The group whittles to single file as they mount the circular staircase to the light. Nora peers down at the whitecap-flecked lake each time the spiral staircase brings her past a skinny window. Her stomach feels sour and her head full of air. Already, they were on top of a cliff, and now they’re climbing even higher. She’s higher than the careening gulls. Nora keeps her hand on the banister. She can hear the exclamations of the people ahead of her, who have already made it to the top of the tower.
“This lens was shipped from Paris, France,” the guide says, as Nora steps in to join the group. “A bivalve frenzel . . .” But Nora has stopped listening. She’s standing before a giant eyeball made of concentric crystal rings. Immediately, she wants to touch it.
“It’s floating on liquid mercury,” he explains, “despite the fact that it weighs four tons.”
All of its edges hold sunlight and rainbows. It’s an enormous jewel. The world’s biggest diamond. She tilts her head and the rainbows shift.
“It’s 169 feet from the focus of the light to the mean water level. Much of my work is its care and cleaning.”
Nora imagines a bright beam of light emanating from the crystal eye, sweeping out over the water to find a storm-struck sailor. How relieved he’d be to spot the light, and to have something to set a course toward. The idea of being on Superior in weather is about the most terrifying thing she can imagine. The old schooners didn’t even have electricity. Nora scans the horizon for boats. Even in the daylight there are dangerous shoals, engine troubles, human mistakes. Most sailors swear that fog is the worst.
A huge, round, gorgeous crystal eye. Nora wants to walk all the way around it, or just sit near it for a while, but already people are stepping around her as the man herds them back down the stairs.
Gooseberry River. Castle Danger. Then, the tunnel through Lafayette Bluff. Her stomach feels lousy, worse than before. The sturgeon. It appears in her mind, ugly and menacing with its prehistoric plates of armor. It hung in the nets over the back exit. Nora leans over and writes it in the notebook. Her thoughts slide back to the giant lens, then the serious look on the guide’s face when he told them that a foghorn blast could move across the water like a skipping stone. She sees a ship captain blinded in a fog, and then the loud as hell sound that’s supposed to save him hitting the water and bouncing over his boat. The car goes dark in the Silver Creek Cliff Tunnel, then zooms out the other side into sunlight.
Half an hour or so, and she’ll be back home.
Nora turns into a small unpaved lot on the final stretch of the old scenic highway. The water’s still rough, but the wind has died, so she gets out and leans against the hood. The outline of the Twin Ports is visible—the hills of the North Shore meeting the flatter land of the south. She can make out the shapes of the grain elevators and ore docks, but it’s like she’s looking through different eyes. The Twin Ports are business as usual, and she doesn’t belong, has no part in it anymore. Nora pushes gravel side to side with her foot, making a small fan shape in the rocks. Her stomach is really rolling around. She needs to get a grip. Maybe Joannie is right, a big change would do her good.
On London Road, an old woman is walking her dog, and everyone is going about their business, stopping for gas, pulling in at the market, driving with cell phones held to their ears. Nora feels like her car is invisible. She passes the lift bridge as it’s rising for a Coast Guard cutter, passes the aquarium, the line of billboards, and then exits for the high bridge to Wisconsin. The road takes her out on the spit of land that’s all railroad and industry, passes the Goodwill, then lifts onto the bridge, and she’s up in the sky with the water below, the ironwork flashing shadows in the car.
Her stomach is twisted up like a pretzel. Nora lifts her foot from the gas as the bridge descends. She could unpack her things, surprise Rose with the painting, maybe go to the 22 and see who’s around. The bridge empties onto Hammond Avenue. But instead of heading home, she finds herself veering onto the truck route that runs behind the grain elevators, passing the shipyard and then Barker’s Island. She keeps on going through the east end, then Allouez. Her car heading out of town.
1902
Berit lays askew in the bed, her body curled into itself, aware for a moment only of warmth in the soft, brief rise from sleep. One moment of warmth and then the next, a wave that lifts and breaks over her back. There, the bureau drawer hanging open. She pulls the pile of Gunnar’s clothes against her stomach as a sound oozes from her mouth. Her body rocks from side to side, propelled by a force she can’t control. Dear Lord. Make the nightmare stop. The feeling brings her to all fours and pitches her forward, rocking violently, yowling and bucking as if to throw it off.
Numb, Berit sits at the table, wearing Gunnar’s big green sweater, her hair in tangles, her face puffy. Out the window, the clothes hang on the line, going bright and then dull as clouds move over the sun. She pinches off a corner of bread, but it sits in her mouth like a piece of cloth and she has to pick it from her tongue. The lake drums against the shore. She drops her head into the crook of her elbow as again, the whole thing comes cascading down.
Berit sprinkles water on a dish towel and pushes the hot iron across it, the crumpled terrain of the fabric flattening. She noses the iron into a corner, tears dripping off her chin. Ironing. She is ironing clothes, the basket of whites sits at her feet. The last time she saw him they were in bed, his face so close that he had a third eye. Now she can’t even conjure his face, just the shape of his head, vague and featureless.
The iron trembles in her hand, and she drops it onto the stove top. What other face has she ever known better? She closes her eyes and wills it to appear, sees his eyes, his chin, but the whole won’t compose. She has lost his face. She goes to the window. The fish house stands stone quiet. This has to stop now, Berit reels. This can not be. She breaks at the knees.
The fire is nearly out, but she can’t rise from the chair or light the lantern though night has come down. She sits unmoving at the table, her hand resting on two overturned photographs. In one, Gunnar stands with his uncle, their luggage behind them, and the passenger ship. He’s squinting into the sun, his weight on one leg, his hands deep in his coat pockets. The other, inside a cardboard frame, is the portrait taken when they married. They sit side by side on a small settee. Gunnar, in a dark suit, looks straight ahead, his face still and serious. She’d dug frantically through the trunk for the pictures, but now she fears looking at them any longer. She fears that those two images of his face will be all she will ever have. Two moments frozen in time, two expressions replacing all the rest.
