Each of the personas my father remembered in his stories were the kind larger than life that would inevitably dim should they ever encounter the person modeled after them. But in my young consciousness, it was these fanciful incarnations that had collectively stamped themselves as the ubiquitously mysterious boatman who ferried me from sleep and into dreams.
There was Bill, who was short, stocky and went on to briefly play minor league rugby in New Zealand. Claude, the loudest of the bunch, but who later disappeared as quickly as footprints in falling snow. Keith was the friend of the group who laughed more than he spoke, never quite sure what to say and so cheered on the others instead. Then there was Kelly, called “witch” because her chest-length curls had grayed completely before she turned nineteen. And Dana, Kelly’s best friend who, for many years, remained only the faintest silhouette in my mind. She existed at the scene of my father’s stories, but remained inconsequential, a side-character I was never quite sure why the author invented. All I knew was that Dana had a dog, an ivory-white English setter named Heidi, who tailed her like a shadow on all-fours. Then of course there was my father, of whom I now realize I learned very little, who faded into the edges of his own memory. Selfish as all children are, I relished the way my father’s voice faded into the role of omniscient narrator. Now, when I wonder at what point it became easier for him to hold the camera than to be reflected back into its lens, I think of when I was a child, on those days it was acceptable for my father to take me to work.
As the waxy scent of my stubbed crayons permeated the windowless conference room, I watched from the stale carpet my father’s head on a hinge, gaze tracing each pair of babbling lips as they moved. His right hand fussing over the magnet wrapped around his ear, as if there was some core meaning that could never truly be made whole again after it was filtered through the sparks of electricity my father’s brain could understand. After business had been sorted, and those men in frayed suits spoke of trivial things they pretended they could afford, my father would duck his head and say my mother had lunch prepared for me, although I knew she wouldn’t be home before the sun was nestled in its cot below the clouds.
It was only when he told stories that I began to see the contour of a man I could imagine my mother falling in love with. With a precise command over his language and an aura of infectious reminiscence, he was a gentle yet firm hand leading listeners through the delicate terrain of his wistful recollections. Watching from the hem, his voice became the needle stitching us together with the fabric of his memory, merging our minds across decades, continents. For as long as I could remember, I heard the same stories of my father and his friends. They all took place from the same span of time: beginning sophomore year of high school and ending around the time my father began his Master’s program, the place he eventually met my mother. The tales varied little, in a way that I didn’t scrutinize as suspiciously artificial until I was nearly beginning my own graduate studies.
A few days before no particular Thanksgiving, my father asked me to drive him to his hometown of Nadine. The request was quiet, a mere half-thought that, perhaps gone rogue, happened to escape his lips. I hated driving the rounded, cliff-edged roads up the coast, but what was a seaside avalanche to two days of skinning carrots and lacing pie crusts? I grabbed my keys and we promised my mother to bring her back a lobster-pot magnet for the fridge. The drive was only a few hours, but he hadn’t seen it since he went back for his mother’s funeral during his junior year of college– a story I’d heard many times before. The car was contentedly silent, and an 80s song I knew solely from car trips with my father lingered softly in the air around the radio. To my right, he shuffled a crumpled piece of newspaper he pulled out of his back pocket. Although he hadn’t been in years, he had had the Nadine Herald special delivered to our house every Saturday since I was a child. I only caught a glimpse of the portrait in his hand, nestled beside a small block of text: a woman, her laugh caught in mid-air, with a liver-spotted dog flanking each of her sides. It was a mere glance, a flick of the pupils, my neck still fixed forward– but subtlety is a worthless art in a parent’s presence, and I felt his gaze even as I turned back to counting the mile-markers along the road. He sighed, though it was a strange breath, like one of a cat-burglar who tripped an alarm he had set. My father let out a gravelly cough that rattled around his aging chest, wiping a glistening eye. He looked at me again, then the road, and then out to the sea salt-worn cliffs to his right, the paper crumpled and translucent in his moistening hand.
It was there he told me that, one day, the tide in Nadine was so low that the beach looked like a prairie, complete with flattened-wrack tumbleweeds dotted across the plain. Exposed rocks extended out from the cliffs above and cascaded down to the sand. My father and his friends dared one another across the dark, glossy surface, slick with a paste of algae and seaweed, their arms stretched wide and their feet pointed out like penguins as they trekked. They settled with a cooler and snacks on no rocky overhang in particular. Bill and Claude took turns throwing a ball for Heidi, watching her legs slip out from beneath her as she scrambled across sheets of black ice. Sometimes the ball would roll into a tide pool or crevice, but Heidi was persistent, and didn’t return until the cargo was tucked safely between her teeth. Kelly laid out a blanket where she and Dana chatted and Keith drew figures on the rock’s grimy-green surface.
