Afloat (27 page)

There were no bicycles and no tourists and I walked down Main Street wanting someone to ask what was wrong so I could tell them. So they could be horrified as well, and puzzled, asking, ‘Did you ever suspect? Have you heard from him since?' So I could shake my head and begin to cry.

Past Marquette Park I hesitated outside St. Mary's, feeling the need to decide something quickly – feeling I was very close to needing saving. I compromised by doing five vodka shots before entering the church.

But on my knees all I could do was imagine him unclean, his face and clothing covered in hot blood.

Oct…

Bryce, I prayed for you at you with you today can you hear? You stupid fuck.

I'm left. There must be a reason why.

Was it really you?

The press arrived along with the police. Men with black recording devices atop shoulders and microphones covered in fur, wearing baseball caps and trailing wires behind them, went from bar to pub to restaurant, asking questions and drinking beer. Those who never knew Bryce were the most eager to talk.

From work I returned straight home each night, avoiding everyone until it was my turn to speak. My interview was scheduled after Rummy's, and he looked nervous as he left the station.

‘They want to know if there's been any
contact
,' Rummy whispered.

But we both knew there had been none.

Sergeant Mann was wearing shorts even though it was cold, and the navy-blue canvas made him look more like a mailman than a cop. He offered me a shortbread cookie baked by one of the island women, and I told the Sergeant I couldn't see how the two events were connected – the island had nothing to do with what happened. Bryce never told me he was leaving. He hadn't tried to contact me. I'd never met his family. I couldn't give them a motive.

Sergeant Mann wrote everything down and I was free to leave.

Dickweed didn't tell them about the duffel bag, but they found out anyway from one of the dock porters.

From everything left behind, I've reclaimed my calendar of the Pope, and taken only his Mormonator T-shirt, the one he let me wear to bed. ‘Won't answer my knock?' it reads over the image of a sunglass-clad missionary with arms crossed. ‘I'll
be back.' There is a watery brown beer stain near the collar, and it smells like the woods and alcohol and the sharp sweaty sting of deodorant.

Now standing on the dock at eight o'clock, I cannot believe that the island will end this way for me.

There is no color in the sky – the wind cold, the water black, a family of mallards bobbing brown near the shore. In the early morning light everything seems more important, and it's cold enough for mittens, but I haven't got any.

Last night a fly died on my windowsill. Moving slowly for hours it was too weak to climb the glass, and finally turned onto its back, legs waving, quietly buzzing before being still. This morning there was frost on the windows.

My suitcase stands beside a Mackinac Mart bag full of things I've accumulated over the last few months:

One Petoskey stone.

A Tippecanoe mug with the logo of a birch bark canoe.

Four stolen packages of souvenir walnuts from dry storage.

An unreturned library book that I'll probably throw away when I unpack.

Velvet's business card in case I want to return next summer. Phone numbers on paper coasters and slips of paper: Rummy. Brenna.

A small brown scab from the floor of Bryce's bathroom.

Two journals.

The dock porters secure my luggage onto a large metal trolley and wheel it away onto the boat, leaving me without my possessions. The marina on my right is nearly empty and Marquette Park above it is green without the busyness of people. The Tippecanoe on my left is now closed for the winter, its two stories white and clean, its plate-glass windows obscured by massive sheets of plywood. The piece covering the third window from the left holds a fresh pair of initials
carved in the bottom corner; I have a splinter, Rummy a cut from the kitchen knife we used. I stand facing Main Street, facing him.

Our breath is cold, white, and winter advances, though neither of us will be here to see it.

The lake will freeze.

The school will stay open.

The hotels will close except for one or two that stay open for cross-country skiers.

The pubs will close, but for one or two that do a brisk business helping everyone that's left forget about the snow.

In winter the island reverts to those who really belong, I suppose, and when the horses have gone back to green fields on farms and when bicycles become ridiculous, skidding and sliding, when the streets are covered in a foot or two of snow, the island isn't really timeless after all – there are snowmobiles.

Velvet has informed us she will be spending the winter in Lisbon.

‘I've always wanted to go,' she said. ‘And I've nothing else planned.'

She has rented a furnished villa in the countryside that is being let out by one of Lisbon's most renowned orchestra conductors who will be touring southeast Asia for the winter. She expects she will be able to cycle to and from the city quite easily.

I imagine there must be more like Velvet. People rich enough to escape, knowing how far luxury lies from the island in the months of February and March. Chapped lips and hands, air that hurts to breathe and ice forming on beards and scarves, the wet, cold ends of socks – these are not romantic things.

St. Paul has taught me this much.

The ones left behind will check the temperature daily. After two weeks if the ice is white and hard the call goes out, and
bare Christmas trees emerge to line a pathway in the ice to St. Ignace – these used-up symbols of faith will guide the islanders home again. For weeks the island is no longer that – there is land where once there was water. Caught and frozen in flux, the surface will be uneven and slushy with the afternoon sun. Snowmobiles will spray plumes of winter lake water behind them. This is just what I have heard.

Rummy and I hug for a long time. Pulling away slowly I feel a moment of forever; a lifetime caught suspended in our goodbye. Brenna arrives pulling a designer suitcase that must be fake, and wearing white furry mittens. The three of us stand for a moment. She gives me a kiss.

‘I bet you a million dollars he writes you,' she says. ‘From jail or whatever.'

Then, dismissively –

‘What a weird fucking summer.'

With her suitcase she boards the ferry and is gone.

I ask Rummy what his plans are for the winter.

‘I'm going to live in a Californian monastery in the mountains and drink only tea,' he says.

And it's okay to laugh.

I step onto the wet ramp of the ferry, then up the metal steps to the top deck. With an aisle down the middle, the plastic benches have been laminated to look like wood. I sit next to an orange life preserver hanging on the railing, a yellow coil of rope keeping it in place. It's too cold and my hair is black and fierce in the wind, sticking to my lip-gloss. Brenna is on the lower deck, inside.

