A STORM WAITED off the coast. From the first overlook on Cape Flattery, Peter watched the rain. Fall streaks grayed the sky over the mouth of the strait.
The sea surged to shore. Dark water broke over mussels and rocks, draining white foam, rising through green curls of kelp. Waves boomed through sea caves that riddled the sandstone cliffs, shuddering the earth beneath their feet. An eagle wheeled overhead, keeping watch. Otherwise, they were alone.
When he showed up at her cabin this morning, Claudia acted like it was just another day. Which it was, he supposed. At least he had something for her. Whiskey and cigarettes, the last of his stash. She was not as cheerful as he’d hoped, but he tried to rally. “It’s a joke. You know. Get your own?”
“Shouldn’t you be with your mom?”
“She’s at Roberta’s. The girls are opening presents.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I thought we’d go on a walk.”
“Peter, what do you think we are doing?”
“No one will be on the trail. It’s Christmas.”
Claudia ignored the view and studied the carvings on the overlook’s fenced deck, her fingers caressing gouged hearts that spread like spores across the damp wood. Squared initials and cupid’s arrows repeated on the handrail and bench. Peter was fairly certain that the only place his name would appear would be his tombstone, if someone went to the trouble. He tried to imagine Claudia as a teenager whose boyfriends sawed tributes into trees and tables.
She dawdled at unexpected intervals on the trail, wearing a listening look. Runoff from the morning rain gurgled through culverts. She brought her ear real close to a tree, face awash in wonder. Urban women.
He didn’t worry until she stopped where a sudden creek had washed out the trail. She didn’t respond to her name. He hopped over, picked her up and carried her across. “You’re not made of sugar.”
She crouched, hands wrapped around her knees, rocking and staring at a banana slug oozing its way across the forest floor.
“Hey.” He pressed her with the side of his leg. She did not look up. “I said, ‘Hey.’” Another nudge. “Let’s go.”
Thick fog clung to the trees. Needles condensed the mist. Rain dripped on them both. He followed her zigzag off the path. Forest duff thickened the topside of crumbling nurse logs. They walked over spongy carpets of moss. Sword ferns tickled their waists. He was soaked.
They made their way down the hillside, her steps cautious across stumps and roots. She pawed the air as if blind. No branches spanned their path. He kept her in front of him.
The next lookout jutted toward a sea cave like the prow of a ship. Thick-bodied birds flew into the maw, turning sideways to skim its striated surface. A teacher once took him out here, before there were boardwalks over the boggy areas, before signs were written to explain things to people who didn’t know how or whom to ask for knowledge. She was teaching them something while he let the tide of his boyhood friends sweep him into a giddy lack of attention that marked most of his teenage years, before life pulled the rug out from under him. What was it? She said that Neah Bay was rising and moving northeast at the rate of more than an inch per year. “Making a break for Canada,” Peter joked before she shushed him. “Going to visit our cousins.”
The class lesson was about the earth’s plates. They covered cardboard with peanut butter and slid a bunch of other cardboard pieces around on top, showing how the earth’s crust moves on molten iron. She pushed one piece beneath another. “That’s what happens here, offshore. Sometimes a piece of the earth’s crust gets stuck as it slides below its neighbor. It builds up pressure.” Her hands stopped, trembling in place. “Guess what comes when it pops loose and dives down? An earthquake.”
The best part was watching girls lick the cardboard clean.
Claudia hunched over the corner of the platform, ribcage wedged over the top rail, feet off the ground. It was hard not to plant a hand on her shoulder. He shoved his fists in his jacket pockets. She could look after herself. He scanned the forest above the cave. A tree leaned into the wind, roots snaking down the cliff face, exposed. Below, any rock that escaped the restless water was streaked white with guano. Two thin gray figures wriggled on the highest reaches. Holy shit. Sea otters! They humped and scowled.
“Somebody’s getting some!”
It was unnerving to be around a woman who didn’t talk. Let him drift in her presence. Before his dad died, Peter spent his days scrambling around and cliff jumping with Randall, who hadn’t yet sought a uniform to let people know his judgment mattered. Everywhere they jumped, rocks hid beneath. Even if it looked clear, they’d go in only to realize they could have died right there. Never a good place to pull out. Shoals cut their hands and chests. Their moms found out by doing their laundry, though Peter always blamed the blood on fish guts.
