Waterborne by Bruce Murkoff

Author:Bruce Murkoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430137
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

“It was growing dark when the rescue boat found us. We’d been in the water for more than six hours, and Addie had taken the worst of it. She couldn’t stop shaking when they finally lifted her on board, her teeth chattering and her fingers cramped and shriveled, her entire body hard as rock. When we got to the hospital in Whitefish Bay, the doctors put a cast on my ankle and treated Addie for exposure. They did everything they should have, everything they could. But Addie didn’t help them. She didn’t try to fight the fever, or the shivering that was painful to watch and kept making the blankets slip from her shoulders. She lay in her hospital bed for a week with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling or the walls, whichever way the nurse happened to turn her. After the first day, she wouldn’t speak. To me or the doctors. Her parents came up from Chicago, and mine from Madison, but it didn’t make any difference. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. It was shock, of course, and sorrow. I knew that. Ray was gone. We had lost our son.”

He lit a cigarette and Lena was thankful for the silence. There was brittleness to his voice, a matter-of-factness that was almost unbearable. He inhaled deeply and shook his match until it went out, the sulfurous wisps hanging in the air between them. She still held her scotch, the ice already melted and the moisture trickling down the outside of the glass between her fingers. She flicked her hand, and when she looked up, Filius was watching her intently.

“We loved that lake. Both of us. Even when we were still in school, before we were married, we’d drive to Milwaukee on weekends and follow the roads north, hugging the coastline and camping at night, all the way to Gill’s Rock and then around the point to Egg Harbor. After we were married, whenever we had enough time, we’d travel along the Michigan shore up to the inlets of Grand Traverse Bay, to Cat’s Head Point and the Old Mission Lighthouse. We rented a cabin on Clam Lake, where we could catch walleyes and crappies from a canoe, or cast into the Grass River for trout. And then we’d drive up to the Straits of Mackinac, and all around us was deep-blue water—Lake Michigan on one side, Lake Huron on the other. It was like being on the ocean. Water was the first thing Addie and I knew we had in common, and we wanted Ray to share that.

“We took him out on Lake Michigan when he was just two, and both his grandfathers joined us that day on a twenty-four-foot sailboat we chartered out of the Chicago Harbor. It was a balmy afternoon, an easy day for sailing, and Ray was in heaven, the center of attention, handled constantly, a prince on a throne of canvas sail sacks, doted on by his grandfathers and held up to catch

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