My father lingered awkwardly between-behind Bill and Claude, fidgeting with what he described as a defunct Walkman: a fat, black transmitter box fastened to his belt, and a corded earpiece that snaked around his ear. He only caught bits and pieces of Claude’s story about his cranky philosophy professor from last fall semester. As the tale reached its punchline, Bill turned to my father for his reaction, but was met with the awkward half-smile of someone on the outside looking in. The pause that followed was one of old familiarity to my father, and the only way to “kill it,” as he put it, was to fill it. “I’ll throw next,” my father said. He took the ball from Bill’s hand before he could see the cheeks of his friends redden.
Hours passed and the sky was still deceivingly bright for the time, and the water lapping back up into the cove went largely unnoticed until it nipped at the girls’ toes as their legs hung over the edge of the stone. “We should probably start heading back,” Kelly said.
Bill shrugged and threw the ball for Heidi, “When she comes back with it, we’ll head back up. No problem,” he said. Kelly scrunched her damp and sandy blanket up into her arms and began her careful climb back up to the surface with Keith, Claude, and the cooler. Dana, after a moment of brief hesitation, followed after them. My father never mentioned himself, but I assume he couldn't have been far behind her.
As the water grew higher, it seeped into the worn soles and sides of Bill’s running shoes. A fastidious man, the idea of cold, soaked socks repulsed him. He whistled, called the dog’s name, and headed back to the car. At the sight of him, Dana was furious. “Where is she?”
“She’s fine,” Bill said, “She loves the water, she’ll be back any minute.”
As if on cue, a sharp, panicked howl shocked the seaside breeze.
Indeed, Heidi had begun to make her way back up to the surface, but she slipped, trapping her hind leg in a crevice between two stones. The water was far higher now, and what was once a gentle trickle had become a roaring current quickly filling the cove. Heidi’s ankles were disappearing beneath the surface, her piercing whine muffled behind the ball she refused to drop.
Dana didn’t hesitate, she lowered herself back down onto the rocks and waded into the raging tide. My father, for the will of something he could not name, jumped in after. Alone, Dana’s weight wasn’t enough to pry free Heidi’s leg, but my father, with a swift breath inward, submerged himself. It was not until this moment, as the water’s force pried loose grip of the monitor wrapped around his ear, that he realized the gravity of what he had done. He wiggled loose the dog’s locked limb and returned to the surface with a gaping inhale, although the silence of the world beneath the water– like cotton stuffed through to his brain– remained. Heidi’s cries pierced through the stuffing like a needle: the first was for her injured flesh, but the second was for the ball that shot out of her mouth and into the swirling tide.
“Go,” my father said to Dana, sputtering salty water from his lips. He cradled the canine in his arms, racing against time that was already spent as his wading rapidly devolved into hopeless, weighted treading. As my father pushed Heidi up the final rock wall and onto the grassy beach’s surface, a great wave crashed against him, his skull colliding with stone. It was Bill who lifted him up by his arms, reddish water seeping into both of their clothes, and pulled him onto the beach.
My father could feel his friends flutter around him in the small vibrations of their feet that rippled through the ground, and the puffs of air their voices left against his skin. But the world still wavered, like a top in its final rotations, even as Kelly and Claude propped him up against the cooler. Bill playfully slugged my father’s arm and, with a motion far more aggressive than occasion called for, Bill grabbed my father’s head and pressed it against his ear. His voice rattled uncomfortably against my father’s eardrum, although Bill seemed not to notice the way my father’s eyelids puckered with the rhythm of each syllable. On his other side, Keith pressed a corner of the beach blanket against his head. My father did not flinch or say the residual grains of sand burned against his raw skin. It was only Dana who knelt in front of him, hands curled in a ball on her lap. Heidi rested her snout on Dana’s thigh, who opened her mouth several times before her first words ever formed.
“Thank you,” she said, and, for the first time, my father noticed that her words did not begin with her tongue between her upper and lower teeth, instead it pressed tightly behind her upper incisors, which explained the slight whistle that trailed the ends of her fricative sounds. Words lingered on her lips, but she paused, turning her gaze back to the canine on her lap.
Wordlessly, my father reached into his pocket, and his hand emerged with a slimy, yellow tennis ball cradled atop his palm. Heidi scuttled to her feet, the wound on her leg secondary to a reunion with an old friend and launched herself forward, inhaling the ball into her mouth. She raised her nose to the sky for my father to see before wiping the gummy ball against his cheek in place of the kiss she was too busy to give. Heidi galloped back to Dana, but Dana’s eyes remained fixed forward, mouth breathlessly ajar. She opened her hands, and the black carcass of my father’s hearing aid spilled across her lap. Water streamed through the small pores around each button, a piece of seaweed dangled out of the port his earpiece should’ve been.
It was then that something began to bubble in my father’s chest, tightening around his lungs and rising into his throat. He smiled. And he laughed. He laughed so that his head tipped back and collided with the cooler, ice flying out the sides and into the sand. He did not wonder how his laugh escaped his throat, if it really sounded like a bleating goose, as Claude said. Instead, my father pressed a hand to his sternum and felt his laughter vibrate there, before it met the air and the wind carried its sound across the bounds of any shore that so happened to hear it.