Authors: Danielle Sosin

The Long-Shining Waters (19 page)

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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Grey Rabbit feels a hand on her shoulder. She squints into the bright sun, at a smooth youthful face.

Standing Bird touches his mother’s arm. He kneels in front of her. Her legs are cold to the touch and her staring eyes are frightening. “What happened?” he whispers. “We’ve been looking for you.”

The boy is pulling on her arm, trying to lift her hand from her ear, but she clamps it back each time he pries it away. “The beavers,” she nods urgently.

“Come, we’ll go back.” He holds out his hand. “Mother,” he repeats, and jiggles her leg, urging her to get to her feet. She looks at him with eyes flat as a fish’s, and it makes him want to run away. He reaches around her waist and pulls, but he can’t budge her from the rock. He tries from the side with one arm beneath her knees, like he once saw his father do, but still, he can’t. He must, but he can’t.

A voice calls from the woods. Standing Bird jumps to his feet and pierces the morning air with a shrill whistle.

2000

The Shipwreck Museum is an entire compound of buildings, white with red roofs, a well-trimmed lawn, and a lighthouse standing in the center. Nora peers through the door of the building that houses the main exhibit. She has a handbag of feelings about going inside and thinking about sunken ships.

She walks across the lawn to the gift shop. Inside, she buys Nikki a purple hooded sweatshirt with
Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum
on the front, then picks out a matching cap. There are snow globes with boats trapped inside, and picture books of ships going up in flames. A penny-flattening machine stands near the door.

Nora fingers through the change in her wallet and picks out a new, nearly pink penny. She and Joannie used to lay coins on the railroad tracks, then run into the woods as the train barreled by. She’ll send it just to make her laugh, with a card that reads, “How I’m spending my time.” The penny falls into a shallow cup, an oval of copper embossed with the museum’s emblem.

Nora smokes on the sidewalk in front of the shipwreck exhibit. She can see the dark vestibule every time the door opens, and hear snippets of the song about the
Edmund Fitzgerald.
She knew the aunt of one of those boys, and frankly, she can’t stand the song.

People die on the water every year. Small boats. Large. People swept out in riptides. Lost kayaking. Hypothermia. No one with any sense disrespects Lake Superior. But it had been almost twenty-five years since the lake had taken anything near the size of the
Edmund Fitzgerald.
She was ten the year that the
Steinbrenner
and half her crew went down. Eventually one of its hatch covers washed up on Park Pointe. She remembers it as clearly as the day she saw it. It lay on the beach, a gruesome remembrance. Battered and enormous, gouged and scratched, it haunted her in the darkness of her bedroom that whole year. When the
Fitzgerald
disappeared in that November storm, people sat glued to the television over the bar, waiting for news, for the ship to come through. And when all hope was finally lost, she and a lot of people who should have known better were stunned. Somehow they’d all become comfortable, as if modern technology had grown more powerful than the lake. If she hadn’t promised Nikki, she’d skip the shipwreck exhibit.

It’s low lit and blue inside the building, creating the effect that the exhibit is underwater. There are glass display cases around the perimeter, and spoked steering wheels like starfish on the walls, but Nora crosses to the center of the room, where a lighthouse lens identical to the one she’d seen gleams in the wash of blue light. She walks slowly around the lens, watching rainbows form and disappear in the crystal rings. It’s gorgeous. She ought to take Nikki to Split Rock. She pictures her in her little dragonfly jeans, hopping up the spiral stairs. She’d love to see her reaction to the giant crystal eye.

The display cases along the walls are filled with objects recovered from the bottom of the lake. There are blocks and bilge pumps. Watch fobs and dolls. She almost has to laugh at a ship’s good luck horseshoe. A banjo. A typewriter. It’s absolutely grotesque. Scissors. Binoculars. Wedding bands, books, and coins. A fork. A ladder. An iron trap. Wooden winches. An inkwell. A silver shaving brush. Nora sees the lathered face, and the man’s flat fingernails. The woman’s catlike staring eyes, and she walks back out into the daylight.