When Peter jumped from his favorite high spot, his arms and legs flared when he hit the water, flipping him upside down. It seemed natural to swim in the wrong direction. The sun was rarely out. Randall taught him to spit air and watch where the bubbles went. Follow your breath, he said when they surfaced, and it saved Peter a few times.
The temperature was dropping. It was near freezing, his favorite weather, the kind that let you know where you ended and the world began. Clouds rose from his mouth, mingling with fog feeding the trees, heading upland. He hurried down the path after Claudia.
Beyond her, the Pacific buckled into white caps all the way north to Tatoosh Island and west to the horizon. He could barely see the lighthouse. Mist veiled the low line of mountains on the far side of the strait.
Bypassing the raised wooden platform, she sidled up to the cliff’s bare dirt lip. On the tree next to her, branches pointed east in deference to sea winds. During the summers of his childhood, Peter lay down to stare at the seals and sea lions and puffins zooming through the water. Later, he had a hard time finding a good spot. Too many legs shuffling into semicircles. Like Claudia, he often leaned out and hoped a sudden gust didn’t come, knowing from the torque in his stomach that he’d be a goner if it did.
Looking at her was like peering over a cliff, something his mom used to yell at him for when he was a kid, before the tribe put a platform at Cape Flattery for the crowds that came to claim the northwestern corner of the lower 48, not knowing it was on another cliff. The tourists—white people, mostly, but Asians, too—chattered the reservation’s unfamiliar name. “MAKah. MakAH. MaKAW.” They flocked to peck at the view of Tatoosh Island and its lighthouse, hoping to take something home with them, if only a nature shot, soft focus and sepia toned like pictures they’d seen of Indians back in the day.
The toe of her left shoe hovered in space. The wrongness of this moment—it’s happening now, he told himself, you must act—haunted him, as though he was already looking back with regret, peering down at them both, dizzy with vertigo, which, in the end, was a sick love of falling. He spoke her name. She did not answer. He stepped toward her, quiet.
When he was close enough, he bent his knees, leaned back and took her by the shoulders, clutching her to his chest and backing up, her feet dragging, her body limp in his arms.
He pushed her up the ladder to the relative safety of the enclosed space and side rails, her weight slack over his shoulder. Panting, he slung her onto the deck. “There’s a better view from here.”
She inched away from him until her back was against the banisters. Black hair blew around her face, her collarbones sharp beneath her skin, fragile as a downed bird. Her distant expression made it easier for him to feel something, to impose an emotion she might otherwise reject. He studied her pale skin, the dark shallows beneath her eyes and cheekbones, giving way to her stark beauty, which was unforgiving, that of bleached shells, the crisscross of branches in winter.
She knocked the back of her head against the railing.
“Christmas is hard for everybody, sweetheart.”
Again. Again.
“Take my mom. First thing she did this morning was wander out of the house. Before it was light. She made it all the way downhill in the dark. No sidewalks. People on the road that early are just getting home. Not fit to be behind the wheel, you know?”
He waited. Waves splashed and crashed against rock, wind whittling pine needles off burl-knotted branches.
“I wake up, and she’s gone. I jump in my truck. She was past the museum, nearly all the way to where the road climbs up 200 Line. In the goddamned rain!
“She says she can hear drumming. I don’t know, Dave said there’s a lot of spirits here, everywhere. 200 Line is one of the strongest places. Because of the creek that runs there. People used to hike up there to bathe. Purify themselves, you know? So they would be given a song.”
Claudia stopped rocking.
“I guess two medicine men went up there one time. They fought. Only one came back. Plus when the smallpox came, people went up the creek to die. That’s why it’s haunted, Dave said, but I don’t buy it. All the beaches here would be thick with ghosts. The whole goddamned place. Who knows.
“There’s a bunch of housing built up there. The tribe is moving some services to higher ground. In case we get a wave, like Japan. But people keep hearing drumming and singing. Dave said he goes up there to clean houses. I asked him what that means. He said you have to be there.”
