While I was gone, undertaking a ridiculous tour of labor with Reggie and contemplating why some deserters made it through the world almost charmed while others were chased like animals, news of my and Link’s actions had spread. Sales of the paper had slowed in response. Simon brought back grim stories of how slow business was at the boat barn too. Some fishermen went all the way to Sedgwick to have their boats winterized. Others stripped barnacle and sanded hulls and recaulked seams themselves. That they would give up days of work to stay in harbor and struggle to mend their own boats with limited resources, tools, and facilities made the community’s point. We were all being punished.
My mother was working the story of the fire harder than ever, and my father was spending more time alone down in his shop and staying later at the boatyard. He was distant when we spoke to him. Sometimes he would answer in a way that told us he hadn’t heard a thing we said.
A noise stirred me late one night, and I opened my eyes with a suddenness that brought me fully out of sleep. The wolfhounds were sitting side by side at the window. I had not heard them push the door open or come in. I called groggily to Sam first, and then to Daphne, and when neither moved, I understood there was something out there.
We were not alone. And the dogs would not turn away until they knew what stalked us. I was terrified as I pushed the covers back and swung my legs off the bed. The floor was warm against my toes, and I closed my eyes. It would be so easy to stay in bed and drift back to sleep. Sam came over and licked my foot until I opened my eyes again. When I left the bed and reached the small window, I saw, across the moonlit yard, near the edge of the tree line, a figure. I had made no effort to disguise myself. The figure raised a single finger to its lips and then sank back into the forest. As I dropped to the floor with my back against the wall, a low growl sounded in Daphne’s throat. Then the night silence returned. The dogs did not stop watching the window. They made no other sounds. And it was a long time before I rose and peered out at the empty yard and the wind blowing the shadows of the trees all about the night. I thought of Simon and Link, both asleep down the hall, and our parents asleep in their bed downstairs. I had always felt safe in this house my parents built. I had always felt that we had some power when together that would keep the darker things in the world away. For the first time I felt that sense of security vanish. With a single glance out a bedroom window, an era of innocence had ended. I got back into bed and pulled the covers tight about myself. I knew it must have been Lyman Creel out there watching us.
I told no one about what I saw.
We had frequented this river for four hundred years on my mother’s side, and while our family stories of the strange, the mad, and the tragic were seemingly endless, I sometimes thought I was the only remaining one who actually believed the tales. Legend said a banshee had walked alongside my mother’s family for generations, from the green hills of Donegal to the rugged shores of Penobscot Bay, ever since her lover, a young sheep rancher, had murdered her and loosed a curse on the family. While others in the family seemed unable to paint her as anything more than a child’s fright—a banal white-sheeted ghost incapable of materializing any more solidly in the imagination than fog did in the air—from Reggie’s lips she came in sheer terror.
“What makes her worth fearing is that she never leaves you alone,” Reggie told us, gleefully oblivious to the terror he might be passing down to children. “Think cancer. Think having a bad heart. Think knowing all your time is actually borrowed. You live your whole life with death walking at your side. That’s her particular form of torture. You flee across the Atlantic for a better life, and she stands right there beside you on the steamer deck, invisible and waiting.”
According to Reggie, her dress was ornately stitched and an almost comic canary yellow. All levity stopped there. Blood matted her long hair. Her lover had murdered her with a rock in a winter field after seeing her talking with another boy in town, which is not a crime, which is not even wrong, which of course didn’t matter. A faint layer of snow still dusted her face. Her eyes were not dead black things but a brilliant blue and achingly human. They were the eyes of the living, unjustly confined now to a departed body. Worst perhaps was the rusted wire. The young sheep rancher had wrapped her body in barbed wire, covered her with leaves, and left her in the woods. Though she no longer belonged to the forest floor, her barbed-wire bindings remained. Even in death the coils were twisted about her throat and torso, barbs tearing grotesque gashes into flesh, yet she never attempted to unwrap herself from her lover’s iron corset, and she never bled from those hellish wounds.
