“Sorry,” he says. “I’m making a footed bowl. They were my best sellers last year.” She can see right into the glowing orange oven. It’s a heat beyond flames, it’s pure light. He lets the balloon droop like a marshmallow about to fall off a stick, but then has it turning again.
“I never thought about glass like this. It’s so soft and oozy,” says Nora.
“Glass is a liquid.” He grins, glancing over.
“Oh, come on.”
“True. And not just in this oozy, as you call it, state. Goblets, windows—even after it’s cooled, all glass is still a liquid.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Already I have a credibility problem? Did you ever notice the waves in really old windowpanes? Well, they’re like that because the window is liquid. It’s just extremely slow moving.”
Nora raises her eyebrows and looks at her nails. She doesn’t believe him for a second.
He sits in a chair and lays the rod across the armrests, then rolls it back and forth while shaping the glob with a paddle. As it cools it darkens and shines. Then he’s up at a table that holds shallow trays of color—blues, reds, pinks, and greens—some are filled with powder and some with small chips of glass. He touches the glob—Nora can’t see anything like a bowl—into them like he’s dipping an ice cream into sprinkles.
He moves from the oven to the table, to the chair, to the oven. Nora’s waiting for the thing to break, the way he keeps swinging it around. He cuts the taffylike glass with a scissors, pulls it with tongs, heats it, and then dips it, moving rhythmically around his workshop.
When he barely misses the table again, Nora realizes that he’s not about to break the glass. He knows exactly where it is. He knows the rod’s reach precisely, how many steps and when to turn. She’s familiar with the dance. She can do her own version. It’s the late rush after the bars close in Minnesota, and all the people who want to keep their night going flock over the high bridge to Wisconsin. Some nights her crowd doubled in ten minutes. It’s all timing, the taps and the pours. It’s knowing the back-bar and everything on it, and how long a reach, and what’s where in the longboy, and whether you can make it to the register and back.
“Thanks a lot,” she says from the door, fanning herself as if the heat’s too much.
Nora climbs the sloped path to her cabin, feeling the Schooner so strongly she could be standing behind the bar. The cabin is still. The curtains hang. A dish towel is draped over the faucet and a box of stick matches lies on the counter. The sound of the lake washes through the room.
She picks up her notebook and starts for the deck, but her deck chairs are already in the cabin’s shadow. Below, the water and the arms of the cove are still sunlit, and there are more chairs on the end of the point.
1902
The surf is high and breaking against the shore. Berit is at the kitchen table she’d hauled down to the flat spot outside the fish house. A glow on the horizon marks the coming sun. The sunrise, she notices, has been shifting, little by little, back toward the point. Daily, she’s been working on the woodpile, both for the supply and for the satisfaction of the chop, as the logs cleave and knock to the ground. She runs her finger over the inside of her thumb, where a popped blister left an oval of pink skin.
The sun appears, first the rim, followed by the glowing orange orb, lifting steadily, widening and brightening, until it reaches its fat halfway and spills in a line across the water. It’s beautiful. The new breeze stirs the grasses around her. The sun lifts, the ball narrowing again. For just a breath it balances perfectly on the lake.
The orange light grazes the trees on the point, and the backs of the lifting waves where a gull sits peaceably. She turns. The cabin windows glint orange. And there’s John sitting in the tall grass.
Berit rises to build her morning fire. When she glances up the slope, John is standing so she motions for him to come down to the table.
“You could have slept in the cabin. The nights are getting cold.”
John shakes his head.
“Why not?”
“Cabins are dirty and full of bad air.”
The morning sun is now yellow on the windows. “I suppose you’re right,” she says, taking no offense.
John watches her strike a match and hold it inside the tent of logs. The kindling ignites and crackles. “You haven’t packed anything?”
She shrugs off his question and lifts the kettle lid to see how much coffee is left.
John brushes a seedpod from the table planks. He assesses her shoulders as she walks into the fish house; at least she’s not grown any thinner. She reappears with a stool, and the cat trailing along behind her. “You can’t stay here alone,” he says, but she walks away again as if he hadn’t spoken, this time returning with a cup and a bowl.
Berit sits on the stool and watches the surf. It advances in lines that break high on the boat slide, throwing up spray and cool air.
“What about provisions?” he persists.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re thin.”
Berit levels the fire with a stick. “The shed’s full of food, you’re welcome to help yourself. And I have a gun. I can hunt.” She balances the kettle on top of two logs.
John looks past her into the morning, smelling the smoke and the fresh lake wind. He understands now why Gunnar called her stubborn.
Filling his cup, and then the bowl for herself, Berit places the kettle on the flat rock in the fire ring. She smoothes her skirt and sits on the stool. John takes a sip, makes a face, and puts his cup back on the table. “There’s sugar up there,” she tilts her head toward the cabin and the birch slope where the leaves have begun to yellow. She wraps her hands around her warm bowl.
Coming down the path with the sugar bowl in his hand, John strikes her as both amusing and sad.
“Did you see the northern lights last night?” she asks.
John stirs sugar into his coffee. “The ancestors dancing.”
“What did you say?”
“The ancestors. Dancing in the land of the spirits.”
Berit’s face floats on the dark surface of her coffee. She takes a sip and holds the bowl at her chin, remembering the night’s flickering sky. “That’s a lovely thought,” she says, then turns her attention back to the water.
John watches Berit watch the lake, her eyes seeming to drink it in, ingest it as if it were nourishment. She must have the strength of a plant, he thinks, consisting entirely of sinewy fibers. “Don’t you have people? Where are your people?”
