Ashes
Leah met me in the drive with her arms already open, which was worse than I had planned for.
She was wearing her father's canvas work coat over a Kalamazoo Wings sweatshirt, and the coat came to her knees, and below it the white edge of her knee brace showed over the top of her boot. She held on longer than anyone but her brother has held me in a year. She smelled of dish soap and woodsmoke and the inside of a house that has been shut since July.
"You came," she said into my shoulder. "He said you would. I said we'll see."
"I said I would."
"You did. You're the only person I know who does what she says, and I'm still deciding how I feel about it." She held me off by the arms and looked. "You look terrible. How's your mom?"
"Sleeping."
I had left Birchwood at one, after a night in a vinyl chair during which the clocks went back. At two Marisol had come in with the step stool and turned the wall clock back an hour with her thumb, so that the night had two ones in it. It is the kind of thing I would flag in a log. In the parking lot, with the engine running, I had looked up the sunset for the day, and it was 5:22.
I had never been inside the cottage. I had seen it once from across the ice and once from the landing, at distances that flatter a house, and in nine years Adam had asked me up perhaps twenty times, and each time I had given him four words, until the asking had turned into a courtesy we both kept up. It was smaller than the claim photographs had led me to picture, which is true of most things that have lived in a file. Brown-stained shakes, a green roof gone to moss on the north pitch, a screened porch sagging at the near corner. Behind it the ground fell away to the water, and the boathouse sat at the bottom with its doors open and a work light burning inside.
I had worn the charcoal coat. It was forty-one degrees and it is the warmest thing I own, and I had also wanted to see whether he would look at it.
He came up from the boathouse with sawdust to the elbows and stopped at the edge of the gravel, and he looked at it. He looked from the collar to the hem and back up to the hood, without hurry, the way he looks at a joint. Then he said, "Marsh," and took my bag out of my hand, and kissed the side of my head. He smelled of cedar and the truck. On Friday morning at the kitchen door I had kissed him goodbye, knowing what I knew, and I had done it well. Today's was easier. I put that in the file.
"Oh, look at you two," Leah said, and meant it.
In my trade the first statement sets the scope. Whatever a claimant volunteers in the first ten minutes is what the file is about for the rest of its life, and the adjuster who lets him volunteer it has done most of the work. I had been carrying that around since Thursday morning like a coin in a pocket. He knew who I was. I knew he knew. Neither of us had said so, and I had decided that whoever spoke first would be the one who had lost.
We spent the afternoon on Richard Voss's things. There were contractor bags and a box for the church sale, and a box marked ADAM IF HE WANTS that Adam carried to the truck without opening. The kitchen calendar was from a building-supply outfit in Cadillac and still said July, with a red X through the ninth and nothing after. A Lions schedule hung on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a walleye. Leah talked the whole time, about the closing, the inspector's screwdriver, the buyers' lawyer, her ex-husband's lawyer, and I was grateful for every word, because it meant I only had to be somewhere near the conversation.
Around four she took me down to see the sill. It was the first time I had been in the boathouse with the doors open in daylight, and I looked at the sill because I had been told to. New joists, pale as bread, had been sistered along the old ones, and the old sill plate above them had gone black and would come away under a thumbnail in a soft brown paste, which is what forty years of lake air does to untreated pine. A screwdriver had been the honest way to find out. Adam's work was plumb and tight and would go into the letter under someone else's name.
The lift stood empty over its slip. The bunk carpet on the rails had gone green. I looked at it, and then I looked at the ceiling.
The rowboat was tied at the end of the dock. It was a twelve-foot aluminum skiff, painted a green that had faded to something you'd find in a pickle jar, with two oars laid across the thwarts and a cushion on the stern seat that had lost its stuffing in one corner. Adam had brought it around from the boathouse. I stood on the dock in the coat and read it as I read anything that floats, and found the oarlocks worn bright and two old dents on the starboard side, and on the bow thwart, screwed into the front of it, a brass cup hook set at an angle and worn shiny on the inside of its curve, where something had hung and swung for years.
Nothing hung there.
