The Summer We Saw Margaret

Some towns are made for summer. Astoria isn't one of them.

In Astoria, Oregon, summer shows up late and with its head down, apologizing for the trouble. It turns up on some ordinary day at the end of June, gray like nearly all of them, and slips in through the fog without anyone ringing a bell. There are no postcard beaches here, no colorful umbrellas. There's a river. A huge one, the Columbia, the biggest you'll ever see in your life, so wide that from one bank you can barely make out the other and so uninterested in you that it swallows whole ships without giving their sailors back, not even by swimming. It isn't a river that separates Oregon from Washington: it's a river that keeps them both a little scared. Nobody swims in the Columbia. In Astoria the water is there to be looked at, to be respected, and to take from it what feeds the town.

That morning, the first of summer break — the day a whole summer of school-free mornings opens up in front of a kid — the light climbs slowly over the river, gray and cold, and the fog stays pinned to the current, in no hurry to lift. It's a pretty place, Astoria, in a quiet, hardworking way that doesn't make the brochures. A place people leave in the summer.

In a humble house up in the hills, lying on his stomach on the living room floor, his tongue poking out between the teeth he still has, Miru Reed is finishing a whale. He's six years old, with a blue crayon worn down to half from so much use. First the back, in a single long stroke, the way he's learned. Then the spout, which is what tells a whale apart from a whale-shaped rock. And last, the hardest part, the one he always saves for the end because it's the part that really matters: two careful eyes. A whale without eyes looks at no one. And a whale that doesn't look at you is no good to anyone. He knows this.

He lifts the drawing up to his face and shows it to the only respectable critic in the room. Propped against the table leg is Mango: a gray stuffed whale that cost four dollars in a clearance bin and has one eye about to come unstitched, dangling by a thread, which gives him a permanent air of being about to tell a secret. Miru nods his head up and down with one finger. Mango approves. Mango always approves, of everything, without exception, which makes him the best friend in the world.

He hugs the stuffed whale again. —And Mango never goes anywhere. Like me. —He holds up in front of him, very serious, the just-finished page of the gray whale, like someone presenting evidence in a trial—. Whales go incredibly far away, but they always, always come back to the same place.

He says it looking at Mango. But he isn't talking about Mango. Sara understands that from the other side of the room, all at once, the way you understand the things that have spent months waiting for you to understand them. Something breaks inside her, slowly and without a sound, and she doesn't let it show on her face, because that's what mothers are for: to break on the inside without it showing on the outside.

And then, on the table, the phone begins to buzz and drags itself a couple of inches across the wood, the way phones do when they carry an obligation inside. On the screen, a single word: SAFEWAY. The supermarket where for years she's been ringing up groceries at a register, apron already on, ready for another shift just like yesterday's and just like tomorrow's and the next twenty years' worth.

She watches it ring. Once. She looks at her son, hugging a four-dollar whale, telling the stuffed animal things he's really telling himself. And she silences the call.

It's the smallest gesture, barely a thumb pressing a screen. But something in Sara's shoulders shifts, as if she's carried a box for years and has finally set it down. She turns to Miru. And now there's a thing on her face that he hasn't seen in so long it takes him a second to recognize it. —Get dressed —she says—. We're leaving.

At first they ride in silence, each in their own thing. Miru hugs his whale book and buzzes inside without quite knowing why, the way kids buzz when they sense that today they're stepping off the calendar. The radio plays low, a lone guitar feeling out a few notes without committing, as if it too were waiting for permission. And then it swells.

And the song breaks into its chorus. Sara sings. She sings terribly — off-key, swallowing the words, doesn't care — at the top of her lungs, both hands nailed to the wheel, and for a few seconds she stops being a tired cashier to be just a woman singing badly in a car, which is one of the freest things there is. Miru cracks up, and right away he lets loose too: he rolls the window all the way down, holds Mango out into the wind, and the two of them dance in the front seat while the world goes rushing by, golden, on the other side of the glass. The car doesn't feel small anymore. It's full to the roof.

Miru holds all of Mango out the window, turns him to face the wind, and makes him let out his spout — that pretend spout the stuffed whale shoots from his back when Miru is in the mood to play — against the rushing air… and the spout grows. It becomes real water. A wave that bursts white against the rock and leaves Miru with his mouth open, because he didn't expect it. The Pacific has come in without warning, on the right side of the window.

Enormous. Blue to the end of the world, to where your eyes give out. The two of them fall quiet at the same time, tiny against so much blue, the napes of their necks against the glass. And something happens that hadn't happened all morning: Miru, who has a name for everything, can't find a single word. He opens his mouth and nothing comes out. The sea isn't named. The sea is looked at.

—Where are we, Mom? Miru opens his eyes. The first thing is the light. Where he fell asleep there was road gray and then fog and then nothing; now, all of a sudden, there's color. The car is stopped on a rise, at the edge of a town that looks hand-painted and hung from the hillside above the water: wooden houses crowded against one another, each a different color — rust red, robin's-egg blue, butter yellow, sea green — the windows lit like small embers against the night. After so many hours of darkness, it seems to Miru that they've arrived inside a lamp.

