by Lauren Harr
This is what I want to tell you: I always wanted to be a father. I wanted the chance to do it the right way. To love with the kind of strength and unfaltering care that my mother gave us. Now, I am five years older than she was when she died and you are boxing up small mementos and saying goodbye to the girl you convinced to go to prom with you, ready to leave our house, this part of the country, and begin. As you push off into your own manhood, I find myself swimming the distance from my mother’s life to yours. I think I want you to understand how the two are connected, how the accumulated pieces of our lives can cohere.
The morning fog, both outside and in my own head, has a way of putting me right back to that place on the lake. The day your Aunt Stephanie and I took the last load out of our old house wasn’t foggy, but it was fall and the air was heavy and wet. It was gray, too, which was a shame because the colors of the trees against the house were so beautiful in the sun.
That day I sat on the dock, cross-legged and limp-hearted, I was twenty-four and what I remember most strongly is the reflection of the house in the water. Its gray face and dark head rolled along the gentle waves. The way the windows were configured made it look like an owl studying me. From the dock, weathered and cracked, I could see the house’s reflection without seeing the shore. I was adrift. On the opposite side of the bay, the pine-thick promontory curved inward. I knew from the map in the house that it was shaped like a finger in the act of beckoning.
* * *
“Will, you ready?” Stephanie shouted from the side door where our mother used to call us in to dinner when we were kids. We spent every possible minute in the water in the summers, always surprised to find dusk descending on us.
The weight of the place was strongest on the dock. Especially once the house was empty, the remaining bits and pieces loaded into the Ryder truck parked in the gravel driveway. Stephanie planned to take what was left to her house and use some of the furniture and organize the important papers and pictures. The rest she put into her basement where it was forgotten or ruined by water and mold.
I listened to Stephanie’s footsteps coming across the dock and thought about how there was no room in my studio apartment in Minneapolis. It only had one closet where I kept two boxes of old comic books and my yearbooks that I was saving for my future children. All of which I got rid of before you were born.
* * *
I knew guys my age who had kids, it seemed pretty easy, but just as they probably weren’t expecting to be fathers young, I didn’t expect that it would take me another fifteen years. You and your sister came long after I gave up on the idea of having children.
When I was in the seventh grade we did an experiment in science lab. We took a small container, the kind they used to keep camera film in, and filled it with water. One by one, we added straight pins, waiting for the moment when the water would spill over the sides. Only it didn’t. Not for a long while. The water held onto itself, creating a curve of liquid out of the top of the container that seemed miraculous. When we finally reached the pin that pushed the water out of the embrace, it was devastating.
That night, I took out the big dictionary we kept in the loft and looked up cohere. My teacher had said that was what happened to the water molecules. I can still remember reading the words be united, form a whole.
* * *
Stephanie stood next to me and looked out over the water. I knew she felt, as I did, that each molecule bore a memory. “We had a lot of good times out here, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “It makes me sad that my kids won’t learn to fish here, or get their first leech, or swim out to the platform and push their friends off.”
Stephanie sighed. “Maybe some day we can buy it back. Or we can rent one of those cabins on the other side of the lake.” She tried to dull the sharp edges. That is what she does.
“It won’t be the same.” I heard the childish pout in my own voice and immediately wished I could erase it.
“Do you want to move back here?” Stephanie’s voice was hard and she stared at me for one heartbeat more than I liked. “Neither do I. We can’t afford to keep it up.”
After Mom died, we’d had the same discussion, in many variations, many times. It looped through every conversation for days.
“I know you said Mom knew that,” I remember saying, “but I just feel like she’d be sad that her grandkids won’t play here, too.”
Stephanie looked down the shore, to the next lot, its red house shuttered for the winter.
“Well, she also knew this place was changing. I mean, old man Beard’s place is a rental now and the families that stayed there the last couple of years drove Mom crazy. Always taking their speedboats through the last of the lilypads. The lilypads probably won’t come back again, either.”
