by Mary Emerick
I’ll never forget the night of the fog. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.
What did this mean? Was it the beginning of a story she had meant to tell me? There had been many nights when the fog rolled in from the ocean, rolling over us in a suffocating wall of white. It was impossible to pick out one night in all the nights of fog there had been. I crumpled the paper and shoved it into my mother’s jacket pocket. I would throw it away in the morning. Whatever secrets those words held, they had no relevance now.
Sleep remained elusive, just out of my reach. I imagined that everyone else in the world slept but me. Isaiah snored in his floathouse room, wondering what had become of us and when we would return. Ernie and his wife lay tangled in their town sheets, our stories filling their dreams. Up and down the coast, all the others I had never met slept too, their lives surely much less complicated and troubled than ours. Sam and Birdman catnapped downstairs, their dreams unknown to me.
By now my father must have wheeled back into the house and shoehorned himself between whichever walls he had chosen. Perhaps pain kept him sleepless. And my mother, did she sleep? Did she lie awake like I did, searching through the shadowy past?
I floated in the middle of sleep, waking as the early morning hours wore on, and was startled awake by the sound of desperate footsteps hitting the stairs. Sam burst through the door, looming over me, his coat buttoned wrong, his hair a wild mop. He had misplaced his glasses somewhere and squinted at me in the darkness. “Winnie. I went out early to check the boat. Something’s happened. Something’s gone wrong.”
He paced the room as I scrambled out of bed and pulled on my boots. “What’s happened? Has she come home?”
“No. No, she hasn’t come home, but something is wrong out at the dock. Hurry, here’s your coat, come on!”
We ran together out of the house, down the slippery boardwalk and out onto the dock. At first I saw nothing unusual. The sky was overcast, an edge to the air that spoke of winter’s unwillingness to let go. The air was swollen with rain, and looking at the dock I could tell it had already rained once and had stopped a while ago. Recently by the looks of it. I could see where we had come, clear wet outlines of our boots.
I could see something else.
The parallel lines of a wheelchair, rolling straight out to the end of the dock.
No. No.
“It’s too late,” Sam said. “Even if we dove now. An hour, maybe two. Maybe more.”
“The rocks,” I said. “He was gathering rocks on the beach.” Rocks he had taken with him to the bottom of the ocean. It was obvious what he had done. Rocks in his pockets. Big ones, so he could sink faster and stay down longer. Long enough to run out of air.
Surely it wasn’t true. Surely my father was here, playing a trick on us. Hiding in the trees. In the remains of the boat shed. He would come out any second now, grinning at our concern. “Cheated death once again,” he would say. Surely if he were gone the world would feel shrunken somehow. Instead everything was the same. The whisper of waves. The voice of the sea.
The fire was dead out. The pile of rocks was gone.
He wasn’t anywhere.
“We need to dive. To be sure.” Maybe there was a chance. He might have just done it, still on his last breath. I would dive down in a cloud of bubbles and bring him back up on my back. He hadn’t meant to do it. Maybe his chair had gotten too close. There had been a moment of free fall. Accident. Rookie mistake.
But the rocks. There was no mistaking the rocks.
“This isn’t an abalone free dive,” Sam said. “We would need tanks. You know what the current does around here.”
He was right.
There was nothing we could do.
I walked to the end of the dock on legs that barely held me. I looked in.
Part of me was afraid I would see him, his hair tangled in seaweed, his eyes open as he floated. But the water was calm and deep. There was no hint of what lay beneath. Swim down as deep as I could.
My mother and I knew how to swim. My father had insisted on it, but we never stayed in the water long. In fifteen minutes the water would turn the blood in your veins to sludge. In fifteen minutes your breath would freeze in your lungs. In fifteen minutes you would be dead.
“He must have thought she was really gone,” Sam said. He sank to his knees, his fingers tracing the wheel marks, receding now. Pretty soon they would vanish as the day marched on, oblivious.
