2000
I dream of the quarry pond. The deep blue of its center and the way it eased out green to itch at the limestone shores. Those rocks were slick. Our small, pink feet could never find their grip. We’d crawl into the pond if we had to, like dogs with our chins lapping at the water and our bare asses stuck up toward the sun. Beatrice and I with our elbows at too sharp angles, sliding into the water with only our shoulder blades peaking, finning like sharks. My mother at the top of the tallest cliff. The one with the sharpest rocks lurking below. She is weeping up there and we are circling. She is clothed, wrapped up for winter with her big work boots, and I know, if she falls or jumps or is pushed, she will drown, and we will eat her up. I keep swimming, licking at the pond water with a hungry tongue. B.B.’s body slides next to me. I can feel the scales of her lower half, gray and rotting.
My mother’s scream starts before her feet leave the cliff. Long and piercing and taking on the pulse of an ambulance siren. The splash of her body wakes me.
“You okay?” she asks, but I’m still half in the dream and can’t answer.
“I need air.” I push hard at the car door; the wind is fierce coming off the lake. It takes effort to open then slams itself shut behind me.
I can smell the island. The wind whips across the limestone and carries the scent of woodsmoke from fireplaces, of the soft green moss that grows at the edge of the quarry pond, of the rot of the unfortunate fish that wash up on seldom-visited beaches, particularly this month, when the island is still undecided about whether it wants to boast winter or spring. My heart races at the scent.
The image of her body way up high on that cliff, weeping like she had no choice but to stand there, makes me feel like she is wise to be afraid, and I wonder, Am I afraid?
The stairs to the upper deck are crowded, but it feels suddenly urgent for me to get to the highest point I can. The smell of the island is moving toward me rather than me toward it, and this little loss of control makes it hard for me to breathe.
I push through people using my elbows, my hips. Someone says ouch and I do not apologize. Finally, at the top, I hold tight to the railing and find fresh air. I am shaking. My father is dead, I think. Dead. I barely knew him. I’d thought maybe I’d go back to stay with him for the summer. My lease is up June 1. I had not asked him or told my mother; I knew what she’d say, and just how she’d say it. “Do you think that’s wise?” she’d ask, straightening her spine. “Have you asked your father if he wants the company?” And finally: “Having an alternate plan would be best.”
Below me, Lake Erie gushes and splashes against the boat with such force that drops hit my neck, my chin; one lands cold as ice on my forehead. I breathe in deep, lean out, let the water reach as many places on my skin as it wants. The smells of home are brighter, fresh and full and rushing at my face, as if those scents too had the shape and weight of water. The feeling growing in my stomach is not fear. It’s anticipation. And joy.
“You aren’t dressed up.” It’s a man’s voice, and I know he must be the body pressed up against my right shoulder because of the clear, crisp sound of him in my ear. He smells like that too, bright and fresh and warm, a blanket I’d wrap myself in. “Unless you think ‘sad girl on boat’ is a costume.” He laughs. It’s a genuine laugh, sudden and charming, as if he’s truly taken by his own cleverness.
I turn my head to get a look at him.
He’s got an arrow through his heart, fake blood dripping from the shaft. “I’ve never been here for Masquerade,” he says. “I’m not here for it this year either. Just my luck that it coincides.”
“You wear that arrow always?” I look him in the eyes. Wind hits my left cheek, hiding, I hope, the flush that comes over me as I see him. He looks familiar. Blond hair, short but long enough to whip and curl. Brown eyes that look gold in the sun. One of his front teeth slightly shorter than the other, and a pockmark of a scar on his upper lip. My body recognizes him first, heating up my middle, my palms beginning to sweat. Joshua Kevin Wilson. I remember the smell of him, like citrus mixed with soil. The soft pink burn on his nose from the island sun. The way he’d trip a little when he walked, as if too caught up in his own thoughts to lift both of his feet properly off the ground.
Shit, I think.
