Sonja wakes to a stranger’s voice in the boat with her. A man’s voice. A panicked moment passes before she realizes that it’s coming over the radio and not from inside the cabin. “Aidez-moi,” the man says. “Help. Ayúdame. Please.” His call cuts in and out between the fuzz of the handheld VHF’s granular static. It is 2 AM on a Tuesday morning in early July. Sonja’s boat is anchored in a small bay off the eastern shoreline of the Haida Gwaii archipelago of British Columbia. She goes to the porthole and spots a single yawl, small, the sails down but the cabin brightly lit and blazing streaks of white across the black-glass bay. She sees a shadow inside—a dark head and shoulders. A man.
Sonja is alone, just as she’s been alone for the last week in this bay, and before that for a week in the bay just farther south, and before that in other bays along the coast that she’s been slowly following north to a point she hasn’t yet determined: her turnaround spot or new home, maybe Alaska—Ketchikan or Prince of Wales Island—someplace even more remote than here. She doesn’t know. She’s been alone for nearly fifty days, the only exceptions two brief conversations she had at fuel docks in British Columbia on Moresby Island and at Skidegate, both with men who looked at her hard in a way she’s come to expect as a woman traveling unaccompanied. Men like them can sniff out a woman’s vulnerabilities. She laid cash on their counters, said as little as possible, and left—no pleasantries for them to remember later, no name; her money mixed into their tills, indistinguishable from the other bills; her boat motoring away from their docks before they could imagine a more interesting way to end the exchange.
“Please, help,” the male voice repeats over her radio now, and she knows it’s coming from the little yawl.
She fumbles to unfurl herself from the low-ceilinged berth, slides her feet into her rubber boots, pulls a raincoat over her nightdress.
She might just ignore it, she thinks as she prepares to leave the warmth of her boat for who-knows-what catastrophe outside. How is the man across the bay to know she’s receiving his calls? It was an accident that she left her radio on overnight. These bays along the coast are silent, isolated, tucked away in deep glacial cuts between densely treed islands. There’s no reason to expect company of the human sort, so she generally keeps the VHF off. She put it on the night before while she ate, though, scanning for sound to combat the unease that now and then overtakes her. She dislikes it in herself—this occasional need for the illusion of companionship—but sometimes the stillness turns animal on her, furred and thick and hungry. She can’t predict its arrival, that single canine shadow that splits and splits again behind the screen of evergreens at the edge of whatever bay she’s moored in until she feels encircled, trapped. It only happens in the late evening, when the darkness velvets the water and the last dim light in the sky sinks into black. She doesn’t mind solitude, but this is something different—spectral and chilling. Not just loneliness, but obliteration. She can’t bear it, so she turns on the VHF and searches for FM stations that reach this far. She might get classical or jazz. A public news station from Vancouver Island or southeast Alaska. Once, a tribal station was broadcasting a storytelling presentation in a language she couldn’t understand. Only these human noises can send the slinking wolves retreating into the woods. Last night it wasn’t a voice but Brahms. Just as good. She listened while she ate a can of beef-and-potato stew, drank a small mug of hot cider sluiced with a thumb of bourbon, and went to bed without washing up. She’d left the radio on low, only semiconscious of its company, enough to let her sleep. Now she regrets it.
“I see you. Please,” the voice says.
Her heart trips. This time she picks up. “What’s your location? Over.” She has to be sure it’s him—the man across the bay.
Static.
“Hello, copy?” she says into the radio.
“Help. Please.” The voice hardens. “You’re right there. Help me, please. I have a sick child on board. I have no more medicine, no fuel. Please.”
Sonja lets out a long breath and drops the radio into her coat pocket. She lifts down the shotgun she keeps over the cabin door and slings it over her shoulder.
Outside the deck is damp and the air wet and chilled. The black of the water meets the black of the shore in an inky spill. These bays can be shallow bottomed or craterlike, their centers great, shapeless pits. This one is a pit. Overhead the stars seem farther away than usual, though there are more of them—so many more than she ever saw inland, where the cities exhale light in vaporous clouds that never fully dissipate. She is intensely aware of her isolation.
