I closed my eyes. We were silent, as if waiting through that lull, no rain or wind, as if gravity had lapsed.
“I wanted to see you grow up,” he said. “Your mother was good with you guys. She treated you really well. I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to.”
His voice was different, softer, and he spoke quickly now. “You know, I was there to deliver you. I’ll never forget. You were born at home, but you had the umbilical cord around your neck. I had to blow into your mouth and press your chest until you started breathing. When I held you, you lay across my hands. I knew we’d be the closest. I always felt there was something special because of how I held you when you started breathing.”
The storm was building, striking at the windows. The line gasped with static. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the slow, strange working of his hands again, the fishing line invisible in the dark and against the light.
“You’re not going to come see me, are you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him too quickly, instantly wishing I’d taken the time to consider. “Not right now.”
“I know. What you’re doing is right. I’m glad you’re strong. I’ve ruined my life, and you should … you should focus on yours. But you’ll be okay?”
“Okay?” I repeated.
“Are you sure you can deal with it?”
I didn’t speak, and as we listened to the breaking static, I thought of what I could tell him, what I could express that wasn’t strength.
“Will you be okay?” he asked.
“It’s … it’s your choice. I can’t ask you not to.”
“You can deal with it?”
“Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
“It’s what’s best,” he said.
Sleet pattered across the panels, and I shivered, realizing how cold I was.
“When I’m dead,” he told me, “you can contact my family. My mother’s name is Yvonne. I’m sure she’s still alive. I’d know if she was dead.” He was quiet a long time. “She lives in a place called Matane, in Quebec.”
“Matane,” I repeated.
“Promise me you won’t try to find her while I’m still alive.”
“I promise.”
“If you contact her, tell her you’re Edwin’s son.”
“Edwin?”
“That’s what they called me. She’s the one I miss. I wish I could see her one more time. I lied to her a lot, and then I stopped writing. I used to send her postcards saying I was in Mexico or on my way to Alaska. One time, when I was logging, I saw a guy get crushed under a tree. He cried and called for his mother. I didn’t understand.”
Neither of us spoke, and I tried to think of what I could say, how I could talk to him differently, in a way that would change all this.
“There was a time,” he said, “when I could’ve gone back, when you guys were little. But it’s too late now. How would I explain everything? I have nothing to show.”
I stared through the dirty glass of the phone booth, at the blur of headlights above the road. Something fell in the static behind his voice.
“Listen, I should go,” he said. “It’s late. You should get some sleep.”
He said good-bye and hung up before I could speak.
I got in my truck and pulled onto the road, taking my time going up the mountain as rain gusted past the headlights. My mind was silent. I turned into my driveway and parked and went inside to my apartment.
I sat and touched my face to my hands, my elbows to my knees, and breathed.
EPILOGUE
After college classes let out in May, I drove to Virginia to work construction and thaw myself in the sun. It was five months after his death, and I was house-sitting for a friend. One evening I visited my mother where she lived near the Appalachians. Large, thick-bodied moths battered the windows with powdered wings, startling our reflections as we sat at the kitchen table after dinner. The sweltering dark came through the screen door—crickets chirping, the faint, distant echolalia of night birds.
“I want to talk about André,” I told her.
“I don’t think about him anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t do any good.”
“I want to hear how you saw him—what you remember.”
Her eyes were pale blue, the skin around their edges slightly pinched as she scrutinized her hands, strong and tanned from garden work. She rubbed one along her arm. She’d never been a storyteller, reticent in that Scottish way, and only through casual disclosures had I come to understand her: her anger at the US during the Vietnam War, the time she’d seen Jimi Hendrix play in a college basement before he was famous, or the Guatemalan boyfriend she’d had in DC in the sixties, a man from a political family who’d wanted her to move to his country. She’d shown little need to speak of her past, so if I wanted to know something, I had to insist.
She began to tell me the usual things: that my father knew how to live off the land, offering her the life she longed for. They traveled and fished, their freedoms mirroring, his from jail, hers from her Protestant upbringing. But when he got involved with the men from his past, she became afraid. He left with them, and she didn’t want to know what he was doing. She felt she could hardly step outside their cabin. She’d go to the door and the horizon would fall away, the sky empty