“Roy Hudson. Hard to believe he took this route,” Birdman said. He had come up behind us and was staring into the water, hands shoved into the pockets of his army coat. “Sat on this dock, all five of us dipping our toes in, daring each other to jump in all the way. Only Roy and Dean would. We all drank whiskey like water, just like we did last night. Talked about all the things we would do. Climb all the mountains, sail the whole ocean. No limits. Now only two of us are left.”
“Three,” I whispered. “Three are left.”
“I hope you are right,” he said. “But you have to be prepared for the other.”
I held back the burning itch of tears because this did not seem real. It was instead a story my mother had made up. What if, she would say. What if a waterspout spun into the bay and lifted us up into its mouth? We could land anywhere. Kansas. Kentucky. Canada. What would we do then?
What if my father disappeared into the sea? What then?
We told stories of my father, the three of us huddled against the raw wind. That was what he would have liked, stories through which he walked large. He was always the star of his show whether he truly had been or not. The snow got deeper, the bears larger, the sea wilder, facts moved like puzzle pieces until they fit his idea of what should have been. After a while I thought that he believed them too.
Even though I knew what the others did not, I stared at the bay, wondering. Had he really wanted this? Had he realized, too late, that the wheels would not stop on the slippery dock? Moss was so quick to cover wood unless you kept after it with scrapers and chemicals. Or, I thought with a shiver, maybe pushed? My mother, finally keeping her promise? But there were no footprints, only wheels.
The bay held no answers. It was as cold and serene as it ever was.
“Knots always held for him,” Sam said. “Boats always ran. Never got high and dry on the beach or had to swim for the anchor. He understood this country in a way I always wanted to but never could.”
“Either you get it or you don’t,” Birdman agreed. “Rest of us spend our lives worrying at it, chewing off a bit at a time. Others, like Roy, take big bites and somehow get away with it.”
“Outran avalanches, pushed through ocean swells, got away with anchoring in a sandy bottom,” Sam agreed. “None of the rest of us could ever get away with what he did.”
He had always known the power of the sea. He would have known how short fifteen minutes was. And how long it was, too.
“The Hudson boys,” Birdman said. “Both of them gone now. End of an era.”
“What happens next?” Sam asked. None of us answered. Over our heads a pair of scrappy ravens worried a lone eagle not caring or not aware that the larger bird could kill them with a slash of its talons. The three of them swooped and dove in a strange ballet.
“Dean was first,” Birdman said. “He went to a place that none of us could follow. I’ve seen plenty of people disappear, but that one hit everyone on the coast hard. Everyone loved Dean. Everyone thought he was their best friend.”
“I remember how he was after Uncle Dean disappeared. It took three days for him to get up and start the boats again. I remember liking it, how my mother and I eddied around like he was a rock in a creek, as if for once he didn’t matter so much to us. But she didn’t like it so much. She said she missed the fire in his eyes.”
What I didn’t say was what she had told me years later: “Don’t fall for someone like Sam. He’s boring, but sweet. Like angel food cake. No spice.” She had hugged me tight. “Fall for someone a little bit cr
azy,” she said. “Promise me.”
“Why do you think he flew that day?” I asked Birdman, the only person who might know.
“Why would anyone fly in that lousy weather, we all thought later. Ernie saw him down on the float docks all suited up to go. He had made it back from your place with a bunch of clients with him, all clueless and spitting Copenhagen. Still had one load to go. None of the rest of the pilots were flying. Boats all stayed at the dock. There was no reason in hell good enough to be out there. Ernie said that he had barely made it back in the barge, twenty-foot seas, and Dean should stay on the beach. But Dean just grinned and said he knew he could make it. Said the sky was calling his name. If anyone could have made it, Dean Hudson would have.”
“He looked for days,” I said. “Even after the searchers had all given up and gone home.” I never knew where my father had gone in those dark days after Dean’s disappearance. He did not ask us to go with him. I pictured him alone in an open boat, puttering from island to coast and back again, both hoping and fearing what he might find.
