Safe from the Sea (22 page)

He took a room at a harborside motel and unpacked his new clothes on the bed. He began to undress. He clicked the television on and watched the weather report. The forecast called for continued cold and snow, possibly heavy, later in the week. The thought of it appealed to Noah.

The hotel soap smelled of almonds, the shampoo like a fourth-rate barbershop. He took a long, scalding shower, washing and rinsing and washing again. He would have liked to shave but he had no razor. He toweled off.

In the nightstand drawer was a Cook County phone book. He looked in the yellow pages for a piano tuner. There were two listings, both in Gunflint. He called the first and made arrangements for him to come the next day at lunchtime and have a look. Noah gave careful directions. Then he turned the TV off. He fished from his pocket the doctor’s business card. He looked at his watch. It was noon.

A one-sided and dispiriting conversation passed between Noah and the doctor, whose authority and competence seemed as unquestionable as the news was bad. She informed Noah that though not all the tests had been completed, she nevertheless had no doubt about the severity of his father’s illness. She spoke brusquely but with compassion of biopsies and polyps, of tumors and blood, and of stages of
sickness, particularly of a stage designated Duke’s D. A terminal stage, she assured him. She told him the cancer was spreading rapidly and out of control. She said surely his father was in extraordinary pain. She did not mention treatment. “Under normal circumstances,” she concluded, “I’d suggest your father visit us again immediately. That you make hospice arrangements. Though I understand that’s not likely.”

Noah agreed.

“The truth is, it doesn’t matter much. If he were admitted he wouldn’t leave again. His sickness is that advanced. The drugs we prescribed won’t do for the pain what we would do here, but I suspect your father might not want them regardless. He may as well be at peace where he is.”

She asked Noah whether he was able to stay with Olaf. She reminded Noah to give him the drugs, said he might not be able to watch his father if he didn’t. She warned him of the possibility of hallucinations and of the suddenness with which things could turn. In the end she apologized for bringing such news. Noah might have said ten words during the entire conversation.

His conversation with Solveig required more speech, and he left no detail unsaid. She assured Noah she’d be back soon, as early as Friday if everything went as planned with Tom’s folks and the kids. Maybe even Thursday if Tom could clear a court date. She told Noah to go back and take care of their father. When Noah asked her if she’d had any epiphany about the anchor in the shed, she admitted to none.

W
HEN HE’D FINISHED
on the phone with Solveig he dressed quickly in his new clothes. He paid the hotel receptionist for the phone calls. He nearly flooded the truck while starting it and drove out of town with white plumes of smoke huffing from the tailpipe.

The truck didn’t handle the sharp curves of Highway 61 very well. It would lurch and slide and grumble when Noah braked hard midcurve, then sputter when he’d step on the accelerator coming out of one. Rounding one of the steep, uphill curves, he came upon an awesome panorama of the lake and skies. A battlement of cinder-colored clouds broke and the sun reflected off the water in a million different directions. The lake was well below him, down a granite cliff, and the distance eclipsed the reflection. He could stare right at the sun’s image off the lake.

He stopped at the Landing before heading back up to Lake Forsone. He bought kitchen matches and lantern mantles. He bought coffee and hot dogs, oatmeal, roasted peanuts, and bread. He asked for ibuprofen, antacid, ChapStick, and Gold Bond from behind the counter. He asked for two Hudson Bay blankets. He stocked up on batteries and candles and toothpaste. When it was all loaded in the back of the truck, he drove back to the cabin.

A pall draped the house. Noah could sense it more than see it. The midday light settled more like dusk. He rushed to park the truck and hurried into the house.

Olaf knelt on one knee before the stove, adding wood to the fire. The only light in the room came through the windows. He looked over his shoulder when Noah walked in. It was as though he had aged five years since Noah had left that morning.

Olaf said, “The fire’s out.”

“The fire is not out, Dad. It’s a hundred degrees in here.”

Olaf tried to raise himself off the floor but stumbled onto his elbow in the effort.

Noah helped his father to his feet, ushered him to the sofa, and helped him to sit. After he spread the afghan over his father’s legs, Noah went back and closed the stove door.

