will be difficult for me. Sabby notices how slowly we drift through the water. Her satiny white body is muscle-bound, alert, but she is in no rush. She is as old as I am. And there is no hurry left in either of us.
She lies down, leans against the side of the boat, and shuts her eyes.
For a moment we rest on a glassy impossibility. The air is still. The water is flat except at the very edge where imperceptible waves give in, repeating a hushed lullaby for the slumbering sea. The birds on the cliff are done with their dawn songs. The gulls preen themselves on the jetty and stand looking to the north. There are no other boats this morning. Once there were many fishermen but now the beach is for weekends, not work. The water drips from my oar in three places. The sea receives the drops in a dignified series of ripples. I see the sand and rocks of the beach beneath us steeped a yellow-green at high tide.
We move out in rhythmic thrusts. My companion is awakened after her short drowse on the cross thwart. She climbs over my seat. Rising up, she places her front paws on the transom and looks back at the shore as I row out onto the water.
I like to get out past the sandbar, even if my beloved ghost’s owner doesn’t like it. Fish in the shallows don’t bite for me, it seems. The fish are in colder water beyond the sandbar so we’re three-quarters of a mile offshore and, if I had it, it’d be time to put the anchor down.
It takes me so long to lift the oars out of the oarlocks and stow those smooth pieces of wood. But I manage it the way I like. I slide them back behind me, get the handles crossed down under the back seat and the blades vertical along the gunnels.
A cormorant eases by and sits on a boulder which rises out of the water to the east. Our eyes follow its journey, but the bird is nothing uncommon. We always see cormorants when we’re fishing in the morning.
If I am fishing, sometimes my past comes to me. It comes and strokes my hair like a mother. And I rest wearily against it as events occur again. I remember others laughing and my jokes that would last for days. I remember the ocean water in all her costumes and moods. I remember the oceangoing charters and an Atlantic full of fish. Now that is all so close to nothing. The fishing line is wrapped a hundred times around a piece of driftwood. I can barely tie a hook to the line and have nothing for bait but I am fishing still. I drop the hook easily over the side of the boat. It is held plumb with a tiny lead weight.
The sky is colored an early-morning steel. And the blue-gray waters meet it in every direction. “Mi fantasma querida. My beloved ghost.” She comes closer and I stroke her strong back, reciting my poem for her:
Mi fantasma querida, que ayer es los
ojos del Dios. Mi fantasma
querida, que mañanas se entienden para ser
dejadas excesivas y a nada más.
Mi fantasma querida, convengo
con el viento cuando dice, “Cambio.”
Y el cambio siguiente, el viento me
dice que, se duren.
She lies down with her paws outstretched. Her head rests next to me on the wooden seat. And she says nothing. The line is heavy with a catch. But it is likely a sand shark, so heavy in these small waters. I release the driftwood spool into the water and forget fishing. I hold the edge of the seat and lean back under the morning sky, to see its everything once more so fully, and feel the waves rocking the small boat, pushing us. We are tethered to the water by no anchor rope. And the waves push us east well beyond what would have been its limit.
This pain comes and goes. But it is too much. I want to lie down now.
The dog helps me get onto the floor of the boat. I am soaked by the water in the hull, but it is a familiar thing, and I cannot doubt its pleasure.
“Mi fantasma querida, usted debe saber, yo está muriendo.”
Her eyes see into me and say, “Shhhhh. It will be okay.”
I wonder. “Le creo. ¿Pero mi fantasma querida, dónde voy a ir? ¿Cómo yo deje para ir?”
She sits up and looks straight into the splitting place between the ocean and the sky. It seems, with the colors of the dawn, that no such place exists. But she looks straight into it and does not balk. She is saying, “That is where you are going. And do not be afraid.”
I hold her satin body next to mine and wonder who will find us. An early-morning beach walker, maybe. A man drinking coffee up on the cliffs. They will say, Why is that old man’s boat drifting away past the sandbar? Why is the dog there? Where is the man? What a strange picture postcard for our memories. And I will be lying here on the floor of the boat where no one will be able to see me. And it will be a somber picture from the beach—boat, three-quarters of a mile offshore, with a huge white dog wearing its loyalty and pride. And so it will be against a steely ocean that they will find me. And so it will be with a neighbor’s dog that they will find me in the bottom of The Reprieve.
