I called Andrea as I was leaving the Waterbird with my supper sandwich in hand, and I told her that by tomorrow I’d have Len tracked down. We talked for a while after that – not about anything special, just little stuff. I’d met her little neighbors that day – Sydney and Ansley – at Catfish Charley’s, and they really could talk the bark off a tree.
Andrea laughed and said, “Maybe all their chatter will help get Dustin in the mood for water safety class.” The laugh in her voice faded into a sigh. I wondered if she was upset about the lack of progress with Len, or if she was having trouble with her boy again. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my business.
I caught myself looking up toward her house after I hung up and headed home across the lake. Maybe it was the phone call, or the sad sound in her voice, but she was on my mind. Maybe it was just the fact that I was going back to my rented place on Holly Hill, and I knew it would be the same as always when I pulled up to the dock. No lights on. No signs of life. No real reason to want to go in.
Tonight there was a message on my answering machine when I walked inside. I knew who it’d be, even before I hit the button. Nobody called the cabin number, except the family back home.
The phone call was from my sister-in-law, Laurie. She was hoping I’d come home for Levi’s sixth birthday party later in the month.
I called her back and told her I couldn’t. If she’d had any sense, she would’ve known it was better that way. But Laurie couldn’t quite let go of the way things’d been for the past three years. I guess in some ways, she felt like it was her fault I’d left Alpine behind. It wasn’t her fault, really. It was just how things had to be. Laurie and the boys needed to move on, and now that she’d found a good man, it was time. If she could just make up her mind to turn loose of the past, she could start a new life and give Levi, Hayden, and Samuel a family again. A new family. Maybe Laurie and Chris would even have more kids. She was young yet. The best thing I could do was get out of the way, so life could move on.
Laurie wasn’t really my sister-in-law anymore, because my brother was dead. All Laurie and I were to each other was a constant reminder of what’d happened. Even if she couldn’t see that, I finally had. Every time I looked at Laurie and the boys, I thought of Aaron, my little brother, and Mica, the gap-toothed carrottop who was Aaron’s spitting image, except for the red hair. It’s a hard thing to have a little boy frozen in your mind at seven years old, to know he isn’t going to grow into the baseball glove you bought him for Christmas, or fix up an old truck someday, or go on a date, or take a girl to the prom. That’s how my nephew would always be for me – seven years old, with a smile that stretched ear to ear and a spray of freckles over a sunburned nose.
“Come on, Mart,” Laurie begged. “The boys want you to come. I mean, for the past three years, they’ve been with you almost every day, and now you’re just . . . gone? They miss you.”
Something painful twisted under my ribs. I missed those boys in a way there wasn’t words for, but as long as I was right down the street from Laurie all the time, they were never going to start taking baby steps toward a new place. We’d always be stuck where we’d been – dredging up photo albums and videos, reliving past vacations, old fishing trips, the last Christmas we were all together. Clinging to the past so hard it was like leaving an arrow embedded instead of pulling it out and letting the wound bleed clean, then heal.
There was a difference between keeping memories alive and using them as an excuse not to start living again.
“I miss them, too, but I can’t get off.” It was easier to make an excuse than to explain things to Laurie. I’d tried a hundred times before.
I know you’re not Aaron,
she’d say.
I know you’re not him,
Mart.
But before Mama had passed eight months ago, she’d told me that I didn’t need to worry about Aaron and Mica anymore. She was going to be with them, and with my older brother, Shawn, who’d been killed in Afghanistan. I needed to move on with my life, be happy. If she couldn’t have all her boys together in one place, she wanted to know everyone was okay, at least.
I told her I’d work on it, and then we’d talked awhile longer before she relaxed in the bed. The next morning when the hospice nurse came, Mama didn’t wake up. The nurse said that sometimes people needed to feel like they’d finished their business on this earth before they could let go. Mama’d finished her business. She’d said good-bye to all the grandbabies. My middle brother, Jay, had spent some time alone with her, and she’d done her best to make sure we were all taken care of. Now I was doing my best to keep the promise I’d made to her.
