On Mystic Lake

All of a sudden, her daddy looked up and saw her. He gave her a big smile and pushed the silvery hair away from his face. The glove left a big streak of brown mud across his forehead. “Heya, Izzy-bear,” he said. “Wanna help me pull up weeds?”

Slowly, she moved toward him, past the row of primroses Annie had planted last week. He was still smiling when she came up beside him.

All she could think was that her daddy was back and she wanted a hug more than anything in the world, but she was afraid. What if he didn’t stay again? She almost said something to him, she even opened her mouth and tried.

“What is it, Izzy?”

The words wouldn’t fall out. They were jammed in her throat behind a big old lump. Come on, Izzy, she told herself, just say, “Hi, Daddy, I missed you. ”

But she couldn’t. Instead, she reached out her hand and pointed to the trowel that lay on the ground. He bent down and picked up the big fork, handing it to her slowly. “It’s okay, Sunshine,” he said softly. “I understand. ”

I love you, Daddy. Tears stung her eyes; she was sad and embarrassed that she couldn’t force herself to say the words. She squeezed her eyes shut before he could see the stupid, babyish tears. Then she took the trowel and moved in beside him.

He started talking, about the weather and flowers and the beautiful day. He talked so long she forgot she was embarrassed and sad and that she was a stupid little girl who couldn’t talk to her daddy anymore.

Sunday was the kind of day that tricked people into moving into this damp, soggy corner of the world. Th

e kind of day when hapless tourists who stumbled into the rain forest tended to draw in deep breaths of awe and then find themselves driving their rental cars slowly past real estate offices. Almost involuntarily, they reached for pamphlets about cabins for sale, and called their faraway families with stories of the most gorgeous land they’d ever seen.

When Nick flung back the living room curtains and looked outside, he was as awestruck as any foreigner. A bright yellow sun had just crested the trees; lemony streamers of light backlit the forest and gave it a translucent, otherworldly glow. Lake Mystic swallowed the surrounding images and held them against its blue mirrored surface. On the far bank, a single gray heron stood on one leg, proudly surveying his domain.

It was a perfect day for a father-daughter outing. He hurried up the stairs and woke his sleeping child. He helped her brush her teeth and get dressed in warm woolen clothes. While she was sleepily making her bed, he went downstairs and packed a picnic lunch—smoked salmon bought fresh from the Quinault tribe at the local roadside stand, cream cheese and crackers for him, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and string cheese for Izzy. Annie had left a quart of homemade lemonade, and he poured it into a thermos, then crammed everything into a picnic basket.

Within the hour, they were driving down the winding coastal road that seemed to bisect the world. On one side stood the darkest, densest of all American woodlands, and on the other, the crashing wildness of the Pacific Ocean. Along the coastal side, the evergreen trees had been sculpted by a hundred years of gale winds; their limbs bent backward in an unnatural arc.

Nick parked in one of the turnouts that were designed to showcase the view to tourists. Taking Izzy’s hand, he led her down the trail toward the beach.

Below them, huge, white-tipped waves crashed against the rocks. When they finally dropped onto the hard-packed sand, Izzy grinned up at him.

The silver-blue ocean stretched out for a thousand miles away from the land. Sometimes, the wind along this stretch of the Pacific howled so hard no man could draw a breath, but today it was almost preternaturally quiet. The air was as crisp and delicious as a sun-ripened apple. Cormorants and kingfishers and seagulls cawed and wheeled overhead, landing every now and then on one of the wind-sculpted trees that grew atop house-size rocks in the surf.

Nick set the basket down on a gray boulder near the land’s end. “Come on, Izzy. ”

They ran across the sand, laughing, creating the only footprints for miles, searching for hidden treasures: sand dollars, translucent quartz stones, and tiny black crabs. Around a bend in the coastline, they stumbled into a knee-deep mass of tiny blue jellyfish, blown ashore by the wind—a sure sign to old-timers that tuna would appear off the coast this summer.

When the sun reached its peak in the sky and sent its warmth through their layers of wool and Gortex, Nick led Izzy back to where they’d begun. He threw a huge red and white blanket over the hard sand and unpacked the basket. They sat cross-legged on the blanket and ate their lunch.

All the while, Nick told stories—about the Native Americans who had first combed this beach, hundreds of years before the first white settlers appeared; about the wild parties he had attended in high school on this very same stretch of sand; about the time he’d brought Kathy here when she was pregnant.

Once, he’d thought that Izzy was going to say something. She’d leaned forward, her brown eyes sparkling, her lips trembling.

He’d put down his glass of lemonade. Come on, Izzy-bear. But in the end, she’d held back. Whatever had made it to the tip of her tongue was lost.

That silence was worse than the others, somehow. It lodged in his heart like a steel splinter; he felt it with every in-drawn breath afterward. But he forced a smile and went on with another story, this time about a night long ago when he and Annie had climbed to the top of the town’s water tower and painted GO PANTHERS on the metal sides.

At the end of their picnic, they loaded up the basket with their leftovers and made their slow, silent way back up to the car. They drove home in the last fading rays of the setting sun. Nick found it difficult to keep talking, to keep spilling his soul into the stony silence that surrounded them, but he forced himself to do it. When they passed Zoe’s, the need for a drink rose in him, relentless as the surf. He hit the gas harder and they sped beyond the tavern.

When they pulled into the driveway, day had given way to a pink and gold evening. He held Izzy’s hand as they quietly made their way back into the house.

“What do you say we play a game?” he said, shutting the door behind him.

Izzy didn’t answer, but scampered away. In a few moments, she appeared again, with the big, multicolored Candy Land box mashed to her tiny chest.

He groaned dramatically. “Not that—anything but that. How about Pick-up Sticks?”

A tiny smile tilted her mouth. She shook her head. “You think I don’t want to play that because I never win, but that’s not true. It’s because I fall into a coma. Come on—Pick-up Sticks. Please?”

She gave him a grin that bunched her cheeks. Her index finger thumped on the Candy Land box.