by Maggie Carter
A thick layer of fog clung to the surface of Crater Lake that morning. The ends of her ponytail curled as she trudged through the blue haze, kicking up sand with every step. She was only halfway to her destination, and this strange pilgrimage was made even stranger by the January cold. When she’d told her mother that she was visiting the dock one last time, the old woman’s thin eyebrows had jumped to her forehead. Of all the kids, her mother had said, I never imagined you’d be the one to mourn that place.
Neighbors on either side of her family’s small lake house had docks attached to their backdoors, but the Harpers had purchased their home in a time when zoning restrictions prohibited such renovations, and her father had refused his family’s constant requests for an update. Their dock was a solitary mass of warped planks and splintered posts, accessible only by a half-mile hike around the lake. She hadn’t been to the dock in three years, and she hadn’t seen her father in four.
Paul Harper had keeled over after a stroke two weeks ago. She hadn’t gone to the funeral, but she had come to stay at the lakehouse with the rest of the family. Her father had been subterranean for only three days when her mother scheduled the removal of his favorite eyesore. Now that her father was dead, the dock was following suit. A construction crew would be arriving with the sun to demolish the old wooden monster and attach a new model to the back of the house.
The air by the water’s edge was colder than the air on the road, and it turned her lungs into chugging steam engines, puffing out clouds as she walked. When the dock came into view, she stopped and exhaled. It was strange, she thought, to see this place for the last time with her hands stuffed in the pockets of a Patagonia jacket instead of a swim wrap.
She pushed her feet out of her tennis shoes and stripped away her socks, trying in vain to save them from intruding granules of silt. The sand beneath her feet was wet and packed. She sidestepped pebbles and puddles as the wind whipped the tops of her feet. She edged a foot onto the first sun-bleached plank and saw that the skin that stretched from her toes to her ankles was watermelon red. Strange, she thought, to be burned here by something other than summer wood.
Her bare soles read the dock’s gnarls and divots like braille. Here was the place she’d set out her Barbies to dry in the sun after a day playing mermaids; here was the place she’d scraped her knee learning to dive off the dock. There was the place her father had sat to keep watch over the dolls, and there was the place he’d come to call her a fucking brat when she’d cried over her wet wound.
He was all over this wood. Through the fog, she saw him fishing at the end of the dock. Her stomach turned as she thought about the way she would watch him from the sand, wondering if he would yell at her to clear out or call her over to learn about types of trout.
It had taken her until the last minute to return to this place. She hadn’t wanted to see her father’s corpse at the family viewing; she wasn’t sure why she’d decided to visit another place she’d had to tiptoe around her father as though he were a landmine.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled out, wiggling her fingers for warmth as she did. “Hello?”
“Sweetheart,” said her mother. “Are you almost finished?”
“I just got here.”
“Well, it’s not like there’s much to see.”
“I spent twenty summers out here, Mom.”
Her mother harrumphed on the other end of the line. “And you’ll spend twenty more on a dock that doesn’t wobble when more than two people stand on it. I don’t want to rush you, but the builder people will be here in a few minutes and I’m not going to keep them waiting. They charge by the hour, you know.”
She hung up the phone and looked out over the water. The fog was beginning to lift, only a few wisps still clinging to the dark surface. Memories swam in the water surrounding the dock, too. She saw herself small and rosy, laughing as her father showed her how to blow bubbles beneath the lake’s surface. She saw the two of them bobbing up and down on inner tubes as he listened to her talk about her favorite poem.
She imagined diving in, feeling the warm water embrace her. In the space between summers, she dreamed of floating on the surface of Crater Lake and wondering if she would ever feel safe or content as she did in those moments. She dreamed of the bridge that led her to the one place where her father smiled at her the way he was supposed to.
On the dock, he could be as unpredictable as he was on land, but he had always been kind to her in the water.
The skin on her feet felt raw. In the distance, she heard the shrill beeping of utility trucks. It was time to say goodbye.
She knelt down and roved pale fingers along a patch of wood that had been scuffed by a rolling cooler in 2011. A small section came away easily, and she smoothed her thumb across its surface. The water was close enough to touch.
Maybe her father had loved her. Maybe he hadn’t. She didn’t know, and she never would. But she knew that here, in the expanse of water that swept out from the rotting dock, she had loved him.
She tossed the piece of wood into the water and said, “Goodbye, Daddy.”
Maggie Carter is a writer from the mountains of South Carolina.