I turn my face back into the full force of the wind, hoping that it will hide my shallow breathing. It does and I calm myself. He is just someone I once knew.
He is talking, and I’ve missed something but maybe not much. “Some woman gave me this. She said I was underdressed. I think she was drunk. Invited me to ‘check out the potty’ with her. And now that I’m saying it out loud, I wonder if she is from back East and was trying to say party. I assumed she wanted to make out with me in the ferry toilet. Either way, do you think she was flirting?”
“Potty is the word I use when I’m feeling sexy,” I say, and am surprised by my own effort to be funny and even prouder when he laughs.
“She gave me a blood capsule too. And I can’t seem to get the taste out of my mouth. It’s nasty.” He puts his hands on the railing and leans out, spitting into the water. The spit is frothy and pink; the fake blood disappears as it hits the ferry-churned lake, and I imagine my dream Beatrice and Henrietta rushing up from lake bottom to swallow that slush of red.
“They didn’t have this Masquerade when I was a kid,” I offer. “Halloween was always big. There was that weird parade.”
“I remember that!” He looks at me now. Really looks. “Hey, you’re B.B.’s sister.”
In the darkroom, negatives are powerful, they create the space for the real image to emerge, but I don’t want to be B.B.’s negative, a raw space only there for some other image to shine through. I will not be that again. Not for my sister. Not for the island. Not for anyone.
I decide right then not to let him know that I recognized him first. Or at all.
“Yes, that is one of the things that I am.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” he says. Of course, he knows.
“It’s fine,” I say. “The funeral is this weekend. It’s gonna be a shit show.”
“It’s why I’m here, actually. Your father was a mentor to me.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Do you remember me?”
“Not really.” The lie is so dumb anyone could detect it.
The first time I saw Joshua he was sitting under a tree, carving something in the bark—maybe his initials. Didn’t he know that tree was alive and could feel the hurt he was digging into it? I got so mad. I ran straight up behind him and hit his shoulder blade as hard as I could with a rock I picked up off the ground.
“You and your sister were always together. Do you still take photos?”
The irritation I feel for him calling me Beatrice’s sister fades a little with this question. “I do.”
“You and that camera were inseparable.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Someone jostles me from behind, and Joshua puts his hand on my lower back to steady me. It feels good. Melty. “Are you a writer?”
“I used to write. I liked to tell stories, but it’s been a while. Your father read some for me. Marked them up with his red pen. Mostly, I worked in that bookstore that used to be at the back of Island Thrift. You remember? Your dad would order books like every week. He taught me about first editions and what was valuable. I read everything he recommended.”
My father loved his books, his pens—green and red and blue but never black—and his typewriter. He’d refused to own a computer and so his poems were typed out one at a time. He said he liked his words to be “easily lost and easily found.”
I drag myself out of my bullshit reverie. “What do you do now?”
“Just quit my job actually. My mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s this winter.”
“I’m sorry. That’s awful.”
He nodded. “I quit my job so I could be here all summer with them. She’s been wandering. My dad can’t figure how she’s getting out. Anyway, I want to help out and enjoy time with her.”
I feel a twinge of jealousy. But would I really have done anything differently if I’d known about my dad? “That’s kind of you.”
“It sounds noble, doesn’t it? For a twenty-six-year-old? Well, to be fair, I hated my job,” he says. The clouds thin in the sky and the sun shoots through bright and full of potential. He puts his hand up to block the light and tilts a little more toward me. He has light freckles on his cheekbones. “Marketing and social media for a chain of restaurants. Total bullshit. So, quitting my job, if looked at from another way, is just a way to freeload off my parents. How about you? Will you be here this summer?”
“No, I don’t come here anymore,” I say too quickly. “What I mean is, I’m just here for the funeral, then I have to go back and finish my degree. I graduate in June.”
The ferry whistle blows loudly. Once, then two more times. We are almost there. The sun slips back behind a cloud. We both lean out over the railing and look toward the small brown crop of land. Spring hasn’t reached the island yet. The trees reach up, naked, their gnarled fingers scratch the sky, groping for sunlight.
