I have survived another dark night. The rectangular skylight in my bedroom, exposing one quarter sky and three quarters sleeping branches, is my porthole to the outside world. Before getting out of my bed, I surmise that the day is cloudy, but not raining. The overhanging limbs and leaves that tower over my roof like a protective shadow have not a hint of rustle. No wind. The water will be calm.
By 6:03 a.m. I have downed a half a cup of microwaved leftover coffee, taken two bites of an apple, and am in my car, headed for Lake Nokomis for an early morning row. As I cross the bridge, Marshall becomes Lake and St. Paul becomes Minneapolis. As usual, I am comforted by the complete and utter lack of transformation. I like when one thing can become another without the need to make a fuss. Like old love. I turn on the radio, and the whispering secrets of MPR are the only audible accompaniment to this usually bustling song of a street. I drive. Past Leviticus Tattoo parlor, the Hi-Lo diner, and Merlin’s Rest, the Irish bar where men drink whisky in kilts. I give a nod to El Norteno, the best Mexican restaurant on Lake Street, and The Himalayan, everyone’s go-to for Tibetan and Nepalese.
To my left, a family who slept under the Hiawatha Lightrail Bridge is starting to stir. A child rests on her mother’s lap. The mother lights a smoke with one hand, runs her other hand tenderly over the sleeping girl’s cheek. The father is folding dirty blankets, brushing off the sticks and brush. He packs them into the shopping cart most likely stolen from the Savers nearby. I turn left, leaving Lake Street for the lake.
“Severe thunderstorm warnings have been issued for the following counties,” the announcer on the radio says calmly. I turn up the volume, although I can hear every word just fine. I listen intently for Hennepin County, hoping not to hear it. I don’t. Storms are not predicted to hit Minneapolis until 10:30. I will be off the water, back home in St. Paul long before then.
The sky transforms from a muted grey to a slightly brighter one. I roll down my windows, and hang my left hand out the window. It is early, but the humid air is already warm and thick. I imagine I am rolling the air in between my fingers like a button or a damp cotton ball sweetly scented by lilacs in their final breath of bloom. I drive slowly, taking a few detours for summer construction. My GPS reroutes me to 28th Avenue. It is flanked by small cafes, ethnic barbershops, and mini-markets with neon signs in the windows advertising Halal meats. The restaurants are laid out like a multicultural quilt.
I continue driving south, and think about my boat and how it will feel to be in it once again. The traffic light turns yellow where Minnehaha creek crosses 28th and I gently stop. A lone, sunrise jogger, wearing hot pink, checks her fitbit as she runs in place, waits to cross. Outside the Mello-Glaze bakery, a round-faced donut-maker with a hipster beard puts out a two-sided triangular sign connected with hinges that reads: “Legalized crack balls sold here.” I smile. Gets me every time.
I turn onto Nokomis Parkway and drive down to the small beach where we will launch our boats. Liv is already here, doing lunges and stretching her long arms overhead, arching her back like a yogi. She is young, strong, bold, and in the best shape of her life. This year, with any luck, she will place at Nationals, if not win it completely. Our coach is counting on it. She is wearing a high-viz orange tank top.
Adam arrives in his SUV, pulling the trailer of twelve rowing shells. He saunters out of the vehicle, waves amicably at young Liv and middle-aged me, and says in an exaggerated cadence, “Any day on the wa-ter is a great day indeed!” We both smile at this familiar phrase. Our coach yells it at the start of every practice. Adam laughs good-naturedly. “The old battle axe can’t make it today,” he says. “His wife’s making him go to church. As if this isn’t church!” He gestures toward the lake. Adam’s body is beautiful, as if designed by Walt Whitman himself. Strong shoulders, strong legs, strong core. Everything in its place, and nothing wanting or in excess. Like Liv, he is in his prime, and he will never look more like a poem than he does now. I look at them both as an art lover looks at a cathedral. They look at me like the mother I am, which feels perfect because it is.
There are twelve boats on the trailer, some with riggers attached, carefully placed on the racks like an intricate puzzle, and tied down with straps. Most mornings all the boats are claimed, but not Sundays. Sundays, it’s just the three of us and our coach. Adam and Liv because they are training to be champions, and me, because I need the practice. Last year was my first year racing a single, and as our coach frequently reminds me, I’ve got serious catching up to do.
We unstrap our boats from the trailer and haul them to slings. “You heard?” I say, wrench in hand, as I make adjustments to my rigger. “MPR says a storm is coming.”
“Not ‘til 10:30,” Adam says. “I checked the radar.”