“We looked for Dean too,” Birdman said. “Even though it was after the trouble and Roy would never have asked us for help. We circled out there for days in the skiff. Sometimes we still look. The ocean gives up things sometimes, like airplane floats. The land never does.”
“I like the ocean,” Sam said. “You read the charts; you know what you are getting. Even if the charts miss something, there are plenty of stories. Generations worth of stories, so you always know which places to stay away from. You don’t have that on land.” He tossed a rock into the water, and it made a circle of rings that lasted for a long time.
“I only felt safe on land with Roy there beside me. ‘You’ll never make a good guide,’ he used to tell me, because I hung so close to him. You have to strike off with a compass on your own, he would tell me. Get lost. Make some mistakes. If you don’t have the guts to do that, you’ll never get it right. He was right about that. I never got it the way he did. The way he moved through both land and sea like it wasn’t separate from him, that was something I never figured out how to do.”
I realized that most of my father’s stories had been about the sea. He told us about the bay where moon jellyfish gathered so thickly that the water boiled white. About the deer he saw in the middle of channels, swimming miles from shore. The slurp of water across the bow, the stars clustered like coals across the night robe of the sky. The time that the anchor dragged free, deep in the night, and he found himself floating in the boat far from land, as if there was no land, only a deep, deep ocean for as far as the world went. It was when you got to shore that you were in trouble. There were so many ways that the land was more dangerous than the sea. Falls off cliffs, fast-running rivers, bears, and everything else that waited there.
I never quite believed that. You couldn’t breathe in the sea. Boats could sink. Tsunamis could slither across the middle of the ocean, caused by earthquakes in far-off Japan. But my father thought he could dance over the sea untouched by any calamity. I knew that my mother believed that about him too.
“One time,” Sam remembered, “the first season, we were anchored out in the Maze, and Roy told me to take us home. Hell, I didn’t know where we were, all those islands look the same. Bunch of dead ends, shallow sandbars, little keyholes. I had no clue which way to go. Roy looked at me like I was a couple pieces of bread short of a sandwich. No big thing, he said. Just go back the same way we came, he said. Like it was that simple. He had the whole coastline there in his head. Never even needed a map.”
The wind ruffled the ocean like a lover’s touch. A raft of sea otters lounged on their backs riding the swell and nibbling on sea urchins. Gulls dotted the water, waiting out the tide change. The ravens and the eagle flew on to another bay to continue their battle. The rain brought out the silver-tongued waterfalls, dozens of them, falling in unimpeded shining arcs into the sea. It seemed strange that everything should look the same, as though it were an ordinary day. Instead it should be one of the times when thirty-knot winds tumbled over the divide, bending the trees nearly in two, flags of snow blowing off the mountains, the sea whipped into a frenzy of snarling white.
We would climb the cliffs anyway. What else could we do? With full packs, we turned our backs on the ocean. Walking slowly we climbed from the beach fringe, taking the old path to the muskeg above. Years ago my father had laced a rope through the trees so that we could walk up the steepest part while holding onto it for balance. I tested it and it still held, although it had frayed at the edges and turned white with age. I wondered how long it would be here. How long would the lodge that my father built still stand before a tree crashed into it, the roof caved, the otters moved in? How long would it take to erase him from the world?
Coming out of the trees, I stopped at the place that we always called Lookout Point. Like the prow of a ship, the point jutted out over the ocean, a mossy headland about to set sail. Deep green seawater foamed around the base of the cliffs a hundred feet below.
I remembered James Tucker’s grave, somewhere under my feet. Unlike James, my father would never have a grave. Instead, his bones would tumble along the bottom of the ocean. With time and enough storms, they could roll right out of the bay and into Turn Back Strait, where the current would carry them faster than a person could run. Shards of bone could wash up years later on the Trader Islands, mingled with the blue wink of beach grass and thousands of crushed shells. He was really and truly gone.
