Safe from the Sea (17 page)

“A little after five o’clock. Go back to sleep.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing, go back to sleep.”

He had almost fallen asleep himself when he heard her whisper, “Look at all those stars still out.” Noah put his arm around her.

“Is your father still sleeping?”

“No, he’s out working in his shed.”

“I have terrible breath,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said, and again they made love.

When they’d finished Nat took her pillow from behind her head and put it under her bottom. There was a light beyond the stars in the window now, and they looked upon it. They lay so for a long time, both of them awake and silent. Her hair still smelled of its shampoo. Her skin so soft under his hands. He was exhausted but oddly restored next to her there in bed. He felt gluttonous. It was, perhaps, the most luxuriant hour of his year.

Finally Noah said, “What time do you have to leave?” “My flight’s at one. I guess I should leave by nine.”

Noah didn’t say anything, only held her.

“Unless you need me to stay for anything.” She rolled over to look at his face, put her pillow back under her head.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I could help you take care of him. We could try to bring him to the hospital. Whatever.” “He’ll never go to the hospital, and I don’t blame him anymore. It’s his life. We’ll be okay. I can take care of him.” “What about your sister?”

“She’s going to come when she can. She can’t just leave at a moment’s notice. Tom is busy. The kids are busy.” “I feel so weird leaving like this. Your father must think it so strange.” “He knows what’s going on.”

“I guess this all worked out.”

“It did. I hope it did.”

“How long are you going to stay? What’s your plan?”

“I have no idea.”

A
FTER BREAKFAST
N
AT
was ready to leave. She stood at the open door of her rental car and bade Olaf thanks. Noah tossed her bag into the backseat of the car. She kissed Olaf on the cheek. She kissed Noah on the lips. She squeezed his hand.

“Stay over on the right side of the road here,” Olaf said, pointing to the side of the trail up from the cabin with the most traction. “That track’s damn near washed out. And be careful driving back to Duluth on 61. The deer will be out for breakfast themselves. They sit in the
ditch next to the road.” Olaf moved toward the house. “I’m going inside. It was good to see you. Thanks again for supper last night. It beat hell out of instant mashed potatoes.” “We’ll do it again sometime,” Nat said.

Olaf nodded. “Good-bye.”

Nat smiled. “Well, I better get going. It’s two lefts and a right, right?” “A right at Lake Superior.” He handed her the package holding the agate. “Open this on the plane. It’s no big deal.” She put her arms around his shoulders and hugged him. He hugged her back very hard. Her car trundled up the road, slipping into the ruts, the wheels spinning, but she was gone in a moment.

EIGHT

All day Olaf slept while Noah split and stacked wood. Vikar had emerged from the woods to watch, and at noon Noah fed him a bucket of food. His own lunch he took to the top of the ski jump again, leftover black pot and unbuttered
lefse
, the remains of the smoked salmon. Vikar followed him but would not climb the scaffold. After lunch he went back to the gulch to inspect the oak. He tried to devise a plan but realized he needed a much bigger saw, it was as simple as that. He would ask his father about it.

He checked on his father at one o’clock. The old man still slept, deeply but with great agitation. Noah went down to the lake to fish. He rowed across the lake to the spot off the cliff. He cast his line, waited, and jerked the jig across the bottom of the first step. For two hours he cast his line up the step. And for the second time in as many efforts he didn’t catch a thing.

T
HE
SUV
PARKED
in the yard had North Dakota plates.

Inside, Solveig sat on the sofa beside their father, her arm around him. Olaf, his eyes glassy, his hair messed from the long day of sleep,
looked both thrilled and desperate. “I wish you wouldn’t have asked her to come,” Olaf said before either of his children could speak.

“I didn’t ask her to come.”

“Of course I’d come, Dad.” She put her hand through his hair.

“Well, there’s no need to sulk,” Olaf said.

“Come on, Dad,” Noah said.

“I’m okay,” Solveig almost sang. “I’m glad I’m here.”

“When did you get here?”

“Just now. I can only stay for a couple days. The kids are with Tom’s folks.” She took a deep breath, trying, Noah saw, to stave off tears.

“You just missed Nat—it’s a long story. But this is great,” he said. “Here we all are.”