She untethers the dinghy from the stern, climbs down the swim ladder, and steps in. The water slaps against its aluminum side. She’s learned to sit in the dinghy with her knees splayed and feet wide apart for balance as she rows. Each time she raises the oars, water beads skitter from the blades along the handles and into her coat’s cuffs, trickling cold up her arms. It takes five minutes that feel longer for her to cross the distance between her boat and the stranger’s.
As she pulls herself nearer, the man disappears from the inside and reappears on deck. He waves his arms at her, as if she has any doubt it is him in need of her help.
Thirty feet away she stops, stands up, and swivels the shotgun so it hangs over her chest. “I’ll shoot if I have to,” she says.
The man drops his hands. “No,” he says. He has a heavy accent that she can’t place. “No, please.” His voice shifts. “It’s my daughter.”
Sonja feels a burning in her back like a wire plucked and popped. It sends fire down both arms and into the pit of her stomach. She lets go of the shotgun. “Coming aboard,” she says and sits again, picking up her oars.
Sonja believes that people only choose the sort of life she’s chosen if there are no other options. This has been confirmed in her year and a half of living on the water. There was the man she met in Seattle after she first bought the boat and was paying monthly for a liveaboard slip in the marina at Shilshole. He’d lost his wife to pancreatic cancer and his house to the bills for her useless treatment. He kept a blue heeler for company and spoke to the dog in a bitter, caustic tone. At the same marina she met another man—Tom—three slips from hers, who was five months sober and kind, his face soft with what she read as shame and sorrow and tentative hope. He was afraid, he told her one evening over takeout boxes of fried chicken and tall brown bottles of vanilla soda that he drank to keep from really drinking.
“Afraid of what?” she asked.
“Afraid if I live anywhere but alone on this boat, I’ll kill myself.”
He’d been an investment banker with an apartment downtown, a girlfriend he’d thought he would eventually marry, and a Lexus he’d totaled driving the wrong way up a freeway on-ramp at seven thirty on a Sunday morning. That had been the end for him. “Why?” she asked, and he answered in metaphors—the dogs never stopped nipping at his heels, the big hunger kept swallowing him, the black hole never bottomed out. Did she understand? She did. He had to leave it all and start over if he wanted to stay clean. “Clean break,” he said. “That’s what it means.” He couldn’t keep pretending he wasn’t terrified. He had a handsome half smile and was a good lover, patient and soft-spoken in bed, always apologetic afterward, though she assured him there was nothing to be sorry about. He liked to sleep with his hand on her bare hip, and now and then his fingers tensed as if her body were a ledge he was gripping. Eventually his need was too much. She had no interest in being claimed. Sonja left Seattle and went north.
In La Conner she met a woman who’d been jilted a week before her wedding and had left everything to move onto a thirty-foot tug. In Bellingham she met a man who’d been homeless until his brother had died and left him a thirty-six-foot sailboat. “Bastard wouldn’t give me a goddamn thing when he was alive,” he laughed. Sonja slept with him too, just once. “I’m lonely,” she said when she kissed him. “That’s all this is.” He understood and expected nothing more from her. Men who had never owned much were perhaps better at letting go.
Farther north, in Vancouver, she moored next to an old man and his teenage granddaughter. He was raising the girl to be free, he told Sonja. “Fuck the government,” he said and cackled, relishing his rebellion. His boat kept him untethered, mobile, owing no one. Sonja ate tacos with him and the granddaughter one evening, then played a round of gin. The girl barely spoke. She had acne that flamed swollen and red across her cheekbones, eyes the color of a gray March sky. Where were her parents? Sonja wondered. Why had they let her go with this grandfather? The girl troubled Sonja, appearing in a dream that night as a stray dog skulking around the marina. Somehow in her dream Sonja knew the dog was the girl and that she was hungry, but she didn’t set out food or water. When she woke, the dream’s disquiet lingered through the day. It’s none of my business, Sonja told herself, but when she and the girl ended up in the marina laundry at the same time one afternoon, the girl with her sweatshirt hood up and her earbuds in, Sonja slipped her a piece of paper that read, “If you need out, I’m in slip A24.” The man’s boat was gone in the morning, and the girl with it. None of my business, Sonja reminded herself, though for weeks she worried that she’d made things worse, or that she should have done more.