“Plenty of time!” Liv says enthusiastically. Impossibly and eternally chipper, every sentence Liv utters is punctuated with an exclamation point and a smiley face emoji. “I love rowing before a storm! Look at the water!”
The water is glass. It reminds me of the smooth outer surface of a snow globe. The sky, which keeps changing, has become the color of cream of mushroom soup, and it is reflected in the face of Lake Nokomis. A family of well-behaved ducks, in a perfect line, glides across the wet portrait like a steady stroke of an artist’s paintbrush. We hoist our light, twenty-six foot long boats onto our shoulders, cross the street to the lake, and roll them into the water. We gently get in our skinny, single shells. We secure our oars into the oarlocks, and push out slowly. “You two go ahead,” I say. “This is only my second time on the water this year, and well, you know what happened last year.”
Liv smiles her gargantuan smile. “No one, and I mean no one can get back into a capsized boat faster than you!” Every time she says that, I want to kill her, but it would be like assassinating a lovable kindergarten teacher. She is so genuinely, enthusiastically supportive, I end up thanking her instead. “You’ll be wonderful!” Liv says. Wonderful is in capital letters and italics. “You got this, girl!” Her smile is so big, I think for a moment that her face will explode.
“Stay close to shore,” Adam says. “We’ll catch up to you on the second lap. If it starts to rain, keep going. But first sign of lightning, head in.” The two of them align their boats side by side, so that Liv’s starboard oar is 30 inches from Adam’s port oar. Facing backward, they row past me, building to a steady state. They pull their oars close to their bodies and breathe out as their legs push the boat from beneath them. The muscles in their backs ripple in unison, and they look like two perfectly rhythmic stanzas of a sonnet.
I paddle out slowly and awkwardly. I am determined not to tip today, and I know that if I go at my own pace, I won’t. I take a few slow, baptismal strokes. Wobbly. I take a few more until I find my balance and a semblance of rhythm. I notice the water, the feel of my blades across it. I notice, with the precision of a cook who can tell the sauce is done by stirring alone, when the water changes. I watch the wind, slight as it is, whisper across the water as if it were telling me a secret, but I tell myself not to rush. I have learned not to lean toward secrets.
A few years ago, when I was still married, and had my neat little family of four fastened in place like an oarlock, I competed in a racing quad on the Mississippi River, with a different crew of rowers. I rowed in the two-seat position, and I was not responsible for setting the pace, like the stroke in the four-seat, or for steering, like the bow in the seat behind me. My only responsibility was to blend my body, to be strong, but not too strong. My job was to go entirely unnoticed, so that an observer on the shore would not see four individuals, but rather, one boat. I was good at being invisible.
I feel my body, my sleepy middle-aged bones moving inside the confines of my skin. I feel the humidity in the air grow heavier, like a pregnant woman not ready to deliver. A storm is definitely coming, but not yet. With each slow stroke, I gain confidence. As my boat skims across the watery landscape, I feel part fish, part bird. Rowers. We look backwards as we move forward. We know where we want to go, but we are only certain of where we have been.
I switched to single skull rowing not long after I first found out about my husband’s other life, the family he had in New York: Sarah, who was my age and Evangeline, his third daughter, just two years younger than our Simone. I had been filled with an emotion that had no name: a dangerous mixture of uncontrollable rage and bottomless humiliation. It was as if an alien lived in my skin, swimming around, making me lose my center of gravity. I lost my balance. And I lost my spot in the racing quad.
My husband wasn’t there with me, in the kitchen, when I broke the news to our daughters. “Your father loves you very much,” I remember saying, in a smooth, calculated rhythm. As if I were rowing the middle section of a 5k headrace.
But then an image intruded. Rowers might say I caught a crab. “Catching a crab” is the accidental result of a faulty stroke, in which the oar either misses water or it gets jammed under the water for too long. This split-second mistake can flatten the rower, leaving them flailing on their back with an oar handle jammed into their stomach, or it can eject the rower completely. The mistake of one rower impedes the forward motion of everyone in the boat.
“Your father loves you very much,” I had said, “but…” I pictured myself as an old wooden chair, the kind you’d see in a homey cabin with a wood-burning stove and a little table with a puzzle on it. And the unspoken thought, but he didn’t love me, was like a strong kick to one of the legs. I don’t remember what I said next, but I do remember lying on the kitchen floor, like a pile of splinters, with my horrified daughters towering above me with looks that reminded me of pictures taken of children in Hiroshima.
