Safe from the Sea (26 page)

“How long does it take to get to Misquah? I don’t remember.”

“A couple hours, maybe a little more,” Noah said. “We’re meeting Solveig and Tom at noon at the Landing. We have plenty of time.”

So they drove again the Superior coast. The trees were in that instant before budding, and beautiful. The lake, when they turned upon it, churned not at all. They talked all morning of possibilities.
After their weekend at the cabin they were going back to Duluth to see if Nat could stand living there. Noah had planned it this way, hoping for a few days of kindly spring weather to trick her into loving his native city. He wanted to move back, wanted to start everything anew. Natalie, amazingly, had not rejected the idea outright, though she needed to be convinced, no doubt. Noah had a strategy. So far the weather was cooperating.

They stopped along the way at the Split Rock lighthouse, up among the trees, resting atop a cliff one hundred feet above the water. The image was fit for a tourist brochure. They stopped also at Tettegouche. They walked up the well-tended trails and marveled at the flowing water of the Illgen Falls. Noah told her about the bear and moose that drank from this river five miles upstream. She nodded, teased him about being a Boy Scout.

He slowed at the enormous loading facility at Taconite Harbor. Again great cones of taconite stood at the roadside. His father’s ships had loaded here, he told her, and at countless other such harbors. She listened intently.

In Misquah they met Solveig and Tom. They lunched in the little café. Noah told Nat how he’d stood outside talking to her on the pay phone. Solveig reminisced about the taffy their mother would buy for her every time they stopped there. Natalie described stopping here before heading up to Lake Forsone. After lunch they drove to the cabin.

There were still small mounds of snow beside the shed and at the top of the hill, where the plow had piled it all winter long. The eaves trough along the front of the house had come free of the roofline and hung to the ground. Icicles, Noah thought—it had been a snowy winter—and age.

They all stood in the yard, silent for a spell.

“This is how I left it,” Noah finally said.

“And you think you can fix this place up?” Solveig asked. She pointed to the gutter.

“That gutter’s nothing to fix,” Tom said.

“It’d be nothing for you to fix, honey.”

“Hey, I’ll manage,” Noah said. “Don’t worry.”

Nat took his arm, squeezed it.

“I’m going to turn the shed into a guesthouse. I already ordered the windows. The plumber just sent me an estimate for running a water line from the well to the house. By this time next year I’ll be running a four-star lodge here.”

“Just show me where the hot spot is on that lake,” Tom said.

The sound of birds erupted from a treetop. Ravens. They lifted into flight, arced once, and disappeared.

“Well?” Solveig said.

“No time like the present,” Noah said. He stepped to the trunk of his car. Neatly packed in a canvas book bag was his mother’s urn. He took the bag from the trunk and led the three of them down the path to the lake.

The last time Noah had trodden that path he’d done so with the weight of his deed as his only load. On that November afternoon he’d rowed back across the lake. The wind stiffened with each stroke of the oars so by the time he reached the dock there were whitecaps curling beyond the lee of the shore. It was as if the wind were rushing toward the deep water on the other side of the lake. As if to make it deeper still.

When he stepped onto the dock he accidentally shoved the boat. He made one grab for it but could only watch as it scudded away. He watched for a long time. Then he walked back up the hill.

Inside, he tried to conjure from the dusky heat of the stove some
vision of his father’s ghost. All he found was sadness. But there resided in it a confused bliss for all that had come to pass. Their reconciliation. Late in the afternoon he trudged through the snow up to the county road. A plow had already been through and buried the truck. All he could see was the faded green roof. Expecting as much, he’d brought a shovel. In the last hour of daylight he dug it out. He drove into Misquah and called his sister.

In much the same way that she’d once orchestrated a response to their mother’s death, she began to instruct Noah. It was as if she’d thought of nothing else since she’d left those days ago. In the background Noah heard Tom’s voice. His usual gaiety was replaced with an earnestness Noah had never suspected. Tom reminded Solveig of details she’d forgotten in their scheme.