Later, when her own boat’s motor broke down in Campbell River and she had to stay a month at a motel in town, she met Melora, who cleaned rooms four days a week and studied to be a sonographer the other three. They got margaritas together at a Mexican restaurant a few times, and Melora told Sonja about her ex and how he’d taken even her wedding ring when he’d left her and how what she loved most about sonography was the darkness and the silence of being with a stranger whose insides you could see. Since the ex had left her, she’d lived alone and would forever.
“How can you say forever?” Sonja asked.
“I know it in my heart, and I spend all day looking at people’s hearts, so I should know.” She laughed. She had the kind of laugh that seemed to break open suddenly, a cascading peal of real joy. Her short burgundy hair was damp against her temples from the heat of drinking, and her face and laugh reminded Sonja of her own grandmother’s somehow, though the two women were nothing alike. She hadn’t felt true comfort with another person in ages.
Melora was the only person Sonja told about Angie.
“Isn’t that the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Melora said after the whole story was out. She slid her hand across the sticky table and laid it on top of Sonja’s. “God, honey. That’s just the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
The next day Sonja’s boat was ready, and she didn’t hang around to say goodbye.
Now, in the dark, her heart judders inside her chest as she rows the final strokes toward the stranger. I am being irresponsible, she thinks. How do I know this isn’t all bullshit? Maybe he’s a pirate. Or a rapist. How do I know this isn’t a trap? But her arms keep dipping the oars into the water, drawing her closer to him. She ties the dinghy to the rail of his boat, hands shaking. Standing up, she stumbles and nearly capsizes herself. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she says and grabs for his railing.
“Here,” the stranger says. “Let me.” He takes her arm gently, one hand at her elbow, the other gripping her palm. She feels his strength and also his hesitation. To him, lifting her onto the deck would be no more difficult than pulling up an anchor, but he lets her climb, braces her to keep her from sliding, saying quietly, “There we go. There we go.” She believes him then, about the daughter. She believes he is a father.
“You came out of nowhere,” she says once her feet are under her. Beneath her raincoat, sweat is rolling down her back. She is fifty-eight and not in poor shape, but she’s winded by the row and the climb over the railing and by her fear. Why doesn’t he have a ladder? She looks around and takes in his boat’s deck, which is worn but tidy.
She estimates the stranger to be twenty years her junior at least, maybe younger. He has a broad, open face, his forehead knotted in worry. For a moment he seems reluctant to invite her in, and it occurs to her that he has to trust her too. She smiles and says, “I’m actually a nurse by training, so you lucked out.” The words feel disorienting, coming out of her mouth, as if that life might be a story she once read, not her own past.
“Oh,” he sighs. “Oh, thank you. Thank you for coming.” He shakes his head, grips her hand in both of his in a gesture that surprises her so much she rocks back on her heels for a second.
“She’s in here,” he says.
In the boat’s cabin the cupboards and cushions are mismatched, the table’s varnish worn to dullness, but the countertop has been wiped clean of crumbs and the stove’s single burner polished bright. The lights Sonja saw across the water are warm, and there are quilts tucked here and there. It’s a home.
The one off-putting detail is the stale odor of sickness. She recognizes it as flu from her days working in the hospital. Each illness has its own smell: Strep like fermentation. GI conditions tangy with acid. Flu is dry and stale and sometimes putrid-sweet like compost, the body working so hard to kill the virus that it begins to eat itself.
It crosses her mind that she herself could get sick, and that in an ideal situation she’d have a mask and gloves. But she’ll have to make do without them. “Your girl, she has a fever?” Sonja asks.
The man nods, waves her toward the bow. He has to stoop under the low ceiling, but Sonja’s head just grazes it.
He has put the daughter to bed on the V-berth beneath a quilt. She is little, maybe five or six, and looks worse than Sonja imagined, the color in her cheeks flat, her face slack and a little doughy where it’s swollen around her eyes and neck. Lymph, Sonja thinks. The fever must be high. Sonja puts her hand to the girl’s forehead and estimates 104.
