Contingencies

Emory

His mother’s glasses were a pair of tortoiseshell half-moons, plus two and a quarter in the left lens and plus two and a half in the right, and he knew that because he had been reading the prescription since he was eleven.

He sat in the oil room that night with them lying on the plank desk under the green lamp, and looked at them. He didn’t touch them. The thin gold hinges caught the light. A faint crescent of oil from the bridge of her nose lay on the left pad, and there was a hair caught at the temple, a single copper hair with a silver root, and he thought that if he picked it off with his fingernail it would be like pulling a thread from a sleeve in a house where somebody had died.

She left them on purpose. He tested the sentence again. It held.

He was not angry. He had gone looking for the anger in himself, honestly, as a man goes through his pockets, and what he’d found was something much stranger. It was a sort of vertigo. It was how he had felt at nine, on the dock at the cabin in Nova Scotia, when his father had taken the oars out of his hands and said let her drift a minute, Em, and see where she goes, and the boat had turned slowly on the black water and he’d understood for the first time that there were forces in the world that did not care how well he rowed.

Mom knows.

It was a thing he had arranged his whole life not to know. He turned the knowledge over, delicately, and found that it had a certain grim beauty. His mother, who had once stood in a kitchen with a manila folder and said you’re not going to say a word, had driven two hours up a gravel road with a thermos of her dead husband’s chowder and looked her son in the eye across a table and not said a word. She’d given him a chance. She had given him the whole of lunch.

And I took it, he thought. I lied to her three times.

He picked up the pencil. He turned to the page that said CONTINGENCIES, and under the first line, NOVA SCOTIA, he began, in his square calm hand, to build.

* * *

It took a week to build, and it was the best work he’d ever done.

The cabin was on a lake in the hills above Pugwash, nearly three hundred miles of two-lane road past the border: a one-room hunting camp of spruce logs, with a tin roof and a wood stove, built in 1947 by a man named Gordon MacAskill who had fished with his father off Georges Bank. Gordon had died two winters ago. His daughter, a retired schoolteacher in Truro, had been trying to sell the place ever since. Emory had written to her in August, from an address in Portland, in the guise of an engineering student looking for a quiet place to finish a dissertation, and sent a deposit of four thousand dollars, and had been surprised, and a little touched, to receive in return a hand-drawn map and a note that said the key’s under the third rock on the left and mind the wasps.

He had never meant to use it. It had been, in August, a kind of insurance, a bolt-hole for a world that had not yet gone wrong. Now he sat at the plank desk with the map spread out and a ruler and a pot of coffee, and planned.

Departure: Sat. Nov. 1, 0400. (Lull, if weather forecast right.)

Vehicle: truck. Winterized. New plates not required. Fill both tanks.

Route: US 1 to Calais. Border at St. Stephen. 0900 arrival. Then A-1 to Pugwash. Arrive 1500.

He looked at the word border for a long time.

It was the weak point, and he knew it. A woman in the passenger seat of a truck, at nine in the morning, in front of an official in a booth who would ask her, politely, whether she was traveling of her own free will. It was not a thing one could argue with. It was the one door in the whole structure that he did not have the key to; and for a night and a day he turned it over, like a man with a splinter, trying to find the angle.

On the second night he found it, and it made him feel a little ill.

She’ll be asleep.

He wrote it down. It was only a sleeping woman in the front seat of a truck, wrapped in a blanket, with a pillow under her head. A pregnant woman with a doctor’s letter on the dashboard. He knew the letter well; he had written it himself, in the voice of Dr. Baptiste, on a sheet of Maine Medical letterhead he’d printed from the website: Mrs. Aldermere is under my care for a high-risk pregnancy and should travel only in conditions of strict rest. She has been prescribed a mild sedative for safe transport. He had signed it J. Baptiste, MD. He had practiced the signature a hundred times on a legal pad, until it had the hurried, slanting, impatient look of a doctor’s hand.

He sat with the letter in front of him, and for a while he did not write anything.

It was a lie. It was the biggest he’d ever put on paper, and he was fully aware that it was one. But a lie, he reminded himself, is a thing you tell to someone who has no right to the truth, and the border guard had none; she was a stranger with a stamp. The woman in the truck was the only one who mattered. And her he did not lie to. He had not lied to her, in the matter of what mattered, since the day he met her. He had told her he loved her. He had told her he would keep her safe. Everything else was machinery.

That’s the difference, he told himself, and turned the page.

He added a line at the bottom of the contingencies, in smaller letters, almost as an afterthought.

