North of Boston (30 page)

We laugh. “Long time, no see, Pirio.” His eyes twinkle gaily. To a pure childhood bond, twenty silent years is nothing more than a refreshing nap. He touches along his cheekbone. “Got hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Accident?”

“Uh, no.”

His gaze sweeps across the living room and into the part of the kitchen he can see from where he's standing. “You alone here?”

“Yeah.”

“You feel OK? Safe?”

I nod, moved by his concern.

“Labrador tea will help those bruises.”

“Tastes awful, as I recall.”

“Not the way my wife makes it. Come for dinner tonight.”

I'm suddenly elated at the prospect of dinner with friends.

—

Martin Naggek lives in a one-story yellow house with a red tin roof on the northern edge of Hopedale. It's an unassuming rectangle with evenly sized rooms. In the living room, a large window opens to the bay, which is so close that you can see the smooth black rocks along its shore, and scattered clumps of gold and brown seaweeds that disappear and reappear with the flux of the tides.

Martin's wife, Tiffany, greets me warmly, joking about how few new people she gets to meet. I can tell she is full of questions about my life, but is holding off for now. A baby girl named Matilda sits regally in her arms. With a finger, the proud mother gently lifts the baby's top lip to show me two tiny teeth. Matilda responds with gobs of drool and a jolly gurgle. A feathery sprout of hair is gathered at the top of her head in a pink bow.

Over a dinner of pasta and thin strips of dried caribou meat, Martin tells me that he's a seal hunter as his father, Roger, was. Since a recent European Union ban on the importation of seal products, business is sluggish, even though seal products from Inuit hunters are supposed to be exempt from the law. He's earning sixteen dollars per pelt compared to the one hundred dollars per pelt he used to bring in. He talks about money this way, without self-consciousness. Low prices, he says, have caused the local seal processing plant to stop production.

When Martin's face darkens, Tiffany seamlessly takes up the story, explaining that she has turned their kitchen into a hair salon. The women sit at her table and wait their turn for a wash and cut. They tell stories in Inuktitut while eating bannock and drinking tea. Tiffany says that she enjoys her work, and that Matilda in her playpen in the corner loves the busy atmosphere.

Between the two of them, says Martin, they're doing all right.

After dinner, Tiffany, as promised, serves Labrador tea. She also dampens the leaves to make a poultice, which I press dutifully against one side of my face, then the other, not quite believing it will help. The smell of the raw leaves brings me back to the cool subarctic days of my childhood. I find myself describing how my mother worked in the kitchen of the architect's house, using the flowers' dried petals to make a scent that was later synthetically manufactured and sold as a fragrance called L'Amour du Nord. I promise to send Tiffany a bottle when I return home.

I noticed that Martin and Tiffany exchanged several private glances over dinner, and now they do so again. They have a secret they're not hiding very well. Emboldened for some reason, Tiffany nudges his elbow. “Go ahead. Give her the box.”

Martin drops his eyes in embarrassment. “Tiffany, please.”

“There may not be another time,” she urges.

“I said
no
.”

Tiffany sits back in rumpled distress. Martin remains silent, apparently bracing for what she will say next. A strained minute passes.

Tiffany finally says, “Think of your father, Martin. What he would want you to do.”

Martin continues staring at his plate with a reddened face, a tense jaw.

“He would want you to give her the box.”

“It isn't for her. It's for her mother.”

“Her mother hasn't been back for a very long time. Pirio can deliver the box to her. It's what your father wanted, Martin. He said it specifically.”

A dull ringing in my ears makes me feel separate and alone, far from this loving marital struggle. I almost wish I could slip away from the table before the conversation goes any further, because I've already put some pieces of a stubborn old puzzle together. Seeing Martin Naggek again after all this time stirred up a welter of memories, emotions, and intuition that has been turning and tumbling inside me for the last few hours.