“Look at the ice on the goddamn windows,” Olaf said.

Noah looked at the frost that had formed in the corners of the window panes. “It’s going to snow.”

“Sure it will.”

“I mean it’s in the forecast. We might get socked.”

“Socked,” Olaf said.

“What do we do about the road?”

“Laksonenn,” Olaf said. “Laksonenn plows.” Each word seemed a triumph from the old man.

“Someone named Laksonenn plows the road?”

“He does.”

During the next few minutes Noah watched the old man’s lips puckering and his face twitching, an expression between pain and exhaustion. Olaf fell back to sleep, to what terrible dreams Noah could not guess.

I
N WHAT REMAINED
of that day Noah trimmed the house. He refilled the ten-gallon buckets at the well. He restocked the wood box. Olaf slept motionless on the chair. Before dusk Noah went to the shed. He stood in the doorway and tried to imagine the spot his mother’s ashes occupied. He may even have hoped that some ghost or ghost’s messenger would present itself, would guide him in the looking. Instead he began where he stood, on the threshold of that welter of junk. He kicked over stacks of magazines, he moved unmarked boxes filled with old tools, truck parts, fishing tackle old enough that the barbs had rusted. He picked a lure from among many, held it to the dying light, and when he flicked the hook with his finger it disintegrated into dust.

He cleared a path to the back wall, and here he went through the
contents of an old dresser. Clothes from his childhood. A kitchen mixer. A ledger marked 1972. Here Olaf’s blocked scrawl tallied the year’s receipts coming and going, a column for each. Noah studied the expenditures: groceries, oil to heat the house on High Street, electricity, clothes. There were two columns marked “Allowance,” one for his mother, one for himself.
This
, Noah thought,
is how you end up with two hundred thousand dollars in your freezer.

Noah saw a metal box beneath the dresser. He lifted it from the floor, set it on the dresser, and studied it. The moment felt religious. The box appeared to be waterproof, it was clasped shut tightly, un-rusted. Clearly something made to last. He unlatched the clasp. Within a Ziploc bag her ashes were interred. They appeared almost to sparkle. Why he could not imagine, but he sniffed them. Only the other smells of the shack. He closed the box and brought it with him into the house.

His father still slept. Noah set the ashes on the coffee table. At six o’clock he ate a few crackers and half a jar of pickled herring. He thought of waking Olaf but didn’t. The old man’s sleep was fitful. He’d hiccup and sigh and his face would twist and fold in a hundred unnatural ways, all the while his hands fidgeted in the afghan and his feet kept time to some dream song. Twice during Noah’s light supper Olaf’s eyes plunged open and he stared at Noah, but as quickly they’d close again and whatever afflicted his sleep would begin again.

Noah himself fell asleep soon. When he woke at midnight he put another blanket over his father and went into his bedroom. He awoke at five-thirty to check on his father again. During the night Olaf had moved from the chair back onto the couch. He slept peacefully now, his chest rising under the mound of blankets, a silent snore from his hang-jawed mouth.

It was another sunless, sooty morning. Noah went to the shed. He wanted to study the anchor. He wanted to be prepared for whatever he might do.

Noah inspected the bolts that fastened the first piece of tubing to the barrel. He saw that holes had already been drilled for the second. He finished sawing through the tubing and began to fasten it to the barrel. He worked for an hour, breaking midway to look in on his father. When he’d attached the last piece, he puzzled the chain through the contraption. It looked, as he stopped on the way out to inspect it one more time, like a torture device from some earlier century.

Finally his father was awake. He stood at the sink basin rinsing his empty mouth with a glass of water. He had dressed himself in wool pants and a sweater thin at the elbows. The clothes fairly hung on him.

“Some sleep,” Olaf said.

“I’d say.” Noah looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. “How are you feeling?”

“I’ve had better mornings.”

“You want something to eat?”

“I don’t think I could eat.”

“How about more water? Could you drink? You should take these pills.”

Olaf consented. Rather than expecting his father to swallow the pills—some were the size of almonds—Noah ground them on the counter with a spoon and stirred them into the water. Even drinking looked difficult. When he’d finished Olaf let out a soft burp. He handed the glass to Noah and went to the chair, his walk across the room a feat unto itself.