I stared at the water between the two houses where a thick patch of lilypads hid enormous fish when we were young and felt my heart tear in places I didn’t know existed. The only feeling I could compare it to then was reading The Red Pony for school, when I sat in the window seat up in the loft and felt like I could fill the lake with tears. Now I can compare it to so many other moments when grief surprised me with its unbidden swell.
I watched the outline of Stephanie, arms crossed and head down, as our mother often stood when she was thinking hard about something, as she turned to walk back to the house. “Come inside when you’re ready,” she said over her shoulder.
* * *
Back then I couldn’t even begin to imagine the things that would haunt me about that place. I don’t mean haunt in a ghostly way, but rather the bits and pieces that would stay with me for years. Like the broken banister halfway down the stairs. It happened the time Stephanie and I decided to try sledding down the stairs on our mattresses and never got properly fixed. Or the smell of the boathouse. Earthy, wet, and dense. Once in a while I walk into a smell like that and it’s like walking into that boathouse all over again.
There are also regrets. There were many things I didn’t think to do for the last time. Or I thought of them, but didn’t out of embarrassment or some other ridiculous reason. The one that gets me is the moss. I didn’t take my shoes off and feel its spongy wetness against my feet one more time. It still shows up in my dreams sometimes. It wakes me and I immediately feel that same little boyness. It never fails. Then I think about not going up the first time Stephanie called me to say that it seemed like the end. She said if I wanted to say goodbye, I’d better come. I didn’t.
* * *
We pretended for a long time that Dad was dead. Saying he was gone was like a whispered curse word when we were young and spending our afternoons out on the floating platform. But saying it was a relief, too. There was freedom in it. It was better than admitting he’d made another family in Cleveland, the middle names of his new children identical to ours.
Mom was something else. She was tough. She was hardly ever sick and seemed strong as an ox in my memory. She carried our 85 lb. behemoth mutt named Whopper like a rag doll once. He’d run off and come back dragging a front leg, then collapsed in the pines as soon as he saw Mom. She cradled him against her body as Steph and I, both teenagers then, watched. She yelled, “Stay here. Stay by the phone,” over her shoulder as she laid him gently in the back seat of her Buick.
She left in a cloud of gravel dust and came back with a three-legged devotee. She couldn’t go anywhere after that without Whopper hopping along beside her, his great big shaggy tail wagging. They were like one of those old married couples. He was always there, she pretended to shoo him away, but they were side-by-side most hours of the day and night for the rest of his life.
* * *
I remember the light changing. The gray darkened the shadows of the trees and the reflections on the water. The points of light stood out: the waterside lamp of the neighbors’ house, the street lamp across the bay, the light from the kitchen window. Stephanie was standing in the kitchen looking out the narrow window at the darkening water. Replaying her own memories and regrets, I was sure. The unwise fling with the married father of a school acquaintance that began in the lake. The endless tanning on the platform with her best friends from high school. The time Dad pushed her off the end of the dock as a joke.
I thought I was so aware then, so in tune with what she might be thinking and feeling. We were siblings, how different could her thoughts be after the loss of our mother? Later, I’d learn that she was thinking about what might be happening inside her, whether or not she could be a good parent herself. How she could be a mother without one of her own to guide her.
Finally, it was a woman, an interior designer from the Cities, who bought the house, gutted it, painted the outside coral, and used the interior and exterior as staging for photos of her work. Stephanie and I won’t set foot on the property again, but family friends told us about it and sent pictures taken from their boat.
We won’t buy it back. We won’t stay at cabins on the lake. The strangeness of the place that was once our whole life, but became something foreign, will always keep us from going back.
* * *
After we cleared out the house and I got back to the city, I went to the Y for a swim, as I did twice a week in those days. I went at 5:30 in the morning, as soon as they opened, so I could have the place to myself. The lifeguard checked his phone and rubbed his eyes sleepily as he sat in the little plexiglass room near the deep end of the pool. By 8:00 the pool was usually filled with old ladies in swim caps doing aerobics.