As pleasant as the previous night had been, this night was dour. Solveig, for her part, seemed immobilized by her grief at the sight of the old man. No question he had worsened from the day before, but even Noah thought his sister’s worry exaggerated. Olaf could hardly stand it. The thought occurred to Noah that Solveig—with her fretting melodrama—was handling her father’s illness much as his mother had handled the morning of the wreck so many years ago. Though in many ways she was as sweet and incorruptible as his mother, Solveig was also the child of a different generation, and what had been forgivable in his mother was less so in his sister.

Instead of eating dinner the three of them snacked intermittently on leftovers from the night before. They seemed incapable of coherent conversation. Finally Olaf asked Noah to bring the piano in from the porch.

The old Acrosonic sat in a corner, buried beneath mounds of junk—a fishing net, empty boot boxes, a telescope with a cracked lens, empty bags of dog food, a spare truck tire—against the lake wall.
Noah cleared a path, unlocked the wheels on the legs of the piano, and rolled it into the living room. A long time ago, Noah remembered, the piano had been refinished with a deep, wine-colored varnish. Now the glassy finish was obscured and gauzelike.

“It’s a ghost piano,” Noah said. “Doesn’t it look like a ghost?”

“Been on that porch for the better part of ten years,” Olaf said. “I should have taken better care of it.”

“It’s not as if you play, Dad,” Solveig said. “And besides, this house isn’t exactly built for a piano. They take up a lot of room.”

“Even so,” Olaf said, “it’s a shame.”

Noah had wheeled it across the floor and was positioning it against the wall. “Toss me a dishrag,” he said to Solveig, who stood at the kitchen counter now with her hands on her hips. She flipped him the rag.

Noah had hoped that dusting it off and getting it in the soft lamplight might restore some of its luster. But it looked perhaps even worse. When he lifted the cover off the keys and stood over them playing “Chopsticks,” its wail startled him. Every third or fourth key failed to strike any note at all, and the keys that did hit the strings sounded more like shrieks than music.

He looked over his shoulder at Solveig, who covered her ears with her hands. “We’ll get a piano tuner up here. You can’t play on this now.” He stood, closed the keyboard cover, and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Good luck getting a piano tuner up here,” Olaf said. “You’re in Misquah, not Boston or Fargo.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Noah said as he headed back onto the porch to retrieve the bench. “We’ll find a piano tuner.”

As he rummaged through the mounds of rubbish he could hear Solveig giving the piano another try, some wail approximating a classical
number. By the time he’d found the bench under an old kerosene stove, Solveig had mercifully quit playing. He lugged the bench into the living room, set it before the piano, and wiped his hands. “We’ve got to clean that porch up,” Noah said.

Olaf said nothing, a look of despondency conveying all. He stood, kissed Solveig atop the head, and adjourned to his bedroom.

Noah and Solveig sat opposite each other on the sofa. Noah was flushed again from the heat of the fire. He felt exhausted beyond sleep. “I’m not wrong about this, am I?” he said. “He’s as bad as I thought, right?”

“I think so,” Solveig said. Her voice quavered, but she kept from crying.

“He’s building some goddamn contraption out in the shed.”

“I know. He told me that he wants you to bury him in the lake.” She paused. “We can’t bury him in the lake, Noah.”

Noah nodded half yes, half no.

“I told him we would bury him properly in a cemetery. I told him he didn’t need to do an eternal penance for something that happened so long ago and was entirely out of his control.”

“I bet he loved hearing that.”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“Of course he didn’t.”

She folded the afghan and draped it over the back of the sofa. “I talked to Tom about having him come stay with us. He was wonderful. He said he’d do whatever I wanted, that we could hire a nurse to live with us.”

“That’s awfully generous.”

“I’m sure there’s no way Dad’ll do it, though,” she said. “He’s got other plans in mind now. I can see that clearly.”

Olaf came out of his bedroom. He stepped outside and returned in a moment. He prepared the water and effervescing tablets for his teeth. He said good-night again.

“Where were we?” Solveig said.

“We were getting nowhere,” Noah replied.

