Whistle
Franz Jørgen Neumann
While on our drive to meet Sara’s folks in Port Angeles, the three of us stop at a lodge so my son can use the bathroom. I lead Daniel through the lobby to the single stall in the men’s room where I lay down a seat liner and lift him onto the toilet.
“Got it? I’ll let Sara know where we are.”
Sara stands at the edge of the gift shop. A wedding party fills the space between us, perfumed women done up and laughing, young men looking like it’s their first time in suits. I point to Sara and then to the lodge’s dining hall. She gives me a thumbs up.
As always, Daniel takes his time. On my third check-in, I