do you know how to walk across a snowfield without it falling away under your feet? What tracks will you miss, the two of you?”

  “Birdman,” Isaiah said, a warning. His fingers grasped Birdman’s coat sleeve as if he was trying to hold him back.

  “Nobody else will die in the woods because I wasn’t there to save them,” Birdman replied, and from the way Isaiah stepped back, letting his hand fall, I knew there was a decades-old story they both remembered. I knew that whatever story was unfurling now had begun long before I was born.

  “He goes,” Sam said. He took hold of the bow line. “We’d best go now before the flood tide.”

  Isaiah clapped me on the shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “I can’t go there and get caught up in that trouble again, understand? It’s like the sticky mud in the estuary. Grabs hold of a guy and it’s hell to get free. But come back,” he said. “When this is over, come back.”

  I knew nobody ever came back to Floathouse Bay. Mostly, Isaiah had said, people who had sheltered here wanted to reinvent themselves after leaving. They wanted to forget the circumstances that had made them need such a place. They wanted to sail on, no baggage, toward the rest of their lives.

  Isaiah and Birdman exchanged another glance. One man asked a question with his eyes, the other nodded. A lifetime passed between them.

  “Remember this, Winnie,” Isaiah said. “You may be no bigger than a pint jar of whiskey, but you’re stronger than you know. You have steel inside of you. It will be there when you reach down for it. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  I did not see what he saw. Instead I felt anything but strong as I stepped into the swaying skiff, steadied by Sam’s arm. I was as weak as one of the early flowers that were fooled by the spring, my legs barely strong enough to hold me.

  Isaiah stood with arms folded as we cast off our line. “Good luck,” he hollered over the sound of the engine. We were going to need every ounce of good luck there was.

  We motored slowly out of the bay, our wake hitting the dock with a gentle slap. As we passed them the cormorants rose from their perch and filled the sky with black feathers. Their wings had finally dried enough for them to fly.

  As the three of us steamed north, crammed uncomfortably in a boat that banged hard on each wave, I could see everything that I once knew by heart. There was the low cluster of islands we had called the Maze, a confusing puzzle of wandering channels and dead ends. There was the beach where we used to gather driftwood logs, towing them behind the boat for firewood. There was the good halibut hole and the shelves where we had found the best abalones.

  This is my homeland.

  I understood what Isaiah had meant in the muskeg.

  Five miles had seemed so long when I was younger, an improbable expanse of water to cross. Now five miles took only minutes for us to plot a course through. I sat in the bow scanning the horizon for rogue logs that could pin us in seconds, spinning the boat in a death spiral. The wind forced my eyes to tear. We passed the rocks where the sea lions lived and the kelp-strewn place where whales hunted and jumped right out of the water, arcing in one smooth motion before sliding beneath the surface of the sea. We passed all the spots where we could have turned back.

  The boat could have taken on water from a rogue wave, making us stop to bail. The engine could have sputtered from lack of fuel. We could have come up hard on a rock. All of those things had happened before. This time nothing stopped us. The tide and the wind turned in our favor, as if conspiring to shorten the journey.

  Before I was ready we made the sharp turn into Never Summer Bay, the craggy red cliffs guarding the entrance slipping past us too quickly. Stop, I wanted to say, go slower. Let me breathe.

  As if he heard me, Sam idled the motor past the red cliffs. Uncharted rocks lay beneath the surface and more than one assistant guide had ground up a prop on them. “Wait,” I said. I had forgotten to ask. You’ll have a brother in the spring.

  “Were there other children, after I left?” But Sam just shook his head, puzzled. “There were no babies,” he said. “What made you think that there were?”

  “No reason.” Another story she had made up to plaster over the truth, that it would always just be the three of us in the bay forever? Or had it been true for only a short time, and then not? There was no way to know.

  We ground to a stop on the cobble beach. I was home.

  I scrambled out of the boat to pull the line to shore. Sam had chosen the beach for landing; the dock looked barely stable, good enough for walking but not strong enough to hold a boat turning in the tide. I stepped out too soon and cold water seeped over the top of my boots. That was the excuse I gave for freezing in place while I stood on one leg, draining out cold sea from each one.

  “What’s happened here?” Birdman said. I saw it too. Things were worse in the bay than any of us had ever imagined.

  Here was the place where I had lived for seventeen years. Coming back here should have felt like the inside of a well-worn glove. Instead nothing looked the same.

  Eight

  The forest had forgiven us. In the time since I had been gone, it had begun to heal over the places that we had hacked and burned and carved out so we could live here. Alder had bullied in, creating a fortress along the shore, a wall of intertwined limbs hiding what remained of the lodge. Storm tides had broken up the dock, tossing boards up into the beach fringe. Only a skeleton of it remained, barely safe to walk on.

