Read The Long-Shining Waters Online
Authors: Danielle Sosin
The Long-Shining Waters (9 page)
The French River. Traffic has disappeared. There’s only her car and the shadows of trees on the road. Nora wonders what Rose is doing. She pictures her sitting in the easy chair. When she’d first offered Rose the spare room as a temporary place to live, she worried about having constant company. But it’s been nice to have someone around. And having Rose in her home isn’t really very different than when she was living above the bar. It’s not that they do so much talking. It’s the fact that they don’t have to explain the silence.
Nora flips through the notebook to the page headed “Storeroom.” Things kept in storage too long have a way of disappearing from memory, and there were boxes in there that hadn’t been opened in years—boxes marked “Ralph’s” and “Apartment” in heavy black letters, belongings of Janelle’s that she refused to take, but didn’t want thrown away either. Her stomach sinks. Her foot lifts off the gas. On the back shelf. The stack of white boxes. Her entire collection of ornaments.
A pile of snow from the winter plowing is shoved into a corner of the fish shack’s lot. It’s shrunk down, icy, and full of dirt. Nora can feel its cold air as she walks past. The store is part fish and part flea market, everything fairly mixed together. A hundred. Easily. There were that many ornaments. Each from a different time and place. Some from people long-gone. Nora drifts through the jumble of merchandise while the clerk wraps her order of herring. There is a pair of ancient wooden skis on the wall. A faded croquet set, not quite intact. She flips through a leaning stack of pictures—a poster of fur-trading voyageurs paddling in birch-bark canoes, another titled “Superior’s thirty-nine,” which shows all the lake’s lighthouses, stout ones, tall, stripped, and brick. Behind it she finds a painting similar to the one that hung over Rose’s couch. Nora lifts the large framed canvas and holds it to the window. It’s a scene of the lakeshore, sunset-orange, with a gull in the water, one in flight, and in the distance someone in a tiny boat. The painting is bigger than Rose’s, and maybe hers didn’t have a boat. For $12.99, she can hardly go wrong.
Buoyed, Nora opens a Santa box, hoping to find it filled with ornaments, but it contains just a string of lights. A stuffed mink stares from a log. A piece of shellacked wood says Welcome to the North Shore, with rocks painted to look like a family glued on. Nora lifts a tray with Norwegian rosemaling. It’s pretty, but cracked right down the middle. She unearths a pair of moccasins decorated with plastic blue beads. Too small for Nikki. Nothing else worth getting.
The lake looks different once she’s through Two Harbors, striped dark blue and light, grey and white. Looking out, it’s hard to tell where the water ends and the sky begins. Nora stubs out her cigarette. Part of the painting is visible in the rearview, a gull crossing an orange sky.
The nautical map between the doors to the johns. It had a boat on high seas, and a serpentlike sea monster looming menacingly in the distance. She writes it in the notebook and sets down her pen, a wave of shock breaking over her again. It’s gone. All of it. Just like nothing.
1622
The constant sound of chopping wood is in the air and the sweet smoky smell of boiling sap. Grey Rabbit has chosen a far section of the grove in order to work alone. The reuniting of the families has been a swirling wind—the stories told and reenacted, harsh news, and softer tales of sorrow and relief—but now she wants to think in quiet.
Grey Rabbit kneels under a wide bare maple, the shadows of its branches like dark veins over the snow, and talks to the tree as she touches its bark. She is known to have a gift with the maples, and she wishes to continue to do well with them. She feels the need to prove herself, to stop the concerned glances of Bullhead and Night Cloud. She places an offering at the base of the tree, fingers the spot, and makes her first cut.
She aches for Coming-In Woman, who lost her eldest girl. No one knows what became of her. Some say spirited away, others say she was taken by an animal, most believe she fell through the ice.
Little Cedar is nearby with a group of children. Having finished with their work of setting out containers, they are running and chasing through the trees. It’s clear that he’s unhappy with her for making him stay in view, but that’s the way it must be for now.
If her dreams ended after Little Cedar regained his strength, they would have been a good omen, a warning of the danger he had been in. Grey Rabbit takes a spile from her bag and pounds it into the cut she’d made. But the children of her dreams still come, and always, as before, they’re desperate and beyond help. She knows no one who would cast bad medicine on her, nor of any large offense connected with her family. And yet there were no stories told of hunger as bad as what her family suffered. She must approach Bullhead and make an offering, ask her advice about the dreams, but the time never seems to be right. Why that is, she doesn’t understand. She needs to be alone, and to listen if she hopes to gain any understanding. Yet once alone she begins to feel severed. And that rift is more frightening then the worst of her dreams. Her mind turns in circles like a wounded fish.
Grey Rabbit stands and breathes the damp air. She can’t see Little Cedar, though she hears the playful voices of the children in the woods. She calls his name as she peers through the trees, walks through the snow with its long-veined shadows, calling again, louder and more insistent. She told him not to run off. She won’t begin on another tree until she has him in her sight. “Little Cedar,” she calls in a harsh tone, and then turns to find him standing close.
He’s short of breath and his face is red from running. “What?” he says, his hands on his hips.
I find places devoid of motion or sound. No ping. No fin. No shaft of light. The silt lying undisturbed.
And then suddenly objects like leaves in a wind. A flower vase. A cask of rum.
Laughing boy. Calendar. Broken oar.
And something just ahead. Passing out of view. A dark shadow. The water closing behind it.
I understand that I should follow.
Though it is lost again. Like a fleeting dream.
I traverse clinker trails without understanding. Search the open mouths of caves.
There.
He hovers near the steep rock shoal.
Somehow I always knew.
The man in the dark coat.
I approach.
He scatters like a murder of crows.