Roger Naggek was the man who sometimes drove us places, and trekked with us through forests and fields of wildflowers, helping my mother find the things she wanted. He often came for dinner, either alone or with his son. A sturdy man with unkempt black hair, weathered skin, a flat face, and a long straight nose, I remember him as surging with vitality. Everything about him seemed to be in some kind of natural, irrepressible flux. His hands were sure and quick. His eyes twinkled intelligently, and his lips bubbled laughter. He sampled my mother's essences and oils with a smile that revealed a chipped tooth.

I hated him because he took my mother away from me for long evenings during the one month of the year she was supposed to be entirely mine. And because he played four square with me while dinner was cooking, and sometimes succeeded in making me laugh, and made up crazy stories with me, expressing lots of disbelief and wonder, just the way I make them up with Noah now. I hated him because, after all that pleasure, all the opening and sharing of our hearts, he walked out the front door into the dark night, leaving us alone.

Which was fine with me. Being alone with my mother was all I really wanted, but, after Roger left, it felt all wrong. For a period she would be pensive, distant, falsely cheery when she remembered I was there. I could see that a special light inside her had dimmed, a light that only he controlled. I hated him for making it glow, and then not tending the fire. I hated the happiness he brought her, and how she had to stitch it back inside her heart again when he was gone.

That was Roger Naggek. My mother's lover.

“It's all right. I think I know,” I say. I won't cry—I won't.

A trace of sadness comes into Martin's eyes. “My father passed a year ago.”

“I'm sorry.”

“He had cancer. A few days before he died, he put some things in a box for your mother. I was to give it to her if she ever came back.”

“My mother died twenty years ago,” I say with some coldness. “Didn't he know?”

“No.” Martin looks shaken.

“He must have had an address.”

“He said she never wanted that. They were to be together only while she was here.”

That sounds like Isa. The conditions and withdrawals, the games. She wouldn't risk becoming love's victim, though it always seemed so clear that she was.

“Surely he could have called the first summer that she didn't return,” I say without mercy.

“Who? Who would he call?” Martin is angry now, too, though he controls it with effort. “He just kept watching the house.”

We sit in heavy silence.

“Where is
your
mother?” I finally ask.

“She left when I was a child. My father raised me alone.”

“There was no one else?”

“Only her. One month a year. Then she returned to your father, leaving my father alone,” he says in a bitter voice, and I realize that we both feel cheated somehow.

Matilda in her high chair is dropping pasta on the floor and leaning over to see where it went. Tiffany is studying her plate.

“So.” Martin heaves a deep concluding sigh, though nothing is really over. He places his palms on the table and pushes himself to his feet. “So I'll give you what he left.”

I'm about to say I don't want it. That I shouldn't even have been told. That I don't want evidence of whatever was between them. That what was meant for my mother should not come to me. That Isa and Roger have both moved on, and so should we. That reaction is cowardice, of course. Fear of actually learning the deeper truths about my mother's heart that I've always wished I could know.

Tiffany disappears to put Matilda to bed, and Martin and I move into the living room. He takes a box off a bookshelf and places it on the coffee table in front of me. It's a red cedar box with a black fitted lid. A fish silhouette and a bird's stern beaked face are painted on its sides in black and green. Martin sits across from me as I open it. Inside is a folded note, old photos, a whittling knife, and a small brown vial. I unfold the paper with trembling hands.
Dear Isa,
I waited, but you didn't come back, and now I have to leave. You are the greatest gift I was given in this life. Keep my love close by your side, believe in it with all your heart, even when I'm gone. Love always, Roger.

I swallow a few times and pick up the photos. Kodak black-and-whites with creases and tears from a lot of handling. Names and dates written on the back. The first is of Roger himself, head and shoulders, in his early twenties, smiling broadly out of the fur-trimmed hood of a parka. Snow flurries and diffuse light obliterate the setting. His skin is smooth and supple, his lips are full, and he's growing a little mustache. He looks happy and kind. It's before he chipped his tooth.