They talked for a couple of hours about what to do before they went to bed. Solveig was inconsolable. Noah finally realized how necessary sleep was. His body ached. Somewhere in the intersection of his fatigue and forlornness he caught a glimpse of the old man’s reason, saw how it might all play out.

T
HE PATTER OF
rainwater on the roof woke him the next morning. As he strained to hear his father or sister stirring in their bedrooms he could make out only the thumping in his own head. The rain streaming over the gutters and cascading down the windows blurred the morning. He thought of going back to sleep, even rolled over to do so, but decided he’d already slept too long and too hard. He rose from the sofa, felt the entirety of his fatigue, remembered his labor the day before. He remembered his dreams, too, and he replayed them with a child’s intuitiveness, but their meaning never arrived.

Both of the bedrooms were empty, both beds made. The fire was as temperate as it had been since he’d arrived. He looked out the window and saw that his sister’s truck was gone. He wondered where they were for a moment but gave up on the thought of them and felt an enormous relief in their absence. Given the weather, he could justify a day on the couch.

The morning had risen with more showers. All of the pine trees sagged under the deluge. Even the hardwoods—the poplar and aspen
and birch—were limp of limb in the near and distant woods. The wind, though, was gone; he imagined the rain had quelled it, had drowned it.

Since he’d been here he’d felt a nearly constant sense of responsibility. Any moment not spent doing something was one spent wondering what he ought to be doing. Now, though, as his shoulders loosened, he felt no obligation whatever.

He looked through the refrigerator for breakfast but found nothing. He went to the piano and tried to finger the first few bars of an old piano-lesson standard, but between the lamentable tune and his own sorry playing, he gave up after his first try. He washed what few dishes lay in the sink. He put a kettle of water on for bathwater. He stood at the window for a long while watching the rain. Finally he took a magazine from the table and settled back onto the sofa.

It was the
Wisconsin Lawyer
his father had been reading a few days earlier. He checked the table of contents, turned to the shipwreck article. He read it twice, bored first by the tedious and arcane legal language and then by the clichéd images of Spanish frigates sunk with kings’ ransoms off the coast of America. Though the article was pedantic and forgettable, it did trick him into a question that he spent much of the morning pondering: What was left of his father, his mother, his sister, even himself, on the bottom of Lake Superior?

He pictured his father’s berth on the
Ragnarøk
, a place he knew well from the summer cruises to Toledo and Cleveland and Ashtabula that he’d taken as a child. He could envision the porthole windows and the steel bulkheads; the riveted floor and the braided rug his father kept at the foot of the diminutive bed—too short by two feet for his father; the officer’s desk opposite the bed—mahogany, indestructible, stately, with an inlaid glass top—bolted to the bulkhead; the pictures of the four of them beneath the desktop, the sense of awe it
gave him to think that a picture of him should be included in a place so sacred; the narrow locker in the corner of the berth, the black steel-toed boots polished to a dead flat shine that sat on the floor beneath the sweaters and coats hanging from pegs. Pictures hung on the inside of the locker door, too, one of them of Noah himself, midflight on the bunny-ears jump in Chester Bowl at the age of five. As far as Noah understood, the article suggested that all of these things no longer belonged to his father but to the state of Michigan or Minnesota, depending on which state’s territorial water the wreckage rested in. It seemed unfair that some state historical society owned that part of his past, that the calamity of November 6, 1967, hadn’t been damaging enough, hadn’t taken the perfection of his childhood and crushed it, but that any proof of that perfection, even were it salvageable, wouldn’t belong to him.

The kettle whistle blew. Noah mixed it with cold water from the ten-gallon drum under the sink. He washed and shaved, stood naked at the kitchen basin. He felt a firmness in his shoulders he’d not noticed for many years. He dressed in clean clothes, the last such pair of drawers, the last such T-shirt and pants. A pair of cotton socks. He took the key to his father’s truck from a nail pounded into the windowsill and went out. The torrent had weakened, luckily for Noah. The windshield wipers only worked on one slow intermittent speed.

F
ROM THE PAY
phone at the Landing he called Natalie. Now the rain had ceased altogether and reddish water lay in pools all over the gravel parking lot, none of them reflecting sky. She answered on the second ring. “I was hoping you’d call,” she said.