Megan drove straight into downtown Petosky without asking for any help. She didn't even hesitate, and I said something about what a good memory she had. As a family we used to vacation in that part of northern Michigan when we were kids. My father rented a two-room cottage on Walloon Lake, and we spent a month there every summer.
I waited in the downstairs lobby while Megan and Nina went up to the room. I was tired but knew I would not sleep.
Megan and Nina don't like the way I live my life. Their disapproval isn't something that makes me want to prove that they're wrong, because I don't think they are. I know my singleness makes them uncomfortable, and they're constantly asking me why I don't date more. This is odd, because I don't date at all. Somehow I imagined my life would be somewhat different from how it actually turned out. I thought by the time I was thirty-three I would have been more settled with my choices. I don't think I counted on a prince on a white horse, but I saw myself with someone. However vaguely I imagined him, I at least imagined he'd be someone.
My mother and I had spent most of our time in the U.P. looking for Indian artifacts. We didn't have any digging tools, but we walked near the shores of Lake Superior, checking near the bases of the tall evergreen trees for things that stood out against the dark-green, dark-brown earth. We were looking for surprises but found mostly rocks and a few pieces of off-white water glass. The man in the pancake restaurant we ate at two mornings in a row told us about shipwrecks in the area, and my mother and I looked for pieces of cargo that might have washed ashore.
“I don't believe other people can keep us from loneliness,” my mother said to me one afternoon while we were treasure hunting.
“Well, of course we do,” I told her. “That's why we have friends. That's why we spend time with people.”
“I don't believe that's true.”
“Look at you and Dad. You two were happy together. You weren't lonely when he was alive.”
The tall pines moved in the strong wind coming off the lake. We couldn't see it from the path, but the chill of the spring water was in the air all around us, and it burned our faces bright red. My mother stopped walking and handed me something she had hidden in her raincoat. I thought it was a tissue. I shook my head and told her I didn't need one.
“Which one do you like best?” she asked, and handed me two photographs of herself.
“What for?” I asked. “Which one do I like best for what?”
“Oh, I don't know,” she sighed. “It's always nice to have a photograph of yourself close by.”
She had selected old photographs. Photographs when she was younger. One showed her walking down an aisle in a dark wood church, dressed in a strapless gown with a full skirt. Her partner was wearing a morning suit, gray pants with long dark tails. He was not my father, and when I asked her who it was, she asked me if I liked her hair. I touched the nape of her neck and said it looked fine.
“No. I mean here,” she said and gestured to the photograph with her red-mittened hand. “We wore such cute dresses back then. Not like those awful floor-length things you wear today.”
“When was the last time you saw me in something floor-length?” I asked.
“Who are you walking with in this picture?” Her dress was nice. Her hair was styled around her face. It was dated, but she looked happy, as if anticipating that something exciting was about to happen.
“I think this one will do.” She took the one of her as a bridesmaid out of the plastic bag and gave it to me. “This is really the best one.”
“Is that Uncle Bill?” I asked, though I knew it wasn't.
“I wish I had a clearer head shot, but this one will have to do.”
“Who's going to need a photograph of you?” My mother was not whimsical. She had a reason for everything she did.
“Keep it in a safe place,” she said. “Someplace where it will stay dry.” That's all she said, and a few minutes later we went back to our treasure searching. The dead autumn leaves crumbled when we picked through them. The ground at certain spots had thawed, and the earth was cold and wet in our hands. Later that afternoon, we washed the dirt trapped under our nails in the water of the Tahquamenon River, and I began to understand what she was doing.
Nina stepped out of the elevator alone. They hadn't been upstairs long, fifteen minutes at the most. The receptionist was on the phone, her back turned to us. She spoke in hushed tones, but the echoes in the room were such that I could have heard every word if I had wanted to. I stood up and stretched. My lower back ached, and I rubbed it through my raincoat.
“Mom wants to know where her kayak is,” Nina said.
“Is she awake?” I asked.