I hunted around where I remembered the gravestone to be but could find no trace of James Tucker’s grave. Maybe it had finally mossed over, tendrils of fine green plants lacing together to cover it completely and for good.
I remembered our stories about James and his fate. Suddenly I was unsure. What had been real? You misunderstood things. Had I made this up? But no, I remembered it, the flat coolness of the stone. Didn’t I?
I wandered to the farthest point of the headland, wanting to be away from the others. The line between truth and fiction seemed a thin one. Standing there I could see what I had always believed as truth: the curve of the never-changing land as it bent away toward the horizon, sturdy and firm. It looked exactly as I had remembered it. But I knew even that was deceiving. Forces were working at it, chewing it away. Wind, water, tide, snow. Even though it looked the same to me now, the land on which I stood had changed imperceptibly. In ten years, twenty, it would change again.
“Where are you?” I whispered. The branches on the stunted trees shivered in the wind. There was no answer.
I looked back down to the bay, spotting the dock like a pale finger stretching out into the water. I imagined a man in a wheelchair, carefully gathering rocks from a beach. Placing them in the pockets of his wool jacket. One last gulp of liquid courage. Fire in his belly. Rolling to the end of the dock. Looking around for the last time. Taking a breath. The splash. The silence. The fire still burning on the beach.
I swallowed down a lump in my throat. “Winnie,” Sam called. “What do you see?”
I looked again for the headstone. Sam had never come up here. He had never seen the gravestone. This was a memory only my mother and I shared.
“Nothing,” I said, and it was true.
I turned away from the sea. Ahead all I could see was a thick cedar forest. The trees here were survivors of a war zone, battling gale winds that swept off the gulf, thick cloud bands of rain that drove into their bark with the force of bullets. It was hard not to admire the trees’ tenacity. These were not dying, not yet. They clung to a slope washed by water, landslides and avalanches a constant threat. “We want to head northwest, through the cedars,” Birdman said. “Look to your compass, try to keep a straight line. We’ll get to the backside of the red cliffs in just about a mile.”
The cedar forest was mostly why my mother and I always turned around at the muskeg; that, and my father’s command not to go farther. There was no light ahead, any available space taken up by twisted branches. This was si
lent and fierce combat, each tree stubbornly refusing to concede space to its neighbor. I hesitated. There seemed to be no way to move through.
Birdman, just about to disappear inside the belly of the forest, looked back and saw me pause.
“Winnie, dear,” he said, “in the wilderness, sooner or later, you have to do something even if it’s wrong. Second thoughts will kill you.”
I took a deep breath and plunged in.
It was only a mile by map, but it took the better part of a day. The three of us were swallowed up by the cedar forest, a mass of limbs and trunks as solid as rock. The trees grew so thick and close that I had to slip out of my pack and turn sideways to pass through. The spiky needles scraped over my face and arms as if warning me to stay out. They pulled my hair and knocked me down. I was caught in a web of branches and trees so thick that I could not remember which way the sky was. I kept a firm grip on my compass, staring at the slender needle as if it were my only chance for survival.
Most times it was more like swimming than walking. The others passed somewhere parallel to me, perhaps close enough to touch but not to see. Our calls echoed through the forest as we moved through, my feet sometimes not touching the ground as I balanced on a tightly woven mat of branches.
After an unknown amount of time I came upon Sam, resting on a fallen trunk. His coat hung off one shoulder and a long pink scratch ran down his face. I sat down beside him, resting against the shaggy bark. We gulped down stale water from our canteens and took inventory of the route ahead.
It was dark. Nothing lived in the cedars. Even the deer had forsaken this place.
I could not imagine my mother, alone, slipping through these trees. Why would anyone come this way? I could tell Sam was thinking the same thing. “Should we go back?” I asked. Doubt circled in my head like birds. “Maybe she walked the coast. Flagged down a boat. She could be halfway to Juneau by now.”
