Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  On those nights the clients missed their flights back to the Lower 48 because even my father wouldn’t risk taking his boat from a sheltered bay out onto the ocean and back to the lodge. His radar was spotty and the rocks uncharted. Better to stay in place and wait it out. The fog put everyone on edge, but everyone also knew that it was better to hunker down in the bay you knew than to risk it on the ocean. It was sometimes days before anyone could move.

  “I never saw anything,” I said. But I knew something had happened. I could feel it, like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle pressed into place. This would explain the way my mother stared at the map. The way she seemed to sometimes deliberately place herself near my father when he was in one of his stormy moods. Had it been guilt, sadness, regret?

  “Something could have gone on between the two of them,” Birdman said. “Maybe she wanted the easy way for a change. The sweet without the bitter. Doesn’t take much to make a mistake. Too much red wine, too much fog, what’s the difference, you think. World still turns. Tide still goes out. If I knew Roy, he spread himself thin over there in Never Summer, between the hunters and the weather and the work. Didn’t leave a lot of time for her in the mix.”

  “The bear hunters’ wives,” I said, remembering again the shadows of candles on the walls. “They used to drape over him like sweaters. We used to laugh at them in the kitchen, but I think she hated the way he used to dress for dinner when the boat was in, to impress them. Cuff links, ironing his one white shirt, apricot pomade in his hair. They came in the kitchen wanting more wine and told her how lucky she was to have a man like him. She didn’t like sharing him with them. She was glad when the plane left.”

  “Dean took it hard, her not choosing him,” Birdman said thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “The day she went off with Roy, he went down the coast and didn’t come back for a long time. Probably he never gave up trying, all those years after. He wasn’t a man who would ever give up trying as long as he could see a sliver of hope to weasel through. Kind of the same way he flew.”

  I hung over Birdman’s shoulder, seeing what had only briefly registered before. The note was torn from a pilot’s log, the kind that was used to record flight times and fuel consumption. I had seen this same type of logbook many times in Uncle Dean’s plane, spattered with the ancient remains of coffee and curling up from humidity. He had shoved a pencil behind his ear, brow furrowing as he attempted to do the math. In the end he usually shrugged and scribbled down any numbers he dreamed up. “Screw the FAA,” he said, and chuckled. “What are they going to do, ground me for not adding right?” He always flew like that, trusting in what he saw out of his window more than his instruments to keep him safe.

  Dean’s logbook. His hand with the finger torn off by the prop, writing a note to someone who, in the end, did not choose him. Flying into the teeth of a storm because he did not care if he ever made it back.

  Birdman clicked off his headlamp and handed me the paper. I held on to it for a minute before I placed it on the fire. For a thing with so much weight and history, it blazed up fast and was gone in seconds. “Well,” he said. “So that’s that.”

  “I never really knew her,” I said. It came out all wrong, almost a sob.

  I could tell Birdman did not know what to say, but he let me rest my head on the scratchy cloth of his jacket. If his muscles tensed up because of how close we were, I could barely feel it.

  I thought that maybe he was thinking of his own daughter, somewhere out there in the world growing up. What would she know about him when she was older? It would not be the Birdman I knew, quiet and kind, but someone else, someone distant and unforgiving, someone who could track any animal but could not find her. There were so many different ways to see people.

  “I’m not one to judge, if that’s what she did. We shone being around those boys,” Birdman said. “Me, Isaiah, her, we all shone so bright. Couldn’t last, nothing that burns that hot ever does. But I’ll tell you what, it’s good while it lasts.”

  He dropped a log on the fire. “They weren’t solid, those boys, not the way Sam is. When I look at a tree, I can see how sound the wood is, if there’s heart rot or fungus or something else eating away at it inside. Sam’s as sound as they come. Not a lot of fire, but he’ll last.”

  I remembered what Sam had told me in the cedars, and I imagined him leaving me one day, in search of someone new. “I don’t know if he can stick,” I said.

