I woke up this morning full of the belief that three fried eggs and a good ten-mile hike up some remote and deep-wooded mountain would cure all the ills I’d ever known. It was a very good plan, simple like the best ones. The woodstove was crackling in the semidark. The frosty cabin windows looking out on East Grand Lake had begun brightening with the day when the phone I try to ignore started buzzing. When I answered, I was knocked from the present and flung into the past. What type of world is it where a tiny electronic device can overturn our realities with such devastating ease?
I had not heard Wren’s voice in six months, when we’d gone out to Nova Scotia for a weekend trip, eaten far too much cheese, drank far too much beer, and hiked all over the barren cliffs of the Annapolis Valley. We’d traveled down to coastal Queens to visit the rural community of Mill Village and the surrounding forests, which held the ruins of an abandoned Teleglobe satellite ground station Wren had read about years ago. In those old woods we stood among decommissioned radio satellites being swallowed by moss, amazed the giant discs had held a thirty-year-long conversation with space. Then we traveled back north, listening to Acadian fiddlers at bars and roadhouses all along the way. Again we joked about making love, both of us having slipped into a state of what seemed like perpetual bachelordom, but chose not to mess things up, feeling perhaps after all these years that the boundary was firmly here to stay, and that perhaps it was the boundary that would keep us together for the rest of our lives.
The voice on the line was not the voice I had heard just six months ago, though. It was Wren’s voice from our youth, high in timbre and low in control, the exact opposite of the instrument into which her voice had matured. It made me want to be young with her again, and the shock and power of that realization caused my throat to close and my hand to release the cast-iron skillet I was transferring from stovetop to countertop. I was no longer standing in a camp kitchen I’d known all my life, frying eggs and dreaming of the mountains in early spring. I was in Wren’s house, looking at six perfectly round and smooth blue stones. I was atop a mountain with the Geminids streaking overhead. I was on the Little River, hollowed out with grief and dreaming of an airplane that never stopped falling through the sky.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
“Actually,” she said, “the ten seconds we’ve been on the phone is the only time I’ve stopped crying in the last two days.”
The news was that Lyman Creel had died in prison. With my plunge through time, I realized I was not just sad for Wren, but sad for myself. What a hammer to the throat, to stand with a black iron pan rattling around at your feet and your favorite teenage voice sounding in your ears as you realize that you too will mourn a man you should have hated but never could.
“He’d been sick for a long time,” Wren said.
“People always say that, ‘He’d been sick for a long time.’” I struggled to hide my anger, shocked at how suddenly it rose.
“It happens that way sometimes. It’s no one’s fault.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t tell you.”
“Sorry,” I said, reading the edge in Wren’s voice. “I’m being an ass,” I said. “I’m just shocked.”
“That he’s dead, or that you didn’t know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“You should have. I could have—”
“Helped?”
“Maybe. What’s so wrong with that?”
“Nothing. I’m not mocking you, David. I didn’t want to burden you. You have your own life. You can’t be managing the lives of others and trying to forestall the inevitable.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“And you couldn’t have done a damn thing, though you’d have gone crazy thinking you could.”
She was right. Wren is a cosmologist at McGill University. She does research on time and the relationship between different types of matter and teaches a few classes up in Montreal. Wren does not see the world through a simple lens, and she decries the simplicity of my doctrine—we’re here to keep people here—as an unrealistic and impossibly sentimental value cribbed from an incomplete understanding of my father, who I was never able to get to know as an adult. Wren says this philosophy confirms I’ve yet to have an original thought in my life, which may be true, but of course is a hyperbolic viewpoint. Having loved her in various iterations since we were fourteen years old, I’m of course compelled to listen with great attentiveness to every word she says. “You may be right,” I always tell her. “But I still believe doing the right thing, whether it’s legally, philosophically, or scientifically defensible, is better than doing the original thing.” To this she just rolls her eyes or hangs up the phone. Wren thinks my morality around all this is somehow about male ego and, though largely disgusting, also slightly noble as well. I’m too close to it all to confirm or disavow her suspicions.
“Are you down in the bay, then?” I asked.
“Why? Do you miss me?”
“This isn’t the time for that.”
There was a pause. I watched a phantom of mist coil up through a colossal black pine out in the yard. It was the hour before full light, a lost time between night and morning, and my favorite time of day. At the base of the ridge the lake would for the smallest of moments lie solidly black before the rising day painted it with color. The ice had only been out for a few days. All the ghosts who slumbered through winter on the bottom were surely still waking up.
“I suppose I’m trying everything I can to avoid this conversation being real,” Wren said. “I’m home in Montreal. I know I need to leave. It’s just that I can’t seem to leave. Picking up the phone almost killed me dead.” I choked on a laugh at the timing of the phrase, and Wren said, “This is no time to start being polite. Let it out.”
“Should I come up?” I asked. “I could travel down to the bay with you.”
“That’s not what I want. I was thinking I’d rather come to you.”
“Come to me.”
“Yes.”
“I’m over in East Grand.”
“I know. Despite the fame and fortune of being a good country doctor, you don’t have many places you go.”
