The Lake Wants Her Back

Alana Hobbs was sixty-three years old and she had spent the better part of fifteen years learning how to be alone, and the strange truth of it was that the only time the loneliness ever felt honest was when she was steering a tug through fog with her hands on the throttles and the radar sweeping green circles across the dark water.

She had married Finn at twenty-two, which sounded young now and had felt young then too, and she had stayed married to him for twenty-six years before she packed a duffel bag and a coffee mug and walked out of a house in the rain without slamming a single door. There had been no affair, no cruelty, nothing anyone could point at in a divorce filing. She had just woken up one morning in her forty-eighth year and realized she could not remember the last time she had wanted anything, and that frightened her more than the thought of leaving ever could.

Finn had taken it well, which somehow made it worse. He shook her hand at the end, actually shook it, as if concluding a business deal, and said take care of yourself, Alana, and she had driven to the coast and signed on with a towing company out of the harbor and never looked back, except of course she looked back constantly, every day, in the small ways nobody notices.

The boat helped. There was something about a tug, about the way a thousand tons of steel answer only to patience, that made the rest of her life make a kind of sense. You could not rush a barge through a channel any more than you could rush grief, and so she never rushed anything again, and the years went by the way water goes by a hull, smooth and gray and impossible to hold.

Then in September a letter came to her berth forwarding address, in handwriting she would have known anywhere, and it said, class reunion, forty-five years, my place on the lake, and underneath it said, I could use a caretaker for the off season if you're still inclined toward quiet work, no pressure, Finn.

She read it four times and then she said yes.

Now she came up the gravel road on a Friday afternoon in October with her bags in the cab of a rented pickup, and the lake lay flat and gray between the bare maples, and the cottage sat where it had always sat, weatherboard siding gone silver, the dock boards bleached pale, a thin thread of woodsmoke standing straight up from the chimney into still air.

Finn was on the porch. He was sixty-six now and he had gotten narrower, the way old men do, and there were reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up over forearms that had gone knotted and brown. He did not say anything when she got out of the truck. He just stood there with one hand resting on the rail, watching her come up the steps the way you watch a boat come in.

He held out a key on a loop of fishing line.

"Caretaker," he said, when she took it. "That's you now. Officially."

"Officially," Alana said, and the key was warm from his pocket and she closed her hand around it before she could think about why that mattered.

"You look good," he said. "Salt air agrees with you."

"It agrees with nobody. You just get used to smelling like it." She looked past him through the window, at the wood stove and the old green couch and the map of the lake that still hung crooked over the mantel. "You kept the map."

"Never could get it straight. You were the only one who could ever hang it straight, so it's been crooked for fifteen years." He smiled, and his teeth were mostly his own still, and something in her chest turned over like an engine catching. "Barn's a mile down the road. Starts at seven. Hugo's bringing a guitar and Aimee's bringing Hugo, which is the same thing really."

"I remember them," Alana said. "I remember everyone, that's the problem."

She went inside and unpacked, and the cottage smelled like cedar and cold ash, and she stood a while at the kitchen window looking at the water, and the water looked back, gray and patient, the way it always had. There was a feeling she got near this lake, had gotten even as a young woman, that the water was paying attention. She had never said that out loud to anyone, not even Finn, though she suspected he knew.

At seven she walked down the gravel road to the barn, because it was easier than driving a quarter mile and admitting it. The barn had been converted years back, string bulbs strung between the rafters, propane heaters ticking away in the corners, folding tables with paper plates and a cooler situation that could only be described as ambitious. Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty people were in there, all of them sixty-some years old, all of them doing the thing where you squint at a name tag and shout with delight anyway.

"Alana Hobbs," Hugo said, before she was even through the door, guitar already slung on, gray hair in a ponytail, sixty-three years old and somehow the same kid who had taught her three chords in a dorm lounge. He hugged her hard. "Forty-five years, woman. You look like you could still run a tug up a river."

"That's because I still do, most weeks."

"Captain now, right? Finn said captain!"

"Captain," she admitted.

Aimee came over with two cups of punch and handed her one, and Aimee was sixty-three now and laughed the same way she had at thirty, with her whole face. "I always liked you," Aimee said. "I don't know why we never hung out. We were never not friends, we just never started."

"Life," Alana said, and they clinked cups.

The band, meaning Hugo and a dentist on bass and a retired mail carrier on a snare drum, played songs from nineteen sixty-something, and people danced the way people that age dance, carefully and with great joy, and the propane heaters ticked and the string bulbs swayed, and Alana stood near the wall with her punch and felt the old ache settle into her the way it always did at these things.

It was the ache of being the one who left. That was the shape of it. Everyone in this barn had a story about the years she had missed, weddings she hadn't attended, kids grown and gone, and they told these stories kindly, generously, without a trace of blame, and somehow the kindness was the worst part, because it confirmed what she had always suspected, that her leaving had cost her more than it had cost anyone else.

And through all of it, Finn's gaze kept finding her.

