Of Song and Water (17 page)

He pokes around in the galley drawer. The can opener looks brand-new – no corrosion. He struggles to pull it out and it slips away like a wet fish. He can't pick it up. He can't close the fingers of his left hand. There was a time, he says to himself, when I didn't have to think to make it happen, when barre chords and big grips required no particular effort.

He hears the pump running, a white noise, almost a comfort. He admits that bringing the boat back had more to do with Jennifer than anything else. It now seems ironic and tightfisted, using his father's death as the impetus, substituting one grief for another.

 

TOBERMORY, still a fishing village after 150 years, lies at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula at the mouth of Georgian Bay. He marks its position as less than five
miles from Cape Hurd, from the point where his father's boat washed up without a trace of its captain.

It's lovely, he thinks. It's the place I always imagined, a storybook of old houses. It's slow, as if the town and everyone in it were outside of time.

He walks toward his car, his body leaning into a stiff wind. He hears the thump of shutters. He's drunk enough tea for two men. He turns and goes back through the gate and up the walk to Jennifer's door. He knocks.

Jen tries not to smile. “That was quick.”

“I forgot to use the bathroom,” he says.

She laughs and directs him down the hall.

He sits on the toilet and takes more time than usual to get started. His bladder's too full. It's painful. When he finishes, he lets out a deep breath. He washes his hands and looks at his face in the mirror. His beard needs a trim. There's gray around his temples, more than he ever noticed. He checks to see if his hair is thinning.

He walks into the living room with his jacket over his arm. Jen is sitting on the sofa. “Thanks,” he says.

“So I'll see you tomorrow?” she says.

“Sure.” He hesitates. “You busy now?”

“No,” she says. “Not now.”

“Can I stay a little longer?”

“If you like.”

He drops his coat in a chair and sits on the edge of the sofa. “It's early. I saw a lot of vacancy signs on the way in. I shouldn't have trouble getting a room.”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you have plans for dinner?”

“I made soup yesterday. But I need bread.”

“We could go out.”

“If you like.”

The wind whistles in the chimney. Something bangs and clangs on the side drive. “Garbage can,” says Jen. She gets up and walks down the hall and out the back door. He follows.

She wedges the can between the garden hose and bag of peat moss. She puts the lid on tight. He steps inside and a gust of wind slams the door behind him. He winces. He turns and opens the door.

“You okay?” she says.

“Of course.”

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Just startled,” he says. He could tell her the truth. He could say that the sound of a door closing is more than he can bear.

“Noise always bothered you,” she says, rinsing her hands at the sink.

He nods.

“You got that from Meredith. I remember the time in Chicago when the guy upstairs started rearranging his furniture in the middle of the night.”

He laughs. “She wanted me to call the police.”

“She started packing her bag,” says Jen. “She said she'd find a quiet hotel.”

He looks at her profile and sees a passing smile. “She's gone,” he says.

Jen shuts off the water and dries her hands. “When?”

“Two years ago.”

“But she wasn't old.”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Was she sick?”

“No. She went out for a walk and her heart stopped. She left just before noon. I was working. Dad was out on Lake Erie.”

Jen leans on the counter as if to steady herself.

“A little girl selling magazines found her. Someone called 911, but it was too late.”

“Seems wrong,” says Jen, “for a woman like Meredith to die that way.”

“I suppose so.”

“She was elegant, graceful.”

“More than most.”

“And now Dorian,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Her dying like that is how the boat got here.”

She waits.

“He wasn't there when she died. She was already on a slab when he got to the hospital.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Do I?” He hears the wind rushing against the window. “After the funeral, he left the boat in its slip. He gave up the water for two seasons.”

“He didn't sail?”

“That's right.”

“Then how did he – I mean, how did the boat get here?”

“He decided he'd had enough. Disappeared three or four weeks ago. After a couple of days, I drove over to the yacht club to check the slip. It was empty. After ten days, I suspected he'd gone north.”

“Just like that,” she says, “without so much as a word. You always said – ”

“But I could've stopped him.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Maybe not. But there was a moment. I had my chance.”

 

KNEELING on the cabin house, using the tip of the can opener, he widens the groove in the gel coat. He pictures his father showing him the steps for repairing a crack: the preparation, the taping, and the patching. He uses less pressure and begins to bevel the edges. The laminate underneath is fine. This may not be the case near the samson post where he's found a deeper crack, where the stress and crazing have made the laminate vulnerable, open to damage.

His father rarely talked about how to do things; he preferred, instead, to
offer demonstrations, walking people through the skills and the necessary steps.

He rubs his hand and thinks of the day that he stopped at his father's house and discovered that the brass clock and the gimballed lamp were gone. Then he drove to the yacht club and found the
Pequod
stripped of its boom tent and covers, and his father scrubbing the deck. The trees whispered in the breeze.

“Heading out?”

“Tomorrow,” said his father.

“Where to?”

“Out. Just out.”

“Is she ready?”

“Enough so.”

“Need help?”

“No.”

“I got some Ketel One,” he said. “Stop by tonight and we'll have a drink.”

“If there's time.”

He put one foot on the gunwale, preparing to step off, but then he turned and faced his father. “It's been quite a while,” he said.

“It's all right,” said his father.

“I know,” he said. “Your name is your ticket. You can always go back.”

