When she opens her eyes again, it’s still dark, but the first bit of dawnlight is creeping in. She checks her phone. 6:13 a.m. (613, 46—unhappy.) She rises, rolls up her bed, stores it away in the cupboard. Folds up her diagram and inserts it in her pack along with her Newman. No sound from upstairs. She steps onto the bottom slat of the ladder and listens. Nothing. (Creak of mill shaft.) She gingerly mounts two more slats and stretches to raise her eyes above the level of the upper floor. Nothing. The bed might be empty, but she can’t be sure from this angle. Maybe he’s in a hidden room, hanging upside down from a rafter.
She quietly descends, pulls on her boots, shrugs on her pack. Standing by the door, she scans the achingly beautiful space. She has left nothing behind. She steps out, latches the door, descends the stone steps. Circles around to the beach. There’s an orange glow in the east. The sky is enormous, tessellated across its entire expanse with gray and silver clouds, breaking up. It’s that time of dawn when the light makes everything shimmer, as though you can see individual water molecules jostling in the saturated air.
No fucking way is she going to remain within sight of those upper-floor windows. She walks west along the beach for half a mile, until the curve of the shore and some intervening bushes whose Linnaean names the old man surely knows put the mill out of sight. She steps across seaweed and driftwood onto the ice and walks straight out toward the open water.
Long ago in Astoria at bedtime when Mette wanted to read Wishner to her mother but her mother annoyingly wasn’t in the mood, she (her mother) would annoyingly say that it was her turn, and she would describe some interminable lucid dream she’d had when she was a girl. Mette mostly tuned her out, but there was a set of recurring dreams about an island far in the north that were vivid enough, maybe “magical,” that they stuck in Mette’s head. There was a castle on the island, and a mage, and snow and sleds and dogs. In one of the dreams her mother rode with the mage down to the edge of the island and continued out across the frozen sea. At the edge of the ice she climbed out of the sled and looked out over the water, where a pod of whales was passing. One of the whales nudged up against the ice and her mother hugged it. That’s the kind of romantic fluff her mother liked. It’s deflating to think that she resolutely left her life behind and crossed the United States and then the Atlantic Ocean and somehow ended up in one of her mother’s dreams.
She stands at the edge of the ice. If this piece under her cracked off, it would tilt and slide her in, like a burial at sea. If she couldn’t climb back up, her decision would be made for her. She’d get colder and sleepier and happier, then she’d turn on her back and look up at the morning sky and her backpack would pull her under, trapping her arms, holding her against the bottom. Wishner and Newman would help. Pumpkinseed excavated a simple burrow and failed to reappear from it in the spring.
But the ice doesn’t crack. And even though she’s some seventy yards from shore, the water looks to be only about five feet deep. Of course she could just continue out another hundred or two hundred yards, getting colder, sleepier, happier, etc. Call to the old man, “Come on in, the water’s fine!”
All her life she’s assumed her personality came entirely from her father. But she recognizes something of herself in the old man. She and he share what one might call mental rigor. Or maybe one might call it a cold cast of mind. It occurs to Mette for the first time to have some sympathy for her mother, who has none of that coldness. It must be tough to be sandwiched between a father and a daughter both of whom are unfathomable.
The clouds have continued to break up and the light has strengthened so that the stars are now invisible and the clear parts of the sky are turning a bluish white. She looks across the bright mirror-plane of water, the moiré-like pattern of grays and mauves and pinks on the liquid surface fractally receding toward the molten horizon. As a programmer of visual effects for computer games, she is often struck by the beautifully designed and rendered detail of the world. She stands there for fifteen minutes, her mind more or less a blank, or maybe crammed so full of half-formed thoughts jostling each other that the cumulative result is white noise. Maybe this is her life passing in front of her eyes.
She stands some more.
In Oops!, this would be the moment when two options would appear on the screen, waiting for a mouse-click: (Jump In) (Don’t Jump In)
She stands some more.
She doesn’t jump in.
She turns around. She had an inkling last night, when she regretted that she would never finish Newman. Goddamnit, the old man’s idea about having a project. She walks back toward the shore. She has a feeling, though, that the real decision happened earlier, sometime during the bus or the plane rides. She gave up the idea without