She would be laughing at something Aimee said and she would feel it, across the room, and look up, and there he would be by the coolers with a beer he wasn't drinking, looking at her, and when their eyes met he would not look away quickly the way polite people do. He would hold it a beat, nod a little, and go back to his conversation. Every time. Four times, five, she lost count. It was not the look of a man being polite at a reunion. It was the look of a man who had put her at the center of the room the moment she walked in and was simply checking, over and over, that she was still there.

Around nine she stepped outside for air, because the barn had gotten warm and loud, and the cold off the lake hit her face like a hand. The stars were out over the black water, hard and close, and the gravel crunched behind her and she knew before she turned who it would be.

Finn came and stood beside her with his hands in his pockets, and for a while neither of them said anything, and the lake made its small sound against the shore.

"You didn't have to offer me the job," she said finally.

"No," he agreed. "I didn't."

"Fifteen years, Finn. You could have just written a letter."

"I did write a letter. It took me fifteen years to write four sentences." He turned to look at her, glasses still up on his forehead, and his eyes in the dark were the same eyes, that was the terrible thing, they were exactly the same eyes. "There's something I need to tell you about this lake, Alana. It's not nothing, and it's not a metaphor, and I'd rather you hear it from me before you hear it from the water."

Alana looked out at the gray-black surface, flat and still and attentive, and felt the old feeling rise in her, the one that said the lake was listening.

"All right," she said. "Tell me."

But before he could, the door of the barn opened behind them and somebody yelled that the dentist wanted to do Sweet Caroline and needed bodies singing along, and Finn closed his mouth and said, "Inside, then. It'll keep. It's waited eight years, it can wait two more hours."

So it kept. Alana went back in and Aimee handed her another cup of punch and Hugo launched into something with a chorus everybody knew, and the dentist did indeed sing Sweet Caroline into a microphone that squealed, and people shouted the ba ba ba parts with real commitment. Around ten somebody's wife started the karaoke portion of the evening, which was just the same three guys taking turns, and the mail carrier did a version of Satisfaction that Alana thought was honestly not bad. Then Hugo looked right at her from the stage and said, "Captain. Three chords. You know the one."

"I know about four words of it," she called back.

"That's all anybody knows," he said, and played it, and she went up and sang the four words and mumbled the rest, and people clapped, and Hugo leaned over while still strumming and said quietly, "He hasn't taken his eyes off you all night, you know. Whatever's going on there, I hope it's good. You both earned a good thing." Then louder, into the mic, "Give it up for Alana, ladies and gentlemen."

At eleven the food came out, chili somebody had made in a crock pot the size of a battleship boiler, and cornbread, and Alana ate two bowls standing up at the folding tables and talked to a woman named Carol about grandchildren and diesel engines, because it turned out Carol's husband had worked the docks too. By midnight the party was folding itself up, people stacking paper plates and rolling coolers out to trunks, headlights swinging around the gravel lot, and Aimee hugged her and said, "Next time we start the friendship, no more waiting forty years," and Hugo shook her hand like it was a deal being signed.

The walk back to the cottage was a mile of gravel road under a cold bright sky. Alana had the rented pickup but it seemed wrong to drive a mile, and she wanted the air, so she left it in the lot and walked, and the maples stood bare and gray along both sides, and behind her the barn light died as the last person pulled the string. Halfway along she heard footsteps and did not turn around, because she knew the walk of them, she had known that walk at twenty-two and she knew it now.

"You could have taken the truck," she said.

"I like the walk," Finn said, falling in beside her. "I've walked it a lot this year. Mostly alone."

They walked the rest of the way without talking much, and that was fine, because some silences with some people you don't have to fill. The cottage came out of the dark the way it always did, silver weatherboard and the bleached dock boards running out into the black water, and Finn got the porch light on and they went down the steps to the dock and sat, side by side, feet hanging over the water, the way they had sat a thousand evenings when they were married and did not know it was only a thousand.

"Tell me," she said.

He took his glasses off his forehead and folded them and held them in his hand, and looked out at the lake, and took his time about it, which was fair, because she could see him taking his time.

"Eight winters ago I stayed up here the whole season," he said. "I came up to check on the property in February and the ice had gone black in the middle, in a perfect circle, like something had breathed on it."

"Go on."

"I went out on the dock at night. I don't know why. Nobody sane goes out on a dock in February. And it spoke to me. Not in words. It's never in words, that's what I'd want you to understand, it doesn't use your language, it uses your loneliness. It found the loneliest part of me and it talked in that." He turned the glasses over in his hands. "And I listened. I've been listening for eight years now, Alana. It's hard to say where the listening stopped and the rest started."

"The rest being what."

"Being what I am now." He said it evenly, as if reporting the weather. "I don't get cold. I don't get sick. I dream, but all my dreams are of one place. I eat, but less every year. And I wanted, I wanted very badly, to be the one who hired you this fall. The letter took fifteen years because I had to be sure I was offering you a job and not bait." His voice cracked a little on the word bait. "I still don't fully know which it was. That's what I have to tell you before anything else happens between us. The