“Mart, please,” Laurie whispered, her voice shaking. “Chris and I want you to come.”
“Laurie, it’s better this way.” Chris didn’t want me to come. Chris was a nice guy, but having to share space with a third wheel and a dead guy was more than any man could do forever. If Laurie didn’t wake up, Chris would pack his bags and head out the door. “Y’all just go on and have a good day with Levi – just the five of you. Do something . . . different than usual.” Something that didn’t end in sitting around a half-lit room, sipping wine and drowning in memories.
“It’s not right without you here,” Laurie whispered.
“It can be. You’ve just got to make up your mind to it.” I loved Laurie like a sister, and I always would. She loved me because I was the closest link she had to my brother and Mica. I was the last one to see them alive.
I was the one who should’ve looked after them that day.
Laurie didn’t see it that way, though. She’d never blamed anyone for it – except maybe Aaron for not being more careful, especially when he was taking Mica out in the boat with him. Aaron should’ve scanned the storm reports. He should’ve checked over our little bay boat before he took it out – made sure that, if the weather changed, he and Mica wouldn’t end up trapped out on the water when the bay turned rough and dangerous. The fuel filter had been clogging up and killing the engine. I had a new filter waiting in the back of my truck – a little ten-dollar part. I should’ve been there to put it in the boat, but I wasn’t. I was at work, clearing up one last case, when I should’ve been at our little man-shack on the beach, getting the boat ready for a weekend of bay fishing with my brother and his boy. An extra hour at work and a ten-dollar part had cost Aaron and Mica their lives.
Laurie pulled in a trembling breath. She was probably off in a room by herself, trying not to let anyone know the past was wrapped around her so tight she couldn’t breathe. “I was just . . . looking at the pictures from that trip to Taos. Remember? Aaron and me, and you and Melanie.” She laughed softly, and I could see her sliding a hand over the pages, her fingertip caressing the faces. “Mica was just little. Remember, you got him all dressed up and stood him in your ski boots? He looks so funny in those huge skis.”
“I remember.” The good times slid around me with the softness of freshly combed fleece. The past turned in my head like a spinning wheel, slowly twisting fleece into thread, and then into rope. Melanie was Laurie’s best friend, the maid of honor at their wedding. The four of us did everything together – trips to the beach, campouts in Big Bend, weekends in the mountains. The ski trip. None of us had any idea that we were living on borrowed time. Just a few years later, Aaron and Mica were gone, and Melanie was packing her bags to move back home to Kansas, saying she couldn’t take all the grief anymore.
I feel like I’m choking on it,
she’d said.
You’re all choking
on it. You just don’t see it. Sometimes things aren’t anybody’s fault, Mart.
Sometimes bad things just happen. They got caught in a storm. The boat
capsized. That’s it.
“I’ll try to get home for Christmas,” I told Laurie. “Tell Levi there’ll be something coming from Uncle Mart in the mail for his birthday.”
“He can call you when he opens it.” Laurie’s answer was flat, and she followed it with a quick good-bye. I sat staring at the phone after I hung it up. I wanted to call back and tell Levi I’d be there for his birthday, but I knew it would be ten steps backward.
All of a sudden, being dog-tired seemed like a stroke of luck. I took a shower, ate my sandwich, and sacked out instead of wandering around the little lake house, bouncing off the walls and trying to find something to do with myself.
In the morning, I was up before first light and ready for work. While I was pouring coffee into my thermos, Jake called to let me know he was down with food poisoning from some roadside taco stand, and wouldn’t be able to come for an assist this morning.
“Should’ve stuck with the Mennonite bakeries,” I told him, and he let out a weak laugh that actually made me feel a little sorry for him. Jake would eat just about anything that didn’t crawl away first. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll go ahead and sidle on up Len’s way – see if I can catch him heading out to check his trotlines at sunup. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. If anything looks dicey, I’ll call the boys from the sheriff ’s department.” Jake and I traded a snipe or two about the sheriff ’s boys, and then he warned me to be careful, before he hung up the phone in a hurry, on his way to the bathroom again. I got the rest of my stuff together and headed out the door.