Noah was to report his father drowned. Man overboard trying to net the last fish of the year. A tragedy. Noah interrupted, described the rowboat adrift in the lake. Solveig related this to Tom, who took the phone from Solveig. “Then it’s a mystery, Noah. Call the police. Tell them your father is missing. Tell them you saw the boat floating empty in the middle of the lake. Tell them he’d gone fishing. It’s actually more plausible this way.”

Noah stood dumb in the wind. He did as he was told.

Solveig never so much as questioned Noah’s undertaking, not then, not ever.

After he’d talked to the sheriff’s office, Noah called Natalie. “My father passed away this morning,” he said, looking over each shoulder in the darkness of the vacant parking lot at the Landing. “I put him in the water.”

Natalie said nothing for a moment. Then, “You did the best thing, Noah.”

Now Noah answered her with silence.

“You did,” she reiterated. “You did, and I love you. And you’re braver than I thought. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

She would be.

It was late when the sheriff’s deputy arrived. One man coming down the road on snowshoes with a flashlight’s beam bouncing before him. His name was Ruutu, or so his badge said. He was a brawny Finn with a blond mustache and feathered gray hair. Noah invited him in, offered coffee. He described the false scene.

After the story, as Ruutu sipped coffee, he looked around inside. He kept licking the tip of his pencil but never marked anything in the notepad he’d taken from his shirt pocket. “Can we have a look down at the lake?” Ruutu asked.

“Of course.” Noah put on his boots and coat. He took the flashlight from its spot on the shelf. They walked down to the dock.

Ruutu panned the lake with his flashlight. He shone the light up the path. In the flicker of the light Noah could see ice on the deputy’s mustache. Ruutu stepped to the end of the dock. Noah joined him. The sky was luminescent with stars.

“That path down from the house is pretty well traveled,” Ruutu said.

“I was up and down it a dozen times. I was frantic,” Noah said, horrified at his own lie.

Ruutu nodded his head as if he understood. “Awfully damn cold to be going fishing. What was he fishing for, anyway?”

“Trout, I suppose.”

“You say you saw the boat empty? That’s when you came to call us?”

“That’s right.” Noah could not meet Ruutu’s stare.

Ruutu put his pencil and notepad in his shirt pocket. “Trout season ended in September.” He gave Noah a knowing look. “We can
come back and search in the morning. You want us to do that?” Before Noah could respond Ruutu continued, “Listen, I knew your pop. Just a class-A man. A hell of a life he led.” Now Ruutu fished a cigarette from his coat pocket. He offered one to Noah, who refused, and Ruutu lit his smoke. He exhaled over his shoulder. “We all knew he was sick. Not that he told us, but we knew. One of us would stop by of a Saturday to check on him now and again.” He took another drag on the cigarette. He pinched the glowing end of it. “We’ll call it an accidental drowning if that suits you. Anyone asks, I gave you the third degree. The third and the fourth.” He turned to the lake. “There’s some awfully deep water out there. But you probably knew that. Your pop would have made sure of that.” He took a deep breath, coughed, and looked up at the stars.

“That’s right, anyone asks, you tell them I asked a lot of questions. You tell them I came back tomorrow morning, that I had a look around the lake. That’s how I’ll write it into the report. In the meantime, I’m sorry.”

M
IDNIGHT HAD COME
and gone by the time Noah stood again in front of the potbellied stove. The ashes radiated the last of their heat. He tried to imagine the list of necessary actions for closing the house for winter. He took the food from the refrigerator and loaded it into a garbage bag. He scrubbed the kitchen basin and counters. He swept the floor and wood box. He tidied the porch. He covered the piano with the sheet he’d been sleeping on those several days. He checked the windows and the back door to see they were locked. He packed his bags. Finally he put what dog food remained into the ice-cream bucket and set it outside for Vikar.

Satisfied, he tried to sleep on the couch. All night he listened to the wind dying. The calm settled in, the house creaked. Sometime in the middle of the night an enormous ray of white light came into the house. He startled, fearing what he could not imagine. A hum and a clattering, the light rising and falling. He sat up. He went to the window. There was Laksonenn and his plow as ordained.

Sometime toward dawn he slept for an hour. When he woke he washed his face with the last cold water. He dressed according to the temperature. It was eight degrees. He walked up to the road and dug out the rental car just as he had his father’s truck the day before. He drove the Suburban down to the house and parked it for the winter.

