Chris dashed ahead of Jake and skidded to a stop at her side. His cheeks were flushed. He started coughing.
“Remember . . . in the elbow,” she said.
He reached under the flannel blanket that covered his brother, poked him in the tummy with his finger, and sang, “The itsy, bitsy spider climbed up the water spout . . .”
Eddie drew his knees to his chest and chortled.
“Down came the rain and—”
“Ready to go over the bridge?” Jake asked.
“Yeah,” Chris yelled and danced in a circle on the dry grass.
“We’ll refill the water bottles while you finish feeding Eddie,” Jake said.
His face looked dispassionate, its profile stolid against the cloudless sky. His clean-shaven jaw, the knob on his nose from a hockey mishap, his shaggy eyebrows. These features—his entire body—were as familiar to her as breathing. Yet who was he? Why could he let Chris get lost? At this moment he was a stranger. At his core he was unknowable to her.
Hand in hand, Jake and Chris walked to the water fountain.
Had she married him because he was funny? Honest and loyal? Kind to his mother? Smart and good-looking? True, he was all of those things. He also was incapable of remembering her birthday. And, in the mornings, he stumbled from the bed to the bathroom without uttering a civil word and stayed crabby until he finished his cereal. The rare times he used the dish rag, he never rinsed it out, but tossed the milk- or coffee- or juice-soaked cloth into the corner of the sink to molder until she retrieved it. Maybe her attachment to him was little more than habit, as automatic as conjuring up the words to the Lord’s Prayer she had recited at Jennifer’s wedding.
During the service, the best man had read a poem, something about time and rivers and journeys. She had squeezed Jake’s fingers. When he returned the gesture, she had grown teary-eyed and swallowed hard to dampen the sob that had been building inside her. He had smiled at her, a loving smile, a smile of understanding.
Now she watched the waves of Lake Huron pound the rocks along the shore, again and again, rhythmic and organic as a beating heart. She found the water petulant and fierce at one moment, soothing as silk at another—rising, falling, giving, taking. Sort of like her marriage, she decided.
As they walked back toward the car, the sunshine warmed her face and seeped through her hair to her scalp. Chris rocketed forward on the path to the parking lot. With each step, the soles of his shoes blinked cranberry-colored light as if propelled by a missile’s afterburners.
“Slow down, mister,” she called.
“He’s okay.” Jake patted her on the fanny. “You can’t see it but he has an invisible leash that’s about twenty-five feet long. He never strays beyond that.”
“How about when he disappeared behind the visitors’ center?”
“Well . . . that was just a tad over twenty-five feet.” He grinned. It was one of his sweet-as-rhubarb-pie grins.
She straggled behind them, feeling as if, once again, she had lost a minor skirmish. Should she send a dart back Jake’s way? No. There was no point in escalating this little kerfuffle. She could never win. As always, he would charm his way to victory.
Ahead, Chris bent over and picked something up. Then another thing. And a third.
“What’re you doing?” she called.
“See . . .” Chris opened his fist. On his palm lay three acorns.
She stooped at the base of an oak tree and found an acorn for herself. She turned it over, ran her finger along the rough shell and the smooth nut. She looked up into the bare branches overhead at the network of leafless twigs tipped by buds. This huge tree had grown from a similar, tiny seed.
Jake took the acorn from her hand and rolled it between his fingers. “Think I can hit the lake?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Chris yelled. “Throw it.”
Jake took a step backward and flung the acorn toward the water. It sailed into the sky, then nicked a low-hanging tree branch and tumbled down a rocky embankment. It bounced off a boulder, skipped over a patch of weeds, hit another boulder, and continued down the steep slope until it bumped against the knobby root of a tree. There it stopped. Short of its target.
“You missed,” Chris said.
Jake laughed.
Was there was enough dirt along that tree root for it to germinate, enough water on that steep incline? she wondered.
She slid into the passenger side of the car. Jake strapped the kids into their seats. As he turned the key and started the engine, she leaned against the headrest.
“I sure hope you don’t get this,” she said and blew her nose.
“Me, too. Monday’s a big knee day—two arthroscopies and two total joint replacements. Can’t be sick during those.”
She blew her nose again.
“Have you taken something?” he asked.
“Sudafed. Doesn’t help.”
Within minutes, their car rolled onto the bed of the bridge. “I think we should go on the inner lane,” she said.
“It’s too rumbly.”
“I know, but there’s better traction on the grate than on the wet pavement.”
“It’s not raining.”
“The pavement’s always wet up here.”
