IN MID-JANUARY, MY FATHER TOOK ME TO DINNER at a new restaurant smashed amid car dealerships on Loyalty Island’s eastern edge. He’d been home for two or three weeks by then, at least since New Year’s Eve. I knew this only because I saw his pickup truck splashing through a puddle downtown on the last afternoon of vacation.
His arrival at the Norths’ was just as sudden as my own arrival there months before. He rang the bell one morning, and when I came downstairs he pulled me close to him, crushing me against his chest. “We should go home, huh?” he said. “Anytime you’re ready.”
My green duffel, his old green duffel actually, was already packed. I grabbed it from under the bed and left, squeezing past Jamie at his desk. We hadn’t spoken since Christmas, but I’d felt his cold, silent anger each day. I’d heard him, one night, sobbing on the roof. The thing I most wanted at that moment was never to see his face again.
The restaurant was called Mr. Steak. My father and I ordered sirloins and baked potatoes. We sat, pretending to be too busy gazing at the wood paneling and the display-lit Ansel Adams prints to talk. After the food came my father tucked his napkin into his collar and said, softly, the way he said everything, as if the words didn’t have a right to exist, “Do you have anything you need to ask me?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
The waitress came with Coke in a pitcher.
“I had Diet Coke,” my father said. She apologized and left. “If you do have something to ask, it should be now.”
“No,” I said.
He closed his eyes and sighed. “Good.” He patted my hand. His own hand was rough, calloused. “That’s a good guy.” And the way he said it, with his eyes still shut, I knew that Richard was dead. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I’d left the revolver on the kitchen table myself, without having to be asked.
“You think your mother would like this place?” my father asked.
“I don’t.”
“Well, I like it. We should go when she gets back. I feel like I haven’t eaten in a year. Are you sure there’s nothing else?”
There was nothing else. In my mind, I could already see my father picking the gun up from the table. I could see him and Sam walking the same path through the basement that Jamie and I had walked so many times. I could see Richard even more clearly.
He’s been alone for three days straight when he hears the knock on the door. He’s expecting me, but, just from the sound, two heavy thumps, he knows it hasn’t worked out. Sam and Henry look tired and windburned. They smell like the harbor. They don’t say anything, and he’s glad they don’t.
Was he grateful that they’d given him this extra time, these months of extra breath, even if it was only of stale air? Or did he wish they had done it months before on the lawn behind his father’s house?
The revolver pokes from the zip pocket of my father’s corduroy jacket, but he doesn’t touch it. He and Sam unlock the chain from around the water pipe but not from around Richard’s leg. They put a piece of gray tape over his mouth. They gather up the chain, and Richard puts out his hands to hold it.
They drive through dark streets, Richard sandwiched between my father and Sam. The truck smells of cologne. The road is dirty white under the headlights. It’s too dark to see much else, and Richard finds this unaccountably disappointing. They pass the harbor and pull off near Black’s Beach. The tide’s in, so there isn’t far to walk.
He sits in the bow of the skiff as instructed. He waits as they wrap the chain tightly, but not painfully, around his legs, from the ankles to the thighs, and refasten the lock to hold it in place. This boat’s a twelve-footer, not so different in size from the one that supposedly carried Richard’s great-great-grandfather to the shores of Loyalty Island. My father sits in the stern, while Sam pushes them into the tide. After two pulls, the engine sputters to life.
Richard pulls the tape from his mouth—my father doesn’t protest—and looks out into the water rippling invisibly along the boat. Here it all is: the sounds, the smells, the absurd perceptions from which there was no escape.
After ten minutes my father cuts the engine. “Stand up, Richard,” he says. And Richard stands, almost automatically. Moonlight drops on the water like a woman letting down her hair. A weak breeze brings up the smell of the sea, that particular sea.
My father begins to rock his shoulders. At first he looks almost funny, as if he’s trying to dance. Then the boat lists sharply. He won’t even touch me, Richard thinks. His body tells him to check his balance, but his feet can’t move, and he stumbles over the side, his cheek striking the surface, the water stinging back. He flaps his arms and claws for the boat. He swallows cold water. His hair is plastered across his eyes. He hears the engine start again as his head dips under. His legs want to kick and his lungs want to breathe, but he can do neither. What a terrible feeling it must be, to want to live.
It’s only a guess. My father would have told me everything, I think, if I’d asked, but I said nothing, and he patted my hand and repeated, “That’s a good guy.” And peeled the tinfoil from his potato and ate.
MY MOTHER RETURNED from Santa Cruz two weeks later. My father had flown down to plead with her, and finally she’d given in. I had to swear to her, he said, that as far as I knew Richard had died in September on the Inside Passage. There would be no more secrets between my father and me, but I was starting to learn that this meant keeping secrets from everyone else.
I cleaned the house and filled the refrigerator, and finally she returned. She looked younger than she had when she’d left. Her hair, dyed a brighter red, hung to the small of her back. She wore a green sundress with white stripes, a dress much too light for a Washington January.
I met her at the front door because my father was at work. She embraced me immediately, holding me tight for minutes. She introduced me to my sister, Em, who had green eyes and white hair. We ate lunch, sandwiches I made because my mother said she was too tired to cook, and then we put Em down in a new crib and watched her sleep from the doorway, saying nothing.