Mi Fantasma Querida looks into the impossibility. She looks straight into the invisible morning horizon and escorts me. The boat drifts further, my last grip around her loosens, but she does not quiver.
HOLSTERS IN THE GUESTROOM
Roni’d been cleaning, breastfeeding her son, and wiping dog slobber off the floor for the better part of the day. When her son vomited breast milk all over both himself and her, she was already running late to pick up her husband’s college friend from the South Shore. Roni changed the baby’s clothes, put him in his swing, jumped in and out of the shower for thirty seconds, threw on her husband’s old FBI SWAT training t-shirt, put her five-month-old son into his carrier, and grabbed her keys. “Jesus Christ,” she said under her breath but didn’t stumble on the guitar that her dog must have knocked down again with his big wagging tail.
She pulled her wet hair up, picked up her son in his bulky, crash-test-rated car seat, dragged it through three rooms, shoved her feet into some old wedge flip-flops, and rushed through the laundry room toward the garage.
She tried to think about what she’d say to Brandon’s friend. She couldn’t remember if this was the guy that ended up going to the police academy at the same time as Brandon or if this guy worked with her husband at the stromboli place for five years. She should know. So she couldn’t ask. Maybe she could ask him whether he had any good stories on Brandon from when they first met. She definitely wanted to clarify which guy this was before she got back to the house to make their dinner.
Either way she was about to miss his train if she didn’t hurry. Hopefully she could catch mostly green lights on the way there and be at the front of the line of cars picking up commuters. She hurried to the garage steps as best she could while lugging the awkward baby carrier because she hated being in the back of that Kiss & Ride line more than she hated being in a rush to leave the house. But at the foot of the garage stairs she just stopped.
Her navy sedan was backlit with blinding light off the cement. The garage door gaped.
She gripped the handle of the baby carrier but didn’t look down at her son. All the motion and momentum that had gathered in the past ten minutes dissipated to nothing. It wasn’t even worth hesitating. She took the first step and stood on the second step of the garage stairs overwhelmed by both knowledge and disbelief. It took brute force to move up one more step and stand immobilized on the third shocked but not surprised. She stared into the backseat of her car.
She didn’t hope. She didn’t pray. She just said to herself, “I really don’t need this right now.” She climbed the last step and stood on the garage floor. Her son kicked his feet in the carrier. She shifted the thing from one side of her body to the other.
Brandon’s friend’s train was due to arrive in ten minutes. But it didn’t matter. What choice did she have? She had to deal with this bullshit again. She set her son’s carrier down on top of a fifty-pound bucket of dog food and sent a text to her mom: What happened?
Then she walked around to the other side of the car to be sure.
Her husband’s motorcycle lay tipped over on the pile of recycling.
Yep.
Go
d damn it.
The driver’s side passenger door was standing wide open and her father lay passed out in the backseat.
Roni felt nothing. She just wanted her dad out of her car. She wanted him not there at all. Inert like the mountain bikes, the garden hose, the lawn seed spreader, the broken fire pit, the black shelving, the bag of bulb fertilizer, the snow shovel, the weed whacker, the new wagon, and the crib box, she just blinked. She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She didn’t throw anything. She didn’t abandon her son. She didn’t kick the aging, tyrannic bastard.
She said, “Dad. Wake up. Get out of my car. I need to go. I need to be somewhere.”
He didn’t move.
She pushed her dad’s knee gently but firmly by shutting the car door against his shins. He didn’t notice. She picked up each of his legs and let them drop. They were deadweight. She poked him in the chest. He was nearly lifeless—didn’t respond to any stimulus. She tried to drag him out of the car but he was too big. She had trouble enough lugging her son around. There was no way she could move her father. It was an exercise in futility to even push isometrically against the accumulated weight, resistance, and friction of their intolerant years. She tried to shove her dad into the car but his clothes against the upholstery of her car seat created too much drag for her to overcome.
Her son started to cry.
She looked over at him, balanced