Here to Stay (26 page)

“No, not at all.”

Mike put both feet down and cracked his knuckles. “Look, let me just put something out there. I don’t know you from a baby I held once and what happened with your father was a horrible thing. If you don’t want to talk about it or you don’t want me to tell any stories about him, that’s fine, I get it.”

“No, I do,” Erik said. “I came here to look around. To see if anyone was left here who knew me, or knew him, or knew anyone in my family. My memory is so full of holes and I want to see if I can fill some of them. Does that make sense?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m ready to hear stories about my dad but not from my mother. It’s too painful for both of us. Hearing it from someone a little more removed is easier.”

Mike nodded. “Your dad meant a lot to me. I’m born fifty-five. He was born forty-seven. So an eight year age difference. He was one step down from Uncle Emil. If Emil wasn’t available to bury a body, Byron was my next phone call. He taught me about cars and boats. Taught me about fishing. He was the guy who drove me to the drug store to buy rubbers when I was seventeen. He made me go in there and buy them myself, said I couldn’t cheat by buying shaving cream and a bunch of other stuff to hide them. ‘Go in there and buy them like a man.’”

Erik gave a bark of laughter. “Jesus Christ, one of my mother’s brothers did the same thing with me. ‘If you can’t walk into Rite-Aid and buy your own rubbers, you have no business having sex. Now get in there.’”

“Well, good, you grew up with some uncles. I feel better knowing that.”

Daisy came back out with their beers. She seemed to stretch her antenna into the air between the men and make a decision. “It’s a little chilly for me out here,” she said, leaning to kiss Erik’s face. “I’m going to hang with Cassie a bit then I might head up to the room.”

“You sure?” Erik said, half getting up, as was Mike.

“Sit,” Daisy said, reaching a hand to squeeze Mike’s. “You guys talk. It’s your time.”

“SO,” MIKE SAID. “I grew up looking up to your dad. When I graduated high school, my mom wanted to have a party out in the gardens, but then you and your brother got sick with the mumps. They had to quarantine the hotel. Your dad felt really bad about it and once things calmed down, he took me out to dinner.”

Erik nodded.

“Then I joined the Coast Guard so I was down in Cape May, New Jersey, a couple years. Your dad wrote me a few letters. He was busy but he took the time. That’s how I found out your brother had gone deaf. He shared his thoughts with me, said how hard it was to see your kid suffer. Hard when things beyond your control just happened. He…” Mike’s hands groped in the air as he searched for words. “He let me see the harder parts of growing up. Know what I mean?”

“What else,” Erik said, hardly daring to breathe. “What was he like?”

“Serious. Not that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but his home base seemed to be thoughtful. He often faded into the background in a crowd. Listening more than he talked. Like he was recording everything. Sometimes he’d go away though.”

“What do you mean?”

Mike’s face twisted as if he weren’t sure. “He’d get a faraway look in his eyes,” he finally said. “Like he was listening to music no one could hear. I sometimes wondered if he was a secret poet. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a novel tucked away nobody knew about.”

“Really?”

Mike nodded, taking a pull of his beer. “I remember some passages in those letters being really eloquent, but in a way even a big lug like me could understand. He wasn’t an outwardly passionate guy in person, but on paper it came through.

“When I’d come home from the Coast Guard, and later when I came home from college, he was always here. Always was glad to see me. We’d have beers in the hotel bar or go out on the boat or just kick rocks along the beach. If I had a problem, I dumped it at Byron’s feet. Money, girls, anything.

“Meanwhile I watched him with your mother. I don’t even know how you fit this into the big picture of what happened but he loved her. Like his love for her was a thing in the air. Shit, I’m not good with words but you could see how he loved being with her best. And I wanted what he had. Byron didn’t have grandiose ambitions. He was a smart, well-spoken guy. He could’ve been a success at anything, in my opinion. But he just wanted a nice life in the town he grew up in. With the woman he loved.

“So he changed my outlook a little. I always figured the definition of success was getting as far away as possible from your hometown and making a new fresh mark somewhere else. Byron made me see nothing was wrong with sticking around and building on top of a foundation already there.”

Erik was staring past him, listening as he looked across Riverside Drive to the water. Caught between the past and the present. Mike’s description of Byron layering on top of the few precious memories Erik kept locked behind display cases in the gallery of his heart.

His father’s desertion had been contained with a triangle: himself, his mother and Pete. Now that triangle was taking dimension and becoming a prism. Mike’s stories were refracting the narrative into different wavelengths. Erik had only seen father and husband. Now Byron was colored things like son, nephew, cousin and friend.

“I was a senior at Potsdam when my mom called me,” Mike said. “She said Byron was missing. I came home that weekend. The place was… Police were in and out of the hotel and your house. People went door to door from here to Alexandria Bay. They searched the river front on both sides, combed every island.”

“So weird how I don’t remember any of that drama,” Erik said. “I can remember the emotions from when he left, but I’ve forgotten the day-to-day events. I can see his truck driving away and making a left turn. Then the chronology just implodes and my next memories come from living in Rochester.”

“A year they searched. Your mom hired detectives both in the States and Canada. She starved herself to a thread looking for him. My mother would always give me the latest news, but she had less and less to give as time went on.”