“Awake and worried about the kayak,” Nina said. “She's not talking about anything else.”
“Does she want to see me?”
“I've been up since five-thirty,” Nina complained. “Can you just do what Megan says so we can get some dinner, maybe some sleep tonight?”
Prone to exaggeration, sometimes outright lying, Nina is the kind of person who goes around telling people that her whole life changed when John Lennon died. People are impressed with this kind of statement. It's strong, powerful, almost spiritual, until you add it up. Nina, who was born in 1964, would have been all of fifteen the day Lennon was shot. I once asked her what kind of changes she went through and she said something about cutting out the excessive things in her life. I guess maybe she switched from Coke to Diet Pepsi, or started limiting herself to one hour of television a night. I like her exaggerations and feel sorry when they get her into trouble, as eventually they always do.
“How is she feeling?” I asked.
“She's okay,” Nina said. “Obsessed with her kayak.”
Up to that point I hadn't been thinking about the kayak. All morning long it had just been my mother and me alone in the park. And then when the DNR guys came out in their boat, it seemed that we were surrounded by people. In all the confusion, I lost track of what happened to her kayak.
“Tell her it's on its way,” I instructed Nina. “What does that mean?”
“Just tell her that,” I said. I was sure that the kayak must be in the falls, maybe out in Whitefish Bay by now.
“It's on its way?” Nina asked.
“She'll understand.”
“Secret clubs,” Nina said and headed back to the elevator. “A two-person sorority. That's what this is.”
“Don't worry, Nina,” I advised. “Don't worry about it. She'll be happy to hear this.”
I found the book buried between the sheets on her bed. She had all but quit housecleaning, and the place was a disaster. I went over one night to dust, do a few loads of laundry. An oversized children's bookâthe front cover was a painting of an Indian doll in a canoe caught on a wave in the middle of a storm.
Paddle to the Sea
. The waters are white-capped and it looks like the little boat is moving upstream, against the waves. I opened it and skipped through the text, looking mostly at the pictures. It was a story I remembered from school. It is the story of an Indian boy from Canada who longs to have an adventure but can't leave his village. He carves a wooden doll sitting inside a canoe. In the early spring he sets the doll on top of a mountain and waits for the sun to melt the snow. The carved toy takes off for a long journey through and around the Great Lakes, up into Quebec, until finally he makes it out to the sea.
“Is this what this is all about?” I carried the book downstairs to confront my mother.
By this time she was a member of three or four kayak groups. That night she was sitting on the couch; her legs tucked under her, flipping through a new catalog. She rarely drank now. She was convinced that alcohol muddled her concentration. She took a mind-control class at the YWCA in Royal Oak and was convinced that she was smarter. She paid a lot more attention to what she ate, cutting out red meat and fatty foods from her diet. She'd click her tongue at me when I ordered hamburgers or cheese steak sandwiches.
“Excuse me?” she said. She worked out on free weights, and I could see the difference in her shoulders and chest. She was fit. Strong and healthy, she looked much younger than fifty-five.
“This,” I said and held up the book. “Is this why you're doing all this kayaking?”
“That's a children's book,” she said, and took it from me. “I used to read it to you girls when you were younger.”
“No, you didn't,” I said. “I never heard this story before.”
She bent her head forward and began rubbing the back of her neck. I could hear her joints crackingâher workouts kept her constantly sore. We had installed a shower massage to relax her muscles before bed. She slept less, but it didn't seem to affect her. She was full of energy.
“Mom,” I said.
She looked up, her hair covering her face. She no longer had it done every week in the beauty parlor, and now it was an outgrown perm that she cut herself every two or three weeks in the upstairs bathroom. I had just cleaned the sink of hair.
“Okay,” she said. “I never read it to you as a kid.”
“That's not what I mean,” I said, and sat on the armchair across from her. She motioned for me to move. I was sitting on a stack of magazines, but I told her they'd be fine. “You know what I'm talking about.”
“It's a book,” she said. “That's all.”