In the tale it was autumn each time the banshee emerged across the forest or stepped grim and unapologetic from the sea to wail before another of our brood was taken into the next world. The women were always the most irreverent and brave among our family, and my mother and my great-aunts had named the banshee Screech. While the name was not particularly clever, I had always liked that. How these women who raised me and came before me were above fear. How as their husbands became increasingly anxious, they raised the volume of the taunts and jokes they hurled at Screech until the men walked out of the room, shaking their heads in timid protest. How they understood the necessity of knocking down what you most fear in this world with a little humor.
My sleep grew light and troubled: two hours filled with a frightening awareness of every sound. The wood heat moving through the vents in the house. The groaning of trees outside as the world grew colder. The rattle of wind blowing over the dormers. Dreams, some fantastic, others believable, flashed briefly. Then I would sense Sam and Daphne in the room and come fully awake. Slowing my breathing, I focused on the house, sought out the sound of Simon snoring, the refrigerator whirring downstairs. I tried to make sense of the vague dark shapes in my room, the dresser, the beanbag chair, the pile of shirts and shoes and socks and underwear that had been collecting in the corner. Finally, being unable to put off the visitation any longer, I slid to the window. Lyman was there every time, smiling as he stood beside the same tall beech tree in the moonlight. I knew what he was doing was insane, yet by giving audience and saying nothing, Lyman and I began to share a sinister intimacy. He would stand watching me until he stepped backward into the dark woods, as if being swallowed. Sometimes he was carrying a thermos or a mug of something. Most times he was empty-handed. He never gestured, except with his face, which contorted into all manner of expressions, sometimes lewdly grinning, sometimes straight-lipped with stoicism, sometimes turned down with disappointment.
On the sixth night, the moon was full, and I could see Lyman Creel cupped in silver light. He was munching on an apple. I was certain it was from the ghost apple tree. I felt the wind drop from my lungs. I wanted to run from the window but could not. Lyman lifted his pinkie finger and wiggled it in a coquettish wave as he brought the fruit to his mouth. I ran through all the symbolic ways I could read this. A violation of our Eden, Lyman as the serpent, Lyman as Eve, the apple-eater, and so on. Thinking of his teeth working a ring around the ghost apple, I remembered the careful way Lyman had built a fortress of sorts about his family, and I recalled watching him care so delicately for his ravens, chortling to them and tearing meat up for their frantic beaks. What I had seen then was not a serpent or a defiler or a tyrant but a nurturer. Perhaps his mad intimidation in our yard a few Saturdays back and his nightly visits—I didn’t know what else to call them, for they didn’t feel like threats or warnings or trespasses—were carried out to protect his family as well. What if all conflict was just a matter of perspective? He was smiling. He was easy. I wanted to believe he was just a man who was lonely and awake and a bit hungry. Yet there was something about Lyman eating an apple that seemed more sinister and symbolic.
The next day after school I went to the edge of the woods, where he had dropped the apple. The core was gone, picked up or eaten by animals, but a clear set of footprints led back through the woods.
I followed the tracks until they emerged from the forest. Lyman Creel was standing on the bluff by the ghost apple tree, as if he had known I was coming. I should have felt angry. I should have felt violated. But I could muster none of those feelings. The wind rode the bluff heavy. All about the clearing, whorls of color fell from the trees as they shook loose red, orange, and yellow leaves. After years of protecting this place from others, I was glad I wasn’t alone. I shivered, wrapped my arms around my chest, and watched as Lyman reached out to touch the tree, thought better of it, turned, and sat cross-legged on the ground like a child.
“Do you know the story?” he said, pointing to the tree, and I nodded. “Would you mind hearing it again?” I shook my head, somewhat amazed he knew the story at all, but even more surprised he had asked permission to tell it.