  “Some people don’t know when to let go, either,” Birdman said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant my father or my mother, or maybe both.

  The world seemed to me to be such an uncertain place. One wrong step and there you were, knee deep in trouble. Each word seemed so irrevocable, unable to take back. Making choices seemed too dangerous.

  I thought that instead I could sit here until the moss covered me up and I belonged to this mountain. Let the rain pour holes into my heart, sink deeper into the muskeg until roots bound me to this place.

  I leaned forward and plucked a shooting star, twirling it in my fingers. This had always been my favorite flower. It was one of the early ones, bravely poking its head out into the snow before the other flowers dared. It stayed late too, as if it didn’t want to miss a thing. Its purple petals were spread like a dancer’s skirt, the whole flower dart shaped, poised for flight. This flower didn’t seem afraid of anything, even though its heavy head bobbed on a stalk that seemed too tender and thin.

  “How do you ever know what’s right?” I asked, but Birdman only shrugged. He had no answer to that, he told me. Nobody did.

  “You just go until you get cliffed out, or until the mountains bite back. Then you backtrack and pick a different route. Roy’s told you which way to go all your life, but now it’s up to you to choose.”

  It didn’t seem fair to me. I wanted a map like the salmon had. I wanted to swim out to sea the way they did, until a signal told them two years later that it was time. The same thing happened to whales as they slowly swam between Hawaii and this coast. It sometimes seemed like everyone and everything knew where to go except me.

  “The last time I saw Angela, she was six,” Birdman said. He produced a pipe from his pocket and puffed thoughtfully. “This was years ago, when I was a different person. Her mother, my wife once, was hustling her away from me into an Impala and she was crying. Daddy, she screamed. I want my Daddy. My wife didn’t listen. He’s a no-good, lazy son of a bitch, I heard her say as they got in the car. Would rather sit in the woods than get a job like a real man. I still remember Angela’s face in that dirty window. I never saw her again.”

  How did he stand it? How did anyone stand all the things that happened in their whole life? Each thing seemed to add up until the load of them was too much to bear. It was enough to make you roll down a dock without a brake. Enough to walk into the woods and never come back.

  “Look, though,” Birdman said. His gesture took in the glow from the cliffs and the dark pooled water on the muskeg. It included the watchful trees, slowly turning the clearing into a forest. It meant everything, the rain, the unseen mountains above us, and the little creatures we could hear busily burrowing through their night errands.

  “There’s always some reason to get up in the morning,” he said. “Sometimes you have to hunt hard for it, but it’s there.”

  “My father,” I began. Birdman nodded. “Sometimes people get tired of hunting,” he said.

  “Couldn’t you go find Angela?” I asked. “Tell her it wasn’t like she thought? That you never meant to abandon her?”

  Birdman thought for a minute. “The world is so big,” he said. I wanted to argue. There were telephone books; I had seen them in town. He could gather all the ones he could find and look through them until he found Angela’s name. He could call her and explain about all the years he had missed.

  “Maybe someday, Winnie,” he said, but I could tell he had given up on finding Angela, or maybe had lost the courage. Still, I allowed myself a thin ray of hope. Someday Ange
la might show up in Floathouse Bay, following a tip. Her cinnamon hair would shine brightly against the dull green backdrop as she came in to the dock. She would know his real name, the one he had hidden from us. Birdman would gather her up in a hug that went on forever, and they would never be apart again.

  “I like Floathouse Bay,” Birdman said. “I like the sameness of it. You wake up, the same tide, going in and out, set your watch by it. The deer on the beach in winter, whales on their way to Hawaii. No surprises. It’s the most peace I’ve found anywhere.”

  I knew what he was telling me. He would not be looking for Angela. I had thought of Birdman and Isaiah as sages, honest and true and perfect in ways my father was not, but I realized that they were just men after all. Everyone had their own fault lines. Some were just buried deeper.