He rolls the window down without asking permission. And in comes an air that smells of everything at once: of salt, of wet wood, of frying, of sweet smoke. It smells like more. Like more than the aquarium, more than Astoria, more than anything he had stored in his head under the word summer.

They go down to the dock through the party crowd. There's a smell of boiled shellfish and beer, and nobody pays them much attention: they're just two more strangers cutting quickly toward the water. Sara buys two tickets at a wooden booth with a bulb hanging from it. The boat is small, a ferry of worn planks and chipped paint, the bow light already lit against the night. At the wheel is an older man, broad, with an unlit pipe planted in the corner of his mouth as if it were part of his face. He watches Miru come aboard — the stuffed whale in one arm, the whale book pressed to his chest with the other — and looks at him a moment too long. Not with surprise. With something stranger: as if he recognized him from somewhere, as if he'd known about him before ever seeing him.

—Today's the day, kid —he says. And he doesn't explain of what.

They board. The engine coughs, chokes, catches. The ferry pulls away from the dock, and the party, the bulbs, the colored houses, all of it begins to shrink and soften behind them. The fog comes out to meet them from the open sea, white and thick, and swallows the town in a single bite, as if it had never been there at all. Ahead, now, there's only white. Miru leans over the rail, facing that white, without a gram of fear. Sara puts a hand on his shoulder, and she herself doesn't know whether it's to hold on to him or to hold on to something.

Light. Just light, filling everything. The first thing there is, up very close, is a nose. Huge, wet, black, sniffing at something inches away. Capitán. The dog licks Miru from chin to forehead, one long slobbery swipe, until the boy wrinkles his nose, opens one eye, and laughs.

The room is a different room. Nothing's left of the night. The terrace window is wide open, and a mild, gentle sea breeze comes in. It's the first real day of summer: warmth, gulls shrieking outside, a brightness that bounces off the water and fills the room, and a smell of toast and coffee that wasn't there yesterday. By the fire, Sara pours coffee with a radiant smile. She looks tired — she hasn't slept a wink all night — but it's a different tiredness, one Miru has already learned to tell apart. Being tired but happy isn't the same as being tired from unhappiness. The second weighs twice as much and makes you look older and worried.

And then Miru, from his place at the table, notices the painting for the first time in the light of day. The canvas is torn at one corner. It has water on it — real water, drying — bits of the sea, a strand of seaweed stuck to it, a little sand crusted into the oil. Margaret is perfect, whole, magnificent. But the mark by the eye, the one he and Walt made together, four hands, in the middle of the swell, didn't stay by the eye: it runs up her face to the middle of her forehead, a crooked white smear, disastrous, impossible.

Miru leaves the corn half-eaten; he looks at Walt, looks at his mother. The two of them are already looking at the painting too. And they start to laugh. A little at first. Then more. Then a lot. Then they can't stop, all three of them, with that laughter that overflows and spreads and there's no way to cut it off. —Somebody at this table ought to be banned from ever touching a brush, too —Walt says, meaning Miru.

Walt climbs onto the stage with the stiffest face in the world. Facing the audience, on a stand, is the painting of Margaret. They haven't cleaned it — Walt hasn't let the restorers lay a finger on it — so she stands there with her dried-out seawater, her stuck-on strand of seaweed, her crust of sand, the canvas torn at a corner, and the mark by the eye running up her face to the middle of her forehead. Witness to the battle. He reaches the microphone, clears his throat, and starts to talk. Badly. Stiff.

—Look —he starts—. I don't know about public speaking. My thing is switching on a light bulb every night for ships that almost never pass, on a rock where there's nobody. Thirty years I've been at that. The thing is, a man can have a whole life that's very orderly, straight out of the manual, with his sun and his baseball, and be dead inside like a fish in a bowl. Or he can be cold as all hell on a rock, freezing, alone, waiting on a whale that doesn't even know he exists… and be more alive than ever. And nobody teaches you to tell the two apart.

—That one over there —he points at the painting with his chin— was painted by the woman who taught me the difference. I only added the last brushstroke. Selfishly, I kept her paintings locked up, just for me. Someone in this audience taught me that her life and her art were meant to be shared. And so this dry, bad-tempered old sailor off the freighters has decided to set foot on dry land. This one's for you, Eleanor.

And the dance begins. He lets go of the paper, lets go of the lectern, and tells the story of that night, and as he tells it, he acts it: he hunches against the cold, he opens his arms as wide as they'll go to show how impossibly big a whale is an arm's length away in the dark. The whole auditorium roars with laughter. Until, without realizing it, in the middle of a sentence, Walt's voice breaks. He doesn't finish it. The whole auditorium gets to its feet and applauds. For her. For him. For a woman who spent her life painting birds on a rock for no one, and for the old man who took twelve years to let the world look at her.

In the front row, Miru rests his head on his mother's shoulder, without stopping his applause. And then, to the right, one seat over, there's someone who wasn't sitting there before. James. Miru's father. The boy doesn't turn his head. He doesn't take his eyes off Walt on the stage. He just reaches out his hand, slowly, over the armrest that separates them, and lays it on top of his father's.