Lyman told a slightly different version of the story of Nigawes and Sanoba. In Lyman’s version, Sanoba did not die by his wife’s hand, chopped to pieces and cast into the sea. He was killed by loneliness. He left his family because he felt disconnected from those he loved, not because he missed a life free of obligation. When he realized his error and returned, there wasn’t a place for him anymore. His loneliness grew until he became his loneliness and nothing else. Finally, in his anguish, he cast himself off the bluff into the sea.
“You’re trying to make him the good guy,” I said.
“I’m just telling you the story the way it was told to me. There’s no good or bad.”
Then I found myself asking Lyman what I’d been too scared to ever ask my mother. “Whose story is it?” Sometimes you find the origin of a thing, and its wonder dies.
“You mean is it French, Irish, Penobscot, total bullshit, some mumbo from a book?”
“I guess.”
He shrugged. “It’s all of ours. It’s been around these woods for a long time. It was here twenty-five years ago, when your mother and I were on this bluff with Billy. And it’ll be here twenty-five years from now, when you or Wren or Galen or your brothers or your children or someone else’s children are up here.”
“Billy Jupiter?”
Lyman’s face tightened. He looked surprised, then nervous. “You didn’t know it happened here.” Lyman pointed past the tree to the edge of the bluff. “Billy fell right over there. Maybe Moses was right all these years.”
“You know Moses?”
“Everyone knows everyone here. Always have and always will. I was Moses’s sternman for a year when I first started lobstering,” Lyman explained. “He took me on even after my family’s connection to the mills and Billy’s death. I never fully understood it, and it made me uneasy, working with him. I spent my whole life thinking it would be better to be a warrior in the garden. But one time Moses told me the thing to really be was a gardener in the war.”
I thought about the paradox for a long time, until the rushing waves slapping against the rocks had grown deafening.
“I’ll probably die still wrestling with the right answer,” Lyman said. He gestured out to the sound of the waves. “I was surprised Falon came back to the bay at all. Even more surprised when she and your father decided to build near here.”
“Maybe it’s better to keep the bad things in front of you,” I said after some time.
Lyman grinned and rose. He reached out, and for a moment I thought he was going to tussle my hair. “Something like that, kid.” Then he slid his hands into his pockets, curled his shoulders inward, and turned and walked away from the bluff.
That night, the seventh evening of our strange game, something shifted. I woke in the dark gripped by an eerie anticipation. I wanted Lyman to be there. When I reached the window, Lyman was standing outside, but for the first time his back was turned to the house. It was as if we no longer mattered. I watched him stand that way for an hour before I fell asleep on the floor with Daphne and Sam beside me. The dead came to me that night in my dreams. Faces I did not know, but understood were my ancestors. From the dark they drifted toward the window in my room. Gentle, weightless things, really. It was as if they had simply stood in the driveway and raised their arms and let the wind lift them up to the second story. More of these figures kept lifting from the ground and gathering in a line. Hundreds of faceless men and women, stretching back to the woods, beyond the woods, filling the air above the river, filling the air above the ocean, filling the world. Then the first hand touched the glass. I watched it move through the pane. Then I felt it move through my T-shirt, through my chest, through my ribs. Finally I felt the hand close around my spine and begin to pull. I woke curled in a pool of in-slanting sunlight, sore and shaken and scared, scratching at my chest to make sure I was still whole. Daphne and Sam were gone. Lyman was gone. I wondered whether the dead were gone or with me still.
At the breakfast table I fixed my eyes directly on the plate of burned toast my mother tossed down on her way out the door. But my brothers knew.
“What happened?” Simon asked as we stepped outside. After eating we would walk the three hundred yards out to Arnoux’s shop, tell him it was time for school, and then drive into town. He liked that he could see us off in the mornings and head into the yard with the satisfaction of having already put some work into the day. What he did most often at the shop in those early mornings was sketch. He claimed he needed to be down here on the river to draw a proper boat, never in town, never anywhere else. Drawing a perfect centerline or marking out a cabin were his true joys. Building the things was the price he had to pay to draw them.
“Nothing happened,” I said.