“You should come back for the summer after you graduate. We can drink mimosas and sunbathe.”
We both laugh a little at the image. The Fowler Island beaches are mostly shaded, the lake is cold much of the year, and the water is rarely clear. Some islands in Lake Erie boast fancier houses, strips of upscale bars and restaurants, and sandy beaches where loungers take up permanent residency in June, July, and August. Fowler is not one of them.
“I vacation on island in the summer,” I say in a mock-haughty voice.
He laughs. The ferry whistle blows again. I know I should head back to the car, but I don’t want to leave him.
“Will I see you at the funeral?” He looks immediately embarrassed. “What a stupid thing to say. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“I guess I meant we could maybe get a drink afterward or something.”
“I’d like that.”
He nods his head yes, as if to mark the making of our plan for a postfuneral date, then looks out at the water before speaking again. “I remember your name too, you know. Henrie. You were just a kid back then. You were so serious. Always paying attention. I always wanted to know what you were thinking. B.B. would say exactly what she was thinking—”
“She still does that.”
“Your dad filled me in over the years. He was proud of you.” Joshua reaches out his hand as if to touch me again, maybe to turn me toward him, end this meeting with a hug, but it is too awkward, our bodies smooshed between too many other bodies. He rethinks the gesture, puts his hand back on the railing. “I’ve been visiting on and off. Mostly off, but my parents are here each summer, so I’d check in on your dad.”
“And B.B.? Do you check in on her?” It comes out nasty. I am wondering what to say next that might be funny and light, but the ferry hits the dock with a thump and the ride is over. “I should get back to the car,” I say. “You don’t need a lift, do you?” I am pushing back from the rail before he answers.
I elbow my way down the stairs and through the crowd. The ferry attendants hustle to steady the boat, lowering the metal plate that will allow us to drive off, one car at a time. The noise of that lowering, how it protests its own hinges then bangs against the dock, is a sound I haven’t thought of in ages.
I unlock the car and the door opens with ease, happier to let me back in than it was to let me out. Mom is pretending to sleep, her head tilted back, her hands clasped in her lap, her body rigid. I start the car, let it idle, then reach out to put my hand between hers. She lets me, but her body only relaxes enough to make room for my fingertips. Her palms are clammy.
We wait our turn to drive off the ferry in silence, and eventually my mom opens her eyes and sits up straight, picking at her lower lip, then pulling her hair back into a ponytail, her palms smoothing her skull over and over before she finally puts the hair elastic in. Her T-shirt has dark sweat stains under her armpits. I take note of my own body, head, neck, shoulders, stomach. I scan for nervousness or sorrow. I find nothing. No joy or excitement.
We’ll attend the funeral at the VFW later today—our father wasn’t a veteran but it’s the only large hall on the island—but maybe we don’t need to stay for the reading of the will. My father didn’t own anything. There can’t be much to it. I’ll see Joshua, give him my number.
It’s our turn to ease off the ferry, but as I go to release the emergency brake, my mother grabs my wrist.
“Look at me,” she says. She sounds different. The person she is now and has been for quite some time is gone. She looks pale, fragile. “Promise me you will not go near the quarry. Not in the house. Not to the cliffs. None of it.”
“I can’t promise that,” I say. “We’ll need to sort out the house.” I do not say that I can feel the rock of the quarry under my feet already. The pine needles pinching my skin, the cold water folding me in.
“I don’t want you going in there. If there is stuff you want, stuff of your father’s, we can have it sent to us. Sort through it back home. I’ll pay for it.”
“Fine, Mom. I won’t go in the house.” I honestly don’t know if I’m being truthful or just trying to be kind. It’s an awfully big ask. I grew up in that house. It was ours. It was mine. Dad’s stuff is in there. His books. The water glasses we bought at the dime store with old island-restaurant logos and the bunk beds with our secrets carved in the footboards. The moose head originally hung by Seth Volt above the living room fireplace—a gruesome, moth-riddled thing by the time it got to us, but B.B. used to shove M&M’s and little notes up its nose to brighten my day.
