Afloat (26 page)

Looking at Rummy, sitting across from me at my own kitchen table, I feel grateful; this figure sent to ensure my past remains real.

‘What's your real name?' I ask him suddenly.

‘My what?'

‘Your real name. I never knew your real name.'

He shakes his head. ‘You always knew my real name,' he says.

I lean back in my chair, Patty's red, faux-fur Tit-Bits in place.

‘I guess I did,' I say, feeling oddly unsure.

‘My mother's favorite card game,' he says. ‘I thought I'd told you.'

Cupping his drink, relaxed and making no mention of our task ahead, his hands are just as I remember them, large with thick fingers – pouring coffee, wiping tables methodically as everyone else passes them over briefly with a damp cloth, holding the pages of the
Sunday Star
, gesturing as he comments on other people's lives with a kind of balance and tolerance that makes him seem older than he is. As he leaps onto Trainer's back I watch the two of them galloping down Main Street, both alive and vital as only the past lets us be.

I've drifted again, I can tell. Rummy is polite and says nothing, sitting exactly as I've left him.

‘You remember Trainer's favorite joke?' I ask Rummy tentatively.

He doesn't hesitate. ‘What's the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?'

‘Canoes tip!' I say loudly.

He chuckles, and then looks thoughtful. ‘It's not really fair though. It's the exchange rate you know.'

I refill his glass and mine, this time with no ginger ale. He doesn't complain, and the phone begins to ring – Anna, checking on me. Rummy waits, but I wave the noise away.

‘My daughter,' I say explaining. ‘I have a daughter. But I'll speak to her later.'

He nods, understanding. This evening is just for the two of us, as planned.

‘I'm not sure exactly what you need from me,' I confess.

He leans forward. ‘It doesn't matter what
I
need,' he explains. ‘It's what you need to say. Oral history is a very organic process. It's about giving memory an audience,' he says.

This idea has been his life's work. This listening. His dedication to passively recording the truth with no interfering questions, no
tampering with the narrative
has brought him a Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.

‘Who else will you speak to?' I ask.

He coughs deeply from his chest, and for a moment I am worried he will die here, leaving me alone. He recovers.

‘Everyone,' he says. ‘Street sweepers, volunteer firefighters, the mayor, tourists, the governor, the governor's gardener, school kids, dock porters, carriage drivers, State Park tour guides, the police, hotel owners, ministers, chefs, the fake British soldiers, ferry captains.'

As Rummy speaks the island streets become busy again, peopled with figures I'd forgotten to record. I begin to sweat, the air hot from the island sun, uncomfortable; perhaps I've turned the furnace too high.

‘Your chapter will be called
Restaurant Worker
,' he continues. ‘I've already thought of an epigraph.'

‘What is it?' I wonder.

‘You'll have to wait and see,' he says. ‘Velvet died,' he says as an afterthought. ‘Dickweed too. She was over a hundred.'

‘Guess all the flags were at half mast,' I offer.

We both take a sip of our drinks and I know what he will say next.

‘I was sorry to hear about Alan.'

‘Thank you,' I say. ‘I guess you know what it's like.'

We both take another quick drink in silence.

‘Do you ever wish you could go back?' he asks.

We have not begun recording, this is an answer for him
alone. I think of my journals. The envelope at the bottom of my closet, the way everything ended so horribly, and I realize what I have always wished.

‘I want the possibilities back. The feeling that something better was ahead of me.'

Rummy leans forward, wise with whisky and says, ‘Most people have never even had an island. We're the lucky ones, because if we didn't miss our past then we didn't live enough.'

The phone begins to ring again, and the house shudders from a change in atmospheric pressure. I am safe.

‘It's just nice that someone wants to listen,' I confide.

‘That's what everyone always says,' he tells me.

He hesitates.

‘There is another reason I'm here, Bell. But that can come later.'

I'm curious as to what it could be. He sets his drink back softly on the table, the glass empty.

