Five years in a valley, your father pursuing new, inland hobbies, his divorce from your mother finally final, and you got over it. But as you sit to pull on your booties, your eyes level once again with those ropes, that gray water, you remember the terror of the old predicament, the entrapment you felt on the open sea. Now you move easily on deck, swing a leg over those ropes as if they were nothing at all. You scan the water's surface with a pro's calculating squint, watching for the channels of blue into gray that mark the movement of the tide into the bay, the possibility of herring, glittering and alive below. As if you'd made it all up.
Mats loves the freighters, the cruise ships, the abandoned oil rigs named for women.
So ugly it is beautiful. His first morning at the lab, you showed him the closet of aprons, beakers, calibrated droppers with soft rubber bulbs, lightly dusted, like a row of newborn mice. That afternoon on the boat you read him movie star gossip and advice columnists from the L.A. Times , and he said your voice soothed him. A week later, he made you matjes herring, his grandmother's recipe, and you were impressed, a man who kept family recipes alive, a man whose smooth skin and nearly hairless legs and arms belie thick brown hair, a beard shot through with white and orange and blond, as if dappled light had been caught there, bristly to the touch. You are worried about him.