Mom lets go of my wrist suddenly, with a sigh, as if she’s given up. “I know you’re lying.” She pauses. “And I know it’s too much to ask. I just have such a bad feeling.”
“Of course, you do. I don’t blame you for hating this place.” I hold my hand up in thanks to the impatient ferry crew. We drive off the boat and onto the island, and strangely, the rocking doesn’t stop as we pull onto asphalt. The horizon dips a bit deeper and my stomach drops. It’s an illusion—it must be—but my mother seems to feel it too, her hand rushing up to rest over her heart.
“Yes. It’s all those things, but…” A strange noise comes out of her, a kind of hiccup, then she is saying, “Stop the car! Goddammit! Stop the damn car!”
I am going so slowly already that it doesn’t matter when she opens the door and spills out before I’ve completely stopped. I put the car in park and pull on the emergency brake. The cars behind us honk. As I run around to the front of the car, at first the sight of her body is blocked by the car door, so all I can see are her hands pressed to the pavement and that she’s thrown up. The mess is draining away from her down the slight slope to the lake. As I get close to her, I see too that her body is still heaving, as if it has more to give up, but nothing comes.
I squat down and rub her back.
“Make it stop moving,” she groans. Cars continue to honk behind us.
I’ve found my steadiness. The vertigo of driving off the ferry and onto land is gone. “You’re just not used to the ferry,” I say.
“I was fine on the ferry.” Her body has stopped heaving, but she keeps her eyes closed with her face tilted down toward the pavement.
“Well, you’re fine now too. I should get you back in the car.”
A driver behind us lays on his horn.
“I’m not fine. Everything is rocking.”
“If you feel seasick, you should open your eyes, find the horizon. Let me help you stand.”
“I’m not getting in that car,” she says. “The inn is close by. I’ll walk.”
“Let me park the car and get these idiots to stop honking at us. I can walk with you and come back for it later.”
She waves me away, a gesture of both acceptance and dismissal. I shut her car door and get back in, pull the car into an empty space at the edge of the lot.
I walk back to her, and she has taken my advice. She stares out at the horizon where water meets sky, the island behind us. She puts her arm around my waist.
“This place makes me sick, Henrie.”
“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?”
“No, it makes me sick. Literally. It makes me feel like I have no center, like gravity is a thing that can choose to hold me or not. And on top of all that, I feel like there is something I should remember. Like I’ve forgotten some crucial thing and the forgetting of it is going to somehow hurt me. Do you feel it?”
I rest my head on her shoulder, look out at the horizon with her. “I’m sorry, Mom, but I don’t get it.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to. I’m here for you. I can do this.”
We walk together out of the parking lot. The Masquerade crowd is swelling around us but not intruding on our small space. Ahead is the inn. I can see it already. Tall and proud. Its wide windows facing the lake, watching every ferry come in.
“Just the two of us for the next few days,” my mother manages when we reach the inn.
We’ve walked into the front hall, a dining room on our left and a living room on our right. In front of us the old wooden stairs stretch up to the second floor. The wallpaper is aggressively floral. A plush carpet has been installed over what are surely beautiful wood floors. One of those singing-trout toys that you can buy on QVC is above the fireplace, and figurines are everywhere, most of them rose-cheeked and winged. A kind of Victorian era meets haunted house meets dollhouse. The renovations are recent, yet they still seem to suffer from a degeneration that feels wholly unique to Fowler.
“I have you in the front room. Great view of the water. Have you been here before?” says a beautiful woman, maybe a decade younger than my mother, with wild flames of curly red hair shooting out around her head like a halo before streaming down her back. Freckles riddle her face, so many that I wonder if she hates them. The way they’ve gathered high on her forehead and again on her cheekbones is charming, a starry sky of beauty marks. “I’m Gwen. Or Wally if we end up friends. The place was decorated this way when I arrived. I added the fish. It’s supposed to be ironic.”