‘Jesus, Rummy,' I say. ‘Where did the time go?'

‘Well,' he says. ‘I'm here now. Let's begin.'

I start at the end.

‘I still believe he was a good person,' I say. ‘Even after everything that happened.'

Oct 12?

Sunday

He is gone

XXXXXXXXXXXX

Where?

Everything before, everything has been drowned, suffocated and even here, the island, even here nothing keeps the world from us and my mother is dying and Trainer is gone his blood all wet in the street and Bryce…

Is gone. And no one knows where. Six nights ago he was not at the Cock, and he was not in bed, and the next morning Dickweed remembered seeing him on the two o'clock ferry the day before. One oblong duffel bag. Everyone agreed he must have missed the last returning ferry, and would arrive from the mainland having slept in his car overnight. But he never appeared. In the afternoon I made a list of places he could have gone nearby – the pubs he'd told me about on the mainland. After six phone calls there was no one left to call.

That first day I sat beneath the pay phone at the ferry docks until it was dark – still hopeful and worried whether he had enough money and if he'd remember to call. That evening, when the last ferry docked, he was still gone. His BMX was still in the bike rack near the docks. It was an expensive bike and he never left it unlocked, but there it was. It was this careless disregard that terrified me most, as if I'd found his car abandoned and unlocked at an airport or train station.

My blood began to feel too full for my body, pulsing, frantic,
and wanting to escape. A girl I didn't know stopped me on Main Street to ask where he was. Casually, I told her he'd gone to the mainland for a while, but she'd probably see him around soon. She looked at the ground, told me how Bryce came to her rescue one evening, punching a man who molested her.

‘He was arrested that night for fighting,' I told her meanly.

She shrugged, turning awkwardly to leave. ‘He was doing the right thing, you know?'

‘He's a real saint,' I said flatly, and she left.

From Main Street I went straight to church so that I wouldn't have to sit at the Cock and listen to F 12 on the jukebox or have John give me free pity drinks while everyone discussed where he'd gone.

St. Mary's was open. It felt like the logical place to be.

I believe God pays careful attention to these island people.

They are all happy and eating well. They can afford to be here, and not at a roadside diner eating waffles and having to piss without letting their ass touch a greasy unisex toilet seat. They are here and I serve them, work for Velvet, pay bank fees and taxes and still this island is only on loan and we can disappear from it because we are nothing. Actors. Even wearing our nametags we pretend we are more.

With
real
money comes the attention of waiters, dock porters, credit card companies, cameramen, travel agents, secretaries, photographers, politicians, accountants, models – so why
wouldn't
God pay attention to the well-maintained island steeples and women who worship in high-waisted designer dresses, the men with tans wearing khakis by Tommy Bahamas? Maybe I could borrow some of their good fortune. Their ability to arrive at different ports of call with highball glasses and fresh clothing and know that in each new port
they are valued, their patronage is welcomed and no one would ever leave them behind.

Swimming is for the losers.

I asked reverently for a misunderstanding, a simple flat tire, a drunk-driving arrest even, anything to have made that day alone without him my last. On my knees I held onto his name, his prophet name, and wondered if thinking
Lehi
loudly enough would have any effect. If it would keep him afloat, wherever he was. If the existence of it would bring him back.

But all that kept surfacing was
he left me he left me he left me
…

‘And what did I ask for?

‘Oh, Rummy. There was only one thing. In retrospect it was too late – even as I knelt staring up at the Virgin arriving by boat onto Mackinac – it was too late, but then I didn't know what I should be asking for. I didn't know what he was about to do. All I asked – foolishly – was that he still loved me. That he would come back. Even then, with Trainer gone, if he'd just turned around and driven back for our last week together he would have been saved. But there was something wrong even then – that first day – and I couldn't quite figure out what I felt I should know. I never have. The reason why.'

Rummy listens and says nothing. The earpiece feels warm inside my ear, as if it lives.