I hear a splash to my right, and look over, expecting to see a fish. Like Liv, the carp love the calm before the storm. But it is not a fish. I see cupped hands rising and falling in the water. One hand, two. Three, four. There are swimmers crossing from the big beach to the little beach. I won’t hit them. Not even close. I turn my head back to position, raise my chest. Every thirty strokes or so, I turn my head back to the future to spot Liv and Adam, their boats still gliding side by side, their bodies swinging in perfect unison. Aware of everything and nothing at the same time, I increase my speed, and imagine myself evaporating as I listen to the gentle plopping sound of my oars catching the water. I love rowing.
My former husband had one office not far from here, and another one in Lower Manhatten. He did something important. He made a lot of money. You can fill in the rest of the blanks however you see fit. For months after I discovered his secret (his twelve year old daughter, Evangeline, contacted me on Facebook of all things), I tried to get him to fill in the blanks for me, like he was taking a test in my English class. And on what date did Odysseus’ ship set sail to expand his horizons? And what year did he encounter the Sirens? And did he miss his patient wife? The children he left behind? He filled in some of the blanks. But I could not grade the test, as I had no master key.
When I am about one third of the way around the lake, I feel a raindrop. Rowers are not afraid of rain, but something tells me that I should get closer to Adam and Liv, who have rounded the bend, rowed under the bridge and out, and are headed back toward the small beach on the opposite shore. I turn my boat, and row back along the same shore I just traveled. If my calculations are correct, I will reach the small beach before Adam and Liv. Then I will turn around, and we can do the last lap, in the gentle rain, together. They are rowing toward me, their backs facing north. My back is facing south. As we intersect, Adam calmly calls to me, “Lightening. Turn your boat around and head in.”
“Just one little flash!” Liv adds, enthusiastically. “We got this!” Because I was faced the other way, I had not seen it. The three of us row back to the beach. The raindrops are still intermittent. A drop here. A drop there. We have time, but still we do not waste it. We are unstrapped, oars out, with boats on our shoulders, crossing the road when the sky turns color. Not black. Not grey. Green. A sickly, yellow green that reminds me of the face of the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz.
“Holy fuck,” Adam says, as we lower our boats on the slings. He looks up. “Have you EVER seen anything like this?” He is giddy, like a young boy viewing the freak show at the State Fair. “I got to take a picture.” He grabs his cell phone out of the trailer. As Liv and I quickly load and strap the first boat on the rack, I notice that a few runners, walkers, and random passerbys have gathered on the beach, watching the sky. “Crazy,” Adam says when he returns, jogging slightly. “What a sight!” I ask him to send me the picture of the sky. We load the other two boats and begin securing the straps when a thundercap unleashes its barbaric yawp, and lightning explodes across the sky like—you guessed it—fireworks. The angry clouds have had enough, and they release a torrent of hard rain. I can barely see. I mean, really. It feels like it is raining shards of pencil lead.
The wind barrels across the lake, and the trailer full of precious cargo begins to sway. “Hold the boats!” Liv yells. Adam’s boat, a brand new Fluid Design, is not strapped. My boat, an ancient Hudson, is only partially strapped. Adam is on the left side, Liv in the middle, and I on the right. The wind howls, and the rain turns to hail. We are holding the boats, anchoring our feet to the ground, trying to keep the trailer of ten foot high boats from tipping over on top of us, when a man runs around from across the road to my side. He is screaming, his arms flailing about, but the storm is so loud, I cannot hear a word. “Life Jacket? Do you have a life jacket?” I read his lips. “Someone’s drowning!”
We have no life jackets in the trailer, but I have one in my car. I let go of the boats, leaving Liv and Adam to bear the weight. I dash through the penetrating hail, the frantic wannabe hero at my heels. “Was there one swimmer or two?” He screams this into my ear.
I hold up two fingers. I open the hatchback of my car, reach in and thrust the life preserver in his hands. “Definitely two!” He runs to the beach. A fire truck pulls up, the ambulance. Amid the sirens and wind, I hear Adam screaming for help, his voice traveling eerily and tinnily through the headwind. I run toward him and Liv. When I get back to the trailer, Adam and Liv are trying to turn their bodies into trees, planting their bare feet like roots, their limbs extended, trying to save 80,000 dollars worth of boats. “HELP!” Adam yells. “Did you get help?” His lips form the words, but all I hear is howling. He hadn’t seen the man seeking the lifejacket. He had no idea someone was drowning. I reposition myself on my side of the trailer just as the wind picks up again from the lake. I have one hand up high, and the other down low, on Adam’s unsecured boat. A painfully strong gust lifts the wheels of the trailer, and the boats are so very heavy. The three of us push back with all of our strength. “Help us! Someone help us!” The trailer topples, and the boats crash to the ground.