“Sam and Daphne,” Link said. “They’ve been leaving my room in the middle of the night. They never do that. I thought they were just going downstairs or into the hall.”
“But they’re not,” Simon said.
“They’re going to your room,” said Link. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” I felt trapped by my brothers.
“Your room looks at the woods,” Link said. “Mine doesn’t. Sy’s doesn’t.”
Simon stopped in the middle of the path. “It’s Creel, isn’t it?” he said. How could my brothers know such things? We were halfway to the shop. I imagined our father looking up from his drafting table at us in puzzlement.
Simon took my face between his palms. His fingers smelled of chalk and sawdust. He turned my head until our eyes met. “Being scared isn’t being weak,” he said. “You tell us. And we’ll tell Arnoux. Together.”
When we called around the shop for our father, there was no response. The tools were powered down, the piles of sawdust swept up, and the radio switched off, all sure signs he had not even been there yet that morning. “Strange,” Simon said. Outside we caught a faint, high metallic whining sound, and we followed it deep into the trees. Its volume rose with each step, until we came through the clearing in the deep woods beside the old stone foundation. Our father was just outside the barn with the Citabria. The engine was running, the propellers buzzing like saws. His face was only feet from the whirring blades. At first I thought he had been injured, that the blades had cut him open, or perhaps he had had a heart attack or a stroke. But he was just sitting beside the running machine. He looked up and noticed us then, but his face didn’t change at all.
“Almost ready,” he mouthed.
“For what?” I yelled, but my father didn’t seem to hear the question, as he turned back into the machine, his eyes a bit wild, another wrench gripped in his fist.
Simon stepped up beside the plane and reached into the cockpit and killed the engine. The propellers ticked and slowed, bringing our father up from his trance.
“He’s watching us,” Link said. Though the propellers had stopped, the entire barn seemed to vibrate with stored energy. “Lyman Creel’s been coming up to the house and standing at the edge of the woods and staring at our house for some stupid reason. And Almy’s been up there, watching him right back.”
Our father didn’t react at first. It was as though he was trying to fully parse out a complex equation. Then he turned and walked out of the barn without saying anything. He didn’t slow as he walked back through the woods, and it was all we could do to keep up with him. He veered from the path, taking the straightest route possible, not flinching or slowing when branches snapped or sawed at his arms and face. “Get the keys, Simon,” he called without looking back at us. “Start the truck.” And then he went past the shop and up into the garden shed while we scrambled to do what he’d asked. He came out a few minutes later carrying a logging cant hook and a massive pair of channel lock pliers. “This is how he has always liked it,” he said as he tossed the tools into the back of the running truck, “how he’s always wanted it.”
Link said, “Make it hurt,” and then went silent when my father glared at him.
“You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” said Simon. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and my father made him slide over.
“None of you do,” he said.
“I can drive,” said Simon.
“Sit. That’s all I want anyone to do.”
His fury was so calm, so calculated, that I trusted everything would be all right. I wished one of us had had the courage or the knowledge to reach across the cab and touch our father’s face to stop him, but fury is a contagion, and anger intoxicates young men. We drove without speaking or looking at each other. It was a raw gray morning. Gradually the woods thinned until power lines crossed overhead and the town streetlights swung color across the sky. We made the left on Wharf Street, and then another left, going down the marina road, graveled and pitted by too many years of too little money for road maintenance and too much hard weather. We were just beyond The Fish House, where the road went down a slight hill and turned around in a big loop dotted with pickups, traps, and buoys. The fish pier extended two hundred feet out into the water.
My father threw open the door and was gone. The truck had barely come to a stop. He reached back through the window and touched Simon’s shoulder. “Stay here with your brothers,” he said. “Keep the truck going.”
I hadn’t felt the fear until then. Suddenly my body felt weightless. I found I could no longer raise my hands or figure out how to push away what was happening. He was my father. I trusted him. Now he was halfway down the concrete pier. All around, men had stopped what they were doing. No one was stacking traps, coiling rope, checking gear. Everyone was staring.
