Five Tuesdays in Winter(23)

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived. I will carry that summer with me until I am, as Ed used to say, “passé composé.” I have never seen either of them since, though I have read all three of Ed’s novels and liked each one. I confess that I have hoped for some reference to that summer in them, a large gray house, a college town, a lonely boy whose parents have left the country, but there has been no sign of me yet, nor of Grant. It is strange to think that they both still walk this earth somewhere, that they have also had several decades more of life, that right now they are each lying down or standing up or reading a book or on an airplane or in a hospital room or a taxi or sitting in an office.

Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.





NORTH SEA





Oda’s daughter refused to carry her own suitcase.

“You put too many of your own things in it,” Hanne said.

Oda got out of the car. “I put in a beach towel for each of us and snacks in case they don’t sell anything on the boat. That’s all.”

Hanne remained in her seat. She hadn’t wanted to come, and the sight of the sea as they came down the hill into the village of Harlesiel had not moved her as Oda hoped it would. It had not, in fact, moved Oda either. She hadn’t known she’d expected a lift, a change, until it didn’t happen. But Hanne was young, twelve and a half, and had rarely seen the open sea like this.

Perhaps it was all the clouds racing to hide the sun, great bright globs of them as if blown like glass from a fat straw and shorn flat on the bottom by the wind. They muted the hard blue of the water. They stole the show.

Across the parking lot, a man in a green jumpsuit unhooked a long chain at the start of the ramp and signaled a truck to move forward.

“The ferry does too take cars,” Hanne said. “Look.”

“Just trucks. For construction and such. Get out now. People will be next and I don’t have our tickets yet.”

Hanne did not move. The man in the jumpsuit walked backward in front of the truck, flicking his hand left and right as the truck dipped down the ramp with a clank and onto the boat. It was a tight fit. The man patted the hood of the truck as one would a dog and came back up the ramp. He nodded at the pedestrians.

Oda opened the passenger door and pulled on her daughter’s upper arm. It was so slight in her hand, a slender bone wrapped in skin. She felt how easily she could dislocate it from its shoulder socket. Hanne yanked free.

“All right,” Oda said. “I will carry it from here to the terminal, but you must take it onto the boat yourself.” She put the strap of her purse over her head so it crossed her chest, a style she did not like and associated with women twenty years younger than she was, and lifted the two suitcases. Neither was particularly heavy, but this short walk to the ticket shack required all her energy.

It was their first vacation together, just the two of them. Oda had been saving for it for nearly two years.

The woman in the ticket house, having assumed she’d have some peace until the three o’clock boat, was eating a mustard sandwich. “Better hurry,” she said through a mouthful and slid the red tickets to Oda.

Oda left Hanne’s suitcase outside the little house and showed the two tickets to the man in the jumpsuit. “One is for my daughter. She’s on her way.” Hanne was still in the car.

The man held up the chain that he would soon reattach to block the way down the ramp.

“Please.” She wanted to tell him Hanne was in the bathroom, but the ticket shack was too small for a bathroom. “Her father’s dead,” Oda said.

The man lowered the hand with the chain. Its fat links clanked against each other. She was ashamed to meet the man’s eye but she had to if she wanted her daughter to make the boat.

“That’s hard.”

A horn blew. A younger man up in a small window of the control room was pointing and exclaiming something you couldn’t hear through the glass.

“You get on the boat now. Find a seat inside where she can’t see you.” He had a Low Saxon accent she could understand, but just barely. “She’ll come when you do.”

There were a few plastic seats, a bench, and a series of windows streaked with salt. She was the only passenger inside. Everyone else was either standing in the space in front of the truck or up the stairs on the small deck. Oda put her suitcase with the others by the door and sat on the bench.

The horn blew again, angrier. A metal crank hissed and thudded. She leapt up and looked out the doorway. The ramp was rising off the stern. A jolt, and the boat pulled away from land in a rush of white foam. Hanne’s suitcase was still outside the ticket shack.

“Mutti! Look up!”

Her thin arms were waving with others on the deck above.

“Don’t lean over so far,” Oda said, but it wasn’t what she meant.

A few miles out and the sky lowered and the sea rose and there seemed barely enough room for the ferry to squeeze through the two planes of solid gray. People on the upper deck got cold and came inside. But not Hanne.