by Mary Emerick
My mother was missing. I should not be thinking about anything other than that. I should not be counting the distance that separated me from a man I had always thought I loved, even if he had never loved me back.
“I asked her once where her mother was,” I said, remembering that day. We were paddling through the Trader Islands, just shy of the rip current she said would carry me away forever. Thirteen. I had begun to think about a world beyond the boundaries we had carefully laid out for ourselves.
“What did she say?”
“She said that it was a place where people cared more about what showed on the outside than what went on behind closed doors. She said, and it almost seemed like a warning, ‘I was a great disappointment to my mother.’ And she told me that I should not mention her again, because it bruised her heart.”
I left out the last part, where my mother had laid her paddle across her boat and reached over to grasp my hand. “Winnie,” she had said, “we will never be like my mother and me. We’ll be together forever. Promise me.” And because we were drifting too close to the current, because I had always believed that my mother needed protecting, I had promised.
“They talked about this bay like it was the only place in the world,” I said. “Their stories were always about being here, never about the past.”
Sam said, “I know about trying to forget where you came from.” Before I could ask what that meant, he said quickly, “Do you remember her talking to anyone? Could she have told anyone where she was going?”
“You were here long after me. Was there someone?”
Sam ticked off people on his fingers. “Ernie?”
“Not Ernie. He never got in the middle of any of the stories. He just liked to tell the stories, but then he was on his way before any trouble stuck.”
“You’re right. Never stayed long enough for us to miss him.” He considered. “The pilots were just loading butts into the aircraft as fast as they could before the weather came down. We never even learned their names.”
“The radiophone? Did you still use the radiophone?”
“They stopped using the radiophone after the accident,” Sam said, and I knew that she would never have tried to be saved that way. A lifeline for the coast dwellers, it crackled with private conversation, grocery orders, and gossip. Anyone could listen in to what you said, and the next day everyone would know your business. There had been too much danger in the radiophone.
We had kept the marine radio on, tuned to channel 16, and sometimes passing boats hailed us, wanting shelter or fuel. My father answered in a clipped tone, sending them away. “Five miles down the coast,” he would tell them, clenching the microphone. “Try Floathouse Bay. We have nothing left to give here.”
“What about where he came from?” Sam asked, but I knew there would be no help there either.
“When I wondered once why I didn’t have grandparents, his face went dark. He said they were dried up and sour as month-old apples. They never came here, even when Uncle Dean disappeared. My father said they blamed him, as if he had made my uncle fly into the storm.”
There was nobody, and Sam and I both knew it.
Sam reached out, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “What do you think, Winnie? Did she run?”
The place where his hand had touched must surely be burning bright red. I stared at my toes. There were no answers. In my heart I believed that my mother had gone to the Lake of the Fallen Moon. There was no real reason to believe it, but I pictured her there, blueberries staining her mouth the color of the ocean. Perhaps she had lost track of time. Perhaps she never meant to come back. We would never know unless we went there.
Sam said, “I really don’t think she would go that far. I was just out there listening. Roy’s hard to read, as usual. He seems to think that the lake is unreachable, but if there’s a chance she got there, he wants us to go. Birdman talks about the cedars like they are impossible to pass through. I know he can do it, but what about us? What about her? She was as thin as a plate. Arms so little I could circle them with two fingers, I bet. Then you have the cliffs, and I’ve boated close enough to them to know that they’ll crumble under you if you choose the wrong route. You have to be sure. Are you?”
I would be taking him and Birdman on a possibly dangerous route. None of us had scouted this country or sized it up. We had no idea what lay ahead. This was all based on a story my mother had told, a game we had played. I had learned that many of her stories were as ephemeral as the waterfalls that poured down the sides of the bay in summer, just a memory when the rain ceased.
I had never been less sure of anything. My mother and I filled the hours with so many words. The lake was just one place, one story in a thousand stories we created about the land around us. Stories, I realized, were how we had moved through the landscape. Stories had made this big, impossible country easier to understand.
“We have to try. How can we not try?”
Sam exhaled in a short burst. He slapped his hand against a shelf. “Well, you can’t go by yourself up there. I don’t like going against what Roy says. He hasn’t steered me wrong yet, and there’s something about that lake he doesn’t care for. But I don’t have any better ideas, and I owe it to him to find her. We’ll go to the Lake of the Fallen Moon.”
He scooped up the food and started to shoulder his way out of the pantry. Then he paused.
“Winnie, there is a lot I want to say to you. Things you should know. But not here, not now. Can you wait?”
Like the cormorants, I was good at waiting. Sometimes it seemed as though I had spent my whole life waiting. Sometimes I thought that waiting was less perilous than making the irrevocable decision to fly.
Birdman and my father tipped their glasses, heads flung back. The level of liquid in the bottle lowered by inches with each sloppy pour. They stoked the fire high and the woodstove glowed cherry red. They opened the windows to combat the heat, and the clean smell of leftover rain filled the room.
Whiskey loosened their tongues. Dots of color bloomed in Birdman’s cheeks. He told us of events that had happened long before I was born. They were adventures that occurred before the trouble, a handful of men alone in a forgotten bay at the end of the world.