Standing in the cockpit, he felt the impulse to embrace his father, but he turned the urge away, believing at that moment that his father would slip through his arms like fog. He stepped off the boat, his legs suddenly unsteady. He paused at the end of the dock and looked back, but his father had gone below.

 

HE WATCHED for his father past midnight, left the glasses and the bottle on the counter, the ice melting. After another hour or two, he locked the door and turned off the lights. Probably an overnight on Lake Erie, he thought. He's
old. But he knows the water. It never occurred to him that his father, as if he were a young man, would journey upriver, slipping past Algonac and beyond the Blue Water Bridge, to sail on Lake Huron again.

Later, driving to the beach to recover the stranded sloop, the coast guard official, fond of facts and formalities, kept repeating the one thing he'd been told: “Mr. Moore was last seen in Port Elgin, where he'd found safe harbor the night before the storm.”

The weather, of course, was no mystery. He knew that his father could sense a furious blow long before it arrived. With the coast guard official still talking, he closed his eyes and imagined how it began, how sheet metal and cinder block droned, how the boats at Port Elgin made a steady and dissonant music, shafts and crosstrees keening, stays and shrouds whining, the slapping of loose lines. And then, as if he were there, he saw his father, waterborne and well prepared, slipping out under a press of sail, the storm clouds gathering to the west.

The white hull stranded on Cape Hurd looked like a beached whale. He left the coast guard official behind and approached his father's boat, wondering what was left of the keel. He pulled himself up, his left hand throbbing, and climbed over the transom. It's ghostly, he thought. A grounded ship with all its gear in place is unbearable. It's barely alive.

 

HE ADDS a few drops of catalyst and begins stirring. His hand seizes up. He bangs it on his leg, but it won't work. It's frozen in the shape of a hook, a useless claw. Now the mixed gel coat'll go off, and he'll have to try again tomorrow or next weekend. This is too much trouble, he thinks, for a small repair.

He swears he'll hire someone, but then he considers the bill for hauling the
Pequod
from Cape Hurd to the cradle at Humbug. He recounts the charges for fixing the keel, not to mention the propeller shaft, the prop, and the rudder. He hears Maureen fretting about child support and telling him to scrap the
boat. It isn't something he asked for. He admits it's an albatross. There's no way around its crazed hull – or his crippled hands – but, for now, he can't let it go.

 

THE WIND dies off and then comes again in a sudden gust. It pushes against the house.

“I'm tired of the kitchen,” says Jen.

Taking the lead, he floats down the narrow hall. He hears her footsteps and the floor creaking. They return to the sofa. He leans back and rests his head, and she sits sideways and closer than before, one leg folded beneath her.

“Are you hungry?” he says.

“Not really.”

He arches his back and lets out a pent-up breath.

“Something wrong?” she says.

He shakes his head. “Too much driving. That's all.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“No. Not your back.”

“I don't follow.”

“I'm sorry.”

“About what?”

She shrugs. “Nothing and everything. The past, maybe.”

“It was me,” he says. “It was always about me.”

“Listen,” says Jen. “The wind's gone.”

“You called my bluff,” he says. “I never imagined that you wouldn't be there. Then I stopped and turned and you were nowhere in sight.”

She reaches over and turns on the lamp. “We don't have to go through it again.”

“But you said you were sorry.”

“I am.”

“Well there's no reason – ”

“I know that.”

The lamp illuminates one of her photographs, a detail of the Wrigley Building.

“Are you taking pictures?” he says.

“Not so much. Not seriously. I gave it up before I left Boulder.”

“Is it as lovely there as they say?”

“Yes,” she says. “Perfect light.”

“Then why did you quit?”

“It was the teaching – all that history in Chicago and then photography in Boulder. I taught everything out of me. If I had any vision or inspiration or ambition, I taught it all away.”

“Your students were lucky to have you.”

“Maybe.” She looks past him into the shadows. “In the other room are folders filled with images – huge trees, rock formations, the Rocky Mountains. The older ones are in black-and-white and the later ones are in color. And then that was all.”

“Did you teach after that?”

“For a while. But I came here to stop. I knew that Canadian schools wouldn't hire me.”

“And you don't miss it?”

She shakes her head. “I manage well enough. I make the quilts and tapestries in the winter and two of the shops in town sell them to tourists in the summer. The house is mine so I don't need much.”

“And what about photography?”

“My camera's obsolete. No one sells film anymore.”

“That's not true.”

“Making pictures with an old camera feels slow and out of step.”

“What's wrong with being old-fashioned?”

She smiles. “You were old-fashioned when you were twenty.”

“That's a kind way to put it.” He looks again at the photograph. “I remember all the shots of me and Brian, of the three of us – ”

“Have you seen him?”

“Not for a long time. You?”

She shakes her head. “Not since Chicago.”

He wants to touch her hair, still long and dark. “I went back,” he says. “I stayed with Brian for a while.”

She looks startled. “When?”

“When Maureen and I were breaking up.” He thinks of those days, the gray overcast like concrete and the effort it took just to move, to get around. “I couldn't go home,” he says. “Brian put me back together.”

“I miss the music,” she says. She tilts her head as if she were listening. “I miss it more than seems possible.”

He feels his hand throbbing.

“Are you still playing?” she says.

“Barely.”

“That's cruel.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. It's a bad joke. You can't throw me over and then give it up. It isn't fair.”

“No,” he says. “It's not fair.”

“You play now and then, don't you?”

“When I can,” he says.

“Let's talk about something else,” she says.