Bulkhead. Sensor. Tonight.

He had thought of it at three in the morning, in the dark, with the lens turning above him, as one thinks of a thing one has known for a long time. The cellar door. The slab of old oak under the kitchen, in the south wall, in its drift of dead nasturtiums. His father had made the lock. It was a bronze lock, the size of a hen’s egg, the best thing Desmond Wolcott ever built that wasn’t a boat, and there were exactly two keys to it. He’d found one, in August, on a dusty hook in the cellar, with a paper tag, and put it on his ring. And the other, the other had gone, with the rest of his father’s things, into a coffee can in a garage in Portland, on a high shelf, behind the nails.

He had not thought of the coffee can in eight years.

He sat there with the pencil in his fist and felt the cold go over him in a long slow wave. His mother, who never threw anything away. His mother, who had stood in the doorway of the garage on the day after the funeral with a cardboard box in her arms and said, in a voice he’d never heard, I can’t. I just can’t.

She has the key.

He did not know it. He couldn’t know. But he’d been right about everything else tonight, and the feeling in his stomach was the same feeling as when the Marigold’s engine had coughed in the dark: the clean, cold, certain note of a truth arriving.

At five in the morning he went down to the cellar with a drill and a sensor and a coil of wire. He fixed a contact to the frame of the bulkhead door, the size of a stick of gum, wired to the same line as the windows; and then, because his father had taught him that a belt was no excuse to skip the braces, he cut a length of two-by-six oak and set it in a pair of iron brackets across the inside, so that even with a key, even with all the keys in the world, the door would open no more than an inch.

He tested it twice. The phone in his pocket buzzed, a small, clear, satisfactory shiver against his thigh.

BULKHEAD, it said.

He stood in the cold cellar with the first gray of morning in the slit window and looked at the oak bar in its brackets, and the little white square, and thought that Desmond would have liked it. It was good work. It was plain and strong and honest. It would hold.

* * *

He asked her to pack on Wednesday.

He did it at the kitchen table, over breakfast, with his hands folded and the sun on the cloth, in the voice he had used since the call, the soft one, the one he thought of as July. He told her about the lake. He told her about the stove, and the loft with the double bed, and the tin roof that sang in the rain. “The loons come in the spring,” he said. “You’ll hear them in March, when it thaws. There’s one that’s been calling on that lake for forty years; Dad swore he’d know him anywhere.” He stopped. His throat was tight. “I thought she might like it. Alma. A lake.”

Corinne sat very still. She had put on weight, he thought, in the last two weeks; there was a faint soft roundness to her face, and the hollows under her cheekbones had filled. She was eating. That seemed to him a miracle.

“You’ve already decided on the name,” she said.

“I haven’t decided anything. It’s only that I like it.”

“So do I.”

He looked up quickly. She was looking at her plate, turning her fork over.

“It was my grandmother’s name,” said Corinne. “My mother’s mother. Alma Lind. She came over from Gothenburg in 1951 with two suitcases and a sewing machine.” She did not raise her eyes. “I’ve never said that to anyone.”

The sun lay across the table. He found he could not speak.

It was hers, he thought. It was already hers. It’s a sign. The hair rose on his arms. He had only picked the name in the car, in August, out of the air, like a bird out of a hedge; and the universe had, in its slow, patient, enormous way, been waiting for him with the same one.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“I swear to you, Cor —”

“I know.” She looked at him then. Her eyes were dark gray and perfectly steady. “I believe you.”

It was the first thing she had said to him in seven weeks that he believed without any trouble at all.

* * *

She packed slowly, over three days, in a kind of trance.

He brought up the suitcases from the barn, two old brown ones with brass catches, her mother’s, from the storage unit, and set them open on the bed; and she moved between them and the wardrobe with a gray, floating, abstracted air, like a woman walking in her sleep. She chose with care. Two cardigans. Her walking boots. The wool dress that she’d worn for his mother. A framed photograph of a woman in a green coat. Her mother’s pearls. A cloth bag of tortoiseshell hair clips. He watched from the doorway with his arms folded, a lump in his throat, and thought that it was the saddest and most beautiful thing he had ever seen: a woman packing up a house.

“Can I bring the Zenith?” she said once, without turning.

“If you want it.”

“And Chet Baker.”

“Of course.”

“And the Skau.” She laid the manuscript in the bottom of the case, the three hundred and eighty pages with their rubber band. “I’ll finish it there. I’ve got a month. Ingrid gave me till the end of November.”