Nora crosses the lawn, follows a boardwalk toward the shore, sits, and tamps a pack of cigarettes on the wood plank of a bench. A museum for shipwrecks. It’s a morbid idea. Why not a car wreck museum—fill it with broken glass, maps, kids’ car seats, to-go cups.

It’s sunny overhead, but the lake is fogged in, leaving only the sandy shoreline visible. The fog hovers, not moving in or out, but in places lifting slightly off the water. Down the beach, a rusty bicycle is lying in the sand. She wonders if there are any boats out in the fog.

The
America.
The name just comes.

Nora slides her notebook out of the gift shop bag and pages through to find her list of Ralph’s photographs of sunken ships. “The America,” she writes, her pen hovering. A stream of cigarette smoke rolls against the page. The air is still, moist, and even a little warm. When she looks again, the mist has enshrouded the bicycle. And why not. The fog might as well keep coming. She’s already lost. Completely adrift. If there’s a foghorn somewhere it’s surely skipping over her. She looks down the list of sunken ships, and in heavy block letters she adds her own name: “Nora Truneau—Gone Missing.” They can put her suitcase in the museum, her map, her postcards, her glass float, she’s going home.

1902

Berit sees a vague reflection of her head in the window, layered over the moonlit water. She takes another small sip from the bottle, the liquor thick, bittersweet, and smoldering in her stomach. She’d found it wrapped in an old net, saw the glint of glass when it was struck by the moonlight. It is not so much the idea of the drink—growing up on the Keweenaw there were three different groceries—but the shock that Gunnar had hid something from her.

And what else? If there’s one falsity, how many more? Did he take a drink every day, hiding bottles from her when he rowed the supplies in, or had he put it up for a particular occasion? If he’d been a tippler she would have known. Certainly she would have smelled it on him. What else had she been unaware of, sitting with her comfortable assumptions? What secrets? What unshared thoughts?

She brings the bottle to her lips. It shines like ice, but burns in her throat. No. She knew him, she knew him well. Gunnar was not a deceitful man. She swirls the clear liquid against the sides of the bottle. Lord knows she’ll never know the truth now.

Berit climbs down the ladder, holding her skirt hem and the bottle in one hand. It’s a warm windless night, the lake dead calm, the June moon rising toward a long bank of clouds. She wedges the outhouse door open and sits. Silver light floods across their clearing, where everything’s throwing long shadows: the net reel, the stack of fish boxes, Gunnar’s overturned skiff. She can’t bear looking at his boat. Most often, she averts her eyes when she passes. Why did Hans have to bring it back in? Berit takes another drink, and the moonlight flares through the bottom of the bottle.

Suddenly it’s simple.

Berit steadies the bottle in the grass, squats, and heaves the boat over. She runs her hand along the smooth gunnel; he always took care to keep it that way, protecting his nets from catching and snagging. The grasses hiss against the hull as she drags the boat down to the cove, where it scrapes across the rocks.

An owl hoots in the woods as she works her way from bow to stern, pouring the liquor from the bottle. Down the boat’s ribs. Dousing the seats. Running a line down her center seam.

The moon is halfway into the cloud bank and disappearing before her eyes. Berit strides up to the fish house to fetch a lantern. When she returns, the moon is gone, though her lantern throws a circle of light on the beach stones. Filled with purpose, she pushes the boat forward, grabs the lantern, and steps into the flat black water.

The lake is frigid around her ankles. Here, your beloved skiff, she offers. Take your liquor. Take your skiff. The cold clasps her above the knees, her heavy skirt wicking. The lake is a vise squeezing her hips. She won’t be able to stay in much longer. Berit shoves the boat as hard as she can, sends the lantern crashing against the seat. It glides for a moment into the darkness, and then in a flash of bright orange, the skiff bursts into flames.