This was true. I spent most of my time between downeast Maine, where I lived and worked, and the cabin in East Grand. I had some money in bank accounts from a horrendous five years spent as a resident physician in a large Boston hospital. The only things I really much cared about were my patients and of course Cricket, who traveled everywhere with me via a cozy horse trailer. “You want to come to East Grand?”
“This is the part of the conversation you find difficult? Yes, I want to come to East Grand.”
“You sound like my mother,” I said, aiming for an insult and a compliment all in one.
“One could do a lot worse,” Wren said. “Remember how you always used to tell me you loved East Grand because it was between two places, how it was like being everywhere and nowhere at once?”
“Of course.”
“I need to be between places for a bit. Even just for a day or two. Even if it’s a bullshit illusion.”
I understood then and was ashamed. She was not ready to move forward and face what waited for her back home in Penobscot Bay, which was the reality of a death.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll have a bit of time. The funeral’s Monday.”
I remembered that today was Good Friday. “That’s the day after Easter.”
“I guess it is.”
“Are you bringing Harold?”
“I’d not deprive you. He’s already planned a route. He wants to drive.”
“Isn’t he fourteen?”
“Almost fifteen. Not that it much matters. There isn’t much between here and there, and any dummy who can reach the pedals and see over the dash ought to be able to make it alive. I’m in no rush, really. Lyman’s already gone.”
I was amazed at her composure. I thought for sure she was posturing. “You don’t have to perform for me.”
“That would be the male ego speaking. I don’t perform for anyone. Sometimes life forces you to get used to the idea of someone being gone long before they actually go.” Wren’s voice had become a whisper over the line. “So I’d been preparing.”
“But the reality of it,” I said.
“Hurts like hell. I’ll be there tomorrow,” Wren said. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t get arrested. Don’t marry anyone. Don’t get anyone pregnant. Don’t die.”
“Don’t change,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said and hung up the phone.
I felt a great yawning emptiness spread through me. It was a feeling I had not known in years. Death, I thought, looking out at the still lake, beginning now to gain its fire as the light broke overhead: there was nothing more confusing than a death. The wind was down and the water as undisturbed as glass, and I was reminded of what I had first realized years ago as a young child—a lake is simply a window into the earth. Some see through it, some don’t. I believe my father had seen. I believe Lyman had as well. Prison had been hard on Lyman. He had tried to commit suicide once, after my mother bitterly launched a merciless stream of opinion pieces about him and the leniency of our justice system. Of course there were other factors. He lived in a place that was a hell. Each day a procession of dehumanizing defeats tore him further down. My mother didn’t help things. Lyman’s defense of temporary insanity wasn’t enough, and he was convicted of second-degree murder. My mother wanted more. People cut the articles out and mailed them by the dozens to Lyman. He tried to die by hanging himself with a bedsheet. But he lived. Of course he smoked too much and didn’t work out enough, and when he was finally nearing the end of his sentence, it appears he developed lung cancer.
I have a patient who spent thirty years of his life in prison. I treat him for a variety of physical ailments—diabetes, angina, gout, macular degeneration—and he swears that none of those things are what’s actually wrong with him. “I’m afraid they’re symptoms,” he once told me, “of a deeper ruin.” The man’s name is Anders Hines, and he was a Norwegian carpenter. When Anders first came to see me, he was struggling to continue his work. His comment gave me pause. For weeks I lived with it turning around in my head. Anders had been a concert pianist in his youth and somehow got it in his head to rob a Halifax bank with a group of other young men. A guard had died of a heart attack during the robbery. After that moment, his life was never his own again. First he became a prisoner of the correctional system, and then a prisoner of his own body and lingering despair. One day I watched him slowly remove his clothing in my examination room, marveling at just how gray he was. His skin and his hair and his lips, even his fingernails, were all the color of ash. When he saw me looking, he said, “They don’t let you take much back out with you.” A few nights later he swung by my house with a flank of venison for me—he never had much money to pay for his care and always felt bad about that, though I swore it didn’t much matter—and stayed for dinner. He talked about his growing belief that the death penalty was the only humane solution to the problem of incarceration. The moment one is imprisoned, he argued, he or she ceases to be human. It had gotten quite late, and the cabin had become a balloon of darkness. When Anders rose to turn on a light and take our plates to the sink, he slid so fully into a mode of stealth that it was almost as if he ceased to exist in the room. I knew he was there, but I could barely see the shape and weight of his body. When he returned to the table, he asked me if I lived with a variety of emotional registers attached to my memories. Some being sad. Others joyful. That sort of thing. I thought about it for a time and then said I did. Anders told me I was one of the lucky ones. He said fear had become his only emotional association to memory. Even the memories from his boyhood days, long before he went to prison, were accompanied now by a shaky terror. “Guards move up and down all of my memories, jumping locations, jumping decades, morphing from my jailer one moment to my mother the next and back again, and they are always black-eyed and unhappy and provocatively swinging clubs or rifles down around their hips,” he said. After, I was consumed by a despair I had not felt since I was a child. I fell asleep shaken, and I have thought every day since then of how little was left of Lyman Creel after all his years in prison.