“You’ll do it beautifully.”

“Will I?” She smoothed a sweater. “I wonder.”

Her voice was light, a little rueful. It was the voice of a woman wondering whether she had left the stove on. He felt a stab of such helpless tenderness that he came into the room and sat on the end of the bed and watched her fold, and she let him; she let him sit there, a yard from her knee, in the pale afternoon light, while she shook out a blouse and laid it on top of the pile.

“Tell me about your father,” said Corinne.

He had not expected it.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. Anything. What he was like on the lake.”

He thought about it. The dust of the afternoon turned slowly in the air. Somewhere far below, in the kitchen, the refrigerator cycled on.

“He wasn’t a talker,” said Emory. “People thought he was shy, but he wasn’t; he just didn’t see the point of words that weren’t doing a job. He’d say a thing once, and then do it. You learned to listen.” He plucked at the quilt. “I was nine. It was the August after he got out of the hospital with his heart. The first one. He didn’t tell me what it was, only that he’d been ‘under the weather.’ We drove up in the truck, nine hours, with a cooler of sandwiches. He let me drive the last bit on the dirt road, sitting on a cushion, with his hand over mine on the wheel.”

“What was the cabin like?”

“Cold. Smoky. It had a smell I’ve never smelled anywhere else; pine, and kerosene, and wet wool. He taught me to row. He taught me to clean a fish. He taught me the loon call, how to answer it, with my hands cupped. There was a storm on the fourth night. A big one, with lightning coming right down on the lake like a hand.” He smiled faintly. “I was terrified. I wanted to get under the bed. And he sat me down by the stove, in the dark, with the thunder going, and he said —”

He stopped. He had said it so many times in his head that it was strange to hear it in the air.

“When the weather turns, Em, you don’t argue with it. You get off the water.”

“That’s good advice,” said Corinne softly.

“It’s the best I ever had.”

“Is that why you came, the night of the first storm? In April, with the lamp?”

He looked at her in surprise. She had stopped folding. She stood with a cardigan across her forearm and her eyes on his face, and her expression was not one he knew, quite: clear, mild, attentive, almost kind.

“You’d been watching the sky all day,” she said. “You said you just knew I’d be in the dark. I thought it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done.” She tilted her head. “You came to get me off the water.”

“I —”

“It’s all right. It’s a lovely rule, your father’s.” She laid the cardigan on the pile. “It’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Getting me off the water.”

It went through him like a draft in a warm room. He sat very still, with his hands between his knees, and his heart began to beat in a slow heavy thud, and he saw, with a vividness that frightened him, himself at nine in a blanket by a stove, with a man’s hand heavy and warm on the top of his head.

She understands, he thought. She’s the only one who ever has.

“Yes,” he said. His voice cracked. “That’s all it is. That’s all I’m doing.”

“I know,” said Corinne.

She came and sat down beside him on the bed. She did it casually, as one sits by a friend, and her shoulder touched his, and the whole length of his arm went still. She laid her head against him. It was a small tired weight, and warm, and her hair smelled of the rosemary soap he had bought in Camden. He did not breathe.

She has forgiven me, he thought. She’s understood.

He sat with the afternoon on his face and his eyes shut and did not notice, because he did not look, that her hand, lying in her lap, was holding very tightly to the hem of her cardigan; and that at the end of the hem, sewn in with white thread, was a small hard crooked thing the size of a hat pin.

* * *

The forecast came on Thursday.

He heard it on the marine radio in the oil room, at six in the morning, in the toneless voice of the NOAA man in Gray: a deepening low off Hatteras, tracking north, rapid intensification. Gale warnings from Eastport to Provincetown. Winds northeast at thirty-five to forty-five knots, gusting sixty, building after dark on Friday. Seas twelve to eighteen feet. A hurricane-force wind warning for the Gulf of Maine.

He listened to the end. Then he took the pencil.

DEPARTURE: SAT. NOV. 1, 0400. He drew a line under it. OR WHEN SEAS ALLOW. He thought a moment. NOT IN THE STORM. NEVER ON THE WATER IN A STORM.

It was a good rule, and it settled him. There was a grave comfort in it; it meant he would have one more night. A last night in the house, with the wind coming, and the lamp lit, and her in the room across the lawn, safe, with a roof over her. He would sit up with the log. He’d listen to the whisper of the lens and feel the tower take the gale as it had taken a hundred and fifty years of gales, bolted into the rock. He would wait it out.

