The Year of Fog (36 page)

Goofy doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, just dips her hand in the water and swishes it back and forth, disturbing a school of tiny fish. They dart away, lightning fast, a flicker of silver bodies.

“I wish I could be like you,” I say, “wish I had the guts to just pick up and go, start fresh.”

The truth is, I don’t know how to start again, and yet I have to. For so long there was only one thing that mattered: finding Emma. Now that I’ve found her, I feel, for the first time in my life, completely directionless. Lately, I’ve been making lists, trying to figure out what to do next. At my place, I have all these undeveloped rolls of film in the fridge, pictures I took years ago, that I just never got around to developing. Maybe I could start there, with work. And there’s my new niece, Margaret, due in just one week. I can’t wait to meet her, hold her, watch her grow.

And there’s Nick, still a mystery to me, a possibility I don’t quite know how to define. I can see myself in his kitchen. He could make French toast, and I could make bacon. We could sit at opposite ends of his long sofa, face-to-face, reading silently. That would be nice.

He’s been calling me since I came back, but I’ve yet to see him. The first call came a couple of days after I got home. It was the middle of the night when the phone rang, and I was sitting on my couch watching a movie, unable to sleep. Between the first ring and the time it took me to get to the phone, I created an entire story in which Jake was on the other end of the line. He was calling to tell me he’d been thinking it over, and he realized he couldn’t live without me. He’d tell me that he needed me, that Emma needed me, how quickly could I get there?

But it wasn’t Jake, it was Nick. “I figured you’d be awake,” he said.

“I am.”

“Can I come over?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Part of me wanted to see him, to go to bed with him, to give in to the temptation that had nagged at me since the moment I met him. But a bigger part of me wanted to stay true to the conviction, which sustained me over so many desperate months, that I could be Jake’s wife and Emma’s mother, that if I just looked hard enough and long enough, everything would fall into place.

“Have you heard of the
confabulatores nocturni
?” Nick asked.

“Who?”

“The
confabulatores nocturni
, men who tell stories in the night. Alexander of Macedon used to gather these men to tell him stories in order to ease his insomnia. If I can’t see you, at least let me tell you stories. You can listen to me until you fall asleep.”

“Okay,” I said. I carried the phone to bed, crawled under the covers, and listened. His story that night was about a remote village in Denmark—Freetown Christiania—and an enormous, red-bearded Icelander who lured him into a strange bar, where he was forced to trade his wallet for a Peruvian panpipe.

“You’re making this up,” I said.

“No,” Nick insisted, “it’s true.”

The story went on for a long time. At the end of it he asked, “Can you sleep now?”

“I think so.”

And I did. I hung up the phone and slept very well. Twice more since then, Nick has called me in the middle of the night to tell me a story. It strikes me as one of the most generous gifts I’ve ever received. Maybe he was right when he said that relationships—the big ones that change our lives—in so many ways come down to timing. If I had met Nick before I met Jake, it’s possible none of the events of the past two years would have happened. I might be living in Nick’s loft on Harrison, reading his books, listening to his stories—never knowing what it’s like to love a child, and to lose her.

“I’ve been having this crazy idea,” Goofy says.

“What is it?”

“Never mind. I shouldn’t—”

“No, tell me.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe we could be like family—you know, you could kind of be the sister I never had.” She squints her eyes, embarrassed. “Nothing too intense. Maybe we could talk on the phone once a month, you know. And send each other birthday cards, that sort of thing.”

This totally takes me by surprise. The way she says it, I can tell she’s been thinking about it for a while. “Sure. I’d like that.”

“Cool.”

The ocean moves beneath us, a slow, hypnotic motion. In my legs, a weightless sensation. Dr. Swayze, ninth grade, on the anatomy of a wave:
A wave is not water in motion; it is simply stationary water with energy passing through it.

It seems like a long time has passed when Goofy nods toward the horizon, says, “This is it,” and begins paddling in the direction of the oncoming swell.

The wave gains momentum. My heart skips a beat, maybe two. My arms tense, my eyes focus. Every nerve in my body is awake. I think of Emma, the first time I saw her—the small yellow purse she carried, the way she stood in line for tickets at the Four Star, one hand on her hip, like a miniature adult. I think of the first time Jake made love to me, his soap and eraser smell. I think of Ramon, and realize I’m older than he was when he died; he always seemed so grown-up, so at ease in the world, and yet I have outlived him by five years. I think of Gulf Shores, my mother on the beach, waving to me from her red towel, while I stood knee-deep in the current, the sand shifting beneath my feet. I remember her years later, looking nothing like the woman I knew, gazing up at me from a face wrecked by disease. “Promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise me you’ll find someone and settle down, have a family.” And when I said, “Yes, I promise,” I really almost meant it; I believed it might be a thing I could do.

None of these memories seem quite true—in a way they all feel like someone else’s life, snapshots from a stranger’s photo album. I think of Annabel, my one constant, the one relationship I’ve really done right. Annabel in the backseat of the car, lying with her feet across my lap, the steady
shush-shush
of her breath. Annabel now, in the Polaroid she just sent—belly round, hair cut short, just days from delivery.

