“She’s been down in Minneapolis since November. Just a trial sort of thing. I thought she’d be back in May. That’s what we’d talked about, anyway. Well, it’s June and so far . . .” He shrugs again and looks out across the water.
Nora doesn’t have a drink to pour for him, or a single word of advice. “I hope things work out for you,” she says. “You’ve got real talent. You make beautiful things.”
“Thanks for saying so.” His eyes are still soft. He stands and helps her out of the boat. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a good listener?”
The lake is loud even through the sliding doors, and something keeps rattling, causing Nora to start and peer over the newspaper into the room. The sky out every window is dark. She’d be more comfortable in a motel. A cabin has the feel of someone else’s home. And there’s no TV, only books in an old bookcase. Nora turns her attention back to the page.
The rattling starts up again. She should have asked Patrick if there were bears. The dim haze from frying pancakes hangs in the air. The sound is coming from the kitchen corner, as if the teakettle were shaking against the burner.
Nora lays the paper on the bed. Her imagination is going to cut loose if she doesn’t figure out what’s making the noise. But of course, when she gets to the stove the rattling has stopped, and the kettle is just sitting there. She stands with her arms folded, waiting.
At the sliding glass doors, she cups her hands around her eyes. No northern lights, but she’ll never forget them, never forget that sleeping giant. The wind has kicked up and the lake’s whipping against the rocks, throwing spray and slamming around, and there’s a bright star or maybe it’s a planet shinning low on the horizon. Her breath fogs against the glass.
The windows are lit in the workshop below, which is comforting though she can’t see anyone. The rattling resumes. Nora walks quietly toward the stove. The teakettle is sitting on the burner, not moving in the least. The sound is in the wall or the roof, just a vent flap or something, clattering in the wind.
Nora turns off the lamp by the bed. In the dark, the lake seems to drum even louder. The bush out the window throws a shadow on the wall. Her heart jumps when the rattling starts again, even though she knows it’s nothing. She closes her eyes and pulls a pillow over her head.
She can hear the rhythmic waves of the lake, and she knows if she can get there she’ll find the way out. She is lost in a maze of hallways made of snow. The corridors cross through, turn one way and then another. She has been walking in the snow halls for miles. She pauses at an intersection to listen for the water, so she will know which way to turn. Her hand rests on a snow wall, neither cold nor wet to the touch. She can’t find the way out. She walks down another corridor and listens. But now all she can hear is the tapping.
Tapping. Someone is tapping on the windowpane. Nora rolls over, her eyes half-open. The lake sloshes through the room. A shadow is waving against the wall. It looks like a dog’s head or maybe a wolf, its long mouth hanging open. As the tapping subsides, the head slows to a nod. Its eye is a sharp narrow slit. The stove rattles, and the head swings and rears back. And then there are two, entangled, circling. Shadows leaping up the wall. Switching. Rearing. Shadow and moonlight.
Nora watches below heavy lids.
Light is liquid, she thinks. Remember. Light is liquid.
There is a crack in the lake where boats disappear. A bearing below the water’s unmappable surface. Where splintered wood and twisted steel hulls lay scattered along the frigid lake bed.
There is a crack in the lake. A hushed dwelling. Here in the darkness. A cold furrowed lair. Where a great horned serpent lies unblinking.
There is a crack in the lake. Alive. Trembling. Where rock tears from rock. The waters lap like flame.
There is a crack in the lake. It has no name. Deep within Superior’s keep. Its teeth are astral. Its beauty terrifies. And all things eventually come.
There. At the thin line of the precipice.
He turns his marble face.
And waits.
Crossing the water current’s sizzling edge.
I am the harmonic thrum.
The echo.
The tinkle of the long-time shimmering.
2000
The lake is slate grey and moody, and the sky the same color, hovering low. Yield for deer, the sign reads, the yellow of it glowing as it shudders in the wind. Nora had woken that morning feeling strange, small and quiet, as if she were holding something fragile.
The hills are a mixture of light green and dark, and the lines of the ridges slant toward the lake, where a freighter is so far in the distance that it’s hard to tell if it’s even moving.
The Poplar River slides under the bridge. Nora ashes out the crack in the window. She’s not sure what she wants to do, stop in at Janelle’s or go on home. It would be nice to give Nikki her things; she’s always so delighted with presents. But she doesn’t feel like seeing anyone. She could call them when she gets home, make arrangements for another time, after she’s unpacked and settled.
The Onion River. Janelle’s place is coming up after the next guardrail.
She puts her blinker on, thinking about hugging Nikki.
Halfway down the drive she can see there’s no car.
Nora parks anyway, gets out, and rings the bell. The small yellow rambler is quiet. She can hear the lake on the other side of the house, hitting against the low bluff. There was something about the lake in her dream. Dirty dishes lie on the table near the picture window, and her postcards are taped to the window frame. Dancing Indians. A lighthouse. The big locks at the Soo. Coats, an umbrella, and Nikki’s little red knapsack are hanging on the pegs in the hall. She should have called. It’s her own fault. She tries the door and finds it unlocked.
Nora arranges Nikki’s gifts on the table, but then changes her mind and arranges them on her bed—the shipwreck sweatshirt laid out and the hat on the pillow, the sleeve holding the birch-bark canoe. It’ll be a fun surprise for her when she gets home. Out the window the lake is rough, and gulls are sitting in the dark rippled water. Nora walks back to the car.
The long door of the car squeaks open. Nora shoves her suitcase to the side and slides the painting out of the back seat. It’s scratched in the corner from the metal edge of her suitcase. She has grown fond of the painting—the orange sky, the gulls, the little boat off in the distance. Nora rubs her finger across the scratch.
