Read We Live in Water for Free Online

of guy you could stay in town if you’d screwed him.” Flett stared out at the lake. “He run your dad off.”
    “This guy my father owed money to,” Michael said, “is he still alive?”
    “Ralph?” Flett frowned. “No. Bannen’s wife fixed him with his own baseball bat not long after, maybe six months. SOB bled to death. Took him all night to die. He’d been pounding on her for years. She only did two years for clubbing him, even though she hit him four times and didn’t call nobody for hours. Jesus, he was a big man. I’m surprised it didn’t take ten hits with that bat.”
    “And my father. Do you know where he went?”
    Flett was staring out at the lake, smiling, and at first Michael didn’t think he’d heard the question. But he cleared his throat and answered. “He said he was going to Seattle to catch a boat. Merchant Marine.”
    And then Flett smiled. “Your father used to talk about the places he saw in the navy. Islands. Australia and I don’t know. Samoa. I’d never been nowhere but Washington and Montana, so your dad might as well have been talking about Mars. But after he left, I always pictured him living on one of them islands, sleeping with the dark girls and cheating the locals at poker.”
    They talked a little more, but Flett didn’t seem to remember anything else. When it was quiet, Ellie offered to show Michael around. They walked outside and down the exterior wooden staircase, the rail in bad need of stain. The water lapped silently against the rip-rap and a dock lifted and fell slightly.
    “I’m sorry he couldn’t help you more,” Ellie said.
    “It’s okay,” Michael said. “At least he knew him.”
    “What will you do now?”
    “I guess I’ll go to Seattle, see if they keep Merchant Marine records there.”
    Ellie was staring at him. “Can I ask you something?”
    Michael said yes.
    “You said you’ve been looking for your father the last four months.”
    “Yes.”
    “But you said your mother died a year ago. So what happened four months ago?”
    Michael looked down and smiled. “My wife and I split.”
    After a moment, Ellie said, “I’m sorry.”
    Michael shrugged. That was such an odd phrase— My wife and I split —so matter-of-fact and impermanent, making it sound no different than My wife and I bought a home or My wife and I joined a softball team. So what was the truth? That he threw his life away? That he self-destructed and threw away the whole goddamn thing? That his daughter was worried about having books to read at his house? Michael stared at his hands. “A hole opened up.”
    “What?” she asked.
    He was surprised that he’d spoken. “Nothing,” he said. But he finished the thought: A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge, and then everything sort of . . . fell in, him, his wife, his kid, and this fragile life they’d built at the edge of the hole. And that’s why he was here, because he’d begun wondering if maybe his father hadn’t fallen in the same hole—
    Chop rolled over the surface of the lake.
    Michael looked down the shoreline, at nodding docks, at ski boats rising and falling against log pilings. “It’s nice up here,” he said.
    “It’s quiet,” she said, as if that was the same thing.
    They went back in the house through the basement and were starting up the stairs when something caught Michael’s eye in a room just off the stairs. He pushed open the door to a small bedroom. An empty fish tank ran the length of one wall, a big aquarium eight feet long, like a coffin. The water had been drained and all that was in the tank was a wire brush, a pump, some fake seaweed and a little ceramic turtle. Michael stood at the door a moment and then stepped into the room, empty except for a bed, a dresser, and this wall-length fish tank. He reached up and put his hand against the cold glass.
    “This was my room when I was a kid,” Ellie said, looking