Her eyes were open now, if not focused.
“Dave said I need to prepare her. For death. Asking her what she knows. If it’s always been this way or that way in our family, and learning it.
“When she heard I was going to see you, she said it was okay. She thinks you’ll convince me to go ahead with this party. And I don’t want to, you know? She can’t fix me. The things I want to learn, she doesn’t want to tell me. About Dad. She shouldn’t have been the one. I wanted to, sometimes, after he roughed her up. I had my reasons. Like you. You have your reasons why you’re not home with your husband. You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
She squeezed her eyes shut like she’d been kicked.
“I’m talking too much. I just want you to know I understand. I know you hurt inside, like me.”
Her mouth moved, soundless.
“Dave says we need a healing. I hate how he thinks he knows everything. Maybe he’s right. We could try the warm up. Bring out the song. Even if it’s just for us. Maybe she would get better.”
Her shoulders were shaking, her lips a square, her head wilting on its stem. He gathered her into his arms. “It’s gonna be alright, I swear.”
He held her hand the whole way back. Welding taught Peter never to pull away too quick. Leaves holes damned near impossible to repair. He hadn’t known that when he fled Neah Bay, full of self mastery, taking GED classes at community college, clearing tables, sleeping on couches when he got behind.
But the thing is, it’s hard to fix someone else’s weld, to get it to lay down nice and smooth like it would have if he’d been there from the beginning. To fuse steel, he learned to make a hole and let the liquid metal fill it, not too fast, not too slow, the arc so short it blurred into a halo. His shield went black when sparks flew. Only happened if he backed off too much. He couldn’t help watching, though he saw spots the next day. His teacher kept potatoes on hand for people like him, with no self-control, who stared at the tiny sun of their own making. He sliced the spuds—that’s what he called them—and put them on Peter’s eyes with a reminder. “Next time, look away.” Most of what he remembered from his apprenticeship flickered between the smell of matches and the sight of his neighbor’s boots in a shower of sparks. His earplugs made everything sound like he was underwater. So that’s where he went. There was work for those willing to risk their lives.
He always thought he would end up blown to pieces or pinned in silt. Crushed. Electrocuted. Running out of air before the topside crew figured out what was happening. That kind of thing. On good days, he didn’t give a fuck about anything but getting it right in the cold wet dark. He felt then as he felt now. Emptied, relieved and at rest. Neutral buoyancy. Nowhere to go but up.
Back when they used to fish together, his dad talked about being on the boat—when the lines were set and their minds smooth as water, waiting for the fish—as being ready for anything but not in a hurry. That’s how he felt. Prepared for what would come.
Peter locked the truck’s doors as soon as they were inside. Cedars closed in around the road, jade branches laden with rain that splattered the windshield. Between their trunks, the sea flashed silver and pearl. The blur of pavement calmed him, as did the handlettered sign on the way to Hobuck.
HAVE COURAGE TO CHANGE
He felt peaceful, like a storm had cleared the air. The worst possible fate had washed over her and receded. Leaving its wreckage, true, but now all they had to do was pick up the pieces. He was good at that. At least he could try.
Peter didn’t want to leave Claudia alone in her cabin, but he had promised to pick his mom up from Roberta’s, and he couldn’t stand to hear about another thing he hadn’t done for her. It was dark by the time he pulled up to their curb. He beeped the horn so he wouldn’t have to hear the happy shrieking over presents, wouldn’t have to see the mosaic of family pictures of Sarah and Layla tumbling over each other with gap-toothed grins, John in a serious face and shorts that hung to his skinny calves, the entire family lined up, nice and neat, in front of changing backdrops—the marina, Randall’s patrol SUV, a green mountain, a brick wall—Roberta looking the same in each photo, long hair draped around her, hands placed on a kid’s shoulder or around Randall’s broadening waist, the main indicator, aside from the children’s heights, of the passage of time. He couldn’t stand to watch Randall swagger like he owned the place, which, of course, he did. Peter’s father never acted like that. By the time Peter started noticing those kinds of things, his dad treated his wife like she was a schoolmarm.