The ferry backs away from the pier. Reversing slowly, it does a three-point turn before the engines begin, low and thick, the water beginning to churn behind us. The white spray rises from the back of the boat, but it's going too slow
and too fast all at once. I wave and Rummy waves until our hands are too small to see.

Curving in a watery arc, we pass between the lighthouses, the white one on my right, Round Island on my left. A Star Line ferry approaches, passing us and heading towards the island, but there is no one on it, the top deck empty. Across the widening gap between myself and land, the huge white line of the world's longest front porch stands grand and expensive atop the west bluff, but soon that is gone as well. A dark-black break in the autumn-colored trees marks the hidden outcrop that is Sunset Rock. The stone balcony looks like nothing from down here, just space. Bryce's wine glass is still in the water somewhere below.

The wind increases, sharp and cold, turning my fingers red as the ferry emerges past the shelter of the island's north western end, the sky still thin and gauzy, empty. A seagull shits on the seat beside me.

In fifteen minutes I will be in St. Ignace again, the sharp smell of gasoline strange and immediate, forgotten. The cars will all look hard and too big. In the parking lot I will load my one blue suitcase and Mackinac Mart bag into my white Ford Focus and begin the twelve-hour drive through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and towards St. Paul – towards United Hospital and my mother. ‘Head 'em off at the pass,' she said.

In the distance the mainland is dark and thin, but slowly it gets bigger.

Arriving slowly back at the table, with a shudder I try to disembark, to gently let go – but I can't. I never could.

He could have done it differently. Run, maybe. So young.

I would have gone with him. And where would I be now, what place and with who after all this time? But he didn't run. And so he could never have asked me to go with him. He didn't ask me anything at all.

These thin and yellowed newspaper articles aren't the most important part of the story, but they're the only part I don't understand. Folded neatly into the last pages of my red journal are clippings from the
Crawford County Avalanche
, the
Detroit Free Press
and the
Sunday Sun
. Rummy agrees as I offer to read them aloud, though he knows what they contain.

The headlines – still black though the paper has yellowed – are blunt. First, the small article from the
Crawford County Avalanche
:

Alcohol May be a Factor in Father/Son Hunting Accident

A hunting trip turned deadly for a local Grayling man and his son this weekend after a firearm accidentally discharged during their excursion. Brackley Russo, 47, was fatally injured by his son's high-powered shotgun around 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon on Sunday. Police are investigating to determine whether alcohol was a factor in the accident after finding several beer cans in the vicinity.

Then one day later, the headline Brenna brought to us so long ago – the revelation that made the major papers. The cause of his father's death: four rounds to the chest and groin area. From a Remington 7600 pump action rifle.

Son Remains Silent on Motive for Killing

AP – A Michigan man has been arrested for the murder of his father during what was supposed to have been a routine hunting expedition this weekend in Grayling. Initially reported by local police as an accident, Grayling Sheriff Al Codder is now charging Lehi Bryce Russo, 21, with homicide in the second degree.

The cause of death for Brackley Russo, 47, is listed as four gunshot wounds to the chest and groin area.

Lastly, the
Sunday Sun
:

Excommunicated Mormon Murderer Says Only God
Can Judge Him for the Brutal Slaying of his Father

The sleepy town of Grayling, Michigan has been rocked this week by the murder of long-time resident and ‘Mormon elder' Brackley Russo. Home of the world's longest canoe marathon, this small northern community has been coming to grips with what appears to be the calculated, cold-blooded murder of a well-respected father by his own son.

Sources say the son lured his father out into the bush under the pretext of a father/son hunting trip.

The charge against Lehi Russo has been upgraded to murder in the first degree after officers discovered the accused to have transported the suspected murder weapon to Grayling from a previous residence on Mackinac Island, just days before the killing.

Local hunters have expressed disgust the two family members were hunting illegally with deer season over a month away, but were appeased after discovering that no deer were shot before the murder.

Neighbors describe son Lehi Russo alternately as a well-groomed, intelligent, and socially adept young man, and a troubled, unemployed drifter who repeatedly failed his college electrician courses and had a poor relationship with his father. A neighbor of the Russos told the
Sun
the accused left the family home last summer: ‘He tried to take his sister with him, but Brackley went and brought her back. Said his daughter was staying with him at home until she turned 18. She was a quiet one – went and killed herself last week before all this happened. The whole thing's a tragedy.'

Russo has refused to speak with the press, saying only through a statement released by his lawyer that ‘he did the right thing, and only God can judge him.'

Lehi is an excommunicated member of the Mormon Church, the fast-expanding American religion that was founded in Salt Lake City. Many of its claimed twelve million members are said to still practice polygamy.

A church spokesperson declined to comment on the case, saying only that the biased media coverage of the murder reflected an extreme ignorance of the Mormon religion.

This was always the hardest to read, and it remains so. These were the reporters who discovered the island so long ago and wanted to know
exactly how many
women
Lehi
was seeing at the time of the murder, and did he believe God spoke to him, and whether or not he wore the sacred LDS undergarments under his clothes – only the
truly
faithful wore these full
cotton jumpsuits, the press reported ecstatically. He became a caricature, and without him I became uncertain of what he really was. As I am still.

I put the yellowed pages back onto the table. Rummy shakes his head, but we've both lived too long to be angry about these sorts of things anymore. Rummy can only do his job to lend other voices to the story.

What we missed that summer was what came first. What caused him to leave so suddenly. The tiny clipping is an obituary, too small for me to read now:

Suddenly on October 13th
… Odette Russo died alone in her apartment – her brother's empty apartment, with medication she'd taken from Mercy Hospital.