I looked at the hook until I had finished looking at it. I didn't say anything about it, and neither did anyone else.
From the end of the dock the lake ran north and south in front of me, gray and wrinkled, with a wind out of the north that found the gap between my collar and my hood. The east shore was most of a mile off. I could see the line of the trees and the roofs, and a little south of where the landing would be, a white house with green trim, darker than I remembered. The second-floor windows faced the water. The window on the second floor, left, was mine.
We were meant to be on the water at four. At five past four Leah's phone went in her coat, and it was the buyers' lawyer about the joist letter, and she walked the gravel above the boathouse with a finger in her other ear for most of an hour, saying in writing and that is not what the inspector said. Adam didn't go up to her. He found things to do with a coil of line, and once he looked at the sky and then went back to the line. I noticed that he didn't hurry her, and that I didn't either.
"It's twenty after five," Leah said behind me, with the phone still in her hand. "I said four. I'm not doing this twice, and I'm not getting in that thing with this knee. You two go. He was Dad's anyway, he should be the one." She had the big rubber-handled flashlight from her minivan and she held it up like a torch. "Take this."
"We'll be back before dark," Adam said. "Sunset's five twenty-two."
"That's in two minutes."
"We'll be back by six."
"Take the flashlight, Adam."
"You keep it. Flash us in."
She did the thing with her mouth that means she'll give him this one. He handed me down into the stern. The box was already under the seat, a plastic container the color of a manila folder with a screw lid and a label I turned face down against my knee. Adam pushed us off with an oar and sat, and took the oars, and we went out backward from the dock with the wind on the side of my face.
He rowed with his back to where we were going. Rowers do, and the good ones check over a shoulder every twenty strokes to see what they're aiming at. He never turned his head. He watched me, and by the sixth or seventh stroke it was plain that he did not need to look, because he was not steering. He knew the water. He was steering by the oarlocks and the wind and the last of the light in my face.
"Leah says off the point," I said.
"Dad fished the drop-off. Past the point."
"Is it far?"
"Not far."
The point was a low spit of cedars south of the cottage. We passed it. The cottage went small behind him, and its lit kitchen window and the yellow oval of Leah's flashlight on the dock. The wind had teeth in it now, and the light had begun to leave the water before it left the sky. The far shore lost its trees first, then its edge. The white house held on longest, a pale square with a paler square in it.
I had my knees together and my heels against the ribs of the boat. The gunwales under my hands were aluminum and forty-one degrees, and I held them until I could feel each rivet as a separate thing. I counted his strokes. The count wasn't for anything.
Wind, north, ten to twelve. Air temperature, forty-one. Water, forty-eight or nine, by the look of it. Visibility falling. A boat under oars in this state is required to have a white light ready to show between sunset and sunrise, and a flashlight satisfies it. Ready is the word in the statute. I have cited it in more than one denial letter.
"Where's the light?" I said.
I would like to say the question came out of me with difficulty. It did not. I asked it the way I would ask a contractor where the permit was.
"Don't need one," Adam said. "I know this lake."
He didn't stop rowing. His right hand came off the oar on the back stroke and went to the pocket of his jacket, and rested on something hard and narrow, the length of a man's palm, and went back to the oar. My phone was in my coat with its light, which is a good one. My hand was on it. My hand stayed where it was.
It was 5:41 by my watch.
At the drop-off he shipped the oars and let the boat come round. The wind put us sideways to the waves and the skiff rocked and settled. There was still a paleness overhead, but the lake had gone the color of a wet slate roof, and all the edges I use to measure a distance were gone. Across the water Leah's flashlight went on and off twice, a small hopeful bar of white.
Adam took the box out from under the seat and held it out to me across the thwart.
"You do it."
"It's yours to do."
"I've done what I can do." He said it flatly, to the box.
I turned the label up. RICHARD A. VOSS. His signature was the first thing I ever knew about him, on the bottom of a claim form, a stiff upright hand that pressed hard enough to emboss the sheet below. I knew it for a month before I knew his son's voice. I have priced the bow that signature swore to. I unscrewed the lid.