He was a good person. You can't taste someone and not know what's inside them. So young. He did everything like he wouldn't ever get the chance to do it again. As if he knew.

He
was
a good person. And I couldn't have known what was about to happen. Supposing I had? Supposing I'd received a message of some kind before he'd done it? Or any indication I
meant
something. That I was not so easy to leave.

There must have been a reason for what he did. I don't blame him. I just wish I'd paid more attention. I wish there was some way to know for sure.

Are you recording all this?

For the first three days after his disappearance I drank only water, vomiting even the chocolate croissants Rummy brought me out of sympathy. There were no car accidents or bodies discovered anywhere in Michigan, Wisconsin or Canada. The Tippecanoe received no phone calls, and searching through Bryce's apartment there was no indication he planned on leaving – there was no letter addressed to me. I spent the evenings holding his pillow.

I became responsible by association for his disappearance, meeting with Velvet in her office about the disconnected phone line in Bryce's Grayling apartment, his parents' unlisted number.
Did he have money troubles?
she wanted to know.

But I don't know. I know nothing about him – our entire summer constructed around our own imagined wealth, our faith in the exact moment and nothing else. Everything was, and is, horrible. In his absence Bryce became dead, married, a narcotics agent, manic-depressive, kidnapped, on the run, and nothing made sense. It was none of these things, but it could also be all of them – what I knew for certain was the very real fact of the island, without him.

The island police told me there were almost 6,800 missing persons registered in Michigan, and that most of these people disappear of their own accord. A report was filed, but I didn't have a photograph. I couldn't be sure of his eye color.

I spent my mornings with Rummy drinking coffee and convincing myself that Bryce was unreliable, from a different
faith, that our romance was seasonal, and that I believed what I was saying. Rummy listened, put his hand over mine, and said many nice things.

‘You'll be okay, Bell,' he said. ‘Forgetting will be easier than you think.'

– and when he said it his eyes were a nice shade of brown. For a moment I turned my palm upwards so we were holding hands across the Voodoo altar table. His was warm and dry, and he was right. For an instant, I was okay with his comfort and the possibility that some day Bryce could return and we could resume our summer together.

But it couldn't remain so. The problem with time is the way it has of ruling out certain possibilities as it passes.

My world folded in on itself, imploding, exploding, and everything else impossibly terrible as Brenna came running into the Tippecanoe holding the
Detroit Free Press
above her head.

‘You won't
fucking believe
it,' she said slamming the paper down onto the table between Rummy and me. ‘You won't fucking
believe
what the fuck he's done.'

She pointed triumphantly to the headline on the first page. Our table was surrounded quickly by Velvet, Chef Walter, and everyone else wanting to know the news – but there was no one else there as I read the one, black headline that told me where Bryce had gone.

It was worse because, suddenly, I knew.

With the first word followed by another and another and one short paragraph in black ink I read over and over and over again while everything turned inside out and I knew this summer had taken
two
people from me, and somehow this was much, much worse. Inside of me something clean was gone.

Rummy stood abruptly from his chair saying, ‘Oh, God, oh,
no,' as the restaurant erupted into excited gossip, shock, and speculation, so many questions unanswered and the article maddeningly short. Someone put his hand on my shoulder which made it worse – everyone knew he had been mine, everyone suddenly sorry for me all over again, and wondering how I could have loved someone so awful.

Velvet gave me the day off and I ran to the beach, slipping on the uneven shore beneath me. Would I have rather not known? My body was empty, then full again with anger and hurt and disbelief as I battered a large gray rock over and over against my wrist bone to see if it would shatter under my skin, wanting the stone to leave a bruise. The lake was empty. In the mingled waters of Lake Huron and Michigan I careened out into the waves and waited until my bare feet turned cold and unfeeling, until my toes wouldn't move and I had to wait until I could walk again. The clouds hung gray overhead and for the first time, there was nothing else up there.