Like a Land of Dreams
When Andrew got the news that his wife had been killed in the South Shore train wreck, the first thing he did was look for his keys. They were not on the hook by the door where she said he should keep them. They were not on the dresser or the kitchen table or between the couch cushions. He finally found them in his studio on a table near the commissioned painting of a poodle whose idiotic doggy smile had caused Meredith to die—in a way. He restrained himself from slashing the canvas with an X-Acto knife.
He sped blindly toward the lake. He knew the streets of Michigan City like he knew the sound of Meredith’s voice. He could almost feel her gripping his thigh, begging him to slow down, saying, Please don’t kill us, Andrew. I like being alive.
Washington Park was almost deserted. When he turned off the engine, everything was still, except for the gentle sloshing of waves on the beach. There was the lighthouse, white and red and friendly in the evening light. No one was fishing on the pier—wrong weather, wrong time of year. Andrew had forgotten his coat, and there was no shelter on the pier from the persistent November wind surging down from Canada. It needled through his flannel shirt and whipped his hair into a mane.
Before boarding the train that morning, Meredith had buried her fingers in his hair.
Your fur needs a trim, she had said.
I’m growing a winter coat, he said.
She said, You look like a Golden Retriever.
Now as he gazed west, he could just make out Chicago’s gray skyline. He turned east and looked down at the short plunge from pier to rock buffer to water. Many times he had taken his rowboat out on this water, photographing the shoreline, the lighthouse, the pier, the gulls. Tonight, the wind stirred the lake, but it wasn’t truly rough. There were times he’d seen this water in full fury, waves surging over the pier. Once, about a year ago, a local teenager went out on the pier in a storm. He was swept away, dashed against the rocks, and drowned. When Meredith read the story online, she slapped her palm on the kitchen table and shouted, Idiot! Then she murmured: He probably would’ve been in my algebra class next year.
If she had been standing there with him now, he might have said, The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full.
Then Meredith would have said, Lake, Andrew, it’s a lake.
And then he would have said, Poetry, Meredith, it’s poetry.
Andrew leaned against a pylon and stared blankly at the familiar lighthouse. How many times had he photographed and painted that lighthouse? Dozens at least. People liked it, an icon, something familiar. The artwork sold.
The setting sun cast a red glow on the Chicago skyline. In that city, her body lay in a morgue. Her brother had positively identified her. Now Andrew had to go, make arrangements, bring her back. He would have gone today or tomorrow, but they told him on the phone that they couldn’t release the victims until Monday. Get your bodies during regular business hours, apparently.
The sun went down like a glowing sheet of metal. The lake became a darkling plain. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full.
At 3:00 a.m., Andrew was in his studio working on the commissioned portrait of the poodle. He hated that animal. He had been working on its nose that morning while Meredith got ready to leave for Chicago to visit her brother. She had wanted to take the 10:55 train, but Andrew, who had promised to drive her to the station, had been preoccupied with his work and was running late as usual. They pulled into the station just as the 10:55 left. He could tell she was annoyed, but all she said was, I’ll just catch the 11:25.
Andrew could not look at the poodle any more. He crossed the room to a stack of blank canvases. Hidden behind them was a painting of Meredith that he had been working on for her 27th birthday. She was leaning against a water maple in a yellow spring dress that set off the richness of her tan. Her dark hair had caught just a hint of sunlight, and her mouth curved teasingly, as if she knew some private joke.
Meredith had asked him once, What is the hardest thing to paint?
People, he said.
More specifically, she said. Is it the hands?
No, he said, it’s the eyes. There’s a light in them that’s hard to catch.
It’s the soul, Meredith said decisively.
The soul, he said.
Yes, she said, the soul. You catch a glimpse of it sometimes, in the eyes.
She knew perfectly well that he didn’t believe in the soul.
Andrew did not leave the studio that night. In the morning, the silence was appalling, not to hear her moving through the house, getting ready for church. He forced himself to finish the dog, then started on a commissioned bridal portrait. At 10:55, he put down his brush and called Meredith’s distant cousins in Greece. Then he called her brother to get the phone number for her aunt who lived in Rockford. Then he called the aunt, who sobbed into the phone. After that, he judged that church would be over and called Meredith’s minister. The minister was silent for so long, Andrew wondered if he had lost signal. Then the minister said, “Oh, Andrew. Andrew.” It wasn’t so much the words but the way he said it that choked Andrew. It was his turn not to speak. Then the minister said, “If you’d like, I can come over.”
“No,” Andrew said. “No.”
“Call me back, then,” he said. “We need to…discuss service times.”
“Yes,” Andrew said and hung up. He rushed back to the bridal portrait and worked on it all day and into the night. Around midnight, he lay down on the hard studio floor, fell asleep, and dreamed he was marrying Meredith again. She was wearing the yellow dress, and they were standing on the lighthouse pier. At the foot of the pier, waves washed away boulders as if they were nothing but pebbles. Then the lake rolled back, a silent wall of water that disappeared over the horizon. The floor of the lake lay barren and dry.
