A STORY by MARTA REGN
The Kind Of Thing You Hope For
As we pile into the canoe that’s all dents and riveted aluminum, Dad says it was made by the same people who manufactured aircrafts for the war, but there was no more money in planes so here we are. Mom says this is true. These canoes can take a beating because they’re metal. You could ram this vessel into root-strangled, rockslide shore and keep going for the rest of time. She knows because she did this once as a girl, far from here in another range of mountains. She says that was before everything became fiberglass. I think she means boats, but I can’t be sure.
The lake at my parent’s house has been there all my life but not for all of time. To me, these 25 hurricane-filled acres are as fixed as my own name. It was decided before I got there, and so it’s always been.
The lake doesn’t have a real name. Our neighbor, Walter—my dad’s high school friend who followed him here from Northern Virginia for “rural pursuits”—who’s also the self-appointed head of the HOA which consists of the four neighbors living just beyond the lake’s circumference, tried to name it Beaverwood. It didn’t take. On a cellphone map, if you zoom out far enough, it’s called Linton Lake. I don’t know who named it that, and I’ve never heard of a person calling it Linton Lake. I don’t know any Lintons. We’ve always called it The Lake.
My mother is in the middle rowing with new oars. The oars are from someone with which we have a loose connection. From a shed, actually. From the land underneath the shed, rather, depending on how you look at it. They’re from a shed belonging to the dead grandparents of a friend who owned the land where we once rode horses on some mountain trails. My mother asks me if I remember these people. I don’t. She’s looking over her shoulder every few strokes, tracing the shore, searching for wildlife. We’ve set out on a rough circumnavigation, but Mom can’t help but to drift toward the lake’s middle, her right arm stronger than her left. Returning to the invisible course, she dips in one oar and backstrokes with little splashes, like a baby in a plastic pool. The sun has dipped behind the hills, pulling down with it darkness like a curtain, and Venus is just rising. Over us is a great wash of peach-colored sky; under us, too. My favorite thing about the lake is how much sky it holds. I ask if they've seen any beavers. No, my dad says. Walter probably shot them all.
Halfway around, something like a wood duck or kingfisher flies like a zipper through our sightline. When it lands, it walks along the brushy shore with enormous slaps of its little feet like a child that’s gotten into their father’s shoes. Mom says it’s a tiny green heron. This is rare. This is exactly the kind of thing you hope for from an evening boat ride.
Across the lake from my parent’s house is the cottage in which my grandfather I never met once lived. When he died, my father rented it then swore up and down he’d never be a landlord again. Something about late rent and rootless cosmopolitans. My father sold the cottage to a friend from the days before he’d met my mother. The friend was in a fraternity. Somehow, not attending the school, Walter had lived in the house as their bookie. My collegeless father was also involved. This was in Charlottesville, once the closest city to here. My father told me, once, this friend had hopped a freight train drunk, fallen asleep, and woke up in West Virginia. My father joked that he had to call his mother from a payphone to come pick him up.
Tonight at the friend’s cottage, there’s a bonfire out front, and the man-made beach is a zigzag of kayaks. My father asks my mother to row closer so he can say hello. As we do, the voices become louder, but we don’t recognize any of them as the voice of my father’s friend.
My dad holds up a hand. Three men about my dad’s age surround the fire that swirls with smoke. They hold up their hands too, briefly, then their voices return, indistinct and fighting one another and hooting with drunken laughter. At the edge of the dock there is a massive rectangle of double-padded green foam. Some sort of water toy I assume is for someone to lie on and avoid the algae, the seaweed, the water snakes, the sacks of frog eggs that have detached from the dock and stick to your feet as you learn to tread. As a kid, I would have begged my parents for a mat of double-padded green foam.
Dad points to the mat and asks, what is that, but they don’t hear him over the speaker thumping with electronic music. It’s then that I realize how bizarre this all is. Two of the men are shirtless, their chests deflated and wrinkled. They all hold plastic solo cups and throw things into the lapping orange flames. Somehow, I’ve returned to the fraternity parties I frequented in college, but the boys have lived entire beautiful, sad lives.
Overhead, a great blue heron glides and jerks, dives, then glides again. We all watch the silhouette of its hooked neck and say nothing for a while. We float on, through the last vibrations of the men’s music. The call of a great blue heron is even more shrill, even more indecipherable than the manipulated voices of electronic music. There it is, Mom says, hearing the heron call out again. I’m still wondering about the men and how they came to be. I’m tempted to call them foreigners on my nameless lake. Instead, just like I’m back in college at those parties, I wonder how I must have looked to them. They somehow bent the timeline and joined its frayed ends, but the three of us look like we’ve traveled some impossible distance, across space and time, in this metal war canoe, with these splintered oars from an Appalachian outbuilding. We’re tired travelers seeking a thistled shore. Moon-eyed ancients come down from the mountains. We’re specters. Space pirates. We’ve stolen this craft and set sail. My father in an unraveling straw hat. My good grip on the bow, a figurehead. My parents’ hair—silver, thinning and slipping away—emits another twilight.
And then, two more great blue herons ascend from behind us. They come out of the darkest edge of sky, flying together like mute swans. They fly the lake's length, toward the first blue heron still barely there hanging on to the blackening shore. It looks like a lost sliver of white smoke or a plastic grocery bag snared on a limb. Just as we’re saying we can’t believe how many herons are overhead, they call to each other. They screech. The pair in flight collide. Something territorial is happening, and I've got the feeling any of us at any time could be told we don’t belong.
The fighting birds plummet behind the treeline. The night gathers, and the lake gives back the sky. A layer of soft fog forms on the water, and my mother begins to row again. So we finish our sentences, saying we can’t believe it. We’re trying to remember the last time we saw any of this on the lake, but this is useless. None of this has happened before, will happen since. My mother’s picking up speed now. She’s not looking, but I get the sense she doesn’t need to. We’re heading toward the beach at the mouth of the hill on which my parents built their house so many years ago. My mother pushes and pulls and looks past me at something I can’t see. She’s got the image of land in her mind like a celestial navigator. My mother heaves. My father and I know to hold on. We crash to shore. All of us, reaching for something solid.
Marta Regn (she/her) is a writer, student, and yoga instructor living in Southwest Virginia. She's an MFA candidate at Hollins University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Hunger, HAD, and Sky Island Journal, among others.