“Wandering around the woods, I’d guess. Comes home when he wants. Must’ve heard the chainsaw.”
The dog was enormous, a malamute or husky a hundred and fifty pounds or more. It had long, coarse hair and ears and forepaws the size of Noah’s own hands. “He scared the shit out of me,” Noah said. “I thought it was a wolf.”
“That’s what you said.”
Noah let the dog sniff his hand.
“How long have you had him?” They were standing in front of the house now, the dog jumping and twisting under Olaf’s snapping fingers.
“Couple years.”
Noah sat on the step and the dog came up to him, eye level, ears submissively fallen, to be petted. “Any more surprises?” he asked, scratching the dog behind its ears.
“Surprises?” Olaf replied. He stepped behind Noah, onto the porch, took the top off a tin garbage can, and filled an empty ice-cream bucket with dog food. He put it down beside the steps and the dog set to eating.
“DO YOU REMEMBER your mother playing the piano?” They sat in the rusted steel lawn chairs on the grassy beach, an oar’s length from the lapping water, darkness cascading down the sky. Vikar lay at Olaf’s feet, his legs outstretched, a stream of groans muttering from his black lips.
“Of course I do,” Noah said.
“She played beautifully.”
“It used to drive me nuts.”
“Why?” Olaf asked, his chin on his shoulder, his long white beard pointing out toward the lake.
“Because I could never listen to my records.”
She used to play the Acrosonic upright for hours at a time, in summer especially, when her long evenings alone went on endlessly. Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Grieg were always drifting through the house on High Street while Noah and his buddies pitched pennies outside against the garage door. Solveig played, too, in her mother’s style but without any of her elegance.
Olaf was teasing a sprig of brown grass. He sighed, cleared his throat, and put the grass between his lips. “She always wanted to play at your wedding.”
“My wedding,” Noah said, stiffening at the mere mention of it. “I’m surprised you’d bring it up.”
“That was a long time ago, Noah.”
“Five years now,” Noah said, feeling his anger rising. His father’s worst performance ever had come on the eve of Noah’s wedding. He hated to remember it. And here was talk of his mother again, Noah’s sacred subject.
“You know, I was on my way home when she died,” Olaf said, seemingly oblivious.
“I remember when she died,” Noah said, wondering now if his father really was looking for a fight.
“That’s the only time I’ve ever been on a plane in my life. I had to leave my boat in Toledo, take a bus to Detroit and get the plane. It cost a hundred bucks.”
“A regular hero.”
Olaf turned away, set his chin back on his chest. The sky sparkled with stars, lightening and darkening simultaneously as it got later and the moon rose.
“Your mother wanted you to play the piano,” Olaf said.
Noah sneered incredulously, nearly stood up to leave.
“She did,” Olaf said.
“What difference did it make who played the piano?”
“None,” Olaf said. “I’m just trying to remember.”
“Why are you doing this? You can’t even face it now, can you?”
“Chrissakes, Noah.”
Noah had to clench his teeth to keep from saying more.
When, one night early in their relationship, Natalie had asked Noah how his mother had died — they were eating oysters and drinking Pimm’s at a place out on Marblehead Beach — Noah had said loosely but with conviction, “Of a broken heart.”
His mother had, in fact, died of heart failure, of a heart attack brought on, Noah always imagined, by an excess of longing.
“They called you on Saturday. You got to port on Sunday morning. You didn’t get back to Duluth until Thursday. For four days you knew how sick she was, and still you didn’t get home? And somehow you were a hero for getting on a plane?”
“It’s not that simple,” Olaf said.
“She was dying.”
“We didn’t know that then.”
“Are you kidding me?” Noah stood up, walked to the edge of the water, picked up a rock, and threw it out into the lake.
“I didn’t expect her to die, Noah.”
“What did you expect, huh?” He threw another rock into the lake and turned to face his father. “We were fucking kids.”
“Your mother and I, we were hardly speaking to each other by then.”
“You had two kids, too. Did you forget about us?”
“I didn’t forget about anything.”
“You know what?” Noah said, stepping back toward his father. “That only makes it worse. We needed you and you weren’t there. You were never there.”
“The story is a lot more complicated than you remember,” Olaf said.
Noah dropped back into the chair and ran his hands through his hair. “What part of the story am I forgetting, Dad? All we wanted was for you to come home and tell us that the world hadn’t ended, that’s all you would have had to do.”
“The world ended long before that night,” Olaf said.
Noah heard a note of resignation in his voice, a pitiful, sad, thoughtful timbre that he’d never heard before but that he didn’t quite believe. “Don’t you get it? Mom had just died. Whatever tragedy you suffered shouldn’t have mattered. It still doesn’t matter. You had a responsibility, and you blew it.”
“Do you think I’m sitting here ignorant?”
“I think you’ve always believed that what happened to you was more tragic and more meaningful than anything that ever happened to anyone else. And that’s wrong. You just couldn’t shake it, that’s all, you lugged it around like a yoke and nothing else mattered. That’s what I think.”
“You’re dead wrong about all of that. Dead goddamn wrong.”
“Then tell me why you weren’t there. Tell me why you disappeared. Tell me why Mom never had a funeral.”
Olaf looked squarely at Noah, a face full of regret if Noah judged right. “I still have her ashes,” he said.
“What?”
“They’re in the shed. They’re stowed away.”
Noah was dumbstruck.
“I can’t tell you why I wasn’t there, Noah. I can’t tell you why I disappeared or why your mother never had a funeral. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”
“They’re in the shed?”
“I never knew what to do with them. What are you supposed to do with your wife’s ashes?”
Noah had no idea.
They sat quietly for a long time. The night was stunning, cooling, the sky bursting with stars. Noah watched his father doze off, his chin on his chest. Twice Vikar stood and went to the shore to drink, and twice he came back to Olaf’s feet.
Eventually he thought of Natalie. He imagined her at home, curled up on the couch in the den. She was coming here. A fact Noah found hard to imagine. Sometimes, at home, before they fell asleep, they’d lie in bed conjuring up their fantasy child — a baby boy — whose ascendance into the nighttime world of forgiveness and fantasy was like religion for them. The boy would be a prodigy, of course, but a prodigy of ordinariness. This meant a Little League career that included errors and strikeouts galore but also a zest for the game straight from the little guy’s good nature. It meant a seventh grade girlfriend and questions about her. It meant high school and the prom and ski trips up to Sugarloaf with the boy and a couple of his pals. It meant college at Dartmouth, Nat’s insistence, and law school and a job in downtown Boston where the two of them — Noah and his son — could get together for lunch on Fridays. There were no dislocations in this fantasy, no shipwrecks. And certainly no ashes stowed in the shed.