23. Michael
— ? —
Michael
An engine that had been running stopped running, and then there was water, and my wife saying my brother’s name, and then a sound I could not place that I have since worked out was a life jacket strap. And then a smaller voice saying mama, twice, and being answered.
Then a hiss, and then nothing, and then the little bar at the top of my own screen saying call ended, which is a phrase I would like taken out of the language.
I was on the wall at the top of the drive.
I got down off it and I was at the yard before I had made any decision about being at the yard.
Pia was in the drive.
“What?”
“Levi’s boat’s stopped.”
“That’s the thing with his boat. It-”
“Pia, the fog’s on the water and the radio in that boat has not worked since before he was married.”
She went the color of the gravel.
“Go,” she said. “Go, go, I’ll do our mother and I’ll do the hospital and I’ll do everybody, just go,” and she was already running at the house, and that is the last thing anybody said to me for a while.
I am not good at flowers. I have proved that. I am not good at a step or a gutter and I am extremely bad at standing in a room and saying a true thing at the moment it would be worth anything.
I am good at getting things across water. That is it. That is the entire skill, and it is the one thing this marriage has never once needed, and I have spent a season being politely useless in a lane.
I rang the harbormaster from the yard office and he answered before it had properly rung, because it was that time of year and because that is the job.
“It’s Michael Folger. There’s a boat off the east side of the point with no engine and no radio. My brother, my wife and my son.”
“Levi’s boat.”
A pause with an entire island in it.
“Right,” he said, and I could hear him already moving. “Fog’s on the water and it’s thick and it’s sitting. Have you got a position?”
“East side, past the jetty, not far out. She said not far out.”
“That’s not a position, Michael.”
“That’s what I’ve got, and she was holding a two-year-old when she said it, so it’s what she’s going to get right, because she does not get that sort of thing wrong.”
Another pause.
“How are you getting out?”
And I stood in that office with my hand flat on somebody’s desk and heard myself say it.
“I’ve got a boat.”
Nobody knew about the boat.
Levi knew there was a hull, because Levi helped me clamp frames for the Duck and has eyes. My mother did not know. Pia did not know. Willow has never asked, and I have never said, and the pair of us have been extremely disciplined about a boat.
It is the boat I had when I was a teenager. Mostly rot and enthusiasm, and a scraper, and every day of an off-season on my knees on the hard with split knuckles while a girl watched from the wall.
I have paid the yard fees on that hull every single year since my father died.
Through the quarter we nearly went under, when I did not take a salary, I paid the yard fees.
It went in as a line on my own account and nobody has ever asked me about it, and if anybody had asked me about it I would have said something short and unpleasant, because I did not have an answer.
It has been in the water since the spring.
I put it in the week before we came out for the summer, and I told nobody, and I have gone down to look at it exactly twice.
The yard went through her over the winter on my instruction, engine and all, and I told them to invoice it as storage, and nobody has ever asked me about that either.
That afternoon I went down to it at a dead run with a handheld radio in one hand, and she started, because I had paid for her to start.
Levi’s yard boy came off the pontoon with me and Sal came down the ramp with a coat and got on without asking, and I did not say a word to either of them about it and neither of them said a word to me.
The fog took us just past the jetty.
You have never been in anything like it unless you have been out there. It is not weather. It is a room with the walls put in the wrong place. The bow goes and then the pulpit goes and then you cannot tell whether the noise you are hearing is water or the same water twice.
Sal, on the bow, said one thing the entire way out.
“Your father used to run this in fog.”
“I know he did.”
“He used to run it far too fast,” said Sal, “and I used to stand where I’m standing now and hate him for it,” and then he did not say anything else, and I brought the speed down another half a knot without deciding to.
I got the speed down to nothing. I put Sal on the bow with the radio.
I ran a compass course off the point and counted it out, and I did not once do the thing every man wants to do in fog, which is go faster because he is frightened.
Sal had the harbormaster on the handheld the whole way.
The launch was taking the west side of the point and we had the east, and that was the entire conversation.
And I stopped, twice, and cut the engine, and made three men stand in the dark and be silent.
Because that is what you do. You stop making noise, and then you listen, and the whole island stops being a place and becomes a set of sounds. The horn at the point. The bell. Water on a shore that is not where you think it is.