He thought, as he did, of a woman at his mother’s age standing at a window with a candle. Keeping watch.

He did the shopping on Friday morning, in the first spit of rain: bread, tins, a case of water, candles, three gallons of kerosene. At the store Mrs. Dunphy pressed on him a coffee cake in a tinfoil pan and a packet of sparklers for Halloween, in case they felt like a bonfire, and asked after his mother. “Such a nice woman. She was in on Monday. She asked after Mr. Pratt’s boat.” Her eyes were bright. “Wanted to know if Mrs. Aldermere’d been out in it. I said, why, yes, dear, she had; and wasn’t she lucky to have a man like you. She went awfully quiet.”

He thanked her. He took the cake. He stood a moment on the sagging porch with the rain beginning on the tin roof, and thought, so she’s been asking. About the boat. About the day. And, very faintly, somewhere far back in the long flat quiet at the rear of his mind, a small bell rang.

When he got home the house was dark. He lit the lamps. He cooked: a plain supper of haddock and potatoes, with a salad of the last garden greens, humming, with the radio low and the wind beginning to get up in the chimney. He carried the tray up at seven. He drew the bolt and the bar and said, “Storm’s coming. I made the fish,” and stepped into the room.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in the lamplight.

She was dressed. That was what he saw first. She wasn’t in the gray dress, or the nightgown; she was in her walking things, the heavy corduroy trousers, the green wool sweater, the thick socks, and on her feet, laced up to the ankle and double-knotted, her old brown leather boots.

He stopped.

“Why the boots?”

The half-beat. He waited for it. He had been waiting for it all his life, and it didn’t come. She looked up at him with her face calm and tired and a little shy, and said in an ordinary voice:

“I’m cold. I’ve had cold feet since ten this morning. And I thought, if we’re leaving tomorrow, I ought to break them in again; they’re stiff as boards.” She smiled. “Do you mind?”

“No. I — no. Of course not.”

He set down the tray. He stood looking at the laces. They were tied in a neat square knot, tight, the knot she’d learned in Girl Scouts in Worcester when she was ten. It was a good knot. It would not slip.

She’s cold, he thought. It’s a storm. It’s perfectly reasonable.

But the little bell, far back, rang again.

* * *

The pager went at twenty to ten.

He was in the kitchen, washing the plates. The wind was a living thing by now, a long wild tearing roar in the chimney and round the eaves, and the rain was coming in sheets against the window like thrown gravel. The lamp in the tower was already lit. He had seen it from the back step, a white wheel of light turning over a sea the color of slate, torn white from the Ledges to the horizon. It was one of the loveliest and most terrible things he had ever seen.

The pager was a black plastic thing the size of a pack of cards, clipped to the lintel by the door. He’d forgotten he owned it. It gave a high, clear, rising electronic whoop, and then a dispatcher’s voice, flat and tinny, with the static of a long way off:

“Port Ellis Rescue, Port Ellis Rescue. Vessel in distress, Haskell Rock, three miles south-southeast of Gull Harbor. Fishing vessel Mary Ellen, two aboard, disabled, taking water, anchor dragging. Coast Guard Rockland notified, ETA two-plus hours. All available crew respond to Port Ellis harbor. Repeat — ”

He stood at the sink with a plate in his hand.

Mary Ellen. He knew her. Thirty-two feet, green hull, Cody Pratt’s boat: Ned’s nephew, twenty-two years old, who had been sixteen the summer Emory taught him to splice a line. A kid with a gap in his teeth and a laugh like a bark, who had never in his life listened to a weather report.

Haskell Rock. He closed his eyes. He knew it, too. A mile of ledge and a half-tide reef, in a southeast gale, with fifteen-foot seas running up on it; the place his father had once, with a scowl, called God’s own grater. There were four men in Port Ellis who could take a boat through those ledges in the dark, and one of them was seventy-three, and one was in Florida, and one had been dead since March.

He set down the plate.

Quit the squad, he told himself. You’ve left. You told Ned. You have a woman upstairs. You have a bar on a door.

He saw it all as clearly as a map. He saw the black hull on the reef, going over. He saw Ned Pratt’s face in the harbor light. And behind it, folded very small and bright at the bottom of his mind, he saw a hardware-store lot on a wet November afternoon, and a man lying on the asphalt beside a pickup truck with a paper sack of washers in his fist, and a boy who had said he had homework.

I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t there, and he was alone, and it took eleven minutes for the ambulance to come.

“God damn it,” said Emory quietly.