Andrew woke with an aching back and resumed work on the bridal portrait. By morning, his eyes burned, and his hand was cramped. He cleaned up and took the train to Chicago. He had to get her; he had to think, plan, call the minister back. He wished someone else could think for him.
There was no visible evidence of the train derailment. The commuters rushed about in a soulless mass as if no one in the history of the world, let alone two days ago, had been crushed like paper in the bent metal teeth of a wrecked train.
* * *
Almost everyone at the funeral was a stranger. Most were from Meredith’s church, along with a handful of co-workers from the high school. Andrew sat in the front row near the closed casket, next to Meredith’s brother Sean, whose black hair was in wild disarray. The rims of his eyes were the color of a dying sun.
Andrew stared at the casket. It was her body in there, twisted unnaturally at the neck—but it was not Meredith herself. She wasn’t there, which meant that she was either someplace else or nowhere else. He wondered why he used to enjoy the thought of nowhere.
Sean nudged him and cast a questioning look at the leather-bound Bible in Andrew’s lap. Andrew pointed to Meredith’s name, embossed at the bottom. He had given it to her last Christmas. She went ecstatic over it as if it were proof that Andrew was on the verge of conversion. He had been planning to have it buried with her, but the minister had handed it back to him and said, “She doesn’t need it where she is.”
They sang a hymn Andrew had never heard. The minister held forth on the resurrection of the dead. Beside Andrew, Sean began to weep quietly, face in his hands, tears dripping between his fingers.
But Andrew couldn’t cry. He wanted to, but he couldn’t, and he wondered what her friends would say about that. From where he sat, Andrew could smell the sticky sweetness of the flowers surrounding the casket. They were dead, all these flowers, just waiting around to look as dead as they already were.
He remembered Meredith, standing before him in the studio, hands on hips saying, How’d you get to be such a pessimist? You’re an artist.
Exactly, Andrew said.
But your paintings, she said, your pictures. You see beauty.
Okay, look, he said, pointing to a photo he had taken of the sun setting behind the Michigan City lighthouse. He had rowed out on the lake on a brilliant summer evening for that shot. He said, How long a window of time do you think I had to take that?
How should I know? she said. I teach algebra, not photography.
He said, A second. Two seconds. I took the picture, and it was gone.
But it was there, she said.
But it didn’t last. That’s why I paint it. So we can keep it.
After the service, Meredith’s friends offered tearful condolences. Sean hugged him and said, “She really, really loved you, you know.”
“I—” Andrew said. He wanted to say, “I really, really loved her too,” but he found that he couldn’t speak.
They all trooped out to the cemetery and put her body in the ground, and that ought to have seemed final, but it did not.
The house was silent when he returned. He went to the studio and looked at her portrait. There she was, smiling at him, getting flecks of bark on her new yellow dress. He hadn’t gotten the eyes right. Absent was that gleam of life that Meredith called the soul.
“Say something,” he murmured absurdly to the painting. Were she here now, he would gladly listen to anything she said. He wouldn’t even mind her evangelizing.
He who has an ear, let him hear! she had said to him once when he let her read to him in bed.
I have ears, he had mumbled, pulling the sheet up to his chin and glaring at the clock on their bedroom wall. He said, My ears and my eyes are telling me you’ve been reading for half an hour.
She playfully flicked his ear and said, You sound like an old man.
I have a dawn appointment with the dawn, Andrew said. He was going out to the dunes to paint. The forecast said winds would be relatively calm. He rolled over, his back to her.
Meredith closed her Bible and smacked his shoulder with it irreverently. She said, He who has lips, let him kiss me!
Andrew grinned, rolled over, and kissed her.
These lips, Meredith said, touching them with her finger, These lips were made for praise.
She had believed every feature of his face belonged to her God.
When Andrew went to bed the night after the funeral, he placed Meredith’s Bible on her pillow. It seemed like an unreasonable thing to do, but he didn’t care. Perhaps it was alive in the same way she was. It still seemed to have power over people’s hearts.
“You and your God,” he muttered, breathing in her scent on the pillows.
He dreamed again that he was marrying her by the lighthouse. Waves rose and flooded the pier, but they could both breathe underwater. He could hear the spray echoing overhead, and Meredith said, Sweet is the night-air! And Andrew woke up thinking, That’s not very much like algebra.
Rain drummed on the roof and the wind, a dull roar. He rolled over. The alarm clock was dark; the power was out. It was like the storm last October. They had been sitting on the couch watching TV when the screen and the lights blinked out.
Dark! Meredith exclaimed cheerfully.