***
The air is still again. I feel grass on my cheek, and raindrops on my forehead. I am lying on the ground, underneath a tree. I don’t remember how I got there. The sirens have stopped, although I still hear voices coming from shore. I pick myself up. There’s a shrill ringing in my brain. For a second, I forget where I am. And then I see them—like a blurry painting coming in and out of focus—the smashed boats, red, blue and yellow, and the metal of the trailer racks contorted like a horrified face. I see Adam, who must have flung himself in the opposite direction when the boats came down. He is also rising from the ground, looking around dizzily. There is a gash on his right shoulder, and he is bleeding. Where is Liv?
Adam and I run to the capsized trailer, and we see her under the colorful, partially-mutilated carbon fiber plastic shells. Lying on her back, she is breathing. In and out, laboriously, as if she had just finished a sprint piece at a Regatta. Her head is still, but her eyes are opening and closing quickly, as if she were squinting from the sun. Adam and I maneuver our bodies between the broken boats to get close to her. “Are you okay?” she asks. Her eyes look first at me, then at Adam. “You’re bleeding,” she says, in between breaths.
Adam’s eyes move to her abdomen. His eyes start to well up. “Just a scrape,” he says. His eyes move back. Liv has been impaled by a metal rigor. It pins her to the ground like the insect in Prufrock’s poem. He kisses her forehead quickly and runs to the beach. Towards the ambulance, the firetruck. He is screaming, once again, for help. Liv’s breathing slows. “Am I…? she whispers, her eyes glancing downward, “okay?”
“You got this girl,” I say. “Just a scrape.”
Within moments, we are surrounded by the other survivors of the great June storm, and by the EMTs and firefighters who had been called to rescue the swimmer. They take one look at Liv and call for backup.
The swimmer had been saved, not by my life-preserver, and not by them, but by a runner who was training for a triathlon. That same runner was there, with a pink towel around his neck, in the mix of extras who loomed around Liv, trying to save her. Everyone was wet and colorful, like a cartoon. I remember more people arriving. The rowing community is a small, but tight subculture, and it seemed as if everyone I had ever rowed with or against appeared out of nowhere, with water-resistant, hooded rain jackets covering their Sunday clothes. I remember them moving the debris from the trailer, hauling away shards of fiberglass and oars, making room for the paramedics. I heard no sounds, but in my memory, words—real words made of letters—were floating out of people’s mouths as they argued about what to do. If we lift the trailer the rigger will slice her open I remember something like that. And We don’t want her to Bleed Out.
In the movies, there’s always someone who rises from the abyss of mediocrity and takes charge. Someone who calls the shots. Who knows, definitively, what to do to save the heroine. I don’t remember anyone like that. I remember the sound of a chainsaw starting up. I remember the piercing sound of the blade hitting the rigger, and the rowers cheering when the rigger was cut. I remember the paramedics arguing, endlessly, about how to get Liv into the ambulance. She still had a meticulously cut stake of metal in her abdomen, and I remember wondering how she would ever row with that obstruction.
I was told later that seven of the twelve boats had survived to row another day, to travel backwards into the future.
Liv bled out and died before they could move her. I don’t know how long it took. I was there, but I can’t remember her face in those last moments. I’ve tried. I keep picturing her as she was before, which makes everything worse. Just as I pictured my family before the divorce: intact. Perfect.
Was there something I could have done, that I did not do? Surely. If I hadn’t disappeared to grab the lifejacket, if I had been stronger, if I had been able to see what was at stake, Liv would still be alive. She’d race at nationals. She’d become a champion. And her mother, just a little bit older than me, would not be the broken bird that she had become. “It’s not your fault,” my coach told me later. He said this over and over again. But I didn’t believe him. “Sometimes,” he said, quietly, “beautiful things die.”
I do not remember getting in my car, leaving Minneapolis, or crossing back into sleepy St. Paul, to my life before the storm. I don’t remember removing my soaked clothes and crawling back into my bed under skylights, and sleeping for twelve hours with an undiagnosed concussion from being hit in the head by…something. Later, much later, when I looked on my phone, I had pictures of downed trees and blocked intersections that documented the route I took home. I had sent them to my coach. And there was a picture of the boats, the ones that were miraculously unscathed. The rowers who had arrived like ghosts, must have strapped the undamaged ones back on the trailer. They looked beautiful, towering above the blood-stained sidewalk.
I wish I remembered less of what came before. It would make the winds less ferocious, and the crash softer. But I remember everything. The way the blades felt on the water. The way the wind whispered in a voice that only I could hear. The beauty of shared solitude, and Liv and Adam’s perfect bodies floating across Lake Nokomis like a poem that would never end, like a sonnet missing the heroic couplet.
(First Published in Lake Street Stories, by Flexible Press)