  Moss and bears had worked together to bring down the boathouse. Small scavenging creatures had stolen the beach glass collection that my mother kept on the deck railing. Little by little everything that was ours was vanishing.

  Nothing was permanent, even the sea. Years ago the ocean covered this stretch of beach and the forest above it. Exploring, we had found the old shorelines; stark, wave-scoured cliffs now crumbling slowly under the weight of trees; small insistent streams carving down through the exposed rock. Even now, thirteen thousand years after the last ice sheets retreated, the earth was still rising about an inch per year, expanding upward like a pair of lungs, the land taking in a long, deep breath. What I saw here now would not be the same for long. Standing on an uncertain shore I was reminded of the elusiveness of everything.

  How could it have changed so much, so fast? But I knew that was the way things worked here. It took constant vigilance to carve out a space on this coast. You had to endlessly work to fit yourself in here between the devil’s club and the landslides a
nd the tide. The second you turned your back it bested you. It always would.

  Sam cut the engine and lifted the dripping outboard, and we stood for a moment in the silence. It took a few minutes to hear the sounds of the bay again; the delicate lick of waves on the shore, the crackling of barnacles exposed to light.

  I had forgotten so much. I had forgotten the red cliffs, the way they dropped abruptly into the sea below.

  That was not the only thing I had forgotten. I had forgotten the way the air felt, somehow different in this bay than in all of the others, thick with unshed water, almost liquid enough to drink. I had forgotten how my feet could sink deep below the high tide line. I had forgotten the bodies of moon jellyfish and the splayed, fat legs of purple sea stars as they were abandoned by the falling water.

  I had not known there was so much to forget.

  Without thinking, I grasped Sam’s hand for courage. Birdman did not seem to need any. Instead he stepped away from us and trudged the shore, looking up at the cliffs and studying them carefully. He spoke to himself as he walked, making a map in his head.

  Sam glanced down at the place where our hands met.

  “All it did was rain after you left, Winnie,” he said. “Seems like all of the sunshine was drawn out of this bay. We missed you here.”

  “Even you?”

  “I never knew how much until you were gone.”

  In days past I would have pulled these words in close to my chest, tumbled them through my hands like beach glass, and searched them for hidden meaning. There was no time for that now.

  “What will be it like in there?”

  Sam looked uncomfortable. He dropped my hand. “He’ll have heard us come in. You know how he doesn’t like to wait.”

  I did know. Patience had never been my father’s strong suit. He was often whipped into a frenzy he had to swallow down hard, irritated by the way the clients inched down the steep ramp in tiny mincing steps, or how they took forever fussing with their rifles when it was time to shoot. When we were slow, too, he turned on us with words that cut like a bitter wind.

  “He may tell you the story of what happened in Enchantment Bay. If he does, come find me. Promise me.”

  I had heard so many promises in this bay. Promises were hollow words, hollow as the bones of birds, easily broken. Isaiah and Birdman had promised a score of women they would stay and had left each one. My father had promised a string of days without anger. Promises had brought me back to where I stood, irresolute on a familiar beach.

  “You’ll find him different. He’s not the same man you knew.”

  My fingers remembered Sam’s touch. It had been a long time since I had touched anyone that way. Isaiah and Birdman skirted the edges of decorum, treating me like a daughter, sometimes merely resting a gnarled hand on my head. I was used to the unforgiving—the harsh slap of a rope in salt-cut hands or the splintered wood of the floathouse walls. I was acquainted with that toughness now and had thought I could live without the other. Now I knew I was wrong.

  “How is he different?” A gray-faced ghost. I wasn’t sure if I was capable of taking a step. The man I had known was mercurial but recognizable. I had learned to forecast how to move around him by little signs he gave us. We had weathered each mood as though it were a gale or a day of unexpected sun. I wasn’t sure how to navigate someone new.

  Sam spun me around and gave me a little push. “Winnie. Go. I’m right behind you. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  Nobody came down the path like they would have in the old days, my father hurrying down with either a cart or a shotgun, depending on which it was, friend or enemy, and a dark dog in the series of Labradors we had kept tight at his heels. But now there was only silence as I struggled through the alders. The path was overgrown, only an indentation in the solid mass of brush that separated the beach fringe from the forest. The boardwalk was skimmed over with moss and was missing a few planks. The bushes we had always kept pruned slapped my thin jacket and my face as if warning me to turn back.

  “It all got away from us,” Sam said behind me. “Neither of us realized how much Roy did until he couldn’t do it anymore.” It was true that my father had rarely been still. Even when the clients were gone he had worked, a wrench stuffed in his back pocket, hands curled around an ax. “Daylight’s burning,” he had called to us en route to another errand, rousing my mother and me from our lazy afternoons.