“It's a book about an Indian who canoes out to the ocean.”
“The doll makes it out to the ocean,” she explained and opened the book to show me one of the illustrations. “The Indian boy has to stay in his village. Up in Canada.”
“And where are you going?” I asked.
“It's almost nine-thirty,” she said and pointed to her watch. “I don't think I'll go anywhere tonight.”
No one could avoid things better than my mother did. I knew she was planning something and I knew she was soliciting my help, but no matter how many times I asked her to explain, she hesitated and talked about the rapids, the sharp rocks whitewater rafters love but kickers fear. And somewhere in all that avoidance, I became her partner.
It was on our fourth night of camping, just after we had closed the tent and lain down ready and waiting for sleep, when my mother told me she wasn't going to worry about me. It was only eight o'clock, but nightfall comes early in northern Michigan, and it had already been dark for a few hours. We had forgotten candles and used our flashlights only for bathroom visits. Spooked by the quiet woods, we always went together. There was nothing to do but go to bed and wait for morning.
“If you're lonely it's your own fault.” My mother's voice was clear in the darkness.
“I guess so,” I said. I didn't talk to my mother about my failed relationships. I never told her I was lonely. It was not something I complained about. These were her observations, things she put together about my life. I had spent so much time with her that I had quit thinking about my own problems.
“Life has never made any of us happy,” she said. “We don't get that luxury.”
“You sound so pessimistic,” I said. The sleeping bags had spent the day in the trunk of the car and took a long time to heat up to our body temperatures. My shoulder blades were sore from three nights of sleeping on the frozen ground, and I rolled over onto my stomach. My hipbones bore into the earth and I sat up, wishing I could sleep that way.
“You're alone,” she said to me, and though I couldn't see her face, the closed-in tent blocking all light from the spring sky, I knew she was also sitting up, facing me, talking directly to me.
“What about you?” I asked. “Aren't you here with me?” I took my hands out of my sleeping bag and reached out in front of me. I hit her in the faceâshe was much closer than I expected her to be. She held my fingers up to her lips and kissed them. Her lips were dry and chapped. I could feel the blistering skin and pulled away. We have never been a family who showed much physical affection.
“I want you to be serious,” my mother said. “Don't think of this as a joke.”
“Isn't that a little like calling the kettle black?” I asked, and because I somehow knew where she was headed, I tried to divert her. “I've been trying to get you to give me a straight answer for the past two years.”
“I haven't always known what my answers would be,” she said. Her sentences slowed and she got much more serious.
“It's cold, Mom,” I said. But by then I was no longer cold. The tent was sealed and the wind had settled for the night. Come morning we would be wet, and then I would remember what it was to be cold.
“I'm ready,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I'm feeling strong,” she said. “Very strong.”
“Is this really what you want to do?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes.”
“What if you don't make it?” I asked.
“It's a possibility,” she said. “But not the only one.”
The night noises outside hummed and we sat quietly and listened for a while.
“Don't go to flea markets,” my mother said.
“Excuse me?” I sat up again, and this time I could feel her breath on my face.
“If you're alone and wondering what to do,” she said. “Don't waste your time going to flea markets.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Of course I won't.”
“I didn't think so,” she said and touched my cheek with the back of her hand.
What Megan and Nina couldn't understand, and what I'm still having a hard time trying to explain to everyone else in the family, was that my mother always anticipated a victorious run. The trip over the falls was to have made her famous. The day was to have ended not in death, but in celebration.
She wanted the victory party to be at the Pier House in Harbor Springs. Halfway between Detroit and the falls, it would be the perfect place for everyone to meet. She was sure the
Detroit Free Press
would pick up the story, after which it might run on syndication, maybe even with a small photograph and a few lines in
People
magazine. She saw herself sitting at the head of a long table, breathlessly explaining to the photographers and newspaper people that she had never been afraid. The conversation would be filled with words like courage, victory, spirit, soulâand for that one moment she might actually be like her beloved basketball stars.