Oddly enough, Lyman Creel was the last man to turn and look, and when he did, my father was already on him. The cant hook caught Creel across the face, tearing his cheek open. Lyman stumbled back into a stack of lobster cages but kept his balance. Then my father drove the wooden end of the tool into Lyman’s stomach. With the ocean crashing against the pilings, my father lifted Lyman as if he were made of air and dropped him onto the pier. Lyman tried to sweep my father’s legs out, but my father brought his boot down on Lyman’s knee with gruesome force. His howl was almost as loud as the crunch. Then my father was on top of Lyman with his knee pressed against the other man’s throat. He slipped the pliers from his back pocket and tried to peel Lyman’s mouth open. Lyman swung his one good leg around to twist him off until my father reached back and punched Creel in his knee. Pain provided the opening. The pliers slipped into Lyman’s mouth and gripped the man’s thick pink tongue.
Lyman went completely still then, paralyzed with fear, eyes huge. “Your kneecap might be broken.” My father’s voice was eerily calm. “But it’s likely just a dislocation. You have a deep laceration to your cheek. The blood in your eyes is from the laceration. Your vision is completely fine, don’t worry. I’m putting approximately eighty pounds of force on your carotid artery with my left knee right now. The reason you don’t feel tired from oxygen deprivation is adrenaline. Adrenaline is also the only reason you won’t immediately pass out if I tear out your tongue. I told you to leave us alone. I think you understand why I’m here.”
My father started to twist the channel locks, and Lyman tried to scream with his mouth full of fear and metal. Then my father let go. The pliers clattered to the pavement. He retrieved the cant hook and hurled it into the sea in disgust. No one had moved to stop the violence, and no one moved now to help Lyman, who had crawled up from the pavement and was yelling at my father.
“You’ve got kids and a wife.” Lyman tried to stand and let out a piercing howl as his knee buckled and he fell back to the pavement. “You’re crazy.”
My father dusted a spot of sand off his shoulder, shrugged.
“I should kill you.” Creel spat blood.
“You wouldn’t know where to start,” my father said. “Don’t come to my house again.”
My father had been many things in my life, but for the first time I had seen him become a monster, and I needed to kill the image, to push it from my head and forget it had ever happened. At night I woke constantly to the sounds of imagined sirens—I thought surely someone would come for my father. The river gurgled and the distant ocean waves droned on, and some nights thunder bellowed about the woods, but no one ever came, and Lyman never pressed charges.
It was late October. The air was crisp and bright and thin. Red, orange, and gold leaves turned the skies otherworldly. Yet none of us seemed able to stand each other. Our mother said very little. Our father cranked his angriest Mahler records in the shop. Back at the house we could hear each furious note as clearly as if a hammer were being dropped on a nail beside our ears. Two nights passed without our father coming in for dinner—he stayed buried in his work, hunched over his drafting table, planning the winter builds, our mother doing her best to keep from looking out the window. We didn’t know how to talk him back, to say, Hey, Pop, look. Hey, we’re here. It’s okay. Just come back to us.
On the third night, he came into the kitchen well after we’d finished eating. His face was tired, though his eyes seemed unnaturally wide and alert. Engine grease shone on his hands and smeared his coveralls. When he tried to help with the dishes, our mother lifted the plate she had been scrubbing and smashed it on the counter. “Don’t come in here and be helpful now,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from planning your next barbarian lesson.” He looked away, grimacing, and when he couldn’t find the right words, he reached out for her arm. Our mother lifted and smashed a second plate. This time a shard caught his hand, and a small dot of blood bloomed through the grease. She lifted a small clear water glass and cocked her arm. My father turned and left the room. My mother brought the glass down anyway, smashing it against the counter and grinding the shards down with her palm. She seemed then to realize what she’d done. “Oh, I’m a fucking fool,” she said. She held up her hand. Small chunks of glass sat in the skin. There was no blood yet, just light reflecting off the glass, so it seemed almost as though she were holding a tiny sun in her palm. Simon walked out of the kitchen and returned with tweezers and a bowl of warm, soapy water. He took our mother’s hand and, standing there at the counter, removed each shard of glass. He hummed quietly the whole time, a movement from Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” of all things.
