Northwest Angle

“Pull up that anchor!”

She did as he told her, but her eyes seldom left the far tip of the island where the kids had gone. She was terrified, her throat closed so tightly she could barely swallow. Which didn’t matter because her mouth was suddenly and absolutely parched. Without thinking, she prayed as she hauled in the anchor line, prayed desperately. Mal quickly finished drawing in the bow line and jumped to the control station in the main room. Rose joined him there. He kicked the two outboards into action and started the houseboat toward the shoreline that lay in the shadow of the island’s ridge. The craft was ungainly on the water. It moved at a crawl across the lake surface, which had turned black with the shadow of what was looming.

Then Rose saw them. Stephen and Anne. They stood on the beach across the little bay, dressed only in their swimsuits, Stephen holding the nylon bag he’d taken for the blueberries they would pick. Rose knew they could see what was coming and could see that the houseboat was leaving them. She raced from the cabin onto the bow platform and stood at the rail and tried to call out to them, to explain and to warn them to seek their own shelter. But the monster wind was suddenly on her, all around her and over her, and her words were lost in the howling.

She was thrown against the railing. The force knocked the breath out of her and she fell. For a minute, she was stunned and felt only the great heave of the decking beneath her.

When she could think, she realized they were in the lee of the island, which had been Mal’s intent. The ridge offered modest protection. Even though the wind was still fierce, she could now stand. She felt the pontoons scrape rock. Mal left the control station, and a moment later, Rose saw him at the stern, tossing the anchor. Then he ran through the houseboat and burst through the door to the forward deck, where she stood. Without a word, he grabbed the bow line and leaped into the shallow water. The houseboat had begun to swing sideways in the wind, moving away from the island. As Rose watched, the anchor line started to play out quickly. Mal splashed ashore and secured the bow rope to the horizontal trunk of a fallen tree. He dashed to the stern line, lifted the anchor, and dropped it between two rocks that jutted from the shore. Just as he finished, the lines played out fully and snapped taut. Mal leaped into the waves, waded to the steps of the swim platform located aft, and climbed aboard. He stumbled into the cabin, where Rose met him.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine.” She looked toward the two rope lines pulled stiff and vibrating from the pressure. “Will they hold?”

“God, I hope so.”

She turned to the windows that looked north toward the other end of the island. The little bay was a rage of tall whitecaps, and the beach where Anne and Stephen had stood was flooded from the surge.

“Lord,” she prayed aloud, “let them be all right.”

The houseboat rocked and the lines jerked as if tied to wild bulls, but for the moment they held. Mal pulled out life jackets, and they put them on and huddled together in the cabin. Rain fell in sheets so thick that everything across the bay became obscured. Hail beat on the roof in a great din. Pines along the crest of the island’s ridge bent as easily as prairie grass and began to snap. Soon their trunks littered the slope below.

After nearly an hour of battering, the wind finally won. The stern anchor line broke and the bow line followed. The houseboat began to drift rapidly into the bay.

“What now?” Rose said.

“Get to shore,” Mal told her and pushed her toward the cabin door.

“But the boat—”

“Forget the boat, Rose! Get moving!”

They went out onto the bow platform. Twenty yards of angry water separated them from the shore, and the distance was rapidly increasing. Waves swept over the decking under their feet and rain peppered them hard as pebbles.

Inexplicably Mal stripped himself of his life jacket. “Take my hand!” he cried.

She did and they hit the water together. She was surprised to find that her feet touched the rocky lake bottom, but they didn’t stay there long. The next wave lifted her and threatened to carry her out. Mal gripped her hand. Freed from the buoyancy of his own vest, he was able to hold himself against the waves, and he pulled her with him as he slogged to shore. They grabbed on to the pair of rocks where the stern anchor still sat wedged, and they watched the houseboat spin into the bay. A limb the size and thickness of an elephant’s leg flew from the island and crashed through the window next to the helm station. In the next instant, with a sinking heart, Rose saw the houseboat suddenly rise up in the grip of the storm. The windward pontoon cleared the water, and the boat began to flip.

Then a miracle happened. Or what, afterward, Rose always thought of as a miracle. As quickly as it had come, the wind died. With a great splash, the lifted pontoon fell back onto the water, and the houseboat continued a placid drift into the lake.

In the quiet that followed, Mal said, “Rose, I’m hurt.”

“Where?”

“My ankle. I turned it when we came in.”

“Let me see.”

She helped him lift his leg from the water. He wore shorts, and his feet, like hers, were bare. She saw the swelling immediately.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Like hell. But that’s not important. You need to get the boat, and we need to find the kids.”

She looked toward the open water. The houseboat was already a hundred yards distant and drifting farther as she watched.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“I’m counting on it.” He managed a brief smile.

She hated to leave him but knew he was right. She kissed him once, then began to swim.

FOUR

It had been a hard year and she’d needed this vacation. She’d been content to let her father and Mal control where they were and where they were going. Lake of the Woods? Fine. One of the largest lakes in North America? No problem. In the middle of fucking nowhere? Terrific. No, I don’t want to know anything about the charts or the lake channels or the islands more numerous than the stars. I just want to relax.

Until now, Jenny thought, staring at the lumps of wilderness she could see from the rocky beach where she stood. Now she wished she’d listened and taken note.

Great journalist I am, she thought bitterly. All that useful information, in one ear and out the other.

She had no idea where she was on that vast lake. No idea which direction she’d been going with her father or from which direction they’d come. She’d been too deep in her own goddamn worries to let go and be a real part of the gathering.

And now she was lost. And her father was out there somewhere. Lost, too?

She almost thought, Lost forever? but wouldn’t let herself go there. They weren’t lost, none of them. Not her father or Anne or Stephen or Rose or Mal. They were somewhere out there, safe.

“But that’s exactly what you thought about Mom, and she’s dead.”

She said this out loud, startled at the sound of her voice in all that numbed stillness. The effect was devastating. Her legs went weak, and she sat down on the little beach and didn’t feel at all the sharpness of the stones beneath her. She stared dumbly at the water, which was calm now and choked with debris.

Yeah, she’d hoped along with everyone else—believed along with everyone else— that after her mother disappeared she would be found and she would be safe. But it hadn’t been that way. All their hoping, all their praying, all their believing had been in vain. From almost the moment she’d vanished, her mother had been dead.