The morning’s rain has blown over, leaving a fine mist in the air and water clinging to the windowpane. Berit puts her arms in her long dark coat, shoves her feet in boots, and opens the door. The pot of beans that she’d thrown in anger sits upright on the ground, nearly clean. She’d heard the bear come for it in the middle of the night, snort and bang the pot around.
She walks down through the mist carrying her bucket, the grasses wetting the hem of her coat. Warm sweetened water is all she can manage, tiny sips that she leaves on her tongue. She doesn’t care. Why should she have food if Gunnar can’t.
Berit lowers the bucket from the rock ledge. Beast. Betrayer. This lake that she’d loved. She can see down through its clear water, the large boulder, the bed of stones. She’s hauling in the rope, feeling the water’s weight, when she hears the dip and splash of oars. Her heart leaps. She freezes. Listens. Drops everything and rushes to the end of the point, bursting into tears and waving her arms. He’s out there in the mist, rowing toward her. She runs back to land and across the beach to the boat slide, everything blurring as she cries out to the water, the skiff angling in toward shore.
He stills his oars and turns his head. “Mrs. Kleiven. I came over to see that everything was all right here.”
Berit stares at the pocked face of Hans Nelson, unable to utter a word.
“Captain Shephard was asking. He said that Gunnar hadn’t been out with his fish. I rowed over and found his nets untended. The otters have had a day with them, so I thought I’d better come see if he were ill . . .”
Berit can’t hear what he’s saying, but she can see the change drop over his face, his expression turning from neighborly to grave.
No. She won’t go back with him. No. She doesn’t want him to send Nellie. Berit backs away, shaking her head. If they come the next day like he insists, she’ll hide in the woods. They’ll never find her.
Berit sits on the ridge, her back against the rough bark of a pine. The water and sky are a milky agate, banded with lines of grey and white. If they’re coming, it will be anytime now. He’d have his fish in, and dinner would be over. A white-throated sparrow sings its song, the question and the answer repeating over and over. She wipes her eyes and leans her head against the bark, the sickening images rising again. Gunnar, floating faceup in the lake. Facedown, swaying on frigid night waves. Berit wipes the endless water from her face.
Sure enough, she sees a boat coming. Good Lord. He has Gunnar’s skiff in tow.
I hear voices. Over thick distance. Cold. Dark. But the sound has no source.
A glimmering image. Color and light from the blackness. Fragments coalesce. Waver. Disappear.
A French chorus rings. Around the silence. Red-headed paddles flash in time. Plunge and pull. Plunge and pull.
The voyageurs come on a dark wall of water.
Ten men to a boat, laden with furs bound for Europe.
A calloused hand. Red wool. A wind-burnt cheek.
Faces stunned. By the beauty. By the cold.
They paddle to the perfect rhythm of their songs.
Alouette.
Gentille alouette.
Currents whirl as the wall of water nears.
Keep to the shore. To the shore. The shore.
Red-headed paddles plunge and pull.
Rile the heavy, slick, black water.
I search among the paddlers for the man in the dark coat.
But the wall curves.
Darts away like a startled fish.
2000
A neon beer sign with a moving waterfall casts a cold bluish light over the surface of Nora’s vodka. She rattles the ice cubes and the light breaks apart.
“You’re looking rested,” Jerry says.
“Thanks,” replies Nora, looking at him dead-on, an unspoken acknowledgement hanging between them. His kindness the day before had saved her.
When she’d headed out of Superior without a shred of a plan, she’d driven south into Wisconsin, but the further she drove the worse she felt. After nearly an hour, she turned around and backtracked to the T in the road. She sat at the stop sign a good long time, looking at her options, west or east, staring at the glass float as if it were a crystal ball that might direct her—toward home or away. Finally, a semi came up behind her, its grill filling the rearview mirror, and she had to move.
She ended up on the scenic road east, following the shore of the lake. As she drove, she felt a little bit calmer. Finally, she landed at the Breakers. After sizing her up, Jerry gave her exactly what she needed, room and just enough conversation. He told her which motel to stay at, and where to get a good meal. Mostly, he made himself a solid presence, his eyes softening kindly when he spoke to her.
“So you’re going to stay on then?” Jerry asks, opening a bag of pour spouts with his teeth. He dumps them in a highball and sets them below the bar.
“I might, who knows.” Nora lifts her glass in a toast. “I guess I’m fancy free and on vacation.”
“To the first of the tourists, then.” Jerry lifts his coffee cup.
“Thanks a lot.”
“I was kidding,” he says. “We don’t actually get many tourists. We’re more of a drive-though, day-trip town, which is good and bad as I see it. Most of the folks who come through are fine, but a lot of them have a real city attitude. It drives my wife absolutely crazy. She jokes about tattooing ‘educated’ across her forehead.”
“I don’t get much in the way of tourists. Mine is more of a working crowd. Though I do have some college kids this year, and they’re their own brand of annoying.” Nora stops herself. Have. Had. She’s talking as if the Schooner still exists. The light from the beer sign slides across her hand and the shiny surface of the bar.
“You okay?”
Nora manages a smile.
“Why don’t you stick around for the music. I’ve got folksingers coming in, a husband and wife duo, but their music gets kind of jazzy if that makes any sense. He plays guitar and she plays fiddle. They usually draw a decent crowd. Did you book music at your bar?”
“I couldn’t manage it. Didn’t have the room.” Couldn’t. Didn’t. “I had a cook once who had a lot of talent. He was a first-rate songwriter. He’d set up by the jukebox with a couple of other guys, but that was pretty occasional.”