My mother went downstairs to the studio, and I followed. It was the first time I’d been in the basement since December. The mint-green door hung open. They’d cleaned the carpet and put the records back on their shelves, but I could still see the faint black line the chain had drawn along the baseboard. The room still smelled of our cigarettes. My mother brushed her fingers over the record spines and wrinkled her nose.
“Have you been down here?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. The next moment I was crying.
She looked at me strangely. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right. I don’t mind at all.”
What she suspected, what she knew, was never clear. But she knew enough. A few weeks after she returned we were at the dry cleaner’s together, chatting with Mrs. Zhou.
“Your husband,” Mrs. Zhou said, “seems to be doing such a hard job. It must have been hard to see that young man die.”
My mother just stared, and so I stepped in with some cliché. “It was a difficult time for everybody,” something like that. My mother smiled coldly and said nothing until we were back in the car. Then she turned to me and said, “Don’t be a liar, Cal. Liars are so boring.” I’ve done my best to prove her wrong ever since.
She never really came back from California, and she left Loyalty Island for good the summer I turned eighteen. She’d only been waiting for me to leave home before she took Em back to Santa Cruz. She’d lost one child to Loyalty Island, I guess, and didn’t want to lose another.
How much did she know? Though I still imagine telling her everything, I know I never will. We speak occasionally, but never of Loyalty Island or my father. After the divorce she married a lawyer who has helped raise Em, apparently very well. Over the phone Em has an intelligent voice. Recently she sent me a painting she’d done of Monterey Bay. Last year she won the Latin prize at her school, and she’s already a first violin in the high school orchestra, even though she’s only fourteen.
ONE NIGHT, toward the end of high school, I was at a party, drunk, yelling at somebody—I don’t remember who. I stumbled out, or someone threw me out, the front door onto a wide brick porch. My legs were jelly, and I teetered toward the concrete stairs. I probably would have cracked my head open if Jamie North hadn’t been sitting on the ledge, smoking a cigarette.
We hadn’t spoken since our winter with Richard, but I’d kept tabs as much as I could. I knew, for example, that he’d stopped haunting the Orpheum, either by choice or by order. I knew that he’d spent the last two summers up north, out for salmon. And I knew that he’d gained a reputation for having a hot temper, that he’d recently broken a friend’s nose over a pickup basketball game.
He caught me around the chest and stood me up. I’m not sure if he knew it was me at first, probably he didn’t. He was nearly as tall as his father and much stronger than I remembered, much stronger than I was. There was the red shadow of a beard on his jaw.
“You look bad,” he said.
I shouldered away and dramatically adjusted my collar. “Hey, I look how I look.”
“That’s true.”
He looked so much like Sam, except his face didn’t have Sam’s softness. “Hey, man,” I said, “listen . . .”
“To what?” he asked. “Listen to what? You better get home.”
That was the last time I saw him. Jamie went back to Alaska the next summer, the summer before our senior year, and decided to stay on for king season on the Cordilleran.
I had my chance too. The day I graduated high school I heard the words from my father I’d been waiting for as long as I could remember. He had become the head of everything by then, and was lining up the resources to buy the company officially.
He had just come home from work. He’d lost weight, and his hair was a spooky gray at the temples. His hands were spotted with paint, reeking of turpentine, one leg of his jeans completely soaked, the other dry.
“I wanted to catch you,” he said.
“You have.”
“There’s a spot for you on the Laurentide if you still want it. Or you can work with Jamie. We can arrange that. He’ll be taking over Don’s old boat soon.”
“You think that’s what I want?” I asked. “You really think that?” And I laughed, as if this offer were the funniest thing in the world, as if he couldn’t possibly be more wrong about me.
I went on to college. I went as far away as I could. And I told myself that everything that had happened hadn’t. I’d learned enough from Richard to know I could never go back to Loyalty Island. But I’d also learned that I might spend a long time, the rest of my life maybe, looking for some way to leave.
One night, years after I’d left home, I walked through falling snow with a girl on my arm. She had thick eyelashes and the snow fell on them and on her hair and on the white fur collar of her coat. I’d shortened my stride some because it was icy and she was wearing yellow high heels. We were on our way to a warm bar filled with friends. I knew that she would be with me that night and the next morning. But, before that, there would be the ritual of arriving at the bar, of shaking the snow off our coats, of hanging the coats on a post by the door and ordering drinks and saying hello with nods and handshakes and taps on the shoulder. Of finding our close friends among the other friends as they leaned and talked at the sanded bar, of saying, “Now that we’re all here we should get a booth,” of piling into the booth, fitting three or four where only two have room, and lighting cigarettes and talking and laughing. There was nothing else, I realized, to look forward to. There are only two emotions that grant this lack of expectation and disappointment—happiness and fear. And I looked at the girl’s face, and I wasn’t afraid.
On nights like those, there is almost no memory and almost no past. But other nights I lie in bed awake and the darkness around me becomes the wet light of Loyalty Island. I wait, hoping that the phone will ring with news from my father, or Jamie North. Come back, they’ll say. We need you. I imagine the plane ride to Seattle, the ferry across the Sound, the parking lot in Kingston where Jamie and my father wait in weak sunlight, sipping coffee from paper cups.
But what would I say to them, then? I can’t find those words. Not unless I imagine all the miles of cold ocean on earth. Not unless I imagine lying on my back, descending through water shot through with sun, through bands of color, from sky to sea, from green to ink-black. I can’t find those words. Not unless I imagine myself drowned.