He walked down to the lake for a last look. Though cold, the morning had risen splendidly. Overnight the skim ice had returned. It covered all of the lake. There, two hundred yards off, the rowboat sat locked in the silence, the platform still spanning the gunwales.

He waited at the Landing for his wife and sister. He was greeted as a regular, and condolences were many. People spoke to him with such solemnity in their voices, such compassion in their expressions. The proprietor bought him his coffee and cinnamon roll. That morning and the looks on those faces were as close as Olaf would ever get to a visitation, to a wake. Two days later Noah and Nat were on their way back to Boston with his mother’s urn in his carry-on.

His father’s obituary had appeared on the front page of the
Herald
that morning.

N
OW THEY ALL
stood on the dock. At the Landing that afternoon they’d been told that most of the inland lakes were still frozen, still safe to walk on. This was true of Lake Forsone. Tom stepped first
off the dock. He jumped up and down three times to demonstrate its capacity. Noah stepped down next, holding both hands up to his wife and sister. Each took one and followed their husbands onto the ice. Together they walked to the rowboat. The ice had crushed it. It lay splintered, half cast in ice.

“Where is he?” Solveig asked.

Noah pointed toward the cliff, toward the deep water. “Over there,” he said.

“Should we cross? Spread Mom’s ashes with him?”

“I think so.”

And they left the wreck of the rowboat and crossed the rest of the lake. In the shadow of the cliff, Solveig took the bag from Noah’s shoulder. She removed her mother’s ashes and stood facing Noah.

“Well,” Noah said, “I guess we could each say something.”

There was an awkward momentary pause before Tom said, “I never knew your mother, but if my wife is any testament she was a terrific woman.”

“She was,” Noah said.

Solveig nodded.

“And your father was kind to my children.”

Solveig took Tom’s arm. “He was very good to the kids. He had a lonely life, but I’ll remember him every day for the rest of mine.” She closed her eyes. Not to quell tears, Noah thought, but to try to remember something. “They belong together here.”

“You’re right,” Noah said. “They do belong together.” He looked at Natalie. “Do you want to say anything?”

“I love your parents even though I never really knew either of them.” She smiled at Solveig, she held more tightly to Noah. “Because of them I have this family now.”

Solveig stepped over to Natalie. She hugged her, then looked at Noah.

“On the day Dad died he told me to love my children better than he loved me. I said I would. I didn’t realize that any capacity I had to love I owed to him. Him and Mom. That’s really all that matters.” He stared down at the urn. He looked out at the wilderness surrounding the lake. “They’ll rest easy here.”

He uncapped his mother’s urn and handed it to Solveig. She spread the ashes on the ice. They were the same spectral gray.

W
HEN THEY GOT
back to shore Solveig and Tom walked up to the cabin under the pretense of making dinner. Noah led Natalie along the lake’s edge. At the base of the ski jump’s landing hill they stopped. Noah pointed up at it. He’d told her all about it.

“It’s so big,” she said.

Noah only smiled. They stood silently for a few minutes.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Noah removed his father’s old watch from his pocket. Before he left Boston he’d had it repaired, had the escapement and jewel replaced, had a new crystal put on it. He opened it. “It’s almost four.”

“I can’t believe I’m already hungry again,” she said.

“I can,” Noah said. He closed the watch but then opened it again. He read the words his mother had had engraved on the case back all those years ago, read them for the thousandth time since his father had bequeathed it to him.
YOU WILL COME SAFE FROM THE SEA
, it read.

He turned to face Natalie. He put his hand on her stomach, which had only recently begun to show. She held his hand where it lay.

THANKS:

To my father, for answering so many questions and offering so much advice. And to my mother, for her unfailing support.

To Laura Langlie, for her patience and counsel and fortitude.

To Greg Michalson, for his tireless work on this manuscript, it shows on every page. And for giving me a chance.

To Goran Stockenstrom, Patricia Hampl, Bill Lavender, Stuart Dybek, Richard Katrovas, Peter Blickle, Jon Robert Adams, and Jaimy Gordon, my teachers. And to Joseph Boyden especially, who has been much more than a teacher.