“She’s been sick a few days,” the man says. “But it wasn’t so bad—just a cold. She’s had so many colds, and—” He lifts his hands in a gesture she understands as confusion. “I thought she was getting better, and then in the night she went limp, suddenly. I’m out of acetaminophen and Gator-ade and soup. And the fever won’t go down.”
“How many days?”
“Maybe four.”
Four days? A decline that fast means the flu has likely turned into pneumonia. She says, “There’s a hospital in Masset. Why didn’t you just head for there?”
He looks pained. “The fuel,” he says. He waves a hand toward the stern, and she remembers stepping over two red fuel containers.
A flare of anger. “You let yourself run dry up here?”
He straightens, squares his shoulders beneath his sweater. “They gave me bad fuel. Not in the line, but in the extra tanks. When I tried to use it, I realized—water in the diesel. I was stranded.”
She remembers the stares she got in Moresby and Skidegate. They weren’t keen on outsiders. “Fuckers,” Sonja says.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I assumed.”
He looks her in the eye. “I’m a good father. I wouldn’t harm my child.”
Sonja nods. She’s become jaded about people. She thinks of Melora looking inside all those strangers’ chests in her small, dark ultrasound room, and of the way Melora said it doesn’t matter that we’re all the same on the inside—you could still never really know another person. Sonja heard it as a warning then: you can’t trust anyone, not truly. At the time it suited Sonja to hear it that way. But now she sees she was wrong. Other people are usually clear about who they are; it’s trusting yourself to read their signals correctly that is difficult.
“Give me a few minutes,” she says.
She rows back to her boat, finds Tylenol and a thermometer, the jug of cider, a can of soup. She rows back. This time the muscles of her arms burn when she pulls herself aboard, but she manages it alone, bruising her knee as she stumbles over the rail. She rubs it, gets up. She hasn’t felt such urgency about anything for so long.
In the tiny galley she gets to work finding a cup, a spoon. She crushes a pill to white dust, stirs it into the cider. In the V-berth the man lifts the girl into his arms and sits her against his chest. She’s as loose as a rag doll, and Sonja turns away when for an instant memories flood her eyes. “OK,” she says, sniffing and turning back. “Sooner the better.” She directs the man to spoon cider into his daughter’s mouth. When the cup is empty, she takes the child’s temperature. “As I thought,” she says, “104.” Sonja leaves the berth and finds a washcloth, leans over the boat’s railing and soaks it in the cold seawater. The cool air outside is a relief. The stars are throbbing the way they do before they slide away at dawn. It’s almost 4 AM. She looks at the trees along the shoreline. Stay away, her internal voice says to the darkness. Just stay away.
Inside again, she tells the man to put the cloth on the girl’s chest, watches the little body shiver under it.
His expression is pained. “She’s never been this sick,” he says.
“We’re doing what we can do.”
Sonja thinks about her own boat, where she has a tank full of fuel, but she doesn’t offer it. Not yet. Instead she’ll stay with him, see if they can bring the fever down. She gets up and makes the can of soup, puts a bowl on the little table, and tells the stranger to eat. “You don’t have time to think of yourself when your child’s sick.”
“You’re a mother,” he says. “Only a parent knows this.”
Sonja swallows the gravel that rises in her throat.
“Please eat with me,” he says.
“No, but I’ll sit, if that’s OK.” She takes the bench across from him. She can imagine the two of them sitting here together—this man and his girl. She can imagine the girl looking out the portlight at the water as he sailed them north. She wonders, What was their tragedy? Where’s the child’s mother?
“I didn’t get your name,” she says.
“Forgive me. It’s Levan.” He tips his head toward the berth. “And Natia.”
Steam ribbons upward from the soup. She notices that he spoons outward, away from himself, and doesn’t dip his face toward the bowl. Her grandmother would have approved of his manners.
“You’re kind,” he says. “Not everyone I’ve met out here has been.”
She wants to say, You don’t know me, but instead she says, “Tell me something about your girl.”
He smiles. “She’s a firecracker, you know?”
She nods. “Daughters usually are.”
