Peter Geye - Wintering

“How in God’s name did you pass all that time here?”

“I worked. I looked after Rebekah. I read books. Lots of them. You should see the boxes still down in the basement.” I paused. Should I say more? What I spent most of my time waiting for? “I spent more time than was right wondering if I was becoming Rebekah. Middle-aged. Alone. Lonely. Waiting for something to change — for someone to come. I thought about your father. I thought about what a life with him would be like. I pined away for him because I got a feeling around him. I was right about it, too, but I spent nearly half of my life quite sure I might have to let that feeling drift away. I didn’t want to do that. There was too much to it. Too much happiness waiting to be had. I knew that for certain, so I waited. Lord, did I wait.”

“For a long time.”

“It was worth it.”

Again he smiled. A minute passed before he said, “The last time I saw you, I was talking about the Balsam River?”

“You were. About the sault and losing your compass.”

He nodded. “I wanted to tell you something else. Something that happened soon after that. It was important.

“I’d quit counting days by then. Even though my father notched them into his calendar each night, I’d quit. However many days had passed since we washed out of the Balsam and onto those islands of Kaseiganagah, we were by this day properly and irrefutably lost. And because it had been raining more or less since we cleared the last of those islands — and because I had neither compass nor any inclination to wonder — I couldn’t have said if we were lost north or west.

“My father was no longer singing his chansons. He’d hardly spoken in days. He’d stashed the red hat in favor of his poncho’s hood, and he paddled through those days like the angel of death.”

Gus put the heels of his hands over his eyes and held them there. “The day I’m talking about, I paddled on his starboard flank. Watched the eddies trail his canoe. Watched them as they caught the rain and funneled down into the depths.” He lowered his hands. “The lake was black with rain. Like the lake out there.” He nodded out the window. “And just as cold.

“My father, he seemed to have a new and manic resolve to move ahead. Even if it meant floating into oblivion.” He paused yet again, staring through the window at the lake. “From here, I can see that’s just what was happening. My father was discovering the wilderness in himself. It must have seemed as large and unaccommodating as the lands we were traveling through.”

“Oh, Gustav,” I said.

“What I didn’t know, and what makes it all so much more unfathomable — what ought to make it unforgivable —is that he knew not only where he was headed but also what would come after us. Who would come after us. And why.”

I wished that there was a place to sit, that the old davenport was there in front of the window. It was one thing to listen to him talk about his father, to watch the memories working on him. It was another thing altogether to revisit my own lovesickness. Every word about Harry from his lips found a deeper and darker place in me. A feeling I didn’t like. It exhausted me. But there was nowhere to sit up in the apothecary’s attic. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Gus?”

There might have been tears in his eyes. “I’ve spent so many nights between then and now wondering why he dragged me along with him. I’ve been angry. Appalled. Sad. But I’ve spent just as many days giddy with excitement. Like a little boy. So I’ve always said to myself: Let the sleeping dog lie. And I have. At least some of the time. Christ, I have Sarah and the kids as proof that I’ve been able to put it behind me. But now, telling you all of this — I don’t know, Berit. I’m scared.”

“To tell me?”

“No. To look back anymore.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re a father yourself. Or because you’re afraid you’re becoming your father.”

“That’s what Sarah said.”

“Can we both be wrong?”

At this I could tell he wanted to smile. He didn’t, though. “There are so many similarities between him and me, I can see that,” he said. “But what I think really scares me are the countless ways I’m not like him. And because the past is getting farther and farther behind me, and the end coming closer and closer, I’m afraid I’ll never meet the man in myself that I saw in him.”

“Everyone’s past disappears. That’s only natural.”

“Parts of it do. You’re right. But other parts don’t. You know that as well as I do. There are things that can never be forgotten, no matter how hard we try to.”

I caught his eyes in the reflection of the window. “You have your children, Gus. And Sarah. You don’t need to become your father.”

He closed his eyes and turned his head toward the ceiling.

“You’d better help me down the stairs,” I said.

And he did. I put my free hand through his arm and he walked slowly beside me, step by step. When we got outside, the morning was warmer than it looked. The sun was coming out from behind the low clouds. We stood there on the porch.

“Here’s what I wanted to tell you. A few days beyond the Balsam River, a cold, rainy day, we turned into the heavy waters of some swamp. My father paused to take his pointless reckoning, and the rain turned to snow by degrees so deliberate and measurable it seemed to be happening out of time altogether. He pulled his hood back and looked up into the snow. And my father — the same man you knew, Berit — he wept. I was stunned. Too stunned to say a word. I just watched him. And after a moment he turned to me and said, ‘We’ll never find our way back.’

“I felt no fear or anxiety. None at all, even though I was certain we’d die in that wilderness. That I’d die without so much as a compass in my pocket. That we would never be found. What a thing for a boy my age to know. Or for a man to carry around his whole life.”

I took his hands in mine.

“How can I convey any of this, Berit? How can I tell Sarah and our kids that our whole life, all of our happiness, it’s all been make-believe, because my father and I died up on the borderlands?”

I squeezed his hands tightly.

“We died over and over and over again.”

I’D BE LYING if I said my talks with Gus didn’t fill me with a kind of purpose. Maybe even hope. I loved to be so daily reminded of Harry, both bodily and in Gus’s manner of speech — how carefully he chose his words, the pauses between them, his conscience plain to see. Harry had been the same in every respect.

But our talks troubled me, too, and the hours after we’d part — when I was left alone with the stories he’d told me, sorting them out, remembering my own version of Harry, writing things down — troubled me even more.

That morning in December, after he guided me down the stairs at the old apothecary and helped me into my truck, after I’d driven through town and turned up the Burnt Wood Trail toward home, I got to thinking about what he’d said about our being able to forget some things. It was easy to see he was right, even though I’d never thought of it exactly like that before. All I had to do was conjure the image of Harry’s face. The sweet lines around his eyes. The mess of hair that framed it. The soft lips that ought to have been anything but. My God, how I missed him. How I remembered him. But what had I already forgotten? And where had it gone?

When I got home I went to my bureau and opened the top drawer and took from it the only picture that was ever taken of Harry and me together. His shirt collar askew. His eyes cast off to the side as if there were some imminent danger he’d just noticed. He looked nervous. Caught. I know because he told me that the expression mimicked his feelings on that day. In the photograph we’re standing outside the Normandy Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. It was one of only a handful of trips we ever took.