“Roy, remember the time when you flew?” He described the scene for us. “Roy talked Dean into taking off low and slow with a water ski harness attached to the plane. Dean took off too fast and yanked Roy airborne.”
“On purpose,” my father interrupted.
Birdman went on, “Feet dangling over the water, laughing like hell. Finally Roy had the sense enough to let go. Isaiah and I laughed so hard that Isaiah fell off the dock. Too drunk to swim. Then there were two fools in the drink to rescue. There’s me out in the skiff, throwing out line to two men who didn’t have sense to grab it.” As he recalled that day I caught a glimpse of both men the way they used to be, carefree and young and alive.
“We didn’t know what we were up against yet,” Birdman said.
“That time I flew,” my father recalled. A slight smile brushed across his face. “That was before I found Althea.” He spoke of my mother as if he alone had discovered her, the same way we had discovered glass fishing floats half-buried in sand.
“It was better before,” Birdman said.
My father ignored the remark. “When she comes back, we’ll all sit on the dock together and plot like we used to in the old days,” my father said. “Remember our old rule at sunset?”
“Mountain turns pink, time to drink,” Birdman said.
“You got it. Things are different now that the loggers are coming. We can forget the old war between us. We need to stop them. We’re stronger united than apart.”
I watched them clink their glasses together, whiskey running down the sides and pooling onto the floor. Part of me resented how Birdman could slip under my father’s spell so easily. Didn’t he remember the stories I had brought to Floathouse Bay? But my mother and I had done the same, over and over, the
forgetting coming easily when my father approached us with a smile and a promise.
When Sam and I were done packing it was close to night, too late to start out. Even my father knew that it was dangerous to walk in the dark. It was too easy to slip off a cliff, your foot hanging in empty air as you reached for branches that were too high to grab. It was too easy to walk up on a bear as it lay dozing and unafraid in its bed. We would start out at first light.
Birdman laid out a bedroll in the great room, stumbling a bit from the whiskey. Sam smiled at me briefly before disappearing toward the old clients’ rooms downstairs, his old boathouse quarters abandoned now.
My father and I were left in a room that was still echoing with memories. I shifted from foot to foot, ready for flight.
“Something you should know. Your old room’s been cleaned out,” he said. “Burn barrel, mostly. Gave some things to Ernie to sell. Figured you took what you needed, and if you came back we could start over. You can sleep upstairs, in our old room. I can’t manage the stairs, so I’ve been bunking down here. I don’t sleep much these days anyway. Spend a lot of time out on the dock, just me and the sea, just thinking.”
“What do you think about?” Regrets, I wondered, old stories? Was this where he would tell me what I needed to know?
“When you can’t walk like you used to, there’s plenty to think about, trust me. I think about the old men and Dean and me in Floathouse Bay, when we first came into this country, times that will never come again. I think about all the bays down the coast that I know better than I knew any living person. I think about everything.”
I hesitated, thinking that this was the moment everything would become clear. My father would break in to a million pieces and tell me he was sorry for what he had done. He would say that he knew where my mother had gone and how to find her. That it was only a story they had made up to bring me home, and that everything had changed for the better, that things would be simple and sweet and good from now on. Both of them would turn into the parents that I suspected other people had, soft as old pillows.
That did not happen. Instead he turned his back on me and wheeled away; our conversation was over. I listened to his clumsy passage through the rooms, the wheels bumping into doorsills, unseen breakable things falling to the floor and shattering. I could tell where he was by the sounds he left in his wake. Some things hadn’t changed at all.
Nine
It was true. Everything in my old room was gone. There was no sign that a girl named Winnie had ever lived here. The canopy bed my father had made for me was missing, perhaps broken up for firewood. The fairy tales that I had thumbed through until the pages fell apart no longer leaned in a drunken row along the windowsill. My collection of Japanese fishing floats, the schoolbooks, handmade wool sweaters, all vanished. The bare floor echoed with my steps. Shut up tight to save the heat, the room was cold and forlorn.
How could they have done this? I pictured my father with an ax, chopping up the bed and feeding it to the fire. My mother, coming down the stairs with an armful of books for the fish weir children. How long had they waited? Had they been fueled by anger or despair? Regret washed over me. I should have come sooner. I should never have left.
Then I remembered the hiding places, my mother and me in our nightgowns, our feet bare and our hair down as we waited out my father. I recalled the story of the little brother, a slippery fish to whom we would have to teach all the old lessons. There was the swing between rage and sorrow, fear and enchantment, an eternal pendulum. And finally the sweetness that lay within Floathouse Bay. I had been right to leave.
I closed the door against the past. The girl named Winnie who had slept here was long gone. She was never coming back. I walked down the hall and up toward my parents’ old room, boards sighing under my feet.
My mother had always called this room the bird’s nest. It was the only room on the third floor, reached by a short flight of spiraling stairs. My father had built it with windows on all four sides so when I stood inside I could see the slate-gray water of the bay and the mountains scraping the sky beyond. Buffeted by wind and close-growing spruce, it was almost as if I was perched high in the canopy of the forest, about to take flight.