Angie ran away when she was ten. That was the first time. She waited until Sonja was at work on a Saturday and just walked out. The door was unlocked when Sonja came home, and for the first few hours both she and the police feared someone had broken in and taken Angie, but the following day Angie was spotted at the bus station in Everett. An officer drove her home in his cruiser. Child Protective Services investigated and eventually found Sonja to be a responsible parent, though from then on, she had to pay a neighbor woman to sit in the house and watch TV during the hours Angie was home and she was on shift.
“Why’d you do it?” she asked her daughter.
Angie had no excuse, no reason. She was bored. She was tired of being on her own while Sonja was at work.
“Do you think I want to leave you here on your own? You think I’m at work because I’d rather be there?”
Angie eyed her. She had never been the sort of child to cry. Even as a baby she had seemed to know the power of withholding. At nap time she’d stand in her crib, tiny and rigid, rather than lying down and submitting to her own fatigue. When Sonja laid her down on the mattress, she’d hold her body stiff as a rod. Now she hardened her jaw in the same way. The muscle below her ear tensed. “Good mothers don’t have to leave their children,” she said. Then, with a flash of fire in her voice, she added, “Good mothers don’t get left.”
Sonja held her temper. She didn’t say, Someday when you’re a mother, you’ll know what I’ve done for you. She didn’t say, I didn’t raise you to mouth off like that. She didn’t say, The man who fathered you was no father, and I spared you that, at least. And she didn’t lunge forward and smack Angie across her face, which is what her grandmother would have done to her. She understood Angie just wanted to hurt her, as daughters will do, and she believed that was behind all the rest of it, too, in the years that followed: dropping out of school, vanishing, not calling for weeks on end. On and on the standoff went between them, each choosing her side and never wavering. And the more misbehavior Sonja ignored, the more Angie sought to punish her. That’s how Sonja thought of it: punishment. Not for being a terrible parent, but for being incurious about her daughter, for being incapable of real interest. And what could she have done about that? We are who we are. She could not be a different person, a different woman, a different mother. That had been true when Angie was a stubborn baby and Sonja had finally just left her in the crib, turned out the light, and shut the bedroom door on her for the night; and it was true when she knew Angie was using and didn’t put her in the car and take her to rehab, didn’t stop her from living the way she was choosing to live.
“I always did the best I could for her, you know?” she’d told Melora, but even as she’d said it, she’d known it wasn’t the whole truth.
Melora had squeezed her hand. “I’m sure you did, honey,” she’d said. “I’m sure you did.”
The clock mounted to Levan’s wall says that it’s 5 AM. Outside, the water is softening to gray; the sky is beginning to bleach at its eastern rim. It will be light in half an hour, and Sonja will have to decide how long to wait with him for the girl’s fever to break before she forces herself to be on her way.
“You spoke several languages,” she says to Levan, and when he looks puzzled, she adds, “over the radio.”
What he’s told her about himself and the girl: He’s forty-two, older than she first thought, though up close she noticed the wrinkles around his eyes and along his left cheek, where a dimple has become a deep crease. He has been on the water for six months and bought the boat in Vancouver. He’s headed to Alaska, where there will be work, he hopes, in the fishing industry. He’s Georgian by birth, has lived in Canada since 2013. She hasn’t asked about the girl’s mother, and he hasn’t offered.
Sonja says that she speaks only English, though her grandmother, who raised her, tried to teach her other languages. “My grandmother spoke Swedish and Norwegian—learned at home—and English and French from school. A little German to accommodate her husband’s parents, who came from Berlin during the First World War and still spoke it to each other,” Sonja says. “When she was old, her mind began to move through time like it was a braid, not a line, and she slipped from one language to another.”
“That’s lovely,” Levan says. “Time like a braid.” He sips a cup of coffee—black, though he found a can of condensed milk for Sonja’s when she requested cream and sugar. The drink is warm and soothing. She’s missed sitting across from another person.
“I was a teacher,” he tells her. “Secondary school. World languages. This was before.” He tips his chin, indicating before the boat, this life now. Sonja understands. “But when I arrived in Canada, I became a jack-of-all-trades. So now, fishing. I know someone who says he will find me work.” A smile. “We’ll see how it goes.”
“It’s a shame, so much knowledge going unused.”