It is not dust. It is mostly bone, ground, gray with white grit in it, and heavier than you expect, and when I tipped the first of it over the side the north wind took half and gave it back to me across my sleeve and my knee. I stayed where I was. I did it again, lower, with the mouth of the box nearly to the water, and it went in, and floated, and spread in a slow gray cloud that turned as the water turned, and then began to go down. I emptied the box. I set the lid on the seat beside me. A little of him was on my cuff, and I left it.
Across the lake Leah's flashlight went on and stayed on.
Adam had not moved. His hands hung between his knees and he was looking at me, and he went on looking a long time. I could not read his face in that light. Behind him, past his shoulder, the bow rode up and down in the chop and the brass hook I couldn't see was there.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"Row."
He rowed. He took us back on a slightly different line from the one we'd come out on, and the flashlight on the dock grew from a coin to a plate, and when we were about fifty yards off, Leah swung it out over the water and found us. It walked up the bow, along the oars, and across my face. I put my hand up. It went on shining into my eyes for a full second past what was polite, and Leah called out, cheerfully, "There you are!" and then it dropped to the boards.
"Ten more minutes and I'd have called the county," she said, as we came in. Adam caught the dock and tied us off and reached down for my elbow, and I took my elbow away and got out on my own.
The kitchen was warm. Leah made goulash from what the cupboards had, which was macaroni, a can of stewed tomatoes I declined to date, and a pound of ground beef from her cooler. She put a pot on the table and went back for bread. Before dinner I had gone out to the Subaru in the dark, alone, and stood at the open hatch with the light of my phone on and lifted the floor panel and slid one photograph out of the green file and put it in the inside pocket of my coat. I had not decided anything. The panel was up. That's all I'll say for it.
At the table, while Leah's back was to us and she was hunting for a knife in the drawer, I took the photograph out and laid it beside his plate, face up, squared to the edge, the way I set a photograph in front of an insured. It was a four-by-six color print with an orange date in the bottom corner. A pontoon bow lay on gravel in a repair yard in Cadillac with the toon peeled back like the lid of a tin. Along the top of the frame was a strip of registration sticker, and on the sticker, in black block letters, VOSS.
He looked at it. His face did what a carpenter's face does when a client hands him a picture of what she wants. It took a measurement.
"God," Leah said, coming back. She had the bread in one hand and the knife in the other. "Is that Dad's old pontoon?"
"Found it in the boathouse," I said.
"Look at that bow. He never told me how he did that." She put the bread down. "Where in the boathouse? I went through everything."
"Back of a shelf. In an envelope."
"Huh." She was already turning to the pot. "Well, I'm not keeping it."
Adam folded the photograph once, along the horizon of the gravel, and again, and put it into the pocket of his shirt and buttoned the flap. Then he picked up his fork. He ate everything on his plate and asked Leah for more. I had expected a number of things from him at that table. I had not expected second helpings.
I had put a thing on the table and he had put it in his pocket.
Leah left at half past nine for a friend's place in Aldine. She didn't want the cottage's cold, and she said she'd be back at eight with the inspector and a bag of donuts, and she said, at the door, with her keys in her fist, "Don't wash up. I'll do it." Then she hugged me again and said in my ear, "You're good for him. You know that? He talks about you like he's still surprised." When her taillights went up the drive I stood in the kitchen with my coat still on.
We washed up. He dried, I washed, which is the arrangement. We did it in silence. The radio was in the truck and neither of us went for it.
Leah had made up the back bedroom for us, the one with the slanted ceiling, a Singer under a flowered cover on the dresser, and a double bed with a chenille spread. The window looked east across the lake. I didn't go to it. I undressed in the dark and got in on the wall side, and after a while the floor took his weight in the hall and then in the room, and the springs took it, and he lay on his back a foot away from me.
He didn't put his hand on my hip.
The furnace was doing something in the wall that sounded like a man clearing his throat. I lay on my side facing the plaster. It was a little before eleven, and my phone was in my coat on the chair.
"You didn't want to be on the water without a light," he said. He said it to the ceiling.
I didn't answer. I breathed in through my nose, long and even, as if asleep. He lay there and let me.