She hands me one of her business cards, clutched between her first and second fingers (Guinevere Rose Wallace), but more than the card, I notice she is missing a large part of her right thumb. A soft stump of flesh, still pink enough at the end to make the injury appear new. She sees me make note of it and puts her hand behind her back, nodding her head in a way that says, It’s okay. Head on upstairs.
I help my mother up to our bedroom. It’s tiny, the view of the water minimal. There is an old dresser and one double bed. The handles on the dresser have clearly been replaced: dark squares around the porcelain hearts hint at a former, much more utilitarian feel.
“I reserved two beds,” Carrie mumbles, slumping against me. “I swear I did. Don’t get mad.”
“Mom, I don’t care. Truly.”
She is already crawling under the pink floral comforter. “I just need to shut my eyes for a minute.”
“I’ll go get the car from the dock and bring our stuff up.”
“This is so stupid. I’m supposed to be here to take care of you,” she sighs, already going under.
I head back downstairs, each step creaking loudly under my feet. Perhaps the wall-to-wall carpeting is a good idea after all. I see the innkeeper hovering in the living room before I’m halfway down.
“Breakfast is at seven and lasts until nine.” Her words come in a torrent, as if she has reason to think I won’t stand still for them. “I just can’t keep it up after that, so no exceptions. Also, please respect the curfew. Come in by midnight and no later. I have to lock the door at some point, and the other guests might want sleep. I do not drink—recovering—but I know people do, and it’s fine if that’s why you’re here, but please don’t get so wasted you can’t be in on time or find your own room.”
“Don’t worry,” I interrupt when she finally takes a breath, “we’re not here because of Masquerade.”
“No? That’s a relief. This is my first Masquerade. It seems pretty messed up in terms of celebratory events, but what do I know? I just bought this place last summer.”
“How are you liking it?” I ask, although I don’t really care what this woman thinks of the island or how her business is doing. I just want to move the car and get back up to my mom. The funeral is this evening, only a few hours away. “Too many drunks?”
“It’s not that. Have you been on island before?”
“Yes,” I answer simply, and hope she doesn’t ask for more.
“I came once or twice as a kid. I loved the butterfly garden on the east end and Fun Land Park. Do you remember it? The big green dinosaur is still there.”
I do remember it. B.B. and I would sneak under the fence and wander the tacky exhibits. It was full of oddly colored sculptures of extinct species meant to invoke terror. We loved the tyrannosaurus. Her fangs were glorious, too long and sharp for her to ever shut her mouth. I took photos of B.B. next to Gloria Gloria Glorious—that’s what we named her—B.B.’s mouth just as wide, her elbows hugged to her sides with her fingers clawing toward my camera.
The innkeeper—Wally or Gwen or Guinevere—coughs. “I bought this place after … after my other life kind of blew up on me.”
A look moves across her face, and I feel it like a breeze through the room. My mother had that same look in the parking lot. This woman is scared. Lonely and scared.
“People still treat me like I’m visiting. Like there is some big secret I’m not allowed to know. They have island meetings.” She whispers her last sentence and waves her hands in front of her, drawing my attention to her absent thumb. How does one lose a thumb? I imagine it being bitten off by a hitchhiker or sliced off in a bizarre deli counter incident.
“Most small towns have councils,” I say. “Meetings. Things like that for planning. Do they not let you go?”
“Oh, I go. They talk about potholes and ferry maintenance, but I swear they talk about other things after the meeting closes.”
“Like whether to raise the speed limit or allow another hot dog vendor on Main?”
“No!” she snaps. “Like what happened to that woman.”
“What woman?”
The stairs behind me creak. We both jump. Another guest is making her way toward us. She’s carrying a plastic ax, and rubber cuts are fashioned to the front of her shirt as if she’s sliced herself open.