Jake changed lanes. The tires hummed as they rolled over the perforations of the grate. The steel blue water of the Straits of Mackinac swirled one hundred fifty feet below.
“Remember that lady who went over the side?” she asked.
“It’s not a good idea to think about that right now,” he said.
She couldn’t erase the image from her mind. Young woman in a Yugo. Stormy day. Running late to meet her boyfriend in the Upper Peninsula. Speeding. Apparently the car skidded and raced toward the side. The flea-weight auto, boosted by the wind, climbed over the tiered barriers at the bridge’s edge.
Every time they drove to the UP, she thought of the lady inside that car as it dove toward the water. Maybe she unbuckled her seat belt in a futile attempt to escape. Maybe she just stared through the windshield at the approaching waves, an endless moment of unmitigated terror. The car would have hit with terrible force. Maybe she was killed instantly from the impact. Or, maybe she watched the water grow darker as the car sank. Probably the lake water seeped in along the edges of the doors and eventually filled the car. Maybe the lady ran out of air before she drowned.
The Bridge Authority pamphlet said the bridge could sway up to thirty feet during high winds. She couldn’t feel the sway but knew it was moving, knew that several forces, all going in different directions, were acting on their car: its forward movement, the sideways sway of the bridge, the oblique push of the wind. When it was too windy and wet, the Authority closed the bridge. They were only halfway across.
Off to her right and far below, a Great Lakes freighter cleared the bottom of the deck as it chugged through the Straits on its way to, maybe, the Port of Chicago or to Milwaukee or Green Bay. To her left across the water was Mackinac Island, the Grand Hotel a white fleck against the dark of the trees. The waves seemed decorated with silver sequins. These were familiar sights. They helped to ground her during the long, worried journey over the bridge.
Then they were on the other side. Jake drove through Mackinaw City, past rows of cheap motels and franchise restaurants, and headed south on I-75.
“Want to drive again?” he asked.
“You’re doing fine,” she said.
Chapter 2
Jake
H
is knees ached from kneeling all afternoon on the basement floor. Jake dipped his trowel once again into the glue pail and slapped a wad of adhesive on the concrete. The notched edges of the trowel drew wobbly stripes in the glue, reminding him of the windrows that marked his uncle’s fields during harvest. Those rows had been amber colored, these were ash gray; those were made of alfalfa, these of gooey glue.
Black and white was what Anna meant when they chose the tile. She had, though, described the flooring in her usual, lyrical way, “Tweedy charcoal and creamy eggshell.”
He preferred brighter colors. Last week at the flooring store, he asked, “How about this?” The sample in his hand was as teal as a mallard’s head, without the iridescence.
But Anna had her mind set on a checkerboard floor and she wanted it black and white. He thought it would make the basement look like a saloon. She disagreed. “Crisp, dramatic, clean,” she had said, tossing her hair away from her face and raising her eyes toward the ceiling. “You’ll see . . . it’ll be wonderful.” He understood from her posture that the issue wasn’t negotiable.
Cartons of tiles sat on the bare concrete beside him. He pulled a white square from the nearest box and wedged it into the lap of a black L. Adhesive oozed from the seams and then disappeared with a swipe of his sticky wiping rag. He then pulled a square from a box of black tiles and wedged it into a white L. Something didn’t look right. The corner was off square. He wiggled the new tile tighter against its neighbors. “There,” he said out loud.
He sat back on his heels and admired his work. He should have known her project would be classy. That was Anna—maven of high style. Just last week she had hauled an armful of old dresses to the garage. “Outdated,” she had said, wrinkling her nose as she stuffed them into the sack for The Salvation Army. She fussed over her appearance more than he thought necessary. She tweezed stray hairs from her eyebrows, painted her toenails dull red, smeared creams over her face twice a day—the greasy stuff that smelled like balsam at night and the pink-tinged, shiny stuff in the morning. He thought she was beautiful as she was. He liked the way she looked while asleep—calm, relaxed—or immediately upon waking—breezy, distracted, natural. When she walked, she reminded him of a young doe, strong and fluid, trim and confident.
He placed a white tile into a black L. The idea for this project had begun a month ago. They were driving home from the hardware store, a new space heater for the basement stowed in the rear of the van.
“Wish we could fix it up,” Anna had said.
“Fix up what?” He had no idea what she was talking about.
“The basement.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
His wife had stared out the car window, a disturbed look on her face. “It’s so dull down there.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“Well, for starters, it’s too dark and a cement floor isn’t very interesting.”
“I could paint the floor,” he suggested.
