Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

THE 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.

FROM 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.

“How are you? How was the trip home?”

“I’m fine. The necklace is beautiful. Thank you. Whatever possessed you?”

“Sheepishness, I guess.”

“I mean it. It’s beautiful. I’m wearing it now.” She paused, he could picture her caressing the glassy stone around her neck. “How’s your father?”

“We’re a stopover for damsels in distress now. Solveig came yesterday, the two of them are off somewhere.”

“How is she?”

“A complete wreck. So is my dad. It’s like he’s worse for her company.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for both of them.”

“Anyway, I don’t get it.”

Natalie took an audible breath. “I missed you this morning. It’s not the same around here without you.” She filled him in on several details. Her travel plans for the week. A conversation she’d had with Ed about the shop. He was fine. She was going to go to her parents’ house to watch the Patriots on Monday Night Football after work. “But no beer for this one,” she said. “I really feel like I’m pregnant.”

“It was just yesterday, Nat.”

“I don’t mean physically feel, I mean I have a feeling .”

“I hope you’re right.”

“When are you coming home?”

“I didn’t tell you this, but the day you got here, my father asked me to bury him in the lake when he dies.”

“What do you mean, bury him in the lake?”

He replayed the conversation in the shed. He described as well as he could the anchor his father was fashioning from the barrel. “And he told me about the wreck, most of it anyway.”

“About his ship? What did he say?”

“It would take me all day to tell you everything.”

“Tell me something .”

“Let’s just say I’m wiser now. Still, I have no idea what to do with him, no idea at all. No idea when I’ll be home, that’s what I was getting at.”

“Well, I talked to Ed this morning, and he’s fine. Completely fine. He might not want you to come home, the way he tells it.” She paused. “Take as long as you need, Noah. I’m fine here, and I know you need to be with your father now. Just keep me posted. And say hello to Solveig.”

“I will,” Noah said. He felt light. “I’ll call you when I know anything.”

HE HADN’T NOTICED, standing outside the Landing talking to Nat, but by the time he got back to the cabin the day had become frigid. Ice had formed along the edges of the shallow pools atop the splitting stumps. Solveig’s car was still gone. Vikar lay curled atop the steps, the stink of his wet coat noticeable as Noah stepped over him. Only the dog’s eyes moved to check Noah.

He ate the rest of the smoked salmon and stale crackers for an early dinner and lay sprawled on the sofa afterward, the walls and all they held becoming familiar now. He thought of grabbing a book from one of the shelves but fell asleep instead. He woke much later to darkness and the sound of Olaf and Solveig returning.

When they came inside — his father first, held at the elbow by Solveig, the old man swaddled in full winter wear again — Noah sat up to meet them. Olaf looked at Noah with blank eyes. Solveig appeared drained, her eyes swollen, her face splotchy.