Saltwater

He put the boat in at five in the morning, same as always.

His son had loved this part. He used to stand at the stern and watch the wake close up behind them as they moved out from the dock, as if he were memorizing the way the town looked from out here. He had not understood what he was memorizing or why. He understood it better now.

It had been fourteen months. Long enough that people had stopped asking how he was doing, which was its own kind of answer.

He ran the lines out and settled in and drank his coffee and waited. The sun came up behind the headland and turned the water from black to gray to something that was almost nice to look at. A pelican landed next to him, looked and then left. He ate half a sandwich and threw the rest to the birds.

He caught nothing until nearly nine, and then the line went tight, and he worked it in to find a shoe.

He thought at first it was just debris. The ocean threw things up all the time, fishing gear, scraps and things that had fallen off boats and drifted for years before washing back. He reached over and pulled it from the hook and held it in his wet hand.

It was a boy's sneaker, size five, red with a white stripe. He had bought a pair exactly like it for his son when he was nine years old. The year his son had wanted to be an astronaut and had made him tape pictures of rockets to the ceiling above his bed.

He put the shoe on the seat beside him and sat for a while.

It was not his son’s shoe. His shoes had gone with him in the casket. He was sure of that; he had dressed his son himself. He’d put the shoes on himself and tied them, and it was the worst thing he had ever done. He was certain he had done it.

He picked the shoe up and looked at it. It was in very good condition for something that had been in the water. He turned it over. On the sole, written in black marker in handwriting he would have known anywhere was his son’s name.

He sat with the shoe in his hand for a long time.

His son had written his name in all his shoes starting at age seven because he’d lost two pairs at school and had been upset about it. He’d written it in that slightly wobbly way where the letters were carefully formed but didn't quite line up, a little too large for the space. He had watched him do it. He had sat on the floor of the mudroom with a marker and written his name in every pair he owned.

The shoe was dry to the touch even though he had just pulled it from the ocean.

He held it, breathed and didn’t cry. He cried so much in the first months that he sometimes thought he was finished. He was not finished, he knew that, but today he didn’t cry. He sat with the shoe and looked out at the water and felt it, the small weight of the thing, exactly the weight of a child's shoe.

He put it carefully in his bag and ran the lines back out.

Later he caught a fish and then a tackle box that wasn't his. The tackle box was rusted shut. He worked the latch until it opened. Inside, on top of the lures and weights, was a folded piece of paper.

His hands were shaking before he touched it.

He unfolded it. It was a drawing, crayon on regular white paper, the kind his son had made several of per day from roughly ages four to eight. This one showed a boat on water with two figures in it. The figure in the stern was large and dark-haired. The figure in the bow was smaller, with round eyes and a spike of red hair that was his son's way of drawing himself. Above them, in the sky, Remy had drawn the sun. The sun had a face, and the face was smiling.

Below the boat, in his son’s handwriting, it said Dad and me.

The paper was completely dry. The colors were bright, like it had been made that morning.

He held the drawing in both hands and looked at the two figures in their boat, the smiling sun, the flat blue water. He pressed it flat against his chest and sat there a long time. The boat rocked gently. The lines were out and unattended.

He didn't think this was his sons. He didn't think the dead were in the ocean sending things back through fishing lines on cold mornings. He was not a man who believed in things like that. He believed in the physical world; in engines and weather and the particular ways fish moved in cold water. He had raised his son to ask questions and to want evidence.

When he unfolded the drawing and looked at it again, the colors were so bright, and his son had gotten the hair right. The sun was smiling exactly the way his son always drew it, with the mouth slightly off-center, crowded to the left.

He caught nothing more for the rest of the day. Just before he pulled in the lines he sat in the bow, where his son used to stand, and looked back at the stern where he had been sitting all morning. He tried to see the way his son saw it. The dark-haired man with his coffee cup, the wake closing behind the boat, the town receding.

He thought he understood now what his son had been memorizing.

On the way back in he held the drawing in his jacket pocket with one hand on it and one hand on the wheel. He didn't know what he was going to do with it. Frame it, maybe, or just keep it folded in his pocket until it fell apart. He hadn't decided yet.

He docked in the late afternoon and loaded the truck and drove home slowly in the early dark. For the first time in fourteen months the house with its lit windows looked, from the end of the driveway, like somewhere he could go inside.