Gwen puts on a full smile and tucks a strand of unruly hair behind her ear. It bounces back out almost as soon as it is tucked.
“I love it here,” she says to me with false joy. “I hope you enjoy the inn. It makes a lot of night sounds, but that’s just settling. Don’t worry a thing about it.”
I let her talk with her other guest. The gory woman doesn’t seem to invoke the same level of introspection in Gwen that I did. I step out the front door and the lake is ahead of me, stretching out flat as glass, the ferry dock empty now, and I hear it almost right away, a low girlish whistle and the bark of a dog. Laughter echoing up from the interior of the island. B.B. calling my name, the way she did when I was little. I can feel the clank of a camera on my thigh as I run.
My eyes are closed. I open them and the long-ago sound is gone. The water remains calm but brushes up against the shore as it should. Little ripples of waves. A family rides down the road in front of the inn on rented bikes, all of them bright orange.
I can see my car from where I stand. Parked alone on the edge of the ferry lot.
I repeat “Get the car” over and over as I walk. The sidewalk under my feet is bumpy with tree roots, cracked with lack of care. I can hear us everywhere—little B.B. and Henrie, alive and thriving. We know every sidewalk crack, burl, and building.
The inside of the car is already hot. I fit my body into the driver’s seat. My feet leave island, and there is a small relief in this. I shut myself in, lock both doors, and breathe.
When I finally park the car behind the inn and load up with our two backpacks, purses, and my camera, the innkeeper is nowhere to be seen. I climb the noisy stairs, drop our bags on the floor, and slip off my shoes. When I join my mother on the bed and pull the covers up high over my face, the world is dark enough for me to shut down. I float there in the dark, the bed easing itself along the shallow coast of the island.
My mom and I walk into the VFW holding hands. She hasn’t recovered from arriving on island, although the nap helped a little, and the nearer we grew to the funeral, the shakier she became. The sun is just setting outside, and inside, B.B. has decorated with thousands of twinkle lights wrapped around the rafters. With the hall lights dimmed, it looks like the night sky from the quarry floor.
It’s a wide room packed with people; the noise of them all gathered is overwhelming and nothing like a funeral is supposed to be. People chat, talking over and under one another. Laughter prevails. Acoustic music is playing over a loudspeaker, but a woman is also wandering around playing a guitar and singing faintly, almost uncertainly, as if she has mistaken this for a music lesson. And, yes, someone is crying, a loud and impolite snorting sound that isn’t that much different from laughter.
It is a Fowler tradition to bury people on island with a rock resting heavily on their chest. A tradition that goes way back to my great-great-grandfather and maybe further. The rocks are culled from the quarry, and our father was among the men who would go into the quarry to find just the right one.
“It has to have the right story,” he’d say, “and heft. If it can’t speak to who they were on island and keep them from floating back up, what’s the point?”
Once I feel less overwhelmed by the noise and crowd, my eyes find my father’s rock. It sits under his silver casket. Big enough to break all his ribs and, alternately, ready to be pulled out as a footstool, as if he might sit up, swing his legs out of the casket, and share a joke with the crowd.
I can tell by its color and shape that this particular rock has been chipped from the edge of the quarry, up high at the lip. Glaciers made Lake Erie, as they did every one of the Great Lakes, and Fowler is grooved deep where the ice slid across, cutting its path. While the quarry itself is a man-made hole, the limestone at the top shows evidence of the Pleistocene Ice Age. The rock B.B. has picked for our father is from the edge nearest the house where we used to enter the quarry as a family. I imagine our bare feet on this stone just as B.B. must have when she chose it. Island limestone is soft and easily scarred. This rock is scratched from the years of us going into the quarry, chalky with recent wounds but also marked with a few deep grooves that turn the top of the rock into something ruffled.