“Not unused, just differently used, like your nursing.”
“I chose to leave.”
He meets her eyes. “So did I. Please don’t feel sorry for me.”
She sits back. “I didn’t—”
“It’s just that people say things—or they used to say things, before I came out here away from everyone. People assume I’m broken because of what my life has been. You see?”
She grips her mug, considers this. “OK. I won’t assume. You’re out here with a child on your own, taking the slowest route to your destination, but I won’t assume.”
A flicker of amusement crosses his face. “I expected an apology.”
She shrugs. “Why apologize? Everyone’s broken, one way or another.”
“You too, then?”
“Am I not someone?”
He nods. “You don’t have to say. I knew when you showed me that gun.”
“That’s just sensible out here.” She looks at him. “And no, I won’t say.”
Outside the portlight the sky is pale to the treetops. She gets up and goes to the boat’s hatch, opens it so that a wash of cool air floods in, smelling of cedar and salt. There’s birdsong. The glittering sound of water lapping the shore. She stands with one foot on the deck, the other inside. Her raincoat feels too hot. It’s funny to her that she’s kept it on, like the coat might be armor. Against what, exactly, she doesn’t really want to think about. She’s been naked in the bed of more than one stranger out here on the water, but with this father and daughter she has worn her coat despite its stuffiness. She can’t live this way forever, she knows. She can’t go on lonely and guarded for the rest of her life, no real connection ever again.
She forces herself to take off the coat, undoing the zipper and pulling at the sleeves. Her cheeks flame as she stands braless beneath her nightdress’s thin cotton, wadding the coat into a ball in her arms. “I’m sorry. I’m too warm.” Levan nods and looks away, a courtesy for which she’s grateful. The air hits her, cold enough to raise goose bumps on her forearms and harden her nipples.
No one but Angie has ever seen her undone like this—matronly rather than sexy in her undress. Her hair a spiky mess around her head. Her body vinegared with dried sweat. She remembers the smell of her skin in the early days of parenthood—breast milk and yeast and acid. A mother musk. It could level her, the memory. That gravel in her has churned and churned tonight, and now it feels smooth and heavy enough to pull her to her knees. There’s something not so awful about that after all this time.
She sits back down at the table and tells him, “I once nursed a child who had been mauled by dogs.”
“Jesus.”
“It was horrific, if I’m being honest, but I told the mother it could have been worse. I said that sort of thing all the time, to the loved ones.”
“It was your job.”
“Not really. I could have said nothing. Or I could have told them the truth. I knew that child wouldn’t go home for weeks, and when she did, she’d be disfigured forever. But I said, ‘It could be worse.’ ”
“That’s true, though. She could have died. That would have been worse.”
“Would it?”
He frowns. “I want my child alive, no matter what. I’d do anything to keep her alive.”
“That’s what we have to believe,” Sonja says. “Mothers and fathers. We have to believe we’ve done the best for them, always.”
The water pales with the sky, and the trees begin to pull in their sheets of shadow. The center of the bay is silver now, shining and opaque. Sonja feels a pulse behind her eyes, aches in her lower back and between her shoulder blades. She folds her arms around herself and says, “You haven’t said why yet, but your girl has no mother.” She means to be gentle, sympathetic, but it comes out like an accusation.
His expression is unreadable, and she thinks she’s offended him with this obvious question so many hours into their conversation.
“Natia’s mother lives in Toronto. She was not cut out for parenthood, and so she left us when Natia was only a few months old.”
Sonja looks for grief but sees just fact. This has become his story. There’s something amazing about that acceptance, and she envies it. “Don’t you ever feel angry, though?” she asks. “Don’t you ever feel cheated?”
A half smile. “Sure. Sometimes. That’s life, isn’t it? My anger is only for Natia now. The loss is really hers.”
“She’ll be fine, though. Children have a natural ability to forget. My grandmother raised me, and I never missed my mother. I wasn’t scarred, the way people think.”
“Maybe not a scar, but I think she is changed from who she might have been. It isn’t natural to be motherless.”
“No,” Sonja says. She has to clear her throat to speak. “No, that’s true enough.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what? For tonight? I’m glad to be helpful.”