He was in the hall before he had decided. He tore the oilskins from their hook and dragged them on. He took the keys from the bowl, and the radio from its shelf, and the red bag from the cupboard, and ran upstairs two at a time, past the fourth stair, and drew the bolt and the bar with a hand he could hardly feel.

She was on her feet.

She’d heard the pager. She stood by the bed in her boots and her green sweater, with the lamp behind her, white to the lips, with one hand at her throat; and he saw the question in her face and answered it before she could ask.

“There’s a boat on Haskell Rock. Cody Pratt. Two men.” He was panting. “I’m the only one who can get through the ledges in this. I have to go. I’ll be — Cor, listen to me. Listen. It’s the storm rule. You stay in. You stay right here. You don’t open the door, you don’t touch the window. I’ll bolt it. I’ll be back before dawn, I swear to you. I swear on my father.”

“Emory —”

“I know.” He caught her face in his hands. He kissed her, hard, once, on the forehead, in a rush of such fear and love and shame that he could not tell them apart. “I know. I’m sorry. I’d never leave you. But they’ll die. They’ll die, Cor, if I don’t.”

She looked at him. In the lamplight her eyes were very large, and very dark, and unreadable.

“Go,” said Corinne.

It was a strange word. It was low and clear, and it did not sound like a woman begging; it sounded like a woman releasing something. He took it in his chest like a breath. He stepped back, and shut the door. The bar scraped. The bolt went home. He stood for a second on the dark landing with his palm flat on the wood, the way he always did, and said it again, under his breath, to the panel, to the woman and the child behind it:

I promise.

Then he ran.

* * *

The night took him whole.

He remembered little of it, afterward, in order. The truck skidding on the gravel, the wipers beating, the long lunatic lane streaming past in the headlights with the spruces thrashing like drowned things. The harbor at Port Ellis in the sodium glare, boats straining at their moorings, spray thrown clear over the wharf. Ned Pratt in his oilskins on the dock, gray with fear, with a flashlight in his hand. Thank God, Em. Thank God. I’d no right to ask. The squad’s boat, the twenty-five-foot Safe with her twin outboards, slamming against the pilings. A man he didn’t know in the bow. The harbor mouth, and then the open sea.

He stood at the wheel with the spray coming over him in solid sheets and found that he was singing. He didn’t know what. It was something with no tune. He took her out through the gut between the Ledges by the memory of his father’s hands on his hands, and the sound of the surf on his left like the roar of a train, and the white heave of the reef coming up out of the dark on the right. He did not think about anything. He thought about the water. It was the one thing that had always been clean.

They found the Mary Ellen at ten past eleven.

She was lying over on her beam ends, a hundred yards off the reef, her deck awash, her mast gone, a single work light flickering like a heartbeat in the wheelhouse. Two men clung to the stern rail. One of them was waving a flashlight in a wide helpless arc. The sea came up under them, black and enormous, and broke over the stern in a long white roar, and when it drew back there was still a boy’s face in the light, white and wet, with its mouth open in a shout he could not hear.

He brought her in. It took twenty minutes. He did it without hurry, in the lee of the wreck, with the engines thundering and the man in the bow shouting depth, depth, depth, and Ned in the stern with a line, and it was the finest piece of boat handling of his life. He knew it as it happened. He felt it go through his hands like a current. He laid the Safe against the wallowing hull in a trough between two seas, and held her there for ten full seconds, with his heart stopped, while the first man jumped. Then the second. A boy in a yellow slicker with a bleeding forehead came over the rail in a spray of foam and fell into Ned Pratt’s arms, and Emory felt the old man’s cry go through the boat like a bell.

I did it, he thought. I got there. I was there.

He was weeping. He realized it with surprise. The tears ran down his face with the rain, and he didn’t wipe them away, and the wheel was steady in his hands, and the black sea tossed and thundered all round, and for the first time since he was fifteen years old he felt entirely, perfectly, absolutely clean.

He swung her bow to the north. “Got them?” he shouted.

“Got them, Em!” Ned’s voice, cracked, delirious. “God love you, son, we got them!”

It was then, at eleven forty-seven by the dashboard clock, with the lights of the harbor a smear of gold on the horizon and the worst of the ledges astern, that the phone in his breast pocket began to buzz.

A small, clear, cold shiver against his heart.

He took one hand from the wheel. He drew the phone out under the oilskin, in the dark, with the spray running down the glass, and thumbed the screen. A line of white letters. Two words.

BULKHEAD. 11:47 PM.