The room is loud with people wandering with cocktails in hand. Against the wall to my left is a small bar with a meticulously dressed bartender mixing martinis for our father’s admirers—colleagues, former students, and other assorted wannabe poets. The islanders themselves are few and far between but recognizable by the way they’ve gathered on the side of the room opposite the bar, pale and wearing too many layers as if waiting for a guarantee that winter is over. I spot my sister right away. My stomach tightens, and I put my hand to my gut. She is in her element, moving from person to person, smiling but not so much as to hide her sadness.
“This doesn’t feel like a funeral,” my mother says. She is standing next to me, staring at my sister too. B.B. is solid as anything, and I love her for it. “It feels more like a book launch.”
“I think that’s intended.”
“He hated those events,” she says. “Part of why he lived on this island was to avoid shit like this.”
“Really? I didn’t know living anywhere else was an option.”
“You’re right.” She sighs. “This just feels weird.”
“It is weird.”
I can see B.B. trying to get away from the young woman she’s talking to so she can come greet me, but the woman has begun to cry. Big fat tears rest on her lovely cheekbones. She grabs B.B. by the elbow and pulls her in close so she can say something emotionally urgent.
“Do you think any of these people actually knew him? Like as a person and not an idea?” my mother asks.
I know the answer is no. My father had become a recluse. He could turn on charm if he needed to, give a great speech if asked, but more than anything else he wanted to be left alone.
I don’t say anything, but my mother nods as if I’d spoken this aloud. “It’s sad when I think about it like that. I didn’t even know him.”
“Sure you did.” I touch her arm. “He loved you.”
“How about a martini?” She’s still staring at B.B. “She sure is something to watch, isn’t she?”
B.B. is wearing a short black dress. Her breasts swell out of a low neckline just below a scarf, and her short blond hair is spiky and sun bleached. She is tanned, despite the gray spring weather, and her long legs brag of the same mystery sunshine.
I see her look up, wink at me, then gesture for me to wait as she accepts a cigarette from a young man I don’t know.
“I’ll let you talk to her alone,” Carrie says. “I’ll be fine.”
As my sister gets closer, I see that she looks too skinny and her fingers holding the unlit cigarette are stained with nicotine.
She reaches in her bag for a lighter. Then tilts her head back and blows smoke toward the ceiling before she leans in and puts her forehead against mine. It’s an old gesture between us, our foreheads resting against each other so that our eyes slide shut. As girls we thought we could read each other’s mind. I still think it’s possible. I let my jaw soften. I concentrate on B.B.’s hot skin against my own, on B.B.’s smell—cigarettes and sandalwood soap—and I block out the sound of the crowd.
“He’s gone, Henrie.” Her voice is raspy, thick.
I have a sudden flash of our father as he looked one summer out in the garden, my mom by his side. His hair growing long breaks loose from a ponytail at the base of his neck, and his jeans are covered with dirt. He surprised us all by saying he wanted to help in the garden. Mom teaches us how to lift the sprouted tomato plants out of their plastic bins and fit them to the earth so the roots can stretch out into new ground. My father’s hands twice the size of mine, his knuckles filled with dark soil. I open my eyes, forehead still pressed to B.B.’s, smelling the tomato leaves begging to turn into vines.
“You should give Mom a hug.” I nudge B.B. Mom has moved off in the crowd, closer to the casket.
“You mean I should give your mom a hug?” Her laugh is harsh, tight. “Sure. I’ll put it on my list. Didn’t I tell you not to bring her?”
I open my eyes. B.B.’s long fingers have elegant fingernails, so white as to fool one into thinking she’s had a manicure. “You’ve stopped breaking your nails.” I pull away from her body and her question.
“My girlfriend doesn’t like them jagged.” B.B. shrugs. “Speaking of special friends, why didn’t you bring one?” She pulls on her cigarette and searches the room. “Oh, right. You still don’t have one.”
“Mean.”
“I’m sorry.” She sighs. Dropping the cigarette on the VFW floor and grinding it out with the toes of her high-heeled shoes.
“When did you start wearing heels?” I glare at her.