And, the second time we stopped, out of the middle of all of it, a two-year-old.
Furious. Absolutely outraged. Somewhere off the port bow, at a range I could not have guessed at, my son was giving an unbroken account of his grievances to the North Atlantic.
Sal said, “That’s him.”
“That’s him.”
“That’s him, and he is absolutely livid, and I have never loved anybody more in my life.”
“Michael-”
“Get on the horn and keep him going,” I said. “Whatever you do, do not let anybody calm that child down.”
They were low in the water and gray all over and I very nearly went past them.
Levi had done the right things, which I have said to his face once and will not be saying again.
He had the anchor out, which is the thing that saved all of it, because it meant they were still where she had told me they were.
He had got everything reflective on that boat up on the coachroof.
He was banging a wrench on the rail in threes with the patience of a man who has decided he is going to be doing it until dark.
And Willow was sitting on the cockpit floor with her back against the bench and our son inside her coat with just his face out, keeping him warm with the whole of herself, with one arm doing all the work because the other one was in her lap and wrong.
I came out of that fog about a boat length off her shoulder.
She looked up.
A great deal of my life has gone past in front of me and I have never managed to describe any of it afterwards. But I know exactly what her face did, and I am going to be able to see it when I am eighty.
“Here,” I said.
And my wife put her head back against my brother’s boat and closed her eyes and said, “I know.”
We got them off.
Archie came across first and went to Sal, who has held every child in that family and who did not make a single sound about it. Then Levi, who I had to physically remove from his own vessel and who wanted to argue about a tow at a moment when nobody on earth cared about a tow.
Sal said four words into the handheld and the launch went home.
Then her.
“Willow. Both arms up.”
“Just the one.”
“What?”
“Only one of them’s coming up,” she said, in exactly the voice she uses about a bus timetable. “You’ll have to work with what’s there.”
She got up on to the rail one-handed and I got her under the shoulders and lifted her across, and she came the whole way with her face in my neck, and she did not weigh what she used to weigh, and I have not stopped thinking about that.
I got her sat down and got a look at the arm and stopped being able to hear the engine for a second.
“What’s happened to that?”
“I fell over. The boat went sideways when the engine stopped and I fell over.”
“That is not what a fall looks like.”
“Michael, I have got a two-year-old, a wet coat and no feeling in three fingers, and I am not doing a report.”
And from behind me, from the deck of his own useless boat, my brother said, “She had him in both arms and the deck came up and she did not put a hand out.” He was coiling something.
“She went down on it with the two of them on top of it and she got straight back up and told me to put the anchor out, and she is not going to tell you any of that, so I am.”
Willow said, “Levi, honestly-”
“I’m allowed one,” said Levi, “and that’s it, and now I’m going to go and be furious about a filter.”
I sat down on the deck next to my wife.
I did not say anything for a while, because there was nothing available to me that was not going to come out as a speech, and she has had enough of those off me to last her.
“You could have dropped him,” I said, eventually. “He’s in a jacket. He’d have gone over and he’d have floated and Levi would have had him out before he’d finished being surprised about it.”
“I know.”
“You went down on your arm instead.”
“It is safer.”
“Willow-”
“He is two,” she said, “and he was already frightened, and if he had gone in that water in that fog he would have known about it for the rest of his life.” She looked at the arm in her lap as though it belonged to somebody who had annoyed her.
“It’s a wrist. It mends. Being frightened of water doesn’t. ”
And I sat on the deck of a boat I have not admitted to owning and understood, properly, for the first time, at the age I am, that I have spent three years married to somebody who does the entire calculation before anybody else has noticed there is one.
“You’ve got a boat,” she said, into my collar. “How long have you had a boat?”
“Since I was fourteen,” I said. “It’s been in the water since the spring. I’ve been down to look at it twice and I did not get on it either time.”
“Why not?”
“Because I hadn’t earned it,” I said, “and I would like to do the rest of this later, in a kitchen, sitting down, when your hand is not that color.”
She started laughing and it turned into the other thing about halfway through, and I sat down on the deck of a boat I have not admitted to owning, with my wife against my chest and my son shouting at a driver, and went in slow with the horn going the whole way.