2000
“At first everyone was so nice.” Nora sits at the table near the picture window where the sky over the lake is streaked with long morning clouds. She swirls the coffee at the bottom of her mug.
“What was that?” Janelle asks from the tiny galley kitchen.
“Everywhere I went people would come up to me and say how sorry they were, and how much they’d miss the place.”
“Nikki, get your stuff together.” Janelle bags a sandwich and picks an orange from the bowl. “I love this painting, Mom. It almost glows. Rose had the same one?”
“No, it wasn’t the same, but it reminds me of hers.”
“It’s cool, Nanny. She’s gonna like it.”
“It sure captures the beauty.” Janelle squats next to Nikki, where the painting leans against the wall. “We’ve seen the water like that, out our window.”
“Yeah, like a dreamsicle.”
“You’re a dreamsicle,” Nora says from the table.
Janelle tugs on Nikki’s shirt. “Go get a sweater, and don’t forget your lunch.”
“Anyway,” Nora says, “I couldn’t even walk down to the Milk House without somebody bringing up the fire. Everyone seems to have adjusted, though. Some have gone over to the Boxcar, and some are at the 22.”
“Well, Mom, come on, what did you think, they’d stop drinking?”
Nora lifts her eyebrows and looks into her cup.
“Drinking what?” Nikki asks, zipping shut her little red knapsack.
“Nothing, Miss Big Ears. Now go get a sweater. How about your purple one?”
“Your Aunt Joannie thinks I should come out to California.”
“That might be a nice break. You always seem to like it.”
“No, to live. She wants me to move there.”
“You’re not serious?”
Nora shrugs and wipes toast crumbs onto her plate. “She thinks it would be good for Mother.”
“Grandma Bernie’s mind is gone. How could it be good for her?”
“I can’t find the purple one.” Nikki skips in. “How about this one?” she says with a twirl.
“Oooh. That’s a pretty red dragonfly on your pants,” says Nora. Nikki twists to see her rear pocket. “Oh yeah, Mom embroidered it.” She flips her ponytail as if it were nothing.
“Remember, Nanny’s picking you up from school, so don’t go getting on the bus.”
“Nanny, will you come out and wait with me?”
“Your Nanny doesn’t have her shoes on, and you need to get going.”
“Of course I will, Bun,” Nora says, rising. “Just let me get my purse.”
The morning air smells like pine and cold water. Nora walks Nikki down the gravel drive, taking care to avoid the ruts, branches, and soggy leaves that were lying under the snow all winter. Nikki plops down on a little wooden bench enclosed on three sides and topped with a slanting roof.
“This is sort of like my playhouse,” she says. “But I don’t play in it much ’cause it’s too close to the road. Sometimes I count the semi trucks.”
“It has a nice view.”
Nikki nods, swinging her feet. “I’ve seen deer over there in the trees.”
“Really?”
“Bears, too.”
“No.”
“Sure. Lots of times. I wasn’t even scared.”
Nora lights a cigarette.
“Nanny, you shouldn’t smoke. It can kill you, you know.”
“A lot of things can kill you, Nikki.”
“Mom says it’s unrespectful to your body. She says it’s the worst thing you can do.”
Nikki hops off the bench and picks up a pinecone. “Want to see how far I can throw?” Her pinecone hits the far lane and rolls. “Want to bet if a car will run over it?”
Nora waves until the bus rounds the curve out of sight, then goes back to the bench to have a cigarette. It’s quiet except for the occasional car, and a squirrel rustling in the brush. It feels like her first real smoke of the day. She inhales, then blows out a long slow stream. A jay is in the pines across the road, and it looks just like a calendar shot, a dab of bright blue against all the green.
“What are you going to do?” Everyone has been asking, even people she hardly knows. As if it isn’t a personal question.
“When one door closes, another one opens.” Those were Willard’s words. She’s not sure it’s true, though it’s a nice thought. She hasn’t seen any open doors.
She stubs out her cigarette and flicks the butt into the trees.
Nora steps to the edge of the driveway as Janelle pulls near and rolls down her window. “Is there anything you want me to bring back?” She’s dressed for work in her gold-and-white checkout uniform.
“I’m fine,” Nora says, suddenly seeing Duane in Janelle’s face. It’s her eyes and the way she’s looking up. Nikki, too, looks more like her father, with fragile skin and a thin face. Funny how these men found a way to stick around, even though they’d both left. At least her Duane had sent money now and then. And later she had Ralph’s help, though Janelle never accepted him. Those were tough years. It was lose-lose trying to build bridges between the two of them.
“Nikki’s done at three, I’ll be back around five. You going to be all right by yourself?”
A map of Minnesota that Nikki’s been coloring lies open on the coffee table, the shirt Janelle’s mending drapes over a chair. Nora wanders through the little rooms. The house looks so lived in that the quiet feels heavy. There are three glass butterflies suctioned to Nikki’s windowpane—an orange one, a yellow, and a red. The wings glow. The colors look slick and edible, like the stained-glass windows of a church. Her mother cleaned at one for a time. “Joannie. Nora. Let’s head over for services,” she’d sing-song, as if attending were an employee benefit. Always, Nora would find herself staring up at the windows. There was something in the way the light came through the glass that stole her attention away from the service, and made all the words sink into the background.
The look of the lake out the window has totally changed, gone from dull grey to rippled and steely. Nora steps over Nikki’s sleeping bag on the floor, unbuckles her suitcase, and takes out her notebook. All night long she could hear the waves hitting shore. Janelle calls it soothing, but Nora finds it unsettling, with the house so close to the edge, and the water drumming in her ears.
Nora sits at the table, the notebook open to an empty page. “What Next?” she writes across the top. She sips her coffee, taps the pen on the page. Write anything, she tells herself. She looks at the lake, then back to the page. Her eyes wander over the room.
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