“Ummm . . .” She straightened her back and her eyes began to dance. “How about tile?”
From deciding on tile for the floor, they went on to an area rug, insulated drapes for the walk-out door, a hutch to store toys and books, and a hide-a-bed sofa for guests.
“The pull-out couch in the family room isn’t very private,” Anna said.
“This will all take time,” he warned, knowing his wife liked instant results.
“Of course,” she said with a shrug. “There’s no hurry.”
Now, while he wedged the tiles into the black and white Ls, she was working upstairs on a sketch for the hutch. She and her friend Elizabeth had found a monster of a pine cabinet at a thrift shop and were going to paint it to look like a pile of stones covered with ivy. His preference was to scrape off the old paint and give it a coat or two of urethane. But Anna, the director of design for the new basement, insisted on trompe l’oeil.
Time for a bathroom break. Upstairs, he found Anna hunched over her drawings, a deep frown on her face. She attacked the paper with an art gum eraser, furiously rubbing away the penciled lines.
“This’s driving me nuts,” she said as she swept the shreds of rubber onto the family room carpet.
“What’s the problem?” He patted her shoulder and gazed at the shadows of the former drawing.
“These leaves. They’re ugly. Look more like holly than ivy.” She stood back from the sketchbook, her arms crossed over her chest. “They’re too long and the points are too spiky.”
“Looks okay to me.” He headed into the bathroom.
They had disagreed, too, about the color of those walls. He wanted beige, she orange. In the end, he had painted them the color of ripe mangos and she applied pale green fleur-de-lis. Now, his eyes followed the stenciled flowers from ceiling to floor. The rows were parallel—precisely vertical, plumb-line straight—with the corners of the walls. She had borrowed his carpenter’s level to prevent slanted rows.
The bathroom had turned out nicer than he expected. The orange walls didn’t induce claustrophobia. The fleur-de-lis didn’t look like seaweed. And the sconces she had found at a secondhand store didn’t overwhelm the mirror. He had to admit his wife had a flair for decorating.
On his way back toward the basement, he stopped again beside her.
“Nice,” he said, referring to the drawing.
“No, horrid.”
Why did she make herself so miserable over what should be a satisfying project? he wondered. Nobody would care what the ivy leaves looked like. No one would notice. The cabinet would be in the basement, for God’s sake. He shook his head as he trudged down the cellar stairs, thinking of Anna’s reaction to the tie problem at Jennifer’s wedding. Shortly before they were to leave the motel for the ceremony, Eddie had burped milk on his necktie.
“For Pete’s sake,” Anna had groaned. “Where can we get a new one?”
He dabbed the stain with a wet washcloth. The milk smear was barely visible against the brown and ivory swirls printed on the fabric. “It’s coming off,” he said.
“You can’t go with a goobery tie.”
“It isn’t badly goobery. It’s fine.”
But she had insisted cleaning the tie wouldn’t work, seemed angry he hadn’t packed an extra one, paged through the phone book for a store that might sell them. Finally, she had marched down the hall to her parents’ room and borrowed one from her father.
He laid another black tile into a white L and wiped away the adhesive. Footsteps started down the wooden stairs and echoed off the cinderblock walls. He watched first Anna’s brown clogs, then her jeans, then her flannel shirt, and finally her face—serious, unsmiling, scowly eyed—descend the steps. She must still be mad about the ivy leaves.
“Okay,” she said, coming to a stop at the edge of the bare concrete. “Three choices for dinner.” She wasn’t mad, was being, instead, coy. “Number one is”—she tapped her right pointer finger against the left—“hamburgers. Number two is macaroni and cheese—out of a box. Number three is KFC.”
“Chicken.”
“Extra crispy or original or all dark meat or what?”
“I don’t care.” He laid a white tile into a black L.
“Jake . . .” Her voice faltered. She was quiet for a moment. “You should have used the level. The tiles are crooked.”
He dropped the trowel onto the concrete floor and sat back on his heels. He didn’t see anything wrong.
“There by your knee. They’re crooked.”
He stared at the tiles. Then at the wall and back at the tiles.
“Look at that wall.” He pointed behind him. “The tiles are aligned along the bottom. See that? And look over here.” He jabbed his finger toward the opposite wall and said, his voice growing louder with each word, “They’re not perfectly aligned because the walls aren’t perfectly square. The builder should have used your damn level, not me.”
“Okay, okay, settle down.”
He had had it with her nit-picking. “For Christ’s sake, I’ve spent all afternoon down here laying your frickin’ floor and all you can do is criticize.”