“No. For your losses. Whatever they might be.”
“We should get some more fresh air in here,” she says, and she stands and moves through the little cabin opening all the portlights. A breeze slips in, and she stands for a long minute in the chill. She’s shaking under her nightdress and hopes he doesn’t notice. It’s just a physical reaction to her fatigue, and it will pass.
“Let me make more coffee,” Levan says.
“I should get back across the water.” But as she’s putting her coat on, the girl calls from the berth. Her voice is mewling, brittle with pain, and Levan lurches back to her, the boat swaying with his hurry.
Sonja gets the thermometer, wedges herself at the child’s side, waits for the mercury to move. Beside her Levan is stone-faced, folded into himself, his arms crossed over his stomach as he rocks back and forth. Sonja rests her free hand on his knee. “She needs you to stay calm.” She says this, but she remembers what it is to see your child hurting. Pain should retreat at love, but the truth is that love magnifies pain. No one likes to admit that, but she saw it plenty of times as a nurse: An old woman in her sickbed, her adult children leaning into each other with the shared ache. A man suddenly crying out, but the tears running down his wife’s face. Pain can smell tenderness, she thinks. It’s vicious and bottomless.
When she slides the thermometer from the girl’s mouth and reads it, she considers the choices that open like a net in front of her: taking them to Masset herself and again being among people; calling for a medevac, a costly risk if the fever breaks on its own; or—the worst idea—waiting and hoping alone out here on the water. For a second she feels trapped in the knots of these impossible options. She decides to state only what is certain. “You and your girl need to get to Masset,” she says.
He looks stricken. “But my fuel.”
A second certainty: “You need to go now.”
© Pauly V
What she’d told Melora: She lost Angie through her own failures, her own misguided idea of how to love. Angie had been a good girl until she wasn’t, and then everything she said and did and wanted seemed designed to hurt Sonja. She quit school when she was seventeen and disappeared for a while. Sonja spent a winter driving between shelters and emergency rooms and churches, looking for her. And when Angie finally came home, just reappearing one day as if she’d always been planning to return, she was changed. She was skinny, her hip bones visible above the belt loops of her low-slung jeans. Her auburn hair had grown past her shoulders, and she wore it wavy and uncombed. She’d gotten a tattoo of a wolf on her left shoulder blade—the work of a guy she’d met at a festival in Missoula—and another, smaller one on her right lower back that she’d picked up from a tattoo artist she’d almost fallen in love with. She’d stayed on a co-op farm in southern Alberta for a few weeks, and then a friend’s place in Denver, and then ridden along in another friend’s van all the way back to the West Coast and north until she got home. She wasn’t an addict, she said—she promised—but she’d tried things. Sonja felt a sick chill in her gut when she considered what that really meant. She could see the fire of it in Angie’s eyes. She’d come home brighter somehow, a fuse set off deep in her, burning slow and hungry.
When Sonja had fallen pregnant—totally on her own and heavy with the burden of the decision she had to make about her future—she’d imagined the great terror of parenthood to be dullness: to feel one’s keenness dulled by the boredom of being a mother, and then to raise a dull child, one not interested in the world around her, not curious enough to do more than choose a path and stay on it. Maybe that path would be a marriage, maybe a job. Dull comes in many shades. Sonja wanted her child to do better than that. Later her desire became more specific: she wanted Angie to do better than she herself had done. Wasn’t that what a parent was supposed to want for her child? But maybe it had been a mistake to think like that.
“Why didn’t you ever call me?” Sonja asked. “You must have known I was worried.”
Angie scoffed, almost angry at this. “Jesus, Mom. How could anyone ever know what you’re thinking?”
Sonja let Angie stay with her, but after a month she said there had to be rent. Angie was an adult, and it set a bad precedent to just let her loaf. It was for her own good. She meant for Angie to understand: the rent wasn’t about money; it was about responsibility. She set it low—a couple of hundred dollars a month. Enough to nudge Angie into a job, but not enough to keep her from saving. She’d want her own place eventually, wouldn’t she? She’d want to get on her feet, Sonja suggested.