  I crawled into a borrowed sleeping bag, musky with the scent of all of the other people who had slept in it. It was damp from the surrounding air and did little to warm me. Overhead the tarp covered me, an artificial sky. I imagined that the three of us breathed in unison, each of us with our own fears and hopes and wishes. Was my mother out here? Did she sleep under a tarp like this one, listening to the way it moved with the wind? In my mind, she moved like the bears, keeping to the shadows. We would find her when she wanted to be found.

  Twelve

  I slowly awoke from a dream of being under the ocean. In the dream, my body was fluid, somewhere between water and flesh, the color of silver. I was a salmon, a whale, or some other creature whose name I did not know. I was looking for something, combing through the kelp forests and the offshore reefs, around all the islands that were really mountains bursting out of the sea’s floor. It was a map I was hunting. A way home.

  I was tangled in the sleeping bag, my heart pounding. The tarp sagged above my face, casting a blue light over everything. I was not in the ocean. I was in a muskeg with two men I hardly knew. My father was dead. My mother, gone somewhere in the wilderness.

  Sam was crouched on his heels stirring a pot of oatmeal. His hood was pushed back and a fringe of hair fell over his collar. He whistled. A light rain pitted the tarp and a breeze fanned it slightly, sending a fine mist over my face. Sometime in the night rainfall had collected in the center of the tarp, the edges not pulled tightly enough, and now water poured over the sides, spattering everyone inside. A muskeg was not a perfect place to camp either; the downside of sleeping in the open meadow was a slow seeping of water into anything that lay on the ground. I could feel it under the sleeping pad, a river moving underneath.

  “Today we climb the cliffs,” he said, catching my movement. There was fear in his voice, fear that matched my own. Only Birdman seemed immune to it, his hands shoved in jacket pockets. After lying under the bodies of dead soldiers, listening for the welcoming sound of a helicopter, I imagined that it would take more than the cliffs to scare him. He was in his element out here, moving through the landscape in a graceful way that he did not possess inside of walls.

  We ate oatmeal in silence. My thoughts churned through the same groove from the day before. Was this the story my mother had been trying to tell me with each tale she made up? My mother and Uncle Dean involved in a secret love affair. Even if she had known there were so many ways to fall from the sky, even if she knew that after so many years, nobody could survive in this wilderness. Years passed but she never forgot. She had to see. After all, you could fly into a box canyon in the fog and slam into an unseen mountain. You could tumble end over end, punched down by the wind like a giant’s fist. You could scrape the edges of the tall trees, flying too close to what pilots called the deck—the solid line of land or sea. Or your plane could just quit flying, but over a spiky peak somewhere, no chance to save it. Better to think of Dean living it up at a lake by his own choosing than any of those other ways. In the end, had she chosen to believe what could not possibly be true?

  Why had she left my father now, when he had needed her the most? Surely there had been a better time to climb to the Lake of the Fallen Moon. When clients still clomped up and down the stairs, chunks of mud falling off their boots, their chubby city faces flushed with excitement and fear. When the house was still, the hunt on, bays and bays away from here, time heavy on her hands. There were plenty of times she could have left. Maybe she really had fallen or slipped or been surprised by a bear.

  Sam came back from a pothole, the stack of rinsed bowls in his hands. He set them down with a clatter. “Remember what Roy used to say? If it weren’t for the rain this would be just like California,” he said. “There would be roads all over this valley, houses on those cliffs. The rivers would be dammed and all the bears shot out, he said. Roy was wrong, though. People need sunshine.” He placed the bowls in his pack. “This is no way to live. When this is over, I’m heading to the desert. A place so hot you burn your feet crossing it. Where you wear sunglasses all day and night. Where you have to sit under a shade tree to stay cool. What do you think, Winnie?”

  “I might want to stay here,” I said. My voice sounded small. “In Never Summer.”

  As soon as I said it, it sounded right. I tested it again. “I’d live in the lodge. Maybe show people the bears. Not to kill them, but to learn about them.”

