Safe from the Sea. Peter Geye
the table from a son, imagined a whole lifetime of moments like this: spooning baby food, helping with homework, explaining the birds and the bees, sharing a beer over a cribbage board.
By the time the waitress announced that the dining room was closing for the afternoon, they’d finished with the photographs and had been sitting in a reverential silence. “Listen, Dad,” Noah said, “why don’t you pack these up? I have to call Nat before we head back to the house.”
Olaf said, “Sure, sure.” And with the care of a surgeon, he placed each of the photographs back into their sheaths and then into the manila envelope.
“WE’LL BE OUT of your hair in a minute,” he assured the waitress behind the cash register at the Manitou Lodge. She nodded and turned her attention back to painting her nails as Noah dialed the pay phone.
“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d catch you.” The phone at Natalie’s office had rung five times before she’d picked up.
“I was starting to think you’d forgotten me. I left messages on your cell.”
“I don’t have cell reception up here. Sorry. I was going to call last night.”
“It doesn’t matter. I worked late last night anyway. New clients.” She was a management consultant and never discussed clients by name. The late nights were a job hazard. “How’s your father? How’s everything going?”
Noah looked out the window at the galloping lake, he glanced at his father. “It’s hard to say. We went fishing yesterday,” he said as though it were the strangest thing. He paused. “What about you?”
Her voice turned grave. “Now that you’re in the middle of the woods, I’m finally going to ovulate again. Of course.”
He could hear her crying and felt an impulse to hang up the phone, not because he didn’t want to hear what she said but because he knew that whatever he replied would be monumentally wrong.
“Okay,” he began cautiously. “I know the timing is terrible, I know it stinks, and I wish I were there—”
“But you’re not,” she interrupted. “I thought this would be the month. I wish you were here.”
“I know, me, too. But we might have to wait until next time.”
“What if there isn’t a next time?”
A next time. Since their most recent failure, an ectopic pregnancy that had taken Natalie months to recover from, she had come to suspect that the reason things weren’t working—the reason their efforts had yielded nothing but endless fretting, thousands of dollars in fertility-clinic bills, and a terminal attitude—was that they hadn’t been doing everything together. “You go to the clinic at eight in the morning to drop off your sperm, and I go at noon to be inseminated between a tuna-fish sandwich and a conference call—I mean, how could we expect anything? It’s just unnatural,” she had said, ignoring the fact that their course of action couldn’t be anything but unnatural. So they’d decided they would make their clinic visits together, sure that the next time things would be different. The next time was now.
He tried again. “I know this hasn’t been easy.”
“Hasn’t been easy? Noah, they had an easier time putting a man on the moon than they’ve had getting me pregnant. Keeping me pregnant anyway.” She blew her nose. “Maybe you could overnight it.”
He could practically see her, sitting behind her desk at work, looking out the fourteenth-story window. The tears, he’d not often seen them for any other reason.
“There’s an OB/GYN at St. Mary’s hospital in Duluth. You’d have to go down there, but I bet we could make arrangements. They could still inseminate me tomorrow.”
Inseminate, the sort of word that had become stock in the parlance of their infertility. All the words—prescription, ovulation, suppository, uterus, fallopian, cervix, endometriosis, laparoscopy, motility—made the whole thing feel like a science project.
“I’m sure I could make an appointment.”
“So we could overnight it? Nat, honest to God.”
“What?”
“Let’s be reasonable.”
“Injecting myself with a syringe full of fertility drugs every night is reasonable?”
“Is it the end of the world if we have to wait another month?”
“What if you’re there for three months, what happens then?”
This startled him, and he looked across the dining room at his father, whose chin was on his chest. He must have been sleeping. “I’m not going to be here for three months. Listen, I just got here. I can’t very well leave tomorrow. My father needs me right now. He’s not well, remember?” Across the dining room Olaf twitched, his head bobbed up, and he looked around the restaurant, confused. “He can hardly get his feet off the ground.”
“What’s wrong with him? Where is he now?”
“He’s sitting across the dinning room here at the lodge.”
“You’re out to lunch? You went fishing?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“I’ve made a list,” she continued, the tone of her voice suddenly businesslike, “trips to the doctor’s office for fertility-or pregnancy-related visits: fifty-two. Number of prescriptions filled for fertility-or pregnancy-related drugs: no fewer than thirty. Number of injections: roughly two hundred. Cumulative full days missed at work: fifteen. Number of times you’ve had to jack off over some dirty magazine in the doctor’s office: eight. Number of miscarriages: three. Number of ectopic pregnancies: one. Number of dead fetusus: five.” She paused. “Number of hours spent in paralysis, bawling my pathetic eyes out: a million. Do you get the idea, Noah? I need you to come home. If it doesn’t work this time, I can’t go through it again. This is it.”
Noah looked at his father. He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the old man laboring up the hill from the lake.
“Are you listening to me, Noah? I have a scar on my arm from where they’ve drawn blood the last three years. I have permanent bruises on my thighs from the injections.”
“My father is dying. He lives alone in the woods. He has to drive eight miles just to use the nearest pay phone.”
“He’s dying?”
“That’s what he says.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He won’t go to the doctor.”
“But he can go fishing?”
“I know. I said it’s hard to explain.”
“Would leaving for one day matter?” she persisted, though clearly she was less emphatic.
The truth was, he did think one day was going to matter. He thought an hour mattered now. But he didn’t say anything.
“Then I’ll come there,” she said after a moment.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll get a flight on Friday. I’m in meetings the rest of today. I have to go.”
“You’re coming here?”
“On Friday.”
“It’s not an easy place to find,” he said.
“I’ll MapQuest it.” And before he could protest she hung up.
He stood there in stark amazement, the idea of her coming to Misquah sinking in slowly. This sort of impulsiveness was not one of her character traits—though conviction of this magnitude was—and he realized again how single-minded she had become. He tried