Olaf pointed at the box on the coffee table. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

“I found those out in the shed. I hope it’s okay I brought them in.”

His father replied with a look of deep regret, or what Noah took for one. “At least it explains my sleep last night.” He sighed. “I always meant to bring them in. I knew it was a crime to leave them out in the shed.”

“They’re here now.”

Olaf agreed. “She was beautiful,” he whispered, his voice cottony with the memory.

“Always,” Noah said.

“She was the love of my life.”

These words startled Noah. Not because he was surprised at their meaning but because he’d never expected to hear his father say them. He’d always known it, he guessed. “She was mine, too, for a long time.”

Now Olaf smiled. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he laid his hands across his lap the smile disappeared. “What I did to her.” He shook his head. “She broke my heart, Noah.” The words were like something spoken years before.

“There were a lot of broken hearts back then.”

“There still are,” Olaf said, looking Noah square in the eyes. “But I guess it’s a small price to pay. Everyone pays it one way or another.”

“What do you mean?”

“A small price for the memories. Broken hearts or none, we all have them.”

Noah thought about that. “You know what scares me more than anything? That I’m going to end up an old man without Natalie. That I won’t have all the memories I want. Sometimes I don’t care about anything but making it to old age with her. I see folks in restaurants
or walking down the street and I get terrified we’ll end up apart. It’s a terrible feeling.”

Olaf listened with a look of intense concentration. “You feel that way because you figure once you’ve made it to old age, the hard times will be behind you. You’ll have made it.” He paused. “I think I used to believe that, too, when your mother and I were young. But our lives changed. Those thoughts of mine changed. Hers, too, if she ever had them.”

“I know she did.”

This put another smile on the old man’s face. “The problem with your mother was she was too smart for her own good. She was so much smarter than me. It was impossible sometimes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met that wife of yours. I suspect you know what I mean.”

Noah said, “I guess you’re right.”

“She got stuck with me, your mother.”

“I don’t think I believe that,” Noah said. He didn’t believe it at all, in fact. “She loved you.”

Olaf wedged himself up so his feet were flat on the floor. It was not an easy task. He took the afghan from behind the chair and spread it across his lap. “She may have learned to, but she was stuck with me to begin with. Your mother was pregnant when we got married. In the middle of her third month.”

“She was what?” Noah did the math in his head. It didn’t add up.

“She miscarried two weeks later. Gave him a name. Per Olaf. She wanted to bury what came out.”

“Per Olaf ?”

“That’s what I wanted to name you.” Olaf scratched his neck beneath his beard. “I wanted to tell you when you were talking about Natalie. Figured it wasn’t the best time.”

“She named a miscarriage?” Noah had gotten lost in the memories of his and Nat’s own ill-fated pregnancies. That there was something like a history in the family was surprising to him.

“I was passing through the Soo when I found out about it. July 1958. I was never so confused in my life.”

“Why confused?”

“I thought maybe the end of the pregnancy meant the end of our marriage. Your mother was so damn pretty, so damn good, and I thought the only reason she’d settled down with me in the first place was because she got herself pregnant.”

“You got her pregnant.”

Olaf seemed almost to blush. “We met at a dance hall, of all the goddamn places. This was back when people still danced. She told me right off she didn’t want a sailor. I told her she should dance with someone else, then. But she didn’t. There was something underneath all that primness.”

“We’re talking about Mom.”

“Sure we are. We danced and danced. She smelled like rosewater, I remember. She always did. She had on a pink dress and a white sweater and with that blond hair it was like she had claim on half the purity in the world.” He shook his head. “But she knew what she was doing. It was unfair is all.”

“You were defenseless, huh?”

“Anyone would have been, that’s the truth. I would have bought anything she had to sell. But she wasn’t selling anything. That’s the thing. At the end of the night I walked her home. She still lived with her parents over on the west end, by Wade Stadium. Warm March evening. At the door she told me she didn’t want to get old before her time. Said that’s what sailors did to you.”