After they got his mother bundled into his idling truck, Peter turned on the radio, scrolling through AM’s long fields of unused frequencies, hurrying past the distant voices of religious fanatics and the empty rush of news to land on a country music station. That’ll do. He turned it up, static and all, and settled in for the short ride home, thinking on Claudia, which had become a bad habit. There was the moment on the cliff. He massaged it in his mind until she was being incautious. He pulled her back to protect her, it’s true, but only from a sudden gust of wind. When he held her, he could feel her need, its gravity, their friction, the pressure building to something more than a fuck buddy, for once.
She must be lonely, so alienated from her own life that she would choose to spend it with strangers. And wasn’t that what he had always done. On the years when he weakened and accepted an invitation to spend a holiday with the family of some guy he met on a job, regret slapped Peter across the face as soon as he walked into the happy home, regret at being there, regret at not having this, regret at remembering the good times of his childhood, and the bad. Pulled up to their table, seeing the silliness of the kids make its way into adult faces, Peter saw how much he’d been holding in, and for how long. It was that, or a bar. Plan B became Plan A on the same day, more than once, but it seemed that was expected of roustabouts.
He used to keep a girlfriend for such occasions. Not the kind of woman you marry, but it was easier to put up with entitlement than to waste time bedding a new one with dinner and drinks. For a while, he got off on spending money. Every shore leave, he bought something—clothes, electronics, a little blow, if he felt like it. Living that life was like climbing a wall of butter. He grappled with every day and ended right where he started.
He got back here, and what had become of his mother? A hoarder. Shit stacked up to the ceilings. It felt like punishment for everything he hadn’t become.
“Son.”
“Yeah?”
“Watch out for these people.”
A family of six waited next to a minivan parked at Bahobohosh Point. He braked to let them cross and leaned over the wheel to scope the beach. Great powdery gray billows rose above the black shore. People in jackets and hoodies and jeans stood in semicircles around clumps of smoke. He heard popping, flinched but broke out grinning as a giant flower cracked green fire across the sky. The night boomed, sparks streaming yellow and pink followed by rounds upon rounds of red, white and blue, leftovers from last summer.
Skyrockets screeched at the moon, spraying sparks that swirled up and shot off glimmering flashes. Willows and palms whistled and bloomed with bright splashes that burned out in long trails, going dark just above the heads of children who ran with sparklers, chasing each other in lines of sizzling light, their faces ashimmer with smiles. His mother laughed and clapped her hands beside him, their windshield twinkling red and green.
He saved his mom’s gift for when they were alone at home, watching the Christmas specials. First he chitchatted to make sure she wasn’t off somewhere in her mind. He had to watch it around her. Even so, the vaguer he tried to be about something—like, say, his future—the sharper she got.
Well, actually, she was the one who brought out a gift for him first. Made a big deal of it. He could see why. She wove him a hat. Not just any hat, but a big conical cedar hat with a knob at its top to show anyone who knew anything that his family was a force to be reckoned with since way back.
“For your big day.”
The brim shaded his eyes and ears. He had to stand up straight for it to set right. He remembered tromping through forests when he was young to help her gather, peeling strips from cedars on the right day of the right season, the whole year a wheel that turned in her mind like shadows around a dial.
He knew her wrists hurt when she opened a jar or the fridge or anything. How many turns of the wrist to make a hat.
When she stopped crying and rubbing his back, Peter pulled out his wallet. Ignoring her grumbles about not wanting to be paid, he thumbed through bills. There, tucked in the fold, the only picture he ever kept, the one that survived. Her albums were black with mold by the time he opened them.
The photo was yellowed and rubbed white at the crease. The edges were soft and bent. Her bangs were curled into a halo above wings of feathered hair. She wore a thin striped sweater and flared jeans. One arm was blurred. The other held the handle of a pan. By her shiny smile, a drawing he made as a kid was tacked to the cabinet—their boat with a bunch of birds behind it. A hand towel was slung over her shoulder. There were wet spots at her hips. She used to let him wear her apron before his dad said the boy was too old for that shit. Behind her, his dad sat in his chair, laughing and pointing to something off frame.
“You kept this.”
“I did.”
“Don’t you want it?”
“I know it by heart.”