“Prideful, reckless, all grand ideas and sulking guilt after.” Our mother jabbed her other hand around the room. “You’ll be like that too,” she said. “You’ll break my heart, but you’ll do it still.”
I wasn’t sure which one of us she meant. After he’d removed all the glass, carefully setting the bloody pieces on a dish towel on the counter, Simon washed our mother’s hand with soapy water and then poured the bowl of crimson water down the sink. Then he walked out the door with a plate of food and started for the shop, where Schubert was playing now—the impromptus, sad and contemplative. Link and I helped our mother finish the dishes. Link dried. I put the plates and cups away. No one said a word about anything.
When we came home the next day, our father had the truck running. “Get in,” he said. “We’re going into town.”
“To the boatyard?” I asked. I thought perhaps he’d finished the winter build schedule out in the shop that morning—it was my father’s habit to build one new custom wooden boat each winter, often a majestic sloop or a small ketch meant for day-sailing, in addition to the routine winter maintenance he did.
“To the hospital. To see Lyman.”
“What?” I said.
“Gonna bust his other knee this time?” Link scoffed.
Simon cuffed Link on the side of the head, and our father roared, “Enough.” Crows startled from the trees, darkening the sky around us. “He’s owed an apology.”
“He’s owed,” Link sneered.
“I owe him. You’re all coming with me.”
“Why?” Link asked.
“Because I want you to be able to remember what the right thing looks like someday, Link.”
Simon put his arm around my brother. “Come on, Link. Just give it up.”
I’ve thought of that drive often over the years. No one spoke. When my father rolled his window down, Link put his up. When my father turned the radio on, Link reached over and turned it off. Each countering action was another cut. I never again saw my father scold my brother. I think he knew there was nothing he could say to make Link forgive what he saw as weakness. In time he’d either see it differently, or he wouldn’t. My father had called Grace Creel that morning, and she had told him not to go to the fish pier. She said my father had taken too much away from Lyman already in front of others. She told him he would be at physical therapy at the hospital that afternoon, and that was where we went.
When we came in, Lyman was lying on a padded bench as a man flexed and put pressure on his knee. He swore with every degree the knee flexed, and I thought he might begin to cry.
“You’re hurting him,” I said.
“Don’t do that.” Lyman grimaced. “I don’t want your sympathy.”
The physical therapist didn’t seem to know what to make of the scene: a grown man standing with his head down, his three nearly grown sons around him, in the PT room in the middle of the day. “This is a hospital, come on, guys,” he said. “Keep the circus shit out of here. I’m just trying to do my job and go home.”
My father apologized for the intrusion. He seemed to realize now how inappropriate it was to be here. “Sorry, sorry for all this,” he stammered. “We’ll go.”
He had started to turn to leave when Lyman struggled up off the bench and said, “You came this far. Do the rest of it.”
My father turned to Lyman, and Lyman started to limp forward. The physical therapist moved to help him, but Lyman waved him off. He’d made it three shambling steps, his face all sweat and pain, when his knee buckled and he started to fall. I caught his arm and held him up.
“Jesus, Lyman,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“How’s your mother’s hand?” my father asked me a few days later. It was nearing dusk. Blue light gathered outside the boat-shop windows down at the marina. Since apologizing to Lyman, my father had been down here for days at a time, sleeping in the office with his work, grinding, calling his clients, trying to ensure that there would still be work as our family increasingly slid into the role of pariahs, trying, I suppose, to make his world normal again. I had stopped in after school to see him and spent an hour going around the woodworking and paint bays, cleaning up tools. Now we were up in the high office.
“She’ll be okay,” I said.