“What does that even mean to you?” Angie asked. She made air quotes, repeated it: “ ‘Get on my feet’? You mean make the choices you would make.”
“Do we have to battle over definitions now?”
“Fine. Fucking fine. I’ll do whatever you want. There’s more than one way to earn two hundred dollars.”
She flashed her mother a look, and again that chill slid through Sonja, but she didn’t take the bait. Instead she got Angie a job at the hospital, serving coffee and doughnuts and sandwiches in the cafeteria while Sonja worked her regular nursing shift in the emergency room. It pleased her to stop in on her break for a cup of decaf and see Angie there, her hair tucked under the mushroom of the paper sanitary cap, her white apron tied in a neat bow at her waist. Now and then Angie could be convinced to take her break when Sonja did, and they sat together at one of the plastic tables, eating soft serve in wafer cones. It felt like progress, though Sonja couldn’t say toward what, exactly. Adulthood, maybe. Or peace between them. Either way this setup was safer than whatever Angie had chosen for herself in her time away. Sonja had shown her a safer, clearer path.
But by winter Angie was missing shifts. Sonja would go down for her break and discover Angie had never clocked in. She wouldn’t come home for a night, two nights, and then she’d be back.
“What?” she said when Sonja questioned her. “I pay my rent. Am I under house arrest here?”
“No,” Sonja said. “No, that’s not it at all.” And she let it drop.
It was February when the head nurse called Sonja into the break room, her expression tight in a way that Sonja recognized. The recognition unmoored her, and she didn’t understand what was happening, even though later she thought she must have understood but rejected what she knew immediately.
The chaplain was waiting in the break room, and it was she who said it: Angie had died in the emergency room of another hospital, twenty miles north. An overdose. Accidental, they were sure.
The chaplain was a soft-bodied, middle-aged woman with bobbed hair and a pink twinset on over her clerical collar. She wore gardenia perfume, and the odor of it hung thick in the room. She reached across the table and took Sonja’s hand, and Sonja thought how strange it was to hold another person’s hand that wasn’t Angie’s. When Angie was a little girl, Sonja would hold on to her as they crossed downtown streets or made their way across the park to the swings. How out-of-body it felt to do it now, as if her hand were not her own but that other, younger mother’s still.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. But she was lying.
She drove alone to the hospital up north, insisted on seeing Angie’s body, which looked just as the dead do, not at all like people in books say they do—So lifelike, or, Just like she’s sleeping. No.
Sonja quit her job. She sold the condo where she and Angie had been living. She bought the boat.
That was a year and a half ago.
By midday Levan is gone, the tainted fuel washed from his line, replaced by her store of good fuel. It will get him to Masset, where the child will at least have a chance. If he hurries. If he’s lucky. Sonja knows it’s easy to be unlucky, to make a mistake.
Alone again on her boat, Sonja fixes herself a bowl of canned chowder and a pot of coffee and takes her meal out to the deck. It’s quiet, the sky cloudy and low. In a few minutes she’ll find a radio station, one playing anything but talk, and by late afternoon her unease will start to rise, and she’ll climb into her bed and wait for the day to end, the music sounding lightly, a distant companion.
“I’ll come back with fuel. You won’t be stuck here for long,” Levan promised before he left. She could trust him, he said.
“It’s fine,” she told him. “Someone else will come along. You do for your girl.”
“But you’ll be stranded,” he said. “You could be alone here for days.”
“I know how to be alone.”
He didn’t understand—most people don’t. It isn’t loneliness that breeds the dread. It’s something else too complicated to explain. The way dusk can skin time and make its shapeless center suddenly visible. No one understands but people who have already seen that dark hole—people who are always holding the edge of it. Sometimes there’s no redemption. Sometimes there is only that pit and one’s fingers gripping as long as possible.
“Travel safe,” Sonja told Levan, and she tasted fear in her mouth as she did.
As he motored away with the last of her fuel, she stood on her deck and waved. His wake curled after him for a few minutes, the reflections of the trees wobbling and shifting on the surface, threading into the ripples the breeze made. There was trickery in the way water filled and emptied, and the shadow he left quickly unraveled into nothing, just as she knew it would. As if he and Natia had never been there at all.