There was still an indentation in the pillow where my mother had last laid her head. The flannel sheets were thrown back as though someone had just arisen. There were no clues to where she had gone. No letter, carefully centered on the nightstand. No empty hangers slowly turning on the closet rod. A glass rimmed with sticky residue—orange juice—still stood on the handmade wooden dresser. At any moment, it seemed, she would return.
I wrapped up in the old comforter and closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. The house pulsed with the old noises. As the leaves whispered, tree branches slowly and insistently scraped across the windows. The gentle rundown of the generator as Sam or my father clicked it off for the night. The sturdy hum of the gas refrigerator. But there were sounds that were missing. The bass of the clients’ snores from under the floorboards. The tiny, guilty, scurrying steps of their wives as they moused around the kitchen with the lights off, pinching off pieces of brownie after insisting on eating only salads for dinner. The low music of my parents’ voices on a good day, the square of light showing from under their bedroom door late, so late.
I whispered to myself the rules that had always worked, boundaries that made me feel safe in a place that was not always safe.
Never turn your back on the ocean.
Only harvest shellfish in months with an r.
Don’t run from a bear.
Never turn a boat broadside in a following sea.
Hold on to copperbush when climbing slippery slopes.
Follow the deer trails; they know the best way.
Never leave harbor on a Friday.
No bananas onboard a boat or hats on a bed.
Don’t whistle at sea; you will whistle up a storm.
When I was little I whispered those rules every night, over and over until I fell asleep. If I forgot one, I went back and started over. There had been a comfort in them, a promise that if I followed each one, life would be even and unchanging. This time the rules did not work. I got up, pulling on my mother’s fleece jacket from the closet.
The path down to the ocean was lit by a tentative moon, floating in and out of dark clouds. My father was sitting next to the dock, his back against it, a bottle between his knees. His chair sat on the dock and he had somehow gotten himself down to the beach, a ten-foot drop.
He had not seen me yet, and I suddenly remembered being seven years old and asking my mother questions she could not answer. Why the salmon came back to the same stream, when they had no map to follow. Out of the whole big ocean, why this one tiny stream, I asked. What was so special about this one, when there were thousands of others?
My mother was filleting fish and only half listening. Her knife cleanly separated delicate spine from meat, the filmy white bones from the pieces that were good. She threw what she did not want into the ocean for the sea lions to fight over.
My job was to pack the fish in the big white cooler with wheels so that we could move it over to the workbench next to the tall freezer in the shed. Then we would vacuum seal the fillets into bags and let them slowly freeze into rock-hard lumps. The fillets were slippery, the flesh cold rubber. They were hard to hold onto.
My mother set down her bloody gloves and looked at me. “The salmon have their own map,” she said.
My father heard us from where he sat, baiting up a halibut skate with some of the discards. The long hooks on the line were curved and sharp. When he was done he would row out into the bay and set the skate deep into the water, the line spooling out far, farther than I could see, a pale white line falling through to the place where the water turned black. He would attach an orange buoy to the top of the skate and row back to us.
“A map? Like ours?” I had thought of our charts, almost as wide as I was tall, sheets of blue and gold where the
land was not important, just the sea. My father had shown me our own bay on the charts, moving his finger over the places where the shallows were, where the hidden rock shelf lurked, the other places where it was deep, too deep to anchor. The charts are not perfect, he always said. That is why you have to watch, every time. Do not trust anything, ever.
“Their map is in their heads,” my mother said. “The salmon stay out in the ocean for two years, more sometimes. They circle far out there, farther than you can swim. But when it is time to go back, they can find their own stream in this big ocean by what they remember.”
She was finished. She stepped out of her bibs and hung them on a hook by the boathouse. Her hair was knotted behind her head. A streak of blood smudged her forehead. She trudged back up the dock.
“You should tell her the truth once in a while,” my father had said, loud enough for my mother to hear. “Nobody really knows the answer about the salmon. It’s all just a guess.”
She did not turn around, just kept walking up the path.
He stood up and jumped down into the skiff, the boat rocking beneath him. Like always he kept his balance, shifting between each foot. “The salmon come back, Winnie,” he said, pulling on the oars. “That’s all we really need to know.”
In seconds he was gone, moving past the island where we had once found remains of a trapper’s cabin; so far out in the bay that he was nearly invisible. I squinted, trying to turn him back into a man.
Years later, I was back on the same beach. Out to sea, past the cluster of islands, the ocean looked calm. There were no hints of the currents that raged below its surface. Nothing revealed the jagged teeth of rocks that did not show up on the charts. The water looked serene, unruffled, safe. But I knew differently. There was so much hidden beneath.
“Get me some big rocks, won’t you, Winnie?” he asked, looking up and seeing me.
“What do you need rocks for?” I asked, but I had never refused him. My fingers closed around a stone still damp from the sea and I brought it back by his feet to join a pile he had already started. It was a small cairn, the kind hunters made to find their way back from the uplands. He ignored me, hunching over something.