“You know I just want you to be happy, Henrie.”
“And a boyfriend would do that?”
“Or a girlfriend.”
“I met someone on the ferry,” I say, then wish I hadn’t. “Where is your girlfriend?”
“It’s impossible to get a cheap enough flight on short notice. Plus, she’s not a keeper.”
“She’s not a fish, B.B.”
“Who’d you meet on the ferry?”
“Didn’t get a name.” Without breaking B.B.’s gaze, I change the subject. “What do you think Dad would say if he knew we had to have his funeral in the VFW on Masquerade weekend?”
“He’d say, ‘Goddammit, girls. I’ve been avoiding the damn military my whole life, and you’re just gonna offer up my carcass like it’s nothing?’ You want to see him?”
I nod yes, and we are standing together, hands on the coffin edge, before I am ready.
Our father is appropriately dressed for the occasion and his skin is smooth, as if the uppermost elderly layers have been scrubbed off. His costume is not ghoulish or whorish like the ones on the ferry, but he looks in costume. He looks as if someone—probably B.B.—said, “He wants to be an academic for Masquerade, a world-renowned poet.”
“Didn’t they do a great job?” B.B. asks me.
“They could have shined up his hair a bit.” Our father has long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail. It is not at all the desirable silvery hair owed to a poet laureate. His fingers are short and squat, and even though he is horizontal, it is still somehow clear that he is a tall man. They’ve shaved off his beard and put so much makeup on his face that it’s hard to tell how old he is. If not for the hair, he might be thirty or forty or sixty-something.
“Do you think I could take some pictures?” I ask.
“That’s kinda twisted, don’t you think?”
I shrug.
“You brought your camera?”
“It’s in my backpack.”
“So weird. Go for it,” B.B. says, taking a glance at the milling crowd. “He made me promise I’d throw him a party, not a funeral. He wanted cocktails and famous people. So here we are.” B.B. digs a cigarette out from the small black purse that hangs off her shoulder, while I get out my camera.
“When did you talk about his funeral?”
“It’s just one of those things we talked about,” B.B. says, lighting a match, then her cigarette, then, not bothering to make sure the match is blown out, she drops it in the casket. “We talked about everything.”
“You should give those up,” I say, frowning at the dead match resting near our father’s knuckles.
“You’re right.” B.B. drops the newly lit cigarette and stomps on it. “There they go. Given up. I’m gonna make a round. I’ll see you soon. Love you.”
The door opens as she walks away from me, so that when Joshua enters, B.B. is already walking toward him as if she somehow knew he would walk in right at that moment. He looks handsome and tall. He almost looks right at me, his eyes lifting so that they will land on me, but then B.B. swoops in. They hug each other. They hug for too long, too tightly. He shuts his eyes as he holds her, and I feel rage. Anger and embarrassment melt together, indistinguishable. I turn back to the coffin.
The camera lens shapes my father into something I can look at without the anger or the hurt in my chest growing. I snap no pictures, but I focus and refocus on his ringless fingers, on the way the buttons on his white shirt are just visible underneath his navy tie. The satin of the coffin shines in contrast to the chalky makeup that coats his skin, and I follow the creases of that satin into the dark under his body, and that’s when I see it, the slosh of it, the faint swish of water as if displaced or rather splashed up by movement. It eases up, liquid darkening his already-dark jacket, his body seeming to sway as if it could be more than a puddle beneath him. The lower half of the casket is closed, and from under there where his legs must be, I hear a faint smack like water up against the side of a boat.
I focus the lens, zoom into that dark space, and the black stares back at me, forming a presence of its own. Breathing fast, I drop my camera. It clanks against the coffin even as I jump back. Luckily, it’s attached to my neck, so it doesn’t hit the ground, but my heart is thudding and I back up farther, smashing into someone I don’t know.
Without the camera as my eyes, the casket is just a casket. My father’s suit is dry. He does not float or bob or slosh. But I can still hear the lake roaring in my ears.