A low fog clung over the grass, cutting my legs at the knees as I walked down to the lake. In the glow of the dock lights, the water was silver and still, like a pool of mercury poured between the hills. A lazy crescent moon rested on its back just above the ridges to the west; and to the east, the first gray light of dawn challenged the pinpoints of a million stars.
I took a deep breath, and a handful of memories were tied to the scent of water, damp grass, and mist. Good memories. The kind that run through your mind barefoot and laughing and kicking up dust. I remembered the way the grass felt that summer at Moses Lake when we were kids – slick, wet, and cool with the dew still on it. I could hear the four of us laughing. I saw Shawn running ahead, heard Aaron lagging back, whining because it was dark, and he was scared. I told him to shut up – if Mom heard us sneaking out, we’d be dead.
Crybaby,
I said.
Quit whining or go away.
Aaron was always the crybaby, the mama’s boy. The little freckle-faced whiner who that summer had the nerve to shoot up like a weed and get taller than me. All I wanted was for him to buzz off.
Be careful what you wish for.
The voice in my head was older and wiser now. Now I would’ve given anything to head down to the lake with my brothers, all four of us together again. That summer was the last of it. The end of the four of us. This place would always be special to me because of that summer. When we left Moses Lake, Shawn turned eighteen and joined the army. Now he was gone, and Aaron was gone, and there were just two – just Jay and me, the two who would’ve been in the middle on that race down to the shore.
Here at the lake it felt like they were still with me, tramping through the fog, headed out to see what the day had to offer before it’d even begun. Here, I didn’t drive by the church where we’d held Shawn’s funeral, or the cemetery where we’d laid Aaron and his little boy side by side. Here, they were all still alive, frozen in time. No reminders of how it’d ended, except the ones you carried with you.
The lake felt good this morning – quiet and calm, the air just cool enough to pull steam off the water. There was the faintest scent of fall in it, a whisper promising that soon enough the weather would change, the tourists would go home, and the shores would be left to the locals.
Heading across-water, I passed by Larkspur Cove, looked up the hill at the houses there, and my thoughts took a sharp right turn. There was a light on in one of Andrea’s windows. I wondered if she was up this early, and what she was doing if she was. For a half a second, I was tempted to grab my field glasses and look over that way. The impulse was a stealth attack, and as quick as it came, I tossed it over the side of the boat and let it float away in the wake. Peeping into houses with binoculars was wrong in a half dozen ways, and besides that, I was on duty.
The idea followed me across the lake, trailing behind the boat like moss that wouldn’t quite shake loose. I realized there was a strange fantasy circling in my head, the kind you have early in the morning before your mind wakes up all the way. I’d drift by Andrea’s house, and she’d just happen to be out on the dock, getting a little fresh air . . .
Before sunup.
Yeah, right.
I throttled the motor down, passing the Big Boulders, then slid under Eagle Eye Bridge. Overhead, a breeze blew through the cliffs, and I heard the Wailing Woman’s voice. She was moaning low, mourning a child who’d disappeared from the wagon train as they forded the river, or so the story went. In the day-use picnic area across the way, the mockingbirds echoed her voice along with a medley of mimicked birdcalls.
The Wailing Woman’s moans and the mockingbirds’ answers faded as I started up the channel, and there was nothing but predawn stillness and the soft song of mourning doves. When the water was dark and quiet like this, the rumble of the motor floated like smoke, traveling for miles, winding into the trees.
I hoped I’d started out early enough to get to a resting spot and cut the motor before Len made it down to the water. My plan was to pull up in the cedar overhang just past the place where Len had been putting his rig in the water. I could wait there for him to come down for his morning spin on the lake.That’d be a pretty good place to catch him for a friendly little chat. He wouldn’t be able to avoid me at that point, unless he wanted to up and make a run for it, in which case, I’d have to start the day by detaining a suspect.