  “Isn’t this the place you wanted to leave?” Sam said, but he was wrong. It hadn’t been the place at all. Without my father, possibly without my mother, it was just another bay. There was nothing remarkable or terrifying about it. Nothing that I needed to escape.

  Birdman appeared by my shoulder, startling me the way he always did with his ability to move undetected.

  He opened one hand.

  “I found this last night when I had to get up to water a tree. I was shining my headlamp around a bit and saw it hanging off that bush over there. Right over there where the cliffs meet the muskeg.”

  A pale blue ribbon fluttered in his hand. I snatched it from him, but as I took it, the fragile band crumbled into tiny pieces. I watched as they tumbled from my grasp and into the fire where they shriveled and burned in a flash of heat and light.

  “Is it hers, Winnie?” Sam asked. “Can you tell?”

  I stared into the fire, uncertain. My mother had given up on ribbons long ago. Useless pretty things without a purpose, she told me. Like painting your nails to a glossy sheen, or swiping color across your face. What good did those things do out here, where your feet were covered in rubber boots all of the time and your face wet from rain? But there had been times when she wavered, especially when the bear hunters’ wives wafted down to dinner in a cloud of perfume. On those days she had stood in front of the mirror, carefully lining her eyes with gold.

  Nobody else ever walked through the cedars without us knowing, unless they had come the long way, across the island. Had it been someone else entirely, marking his safe return from a long trip? The scientists, somehow circumventing our bay and circling back on top of the divide? Was this ribbon left over from Search and Rescue’s ground search? Or was it from my mother, marking a path for us to follow?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It could be.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to summon her. I sent something with wings out into the forest. Where are you? Is this a sign? I felt nothing in return.

  We had seen nothing else, although Birdman reminded us that there were a thousand ways to move through the cedars. Only luck would have allowed us to stumble upon the path she had taken. There could be a hundred ribbons in the cedars, and we would never have seen them. At the same time, the part of me that still believed in stories and magic saw my mother placing it here for me to find.

  “If it’s hers, there’s only one way she could have gone from here,” Birdman said. He was right. The cedars hugged the cliffs tight around our slice of muskeg. You would need wings unless you chose to climb.

  I felt a fierce surge of possibility that even the rain could not dim. We kicked over the ashes of the fire and shook out the tarp, each of us taking one corner and walking toward each other to fold it up
. The only thing that showed we had been here when we were done was the grass, trampled flat beneath our boots. That would recover too, slowly springing up as if we had never passed through.

  Over all of us the rain fell. It showed no signs of letting up, just kept falling in a lazy way from the sky, plinking into the small pools and through my hair and down into my boots. It had all the time in the world.

  “Bear tracks,” Birdman said. They were recent, pooled with the night’s rain. As we slept, a sow and cubs had padded past. Muffled by the sound of the tarp, we heard nothing.

  “How did they get through the cedars?” Sam asked, but Birdman had no real answers. “Bears can go anywhere, they’re like spirits that way.” He slid open the rifle’s magazine and fit in three fat slugs, clicking them into place. “Running from the boars, the sows do what they have to do sometimes to protect their young,” he said.

  “I’ll carry it today,” Sam said. We had all taken turns so far, hoisting the rifle over fallen trees and balancing it on our shoulders where we could.

  Birdman handed it over, and Sam slung the rifle over his shoulder. As we cinched on our packs, I thought about the night before and what Sam had told me. Not about the Rocky Mountains—that was too big for me to swallow. When I thought about it, a whole world yawned open, a world far beyond the boundaries I had always known.

  I thought instead about his story. Waiting at the boat—something about it didn’t ring true. Getting a skiff high and dry was a bad thing, but not something that couldn’t be reversed with a little time, strong backs, and tide. You could leave a skiff, especially if you scented trouble in the forest. Worst case, you sat on the beach and waited for the hours to pass and the boat to float again. What had really happened in Enchantment Bay? Did I really want to know? I heard my father’s voice. Don’t ask unless you really want to know.