Blown out. There really was no sailing the tug in such snotty weather. By late morning everybody packed and left. For much of the miserable ride to the mainland on the car ferry, Jane and Rand occupied the lounge, plying crosswords while Marilyn scanned the shabby receding vista from the stern’s upper observation deck. The trees on the island’s shoreline looked like puny sticks—this late in October, this far north, on vegetation not terminally acid-rained, the dressy leaves had long since turned to mulch. Another two months and the water’s surface would congeal. By December the ferry would yield to snowmobiles and cars and trucks racing to fishing huts stacked with cases of beer and fishing poles angling lines under the ice. She’d seen that cold underworld for herself once. Slipped on a cold sunny February day through an opening chainsawed from the twenty-inch crust into water unperturbed by surface disturbances and found a junked car on the bottom in such crystalline relief she expected it might start up and drive off. Just past its rear bumper she noted a motionless pike carceral with cold, eyes clouded with winter dreaming. Its grinning needle-sharp mouth. She wasn’t under long though—not nearly long enough. Secured by a rope to a topside line tender to prevent her from getting lost, a nervous, jumpy guy who insisted on cutting short her allotted time by yanking feverishly every two minutes on her harness, she’d returned to the hole feeling like a dog on a leash —until, just before she exited through the hole, a near-hallucinatory blue at the ice’s underbelly elated her. Those memories still held their goodness, she thought now on the ferry’s deck, holding onto herself, again shaking with cold. Some memories still might.
She paced past the towering wheelhouse. She imagined the captain or pilot or mates watching her walking, wondering at how tortured she must look. How desperate to escape. But with no one visible behind the mirror-like windows, the wheelhouse looked like an impenetrable fortress. She glared. She could almost believe there was no one up there. Nobody home. Not even a ghost.
The ferry continued its churn over wrecked schooners and stunted white fish. Partway through the crossing—increasingly frigid and splattered, the sky dehiscing sleet like grey seeds—she tried not to watch a sparrow, spastic in the slurry wind. It seemed desperate to alight, likely having followed the vessel too far from land. Finally it spiralled into a dust-up of feathers and foam.
Three days later she woke pinned to the mattress. Nine in the morning. How late. Her husband’s big head on her belly. He brushed his lips against her navel and gently massaged her hip. For two nights he’d slept downstairs on the couch. For two days and nights she’d mostly lain stricken upstairs in the bedroom of their tower-tall townhouse in a smart old-new mixed district across the river from her scuffed former place. Now—no thanks to her, to anything she’d done to change his mind—she located her legs and arms, slowly gathered her other parts enough to make love. After, she wiped a smudge of sweat from his neck. I missed you, he said.
Yes? she peeped—and then she dozed and then woke to him pulling on pants and selecting a shirt from his closet, his shoulder blades so sharp she marvelled they didn’t cut his skin. She half expected his knobby spine to rattle. She wondered at his sudden weight loss. She wondered if she should worry about his worry over her. Over them. She marshaled her remaining strength and sat up. I miss you already, she called as if across some vast gulf.