“I didn’t realize how badly I was traumatized until I was in my twenties,” Erik said. “I shut down. And when other traumatizing events happened in my life, I reacted by shutting down. My dad taught me leaving was the solution to things.”

“How about your brother?”

“He stopped talking. He wouldn’t wear his hearing aids. He didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to talk about it. It’s a wonder he didn’t put his own eyes out.”

“Astrid was destroyed,” Mike said. “Now both her boys were gone. You knew about your dad’s brother, right?”

“Only recently.”

Mike’s shoulders gave a small shudder. “No parent should have to outlive their child. It’s… It’s so against the natural order of things that it’s offensive. Seeing a parent have to bury their child
offends
me. You know what I mean?”

Erik nodded, barely able to wrap his mind around the amount of loss his grandmother had endured. How the saga of the Fiskares was imbued with so much tragedy.

“For Byron to disappear after she lost Xandro? And then to find out he was alive, he’d just deserted his family? Not only you and your mother and brother, but everyone in Clayton? No doubt in my mind, your grandmother died of a broken heart,” Mike said. “And Kennet was never the same. He watched Astrid waste away and frankly I’m surprised he survived her as long as he did. Then in eighty-seven he passed, and Emil lay down months later and checked out. It was the end. The whole hotel felt lopsided, like it had been through an earthquake and nobody would fix the foundations. Nobody would build on top of it ever again. I think that’s why Kirsten sold it off.”

“I had no idea,” Erik said. “My mom took us to Rochester and my mind hit the reset button. She brought us back here a few times and I can barely remember them.”

Mike’s hands twisted and he started and stopped a half-dozen times before he next spoke. “I felt bad. I still do. I feel like I could have done more for you.”

“For me?” Erik said. “How?”

“I mean the way Byron did for me. Been more of an uncle to you that first year. After your mother took you back to Rochester, I could’ve made more of an effort to reach out and let you know I was here. I don’t know. It was bitter. I don’t pretend to have words to describe your experience. For my part, it was crushing, bitter disappointment to find out a guy I admired so much could be such a heartless prick. I hear he didn’t even show up at the divorce hearing.”

“No, he did,” Erik said. “It’s when he gave my mom this.” He hooked a finger under the gold chain. “Do you remember my father wearing this?”

“God, yeah. Shit, look at that. So he did show up?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“Huh. What were his reasons? Was it another woman?”

Erik opened his mouth and shut it, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “She didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Like I said before, I want to hear about him but not from my mother. And if it makes you feel any better, I have the same kind of regret for not making more of an effort with my grandparents. To see them in their last years. I know about bitter. I was young and punky and self-centered but I could have tried.”

“Well, you’re here now,” Mike said and offered his glass. “Life is full of second chances.”

“No shit, cousin.”

“Skål”

Erik clinked his glass. “My dad said that.”

“I know,” Mike said, and drank.

Erik unlocked the hotel room door and let himself in softly. But Daisy was awake, sitting up under the light of the bedside lamp, reading. “Hey,” she said.

He smiled with a wave, depleted of words, emotionally exhausted. More than a little buzzed. He brushed his teeth and got into bed, full of thoughts and memories. A confused snarl of rusty barbed wire and beautiful silken yarns.

“I’m going to be all up in my head the rest of the night,” he said. “I don’t feel much like talking right now. I’m sorry in advance.”

She patted him, leaned and kissed his face. “Don’t be,” she said. And went back to her book and let him be.

He lay on his side, staring at the folds of the covers draped over her hip, thinking about a million things. Barely blinking, he surfed the waves of his breath. Thinking. Remembering. Not remembering. Arranging puzzle pieces.

I hear he didn’t even show up at the divorce hearing.

Erik’s fingers toyed with the charms. Of course Byron had showed up. It was the story Christine told. The story Erik kept telling when he checked “divorced” on school forms and left “father’s name” blank.

My parents are divorced. My father left us when I was eight and Mom divorced him when I was ten. When they signed papers, he gave her the necklace to give to me.

Fred’s face swam into memory, looking up at Erik from the bottom of a ladder.

I think she’s still married to your father.

“I have my wedding band,” Christine said. “Upstairs in my jewelry box.”

The way he loved your mother. It was like a thing in the air.

Daisy got up to use the bathroom. Erik kept staring to where she had been, staring through time.

A smart, well-spoken guy.

Listening to music no one could hear.

A secret poet.

Sometimes he’d go away, though…

Daisy came back, slid into bed. Threw the extra pillows on the floor and leaned to turn off the lamp.

“‘Night,” she whispered.

“I love you, goodnight,” he said.

A few cars passed outside.

The lamp made tinny clicks as it cooled.

Daisy inhaled and exhaled.

Erik picked up his head. “Wait a minute, you’re naked,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“That’s all up in your head. Sorry.”

He pulled at the covers. “No, I’m positive about this.”

“Oh really,” she said, laughing. “In the midst of your contemplative brooding you noticed I was naked?”

“Think you could sneak it past me?”

“In your current state of mind? Yes.”

“You have so much to learn.”