  A man sat on the porch in a wheelchair. He wore a wool hat pulled down over his head and his eyes were closed, as if he were dozing. It was an old man, nobody I knew, I tried to tell myself, but the lie didn’t work. This was my father.

  As I walked closer it was clear that he had been in a terrible accident. A patchwork of scars ran the length of the right side of his face, puckering the skin. When his eyes blinked open I saw that one was made of blue glass. The other was a dark brown, nearly black. The effect was both repelling and fascinating.

  “Hope to shout,” my father said a little above a whisper. This was a phrase I had heard all through my childhood. I had never known what it meant exactly, but it was said when something surprising happened—a barn-door halibut on the end of the line, orcas following the boat. It meant that good things were happening, and as long as the good things continued, I could let down my guard a little. The good things would string along an invisible line like laundry, adding up to how long? A week? A month?

  “Well, look who decided to show her face,” he said.

  I moved a little closer, trying to reconcile this old man with the one I had known. His voice was the same but that was all. The man I had known could never have been like this. Heat had radiated off his body as he strode from room to room, his mind brimming with ideas. He had stood at the bottom of the steps, coat in hand, boots on. It was three in the morning, just turning light in summer, the birds just beginning to sing. “Get your asses up. It’s a fine day in paradise!” he yelled, rousing the clients from their beds.

  Back then, he was forever afraid of missing out. The clients trailed in his wake, blistered and exhausted, but carried along in a river of enthusiasm.

  This wasn’t the same man, sitting here deflated like a balloon, a blanket resting on his knees.

  “You look just like her. I’d forgotten just how much.”

  I had forgotten too, surer in my own body in Floathouse Bay than I had ever been here. I had not been a reflection of my mother there but someone whole.

  “I wanted to come earlier,” I said, which had sometimes been true. “It never was the right time.” And there had always been a reason not to go, though I did not say so. Crabs to harvest from the sea, deer to stalk, the icy touch of winter. As I said this I could hear how flimsy the words were. Surely my father would see right through them, but he only waved a hand in dismissal.

  “Ancient history, Winchester. Old news. You couldn’t have done anything if you had been here. Everyone’s heard all about it, up and down the coast. They’ve moved on to different stories now. Sam here can fill you in on what you don’t know. Can’t you, Sam?”

  Sam looked at the warped boards and said nothing.

  “Could have used an extra hand, though,” my father went on. “First year you left, we had a windstorm that threw trees like matchsticks. One big one collapsed the boathouse, and we gave up on it then. Left it open to the weather. Last spring, we had extreme high tides, the kind that sometimes come during the full moon. Those didn’t do the dock any favors. Place has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

  He rolled toward the open door, motioning me to follow. His arms propelled the chair in a slow and measured way as if there was an old wound deep in his bones that he was trying to avoid disturbing.

  I swallowed back my questions. My father had never given up information easily. “You’re on a need-to-know basis,” he had always told the clients. “It’s my way or the highway out here. I come to New York, God forbid, you can boss me around there. Here I’m in charge.” Always they fell into line, meekly ro
lling up their sleeping bags when he gave the order. My mother and I had fallen into line, too.

  My father had built the house from the land and sea, using as much as he could from the bay and forest itself, bringing everything else in by barge. That way the wood would weather with the elements as if it were a part of the forest, he had instructed me when I asked how he had done it. Though he had nearly broken his back clearing a space, he told me that some things you had to work with instead of against, and building a house here was one of those things. Avalanche, windstorm, tsunami—you had to think about the possibility of each of these and adjust what you wanted to what could be.

  Being in the lodge was like living inside a large tree. I had always loved the building, with its spiral staircase leading to our rooms, the open great room with panes of windows from earth to sky, and the bumbling stairs that led to the clients’ small quarters. He had no experience and only an instruction book on house building and he had gotten some of it wrong, but somehow the uneven floors and doors that opened by themselves worked together to create a unique house.

  Because of the way it was built, my mother and I had found many hiding places. They were small, tucked-away rooms that nobody used but that provided shelter while my father wore himself out raging over trouble that had occurred that day. Often we sat with knees tucked up to our chins, telling stories while heavy footsteps and spilt ice cubes rattled the floor overhead. What if a prince on a white horse rode up asking if any beautiful young girls lived here? What if apples fell from the sky instead of rain? What would you do then?

  Everything looked the same, the copper-colored beams that my father had cut and planed himself, the brown bear hide draped over the back of the homemade cedar sofa, the deep windows where my mother used to sit and look out at the rain. But something was different too, a taste to the air, a bitter smell of mold and regret.