Nora waits in the South Shore church, her mind now in Canada, Cape Breton Island, where the coast is rockier, the sea wilder than anything she’s known. In the 1920s, ’30s, later, the place offers nothing for young men beyond the body-breaking mines or the treacherous northern seas: some families fish, others work the mines. A gorgeous, rough place, the light often transcendent, but who can live on light? Death litters the towns, each village isolated from the next, the nearest city days away. There is no money. The father: a lovely man, a sorrow-filled life. On Cape Breton, for the son, there is the father and the light. Stay or go? A kind of death to stay; another to leave. How blue the sea; how white the gulls wheeling over the wet black rocks.
“My wife, she reads. She reads all the time.”
She blinks, marks the page with her thumb. The man behind her is fortyish, thin, a pale man in a light gray jacket, jeans, work boots. He’s holding a paper coffee cup from a donut shop. Jittery: the cup trembles. Dark hair thinned as if to emphasize the furrowed brow.
Nora glances around. They’re halfway through the line, ten people still ahead. A few small groups—women, mostly, one with a small boy—near the squared-off entry hunch together and talk. Threads of conversation about a hair salon and a ruined party swim past her.
“Oh,” Nora says. “Good. I think that’s a good thing.”
“Yeah,” he says. Right leg jiggling. He leans in but doesn’t look her in the eye. She glances back at the description of the wheeling gulls.
“This isn’t my church,” he says.
“No?” Nora says. The gulls fall away. “It isn’t mine either.”
“I go to church though,” the man says. “I’ve been going.” He addresses her knees, her feet.
“People seem to,” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do that. I do that but my wife, you know, she won’t talk to me.”
They find her, these men, the lost ones. At the post office, the DMV. And women—but more of the women seem benign. “I’m sorry,” Nora says.
“Thanks, yeah,” he says. “I’m staying with my mother. Now. She wants me to go,” he says. He’s on to his wife’s story, her hospitalization, a psych ward for weeks—and she’s better, she’s better now, but now that she is better she won’t see him, won’t talk to him, and so he prays, and he visits the priest, and he tells his mother who doesn’t want him there he’s going to church, and these bags of food are for his mother, he says, well, his mother and him, but he’s trying, you know? He’s making an effort, he says. It’s as if the coffee cup is all that’s keeping him from flying apart. He’s shivering, shifting from one foot to another. Opening and closing his free hand.
Sometimes the smallest things can keep you from snapping: a tabby sunning herself on the steps, a whiff of chocolate, a neighborhood kid waving hello. Or a stranger in line willing to listen, someone who does not wish, as you might, that you were dead. Nora knows this. Still, she thinks, Disappear. Please please disappear.
Then he says he’s got a boy, a boy and a girl, they live with his wife’s sister now, he’s going to see the boy in a week (so no, mustn’t disappear, there’s the boy, the girl). She’s not a bad person, the sister, he knows that, she’s taken the kids, but she doesn’t like him, he knows she doesn’t like him. Nora does not ask him why.
He’s nice to the sister, he says, he’s always tried to be nice, but these are bad days. Some bad bad days. “I pray,” he says. “I talk to Father Thomas. I pray.”
“He must be kind,” she says.
“Father Thomas? Yeah. Yeah,” he says. “But I need a place to stay. I’m staying with my mother now.”
“You said,” Nora says.
“Only she doesn’t want me there,” he says. “Bad days.”
She does not ask why the mother wants him out; or why his wife won’t see him; or what he did, or what he didn’t do, or if his kids are okay; if he knows what can happen to kids in a minute; or how much it takes to keep them well; and if they are well, if he knows to thank, forever, the sister-in-law. After all, they’re in a church. Now it seems that she is the calm thing that keeps his chaos from spilling out further. She does not want to be the calm thing, but here she is.
They’re almost through the line, and when she picks up her bags and tells the man behind her “Good luck,” he says, “Yeah,” and then “Wait.” But she does not want to wait: she rushes ahead, arms full, out to the parking lot. She’s setting the bags in the backseat, and he’s there, in the parking lot, behind her. His arms are full of groceries; there’s nothing threatening about him, except his drowning. Maybe he is hoping for a ride. He’s looking at her now, catching her eye. She is perfectly still. She wants to push him; to shove him hard, away, send him reeling back to his mother’s house. For a second, his eyes widen, as if he’s seen it, he’s recognized how easily she could be cruel. Maybe he’s not so oblivious. Or maybe he’s now realized that she is a stranger, that he’s latched on to her as if she were his wife or his mother or a sympathetic friend, but she’s out of sympathy and he doesn’t know her at all, the confusion shaming him.
“Good luck,” she says again. It’s flat and unlucky, the way she says it, and he steps back, shambling, gazing at the ground again. And then she’s in the car, and she pulls out onto the road, and when she is a few miles out, stops to light a cigarette. It’s as if she’s caught his tremble. And on the drive back to Blue Rock, to the house beside the sea—who ever wants to leave the sea? Or Nova Scotia, that light? A father. How terrible to leave her own father—burying him had seemed just that, although he had gone—yes, terrible to leave her father, who loved her. In this life, how does anyone sustain kindness? And the island now so very far away.