Yesterday I found a roll of film, unprocessed, marked “Crescent City, California.” In the darkroom, I took the film from its cassette, wound it around the metal reel, dropped the reel into the developing canister. After processing the film, I allowed it to dry, cut the negatives in strips, laid the strips across a piece of photo paper, and made a contact sheet. From the sheet I selected several negatives to print. It felt good to be in the darkroom again, going through the slow, even rhythms: enlarger, developer, fixer, stop bath, water bath.

When the photographs were dry, I took them downstairs and placed them side by side on the floor—a scene in sequential still life, a story laid out, plain as fact. Jake and Emma and me, together, in a small coastal town near the Oregon border.

The camera caught our arrival at a beachside motel. Emma stands beneath the hotel’s sign at night, pointing up at the neon dolphin. In the next photograph, she’s sitting beside a big rock on the beach, her legs buried in the sand, face tilted toward the sun. In the next, she and Jake are riding the water slide at Tsunami Town, a decrepit theme park that pays homage to the tidal wave of 1964. The slide rises twenty feet in the air and swoops down over a miniature replica of the twenty-nine city blocks that were destroyed. Here is Emma, in bathing suit and pigtails, sitting in Jake’s lap on a plastic mat. In one photo they’re tiny, just dots at the top of the slide, and in the next they’re coming straight toward the camera, feet slicing through the water.

A few times during that weekend, I let Emma try her hand at the camera. It’s easy to tell which pictures are hers; they’re close-up, often shot from below, a child’s strange perspective. There’s the pint of Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream we bought in some all-night grocery. There’s a picture of the bathroom sink, Jake’s wet razor lying beside a tiny bar of motel soap. There’s the dim interior of the sad aquarium: a shark’s slick belly, the beautiful underside of a jellyfish, several photos of a sea horse—its curlicue tail, the multicolored creature suspended as if by magic in a murky tank, alone.

The final photograph is my own. I took it in the motel parking lot as we were leaving. Jake is helping Emma into the car. Her shoulders are dark, her feet bare, her profile to the camera. She’s smiling at Jake, who has one hand on her back but is not looking at her. He’s looking at a car that’s pulling into the next space. I remember the car—a beat-up Chevy, going too fast. In the photograph, if one is inclined to look for such things, one can see a father in action, a father in control. He is aware, at once, of exactly where his daughter is, exactly where the car is. He does not take his hand off the child, nor does he take his eye off the car; in every moment, he is alert to potential dangers. And there, in Emma’s profile, is another piece of the story: she is aware of one thing only—her father, whom she trusts completely.

Last night I sat on the floor for hours, staring at those pictures. I could not bring myself to look away. Here is the truth, this is what I know: it was June, summer in Crescent City. Emma was six, Jake and I were in love, and we were beginning to be a family.

We forget, we remember, the mind has its own stubborn will.

Now, as the wave comes toward us, I make a note to remember this particular moment, I vow to write it down when I get home: the strange orange tint of the fog, backlit by the sun; the arch of Goofy’s back as she paddles; the jagged lines of Seal Rocks, closer than I’ve ever seen them; the Pacific’s cold, sweet smell.

I think of Crescent City, the tsunami that buried a town. I think of those twenty-nine city blocks where the activity of the day was proceeding—the bank tellers counting money, the postal workers sorting mail, the schoolchildren marching single-file to lunch. Thousands of miles away, in remote Alaska, an earthquake shook the mountains and caused the plates beneath the earth to move. Deep down, the ocean rumbled. The people of Crescent City, lost in the dull business of living, did not feel the shift. They did not sense the energy that created a wave so enormous it would raze their quiet town.

Even if our scientists were to solve the problem of memory, we would still be at a loss. Memory, by its nature, is merely retroactive, nothing more than a way of acknowledging how we got to where we are. We will never be able to hear the cesium atom, its furious oscillations, each millionth of a second bringing us closer to some monumental change. Even if we can figure out some perfect equation by which to assess the past, we will never be able to devise a like-minded equation to solve the future.

Goofy motions to me. The wave is closer now, like a gray wall, rising. I can feel my body lifting, little more than a cork on the tide. I can feel the wave gathering force behind me.

“This is it!” Goofy shouts. In one swift motion she is standing, knees bent, arms spread, like a seabird poised for flight.

I take a deep breath, paddle furiously, and wait for the wave to carry me back to solid land. Water gushes around me, the board shakes, I cannot see, but somehow I know I am moving forward.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MICHELLE RICHMOND is the author of the novel
Dream of the Blue Room
and the story collection
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress.
Her stories and essays have appeared in
Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American,
and elsewhere. She has been a James Michener Fellow, and her fiction has received the Associated Writing Programs Award and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she teaches creative writing and publishes the online literary journal
Fiction Attic
. She is currently at work on her next novel, which Delacorte Press will publish in 2008.

THE YEAR OF FOG

A Delacorte Press Book / April 2007

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2007 by Michelle Richmond

Lyrics from “Pot Kettle Black,” from the album
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,
produced by Wilco, lyrics by Jeff Tweedy with Jay Bennett. Released 2002 by Words Ampersand Music and You Wanta Piece of This Music.

Reproduced by permission of Wilco.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richmond, Michelle, 1970–

The year of fog / Michelle Richmond.

p. cm.

1. Missing children—Fiction. 2. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3618.I35Y43 2007

813'.54—dc22

2006023692

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33655-6

v3.0