They fumbled until they found each others’ hands and then they stumbled into the kitchen, looking for the flashlight. Meredith found it in a drawer and shone it on her face, lighting her nose an eerie red. They went back to the couch, and Meredith declared that these were the perfect circumstances in which to read. She grabbed her Bible from the coffee table. Andrew didn’t protest. He was comfortable with his head resting on the couch cushions, and Meredith leaned back against his shoulder and started reading from the Psalms. He let her go without comment until she came to the line, He rides on the wings of the wind; he makes his messengers winds, and then he couldn’t resist.
Are you saying God is out there right now? he said, twisting around to look at her and pretending to be in awe. Meredith, did God come by and knock out our power?
In a way, yes, she said.
He said, God is flying by. Right. Now.
Poetry, Andrew. It’s poetry.
The next morning was hollow, wet, and cold, but he couldn’t stay in the house. He strapped his rowboat to the top of his Ford, packed up his camera, and drove slowly toward Washington Park. Meredith had said that he understood beauty. So. He would go catch some beauty.
The water was choppy but not unmanageable. He slid the rowboat into the lake and struck out past the pier toward the “no swimming” signs. The wind was strong and cold, numbing his hands on the oars. Once he had rowed past the lighthouse, he let the oars rest and fumbled with the settings on his camera. From this angle, the lighthouse and the pier looked different, like a long and fragile arm, promising a safety it could not supply. With the heaving of the boat, it was difficult to get a clear shot.
A gust of wind ripped over the lake. Cold water sloshed over the side of the boat, seeping into Andrew’s boots. He looked northwest and saw a dark bank of clouds rushing down from the horizon. Steadying his camera against the strengthening wind, he took several photos of the storm.
Take. Take a picture. Such an odd phrase. As if, by preserving an image, he could really keep a part of the subject, maybe catch its essence or its spirit or its soul.
He imagined Meredith saying triumphantly, Ah, so you admit there’s a soul!
“No,” he said aloud, “but I want there to be.”
Water was getting on his lens. He wiped the moisture off with his damp sleeve and put the camera in its case. Then he took up the oars and started to row toward shore. The wind roared across the lake and swept the quivering waves toward the lighthouse, the pier, and the buffer of boulders beneath the pier. He rowed hard but seemed to have no control over the direction of the boat as the wind pushed him toward the pier. Tightening his grip on the oars, he dug deep into the water. His hair blew into his eyes, stung his cold ears.
Thirty yards to Andrew’s left, waves broke on the rocks and sprayed the concrete buttress of the pier. The black clouds that had massed on the horizon a few minutes ago were now almost overhead. Just to the north, a wall of rain met the lake. He struggled at the oars, hands red with cold.
What had possessed him to come out on a day like this? But he knew. He had wanted the danger of the water so he wouldn’t know the danger of his mind. He had wanted the numbing wind, so he wouldn’t feel his body. Perhaps if all those things were out of the way, he would feel his soul, if indeed he had one. And had Meredith seen her soul, trembling, full of light, as the train jolted it from her body? A twist of metal and a white-hot light.
Waves surged over the side of the rowboat. He stopped rowing and started bailing with his hands. His camera bag floated in the bottom of the boat. Another wave hit him in the face, and he felt the change in the boat, the weight of water tugging it down. The pier loomed close, its support columns barring the gray sky.
Andrew pictured Meredith giving him a look of incredulity. She would say, You died that way, you idiot!
Or would she say, I know, Andrew, I know. If you’d been rowing home to me, you would have made it.
He opened his camera bag, chucked the camera, and tried to use the bag to bail water. It was too late, he knew, but he didn’t want Meredith to say he had given up.
Then he saw the wave coming, broad and high. It heaved his boat aloft, a strong shoulder of water bearing him up. The boat nosed past the crest of the wave and tipped. Andrew clutched at the side of the boat, wet wood wrenching away from his fingertips, and he heard the crack of his own head hitting wood and saw the gray spray around him flicker in and out like electric lights in a power outage.
He thought for a spinning moment that it was Meredith flicking the light switch up and down, as if to gather the attention of her students. She said, “Listen! You hear the grating roar of certitude, and peace, and help for pain,” and he opened his mouth to correct the quotation, but he choked on water. His vision cleared, and he saw far above the murky light filtering through the water like a last will and testament to the goodness of God, and he thought wearily, God. If I’ve even got a soul.
Andrew’s back slammed against rock. He braced himself and kicked, trying to propel himself away from the rocks, but the lake shoved him back, harder. His shoulder blade throbbed, his lungs burned, and his body was going numb. One more time the waves sucked him back, heaved him forward, and when he hit the rock, he clung to it. He hauled himself up the face of the rock and broke the surface, coughing up lake water. Slowly, he crawled to the top of the rock and stood, bracing himself against the concrete pier. The rock buffer stretched out before him toward the shore, white spray leaping along its edge. The lake wind cut through him and hit the pier with a roar like many voices, like a host of souls singing one insistent poem.
Ah, love, let us be true and together sail that Sea around earth’s shore.