She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t go back yet.” The water is blue except in the curl of each wave, where it rises soft green before rolling over.
“What about winter?”
“I’ll move back to the cabin for the better stove, but something else lives there now. I don’t know what.”
“Listen,” John says, looking to the sky. “Nothing survives all on its own. I need to take you away from here.”
A wave lifts, revealing the soft green ribbon. “You need,” she says. “Your need. Well, now that’s something else.” Berit sets down her bowl.
She stands and pokes the fire with the stick, lifts the lid of the kettle, and pours the last in his cup. “He cared a lot for you,” she says softly, and John lowers his eyes to the table planks. Berit leaves the empty kettle on her stool, and walks down to the cove without turning back. She’s not ready to leave the homestead, yet. She’ll make plans for herself come spring.
John watches her cross the rocky beach, her skirt blowing in the wind, her lame gait, her short pale hair winging. She climbs over the slanting rock ledges, pauses and peers down at the thimbleberries he’d left.
She stands with her back to him facing the water—the wind flapping the arms of her blouse, a dragonfly knitting the air above her head—and he knows that’s how he’ll remember her.
2000
Nora walks out on the ledges of rock and settles in one of the highbacked chairs. The sun is warm, the lake air cool. The lake and the sky are two shades of blue. The water lifts against the ledge, sinks back and glugs, rolls over itself smooth and curling. There are halfburnt logs on the ledge below. She sees the charred walls of the Schooner, and the hole through the roof.
“What Next?” She forces herself to look over the page—“ck. dec.” it says in tiny letters. She can’t believe she wrote that down. She draws a rectangle around the words and inks them out entirely. Nikki’s in her thoughts, and then the little canoe. The lake rushes and rolls back. She thinks about glass being cut with scissors, the drawer in the back bar that stuck all the time, and her figurehead Josephine. She pictures her burning.
The sun shines yellow on the water. Nora squints, and tries to hear the Canadian girls giggling in her mind. She had seen laughter, felt the sparkling. Nothing happens. The water doesn’t turn.
“What next?” She’s sick to death of the question. She could move to California. Maybe she should. Maybe it would help things with Janelle if there were that much more space between them. In truth, her time with Nikki is mostly on the phone.
The cars up on the road blow by like wind.
“For crying out loud. What should I do?” She flings her question out into the lake, the weight of it heavy and raw.
The water lifts and rolls. The light slides and sparkles.
Should she move and be with Joannie, leaving Nikki behind? What would she lose? What would she gain? The lake doesn’t answer. The water shifts and shimmers and sloshes, moving both toward her and away.
The cars blow by.
A bird sings in the trees.
“Gorgeous day,” says Patrick, rounding the point in a wide wooden rowboat. “Climb on in. I’ll take you for a ride.”
“No. I don’t think so, but thanks.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t have to do anything, just sit and I’ll ferry you around.”
“I’m not much of a water person.”
“Look,” says Patrick, standing up in the boat. He spreads his legs and rocks it back and forth. “This thing is more solid than that honkin’ car of yours.”
“People die out there.”
“I’m not going out, only following the shore. I want to catch a little sun before it’s gone. You’re going to be in the shade in about ten minutes.”
Nora turns. The shadows have almost reached her chair, but the water around the boat is still sparkling.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Get in.” He gives her his big grin again. “If you don’t like it I’ll drop you off over there.” He points across the cove, and lifts a hand to help her into the boat.
Nora sits on the bench seat, grasping it with both hands. She peers down over the side. There are boulders and ledges and black shadows in the cracks, and a jittery reflection of her head on the surface.
Patrick leans forward and back as he works the oars through the water. Nora feels the strength of the stroke, the glide followed by a short lull. The oars squeak and clunk. It’s exhilarating. Her stomach rolls. She focuses on the land, the cabins on the slope, Patrick’s workshop down below, solid and unmoving as they slide past.
“How are you doing?” Patrick asks.
Nora gestures with her head to the rock ledge where he’d promised to drop her.
“Okay. No problem.” He angles the boat, takes another stroke, but then lets the boat hover. “Check that out,” he points his oar through the water. Nora peers over the side at what looks like a gigantic broken ladder.
“What is it?”
“The remains of an old boat slide.” He grins. “They were used to haul small boats in and out. I’ve come across a couple of them along the shore.”
The shadow of the rowboat lies over the sunken logs, and the ducks are back, she can see their bright feet. “I can’t do this,” Nora says.
In three strokes he has the rowboat sidled up against the ledge rock. “Sorry. I hope you liked the glassblowing, anyway.”
Nora pictures the glowing orange glob, feeling a lot better with the warm stone beneath her hand. “Yeah. I had no idea.”
“I love what I do. The color, the light, the way glass is worked. Even how temperamental it is.”
“There aren’t many people who can say that. Really, you’re a very lucky man.” The boat bumps gently against the ledge each time the lake lifts.
“Well, I used to think so,” he says, his eyes softening. “I thought I had it all.” He smiles, but it’s not his big grin.
Nora can feel the water under her feet. And really, she’d like to get out of the boat, but she knows what’s coming. She’s seen it a hundred times. The half-smile, not really a smile at all. The downcast eyes. The sudden quiet.
Patrick stares out at the water as he speaks. “Some people aren’t cut out for these winters. My wife, Ginny, she thought she’d love it up here. And at first it seemed like she did. But then . . .” He shrugs, his gaze shifting to the ribs of the boat.
Nora grips the ledge rock with her forearm, leaving him room to talk.