The next is of Roger and Isa sitting on the front steps of the architect's house. They are smiling bemusedly, their thighs gently touching, seemingly caught by surprise by some visitor's camera. My mother's wearing old clothes and no makeup. Her skin is glowing, and her eyes are warm and kind.

The next picture shows Isa and me in a wooded area. Isa's wearing a jaunty scarf tied under her chin and big sunglasses. Her smile is confident; her posture is light, athletic. I'm about five or six, in a T-shirt and shorts that reveal sturdy, dirt-covered legs. I'm scowling pugnaciously at the camera, with a hunk of flowers in my hand.

“I don't know what to say,” I murmur.

“It's a lot to take in.”

I put the pictures back in the box.

“You can have them,” Martin says.

“I don't know. Let me leave them with you for now.” Those pictures in my pocket would feel too foreign, too heavy. I still have so much to do before I can give myself over to what I've learned. I squeeze Martin's hand, and he smiles back. It's funny, but he feels like a brother now.

Tiffany is standing in the doorway. I don't know how long she's been there. I motion her to join us, and she sits quietly beside me on the couch.

“I need your help,” I say. I tell them almost everything, from the collision that sank the
Molly Jones
to the
Sea Wolf
to Caridad Jaeger and the
Galaxy
. I leave out Noah, Mrs. Smith, and Troy and give the briefest explanation of my bruises and my escape. “They're headed to Cumberland Sound near some islands and a settlement called Pang on Baffin Island. A friend will be meeting me here with some cameras in a day or two, I hope. I want to get up there as soon as possible.”

“The only way is to fly,” Martin says. “You'll be crossing the Hudson Strait. Past Pang, the land is uninhabited. If there's fog, you may not find the yacht. If it's clear, there's still the problem of where to land and how to get close without being seen.”

The way he says all this knocks the air right out of me. He took what I said at face value and jumped to the solution right away. I wonder if decisions are always this easy for him. If so, I want what he has.

“You sure about the location? It doesn't make a lot of sense if they're after whales,” he says.

“That's what the captain said. He talked like they'd been there a few times before.”

Martin gives a curt nod. “OK. I have a friend who can take us in his Piper Cherokee.”

“Us?”

“I'm going with you.”

I look at Tiffany, and she nods without hesitation.

I'm insanely happy. In fairy tales, helpers appear at the very last moment, which is the moment after the hero, certain that she's alone, commits herself to the impossible task anyway. Martin is my helper, my free gift from the gods.

I wish I could call Milosa. Hearing of Roger and Isa's love has made me sharply miss my difficult, betrayed father. It's not pity, more like identification. We were both left in the dark. Then I realize I can call him. I'm so used to being out of touch that I didn't even notice the phone on the table next to me. The Naggeks agree to let me use it.

Maureen answers and puts me through to Milosa, whose voice is noticeably weak. He listens to a thumbnail of my
Galaxy
adventure without comment. I know he's thinking about what he can do to help, but all he says is
Come over for dinner when you get back and bring your film
. I want to ask,
Will you promise to still be there?
But I don't.

I call Thomasina, and this time she picks up. “Why aren't you at my house? You should be there by now.”

“We're going as fast as we can. Jeffrey's here, and Noah's packing some things.”

“Don't let Max or anyone around Noah.”

“I know, I know. Be careful, Pirio. And whatever you're doing, hurry up.”

I wish I could talk to Parnell. I want to hear his voice.

Later that night, Martin takes me back to the architect's house in his pickup. We stop at the end of the rutted driveway. The headlights illuminate a clump of birch trees between us and the dark mass of the sea.

“Can I tell you something, Martin?” I still haven't accepted my ocean survival and the results of the NEDU tests at face value, as things that simply happened to me. In fact, though, those experiences seem less strange here in Labrador than they did in the States. It's as if this remote place, in its simple modesty, is somehow better able to accommodate the world's most unlikely possibilities.

When I've finished describing my experiences, he continues looking out the windshield without speaking, as if by simply listening he's done his part.