The water was warm compared to the cold of the shower I’d taken. I swam back and forth in the lane cordoned off by black and white rope. I could feel the water buoying me up. Carrying me for a moment until my weight—the weight of my sadness—dragged me underneath the surface. Like the bones in my body were made of iron. For a moment, I felt that the water was helping me, molding itself to my shape, then, quickly it felt like it was squeezing the life from me, trying to wring an admission of guilt from every pore. I swam to the surface and took a deep breath. It was one of the only times I was afraid in the water.
I got out of the pool and thought about the first time after I’d left home that Mom needed me and I let her down. She’d wanted me to come help her sell the speedboat gathering dust in the boathouse. It had been Dad’s baby. Its white seats had brown piping, I remember, everything in a combination of brown and white. Dad had called it the Muskrat. We would bundle into our life jackets and take it around the lake when we were kids, Dad pointing to the landmarks and naming each one. He tried to teach Stephanie to water ski, but she got scared and lost her balance over and over again. The skin between his eyebrows was like a hardened lava flow as he hauled her back into the boat.
Dad had abandoned the boat when he left and eventually Mom got tired of looking at it.
“You’ll know what to say,” she told me over the phone. “You have a knack with people. Remember how you got Lisa Morehouse to go to prom with you? You can sell this hunk of junk.”
I came up with excuse after well-wrought excuse as to why I couldn’t make it up to the lake for the weekend. I put more effort into not going than I did in the rational plea I made to Lisa Morehouse. I wasn’t even sure why, then. I just didn’t want to go up there.
Finally, Mom called and said, “Don’t worry about the boat. I put it out by the road with a For Sale sign on it and a couple of college boys bought it.” I thought about her small body wrangling that boat up onto the trailer. Then she said, “I didn’t get quite what I wanted for it, but at least it’s gone.” A little extra shove of the sharp point.
Many years later, sitting at a café table with the woman who became your mother, I told her this story about the boat. She said, “Of course you didn’t want to get rid of that boat. It was the last tie you had to your Dad.” The rushing sound in my ears told me that it was true.
When I came back to my quiet apartment after swimming, I looked at the two boxes I’d brought back from the house while I drank another cup of coffee. One was full of kitchen utensils, small tools and other things I could use. The other was filled with random mementos and things that made me feel close to Mom. My baby blanket. A mug I made for Dad in third grade that read “Cofee” with the letters all uppercased but growing smaller as the word crept across the ceramic. He’d kept pencils in it on his desk. It disappeared after he left, but Stephanie found it in a corner of the attic. A copy of Leaves of Grass that Mom loved. The Award for Service she got from the Fish and Wildlife Department. She worked for them for eighteen years, right up until she got sick. Pictures. Mom and Dad in a canoe by the lilypads with their 1970s hair. Me and Stephanie holding up a largemouth bass we caught and smiling. Mom asleep in the easy chair with Whopper on the floor next to her. Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Joni Mitchell’s Clouds in the original LP covers.
For hours that seemed like years, I went through everything in the boxes. I found places for all of it in that tiny studio. I put the mug in the cupboard, the blanket in the closet, and the award on the wall. I put the album covers on a shelf above my couch. I put the photos in a desk drawer and looked at them often those first couple of years. I put a slotted spoon in one drawer and a good can opener in another. I still use them and will never pick them up without thinking of your grandmother.
I moved eight or ten times before your mother and I moved into this house. Some of those things got lost along the way. The mug was broken, the albums were handed off to a friend, and Mom’s award disappeared. Everything else made it, those last bits of my childhood. When you arrived, screaming and red, I wrapped you up in that baby blanket that Mom had saved for you. It was better than pushing my friends off the dock. Better than the idea of watching you push your friends off the dock. It was like discovering a patch of lilypads where you had never seen them before. Or the last second in that science experiment before the water let go.
About the Author
Lauren Harr earned her M.F.A. from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Her work has appeared in The Daily Lobo, 3Elements Review, Vast Chasm Magazine, and elsewhere. A former independent bookseller, she lives in Western North Carolina with her husband, daughter, three cats, and one needy dog.