She stared at him, lifted her chin briefly. It was her obstinate look. Then her face softened, her shoulders relaxed.
“I appreciate this. I really do. I just spotted a little irregularity, but it’s okay. I’m off to get dinner. Be back in a sec. I’ll take Chris. Eddie just fell asleep.”
The upstairs door banged shut. He combed another patch of adhesive and jammed a black tile into a white L.
Why couldn’t Anna lighten up a little? She saw the dark side of everything. Those leaves painted on the toy cabinet were fine as they were, pointed or not pointed. It didn’t matter. The tie event at Jennifer’s wedding was beyond ridiculous. Compared to what he dealt with day after day—fractured legs, infected bones, twisted backs, worn-out joints—a stain on a necktie was nothing.
He slid a white tile against a black L. Life with Monica wouldn’t be like this, he thought. Back then, Monica didn’t rag on him, didn’t carp, didn’t dump disapproval on him as if emptying a bedpan over his head. There were no slamming doors. When she left, the door just stayed shut—silently shut.
It had been at least eight years since he last saw her. He wiped the adhesive. He could almost sense her standing beside him, could hear her laugh, smell her soap, feel her northwoods wholesomeness, her easygoing manner. Last weekend, at the wedding in the Upper Peninsula, he had thought of her. Twice. It wasn’t exactly a thought—more like a shadowy, regretful urge.
While Anna had fussed about the milk on the tie, he remembered the day he and Monica stood in the parking lot at the bottom of a ski lift. Monica asked about heavy stockings. It was snowing and she’d forgotten to bring hers.
He found a spare pair of hunting socks balled up in the trunk of his car but they were caked with dry mud. She had reached for the socks, sized them up for a moment, and then whapped them against the car door. The largest of the dirt clods fell to the asphalt. She whapped them twice more and picked the last of the mud scales from the wool. Then she pulled them on over her knee-highs.
Later they locked themselves out of the hotel room and much later his condom broke. On the way home, the car had sputtered to a stop—out of gas. She had laughed, in her hearty, full-throated chuckle, through it all.
He also thought of her at the rest stop beside the Mackinac Bridge when he’d tossed an acorn toward the lake. It had hit a tree branch and tumbled down the bank. An acorn with a lot of potential that landed on the rocks. That was the story of Monica.
He fitted a black tile into a white L, mopped the seams with his rag, and straightened his sore back. In the end, all he had was her silence, her leaving, and the bottomless void.
Six months after Monica left, he had met Anna. He hadn’t been on the lookout for a woman, had sworn off them, in fact. He had buried himself in neuroanatomy, biochemistry, and physiology homework and lived the life of a monk—slept in a narrow bed in a tiny basement cubbyhole at Ella Schwartz’s rooming house; ate boring, cheap food wherever he could get it; organized his days according to his class and study schedules; occasionally drank a beer and played a hand of poker; but dated no women.
Then he saw her through the foggy window of the E-Z Wash. She was sitting in one of the plastic chairs at the end of the dryers, reading a magazine. She was gorgeous, like no one he had ever seen. He had been on his way to the library, but took a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and raced back to Mrs. Schwartz’s. He ripped the sheets off his bed, grabbed his pajama bottoms from the floor, and with the dirty laundry heaped in his arms, dashed back to the Laundromat. On the way, he wondered if he had enough quarters. He’d forgotten the detergent—hopefully the dispenser had some. Would she still be there?
Outside, thirty feet from the door, he slowed to a walk. He needed to catch his breath. Couldn’t have her see him gasping for air. Inside, the chairs near the dryers were all empty. Where was she? Had she gone? He wandered down the aisle of washers. At the end, he turned and spotted her stacking linen at the folding table. As he walked past her, she turned—a pair of turquoise lace panties in her hands—and smiled. He nodded a silent greeting, tried to appear interested but not too interested. She kept smiling and followed him with her eyes. He stuffed the sheets and pajama bottoms into the first open washer and headed for the vending machine. A hand-printed, cardboard sign was taped to the front. OUT OF ORDER.
He leaned his elbow against the dispenser and called to her, “Hey, do you by any chance have any detergent? The machine’s on the fritz.”
She chuckled and said, “You’re in luck.” She walked over to him, her body moving like a waterfall, and held out a box of Tide. “Take what you need.”
“Thanks a lot. Cup of coffee for payment?”
She hesitated a moment. Then she nodded.
While his laundry sloshed in the washer, they walked across the street to the coffee shop. Anna slid into a booth and folded her hands on the tabletop, waiting for him to speak.