“I should have left her alone that day in the kitchen,” he said. “Thinking you can fix everything is cruel. It ends up with people hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “For everything. So is Link.”
I looked around at the boatyard in the soft late-fall light. The east end of the boat shop extended far out onto the pier, sitting only a few feet from the rock wall that held back the sea. During storms water would lash over the wall and smash against the shop windows and sometimes flood the building. The shop was laid out in a giant L, with boatbuilding bays set into the center, ringed by the woodworking shop and all its tools. The woodworking shop was two stories high, rigged with ladders and a balcony that hugged the L and whatever boat was at its center, allowing one man to work down below on the hull or keel, while another shimmied up the ladders into the lofted sky to work on the decks. Atop it all, as if set off in a garret, was a peaked third-story attic that my father made his office. It was walled and floored in rough-sawn, inch-thick hemlock, and he had cut the entire east-facing gable out and framed it in with windows so he could look out at the comings and goings of the sea while he made calls to clients or the lumberyards.
Walking by the boatyard in the afternoons, I’d creep toward the windows and peer inside. I thought it strange how this was the building, among all the buildings in town, that I was continually drawn to. It was simply a big barn down near the water filled with boats, and there was nothing particularly novel about boats: they surrounded us, supported us, were so common and expected in our lives that they faded into the ether, becoming as invisible and essential as oxygen.
“They speak to each other, you know,” my father said to me one afternoon, years earlier. I’d been looking into the windows near dusk, and I’d missed him when he’d come around the corner. He must have stood there a long time watching me lift up on my toes and peer into the darkened windows, my breath fanning a hot gray mist across the glass. When I wiped the moisture away with my glove, the boats seemed to have shifted a little.
“What?” I said, scrambling down, feeling exposed and caught.
“Boats,” my father said. “When they’re in storage like that for the winter, they speak to each other. They talk back and forth to pass the winter nights. Everyone knows that around here.”
“That’s outlandish, Dad,” I said. Simon and Link had long since grown bored and run up the street to the newspaper office, leaving me alone with the wild churning snow and the frosted glass and the gleaming, hulking ships inside.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s common knowledge, established fact, and why you all and every child who walks past that window has to stop to look inside.”
Over the years I had come to understand that the possibility of a whole community of people being wrong, even about something as irrational as boats being able to speak, was less likely than their being right. I chose to believe. Soon after I found a key sitting on my bedside table, and I instinctively knew it went to the boat barn. I must have spent hours sitting between those stored boats on winter afternoons, reading, thinking, watching the snow drift across the windows, breathing in the scent of cedar and the sea, listening to those vessels whisper and speak.
“How about you, Dad?” I asked now. “How are you?”
My father looked at me for a long time over a table filled with unfurled blueprints. I was about to apologize again when he said, “I’m okay.”
“Maybe it’s okay to not be okay, Dad.”
My father shivered, nodded. He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, even though the woodstove was red-hot in the office. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.
I hugged my father, and we stood at the window watching the gathering dark for a long time. Thinking about his words, about time, and of course about regret, which was running beneath all he had said, I began thinking about the boats waiting to be built.
“I shouldn’t have done what I did to Lyman Creel,” he said. “That was too much. That wasn’t human. Your mother deserves better. Loving someone is a fight to keep taking them for who they are. Your mother’s as solid as the crust of the earth. She loves me stupid, but that doesn’t mean I get to stop trying to be better.”
“I know, Dad.”
“And the bateau too.” My father’s face was ashen, and his eyes were sliding about. He touched his throat, right above his collarbone. “I think I need to lie down.”
“Lie down?”
My father pushed papers and build plans off the couch onto the floor. I looked around again. Everything in the office was in disarray. My father did not lie down. My father did not do disarray. “Should I call someone?”
“No,” he snapped, pulling away from me at the window. “Stay here. Stay where it’s safe. The door is locked. Simon and Link are with your mother. I just need to lie down a few. Catch my breath. Think.”