I will tell what I have learned about black water.

Black water is obsidian gone soft. A liquid image of dark space.

Where one dark realm opens to another. Opens to another.

Or maybe closes.

All manner of depth is at once obscured.

It is a dark wool coat. A black serpent’s scales. Quick flash of a copper tail.

Can such a thing be anything but furtive? Concealing razor sharpness. Jut of bone. Open mouths.

Black water calls for vigilance.

Every conceivable bearing is a portal.

2000

Nora’s eyes adjust slowly to the darkness. If the museum was underwater, she is now underground. The bar is made entirely of dark split logs, with moose racks mounted on the walls, and squirrels, beaver, rabbits, and mink staring down from the rafters. The place smells like burgers and cigarettes. Nora nods to the bartender as she crosses to the doorway labeled Restrooms/ Telephone.

“Hey, where are you now?” asks Rose.

“Paradise. I’m serious. That’s the name of the town. I just left the Shipwreck Museum. It was absolutely grotesque. What’s wrong with people?”

“You don’t want me to answer that, do you?”

“What’s going on there? What are you doing?”

“Watching a program.”

“About?” Nora knows that Rose will tell her the whole thing, but that is fine. She just wants to hear her voice.

“The human body. This is good. . .. Did you know that the fluid in your body is the same salt-to-water ratio as the primordial sea? We’re all still carrying it around. That slays me.” Rose laughs, and Nora hears her lighter click.

A coffee can is in the middle of the floor, below a spot in the ceiling that apparently leaks. Nora nudges it with the toe of her shoe.

“So, get this.” Rose is still cackling. “Those saline drips they give you in the hospital are basically bags of old seawater.”

“I think I may head back tomorrow,” Nora says.

“Are you all right? Your voice sounds funny.”

“I’m fine. Oh, I have something for you. I found a painting like the one by your couch.”

“You did? I’ve missed it. That was Buck’s, you know.”

“Well it’s not exact, but it reminds me of yours.”

“Nora, you don’t sound so great. If you’re not up to the trip, you should come on back. You don’t always have to be the Rock of Gibraltar. No one’s judging.”

The bar is small with only a handful of stools. They’re mostly taken, but there’s one for her. “Just a beer,” Nora says, setting her things on the bar. This time she’ll ask about the motels. So far her rooms have been hit or miss, one with rust stains in the sink and a loose toilet seat, the next perfectly clean and for the same rate.

“The Drifter’s a good deal,” says the bartender. He’s a big man with black hair and a drooping mustache.

“We’ve stayed there ourselves,” the man on the next stool concurs. “Did you just come over the bridge?”

“What bridge?” The cold beer feels great on her throat.

“The Mackinaw. It’s the only way up from the rest of the world.”

“I’m from Wisconsin. Superior,” she says.

“Oh, over there. I’ve never been west.”

This strikes her as funny, west being Wyoming or California in her mind. Wisconsin couldn’t be more in the middle. The man’s seventy, maybe, with glasses and thick skin. He looks like a farmer, someone who knows weather.

“Bob O’Meara,” he says. “This is my wife, Margaret. That big guy there,” he lifts his beer to the bartender, “is Mike Stone, owner of this fine establishment.”

There’s a snowmobiling calendar behind the bar, and a boar’s head wearing a baseball cap, a bunch of key rings dangling from its mouth. “I like your place. It feels well lived in.”

“I can’t argue that. There’s been a lot of living here.”

“Not too much dying, recently,” Bob laughs.

“Are you passing through?” Margaret asks, looking at Nora’s notebook with the postcards sticking out. She has a tremor and arthritic hands, so her beer glass shakes when she lifts it off the bar. The couple looks like bookends, in his and her versions. Nora tells them she’s been going around the lake.

“By yourself, dear?” Margaret looks incredulous, her eyes widening behind thick lenses.

It hasn’t been an uncommon response, second only to that she’s going the wrong way.

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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