She’ll have to explain things to Rose, try to make her understand.
Nora carries the bulky painting inside, slides Janelle’s chair from the table, and leaves the present propped in her place.
The Temperance River spills over ledges of rock. She’ll need to make a budget for herself, she’s been spending without keeping track. The last thing she needs is to chip away at the insurance money. She passes the sign for Nikki’s agate beach.
The clouds have pulled apart from each other, and cracks of blue sky show through the grey, brightening strips of the hillsides and patches of the lake. The Caribou River is brown and rushing. The Manitou.
Little Marais. An old man stands on the shoulder of the road, a big yellow dog at his feet. The man opens his mailbox. He waves as she passes.
News is on the radio, but Nora’s mind won’t follow. She turns the volume down to have the quiet low sound. Tettegouche. Palisade Head. The taconite plant at Silver Bay. Beaver Bay. She’s low on gas.
Split Rock Lighthouse. Nora sips her coffee-to-go. She’ll bring Nikki there the next time she visits. She remembers Nikki at her agate beach, nestled out on the rock ledge, her little shoulders square to the lake, content to sit and watch the water. “This is my special spot,” she’d said. Nora opens her notebook to the page marked “What Next?” and crosses out California.
At Gooseberry Falls there are people all over—walking out on the flat rocks, standing at the river’s edge, families and kids throwing stones in the water. She can hear the river when she crosses the bridge.
The road is banded in sun and shade. Her car filling with light and then dimming. Castle Danger. Crow Creek. The car brightens and abruptly goes dark as she enters the tunnel through Lafayette Bluff. At the end of the tunnel is an oval of light, and she drives right out into it.
Nora jiggles a cigarette up from her pack. She hasn’t figured anything out; she should be arriving home with a plan, or at least some good ideas. She has no stock to check, no orders to fill. She enters the mouth of the Silver Creek Cliff Tunnel—no runs to the bank, no payroll to get out, no books to keep, nobody to serve. Her car emerges back into daylight. She imagines the spot where her bar used to stand—an old foundation, a lot filled with weeds.
Nora idles at the light in Two Harbors, the flags at the gas station flapping in the wind. There’s a display of chain-saw art, bears and eagles, and a sandwich board advertising wild rice. She blows out a long stream of smoke that sways the glass float hanging from her rearview. It has made the whole trip with her. Somebody like Patrick must have made it. She lifts the float with her fingertips, finding a knob on the bottom that she hadn’t noticed before, where it was attached to the rod. She pictures him blowing as the orange glob expanded, and wonders if the breath of whoever made the float is still rolling around inside.
The treetops along the shoreline of the scenic highway are blowing. And a rock island in the lake looks white for all the gulls on it. She passes small resorts with their tiny square cabins and their signs saying Vacancy, and Yes, Open. A freighter is heading toward the Twin Ports, though she can’t tell if it’s the same one she saw earlier. She wonders who’s out there and how they’re feeling, whether they’re glad or sorry to be reaching port.
Knife River. The water tumbles down. She passes the smoked-fish house with its jumble of stuff. Everything is closing down toward home.
The French River. A man stands fishing.
Water runs to the lake from the fog-hung marshlands, where rotting stalks and sediment brown the water and moose lower their heads to drink, their massive racks like the roots of fallen trees.
And from creeks that meander through the shaded forest floor, with slow glassy water and matted leaves, where small birds flit from bank to bank, their brief shadows darkening the moss.
It joins the lake from rivers that fall over rock, crash in sheets, rise in spray.
And from those that wind through sandy red clay, their shoals grooved with the imprints of hooves, which harden and crack and curl like bark, until rain or rising water smooth the surface again.
Water circles from sea to sky and back. It lifts through tree roots, releases through leaves, and all the animals make their way. To the water, always changing, always wholly receptive.
2000
Nora pulls into a small gravel lot, turns off the engine, and gets out. The hood of her car is warm and ticking, the wind blowing cold off the lake. There were shadows on the wall in the middle of the night, and something important that she meant to remember.
Below her the lake sways like an empty swing. She can feel it in her stomach every time it drops away. The endless horizon isn’t there anymore; the Wisconsin shoreline is on the other side, and she can see the buildings and the grain elevators of home.
It looks the same, but it feels different. Smaller, all stuck down in a tiny little corner of something she’d discovered to be unbelievably big. Maybe she’ll take Nikki around next summer. She’d do it more slowly, do it right. It’s there at the edge of her mind. It was something about light and animals and water. The wind blows dark streaks across the grey lake, and then the gravel lot floods with sun.
Nora passes the lift bridge, and then the Lake Avenue exit, the aquarium, the pulp mill, and West Twenty-First, before veering off onto the bridge to Wisconsin. She is all eyes and watching from a delicate kept place, both grateful to be there and uncertain all the same. There’s the freight yard lined with boxcars from the DMN&R, and the Goodwill with cars in the parking lot. Then she’s up climbing over the grey water of the bay, where buoys mark the shipping lanes, and barren mountains of coal and lime are mounded at industrial slips.
Wind forces her car and the glass float swings. She looks across the watery horizon. When the bridge lets her down onto Hammond Avenue she will end the circle, she will have driven clear around. But then circles, they don’t have ends.
The air thins as sun hits the grain elevators, spreads over the water in shivering slivers. It fills her car and falls across the dash, catching the agate she’d only just put there. It glows red and orange and banded with white. Nikki will be amazed to see it. It was in the gravel lot when she’d ground out her cigarette. A big, red, translucent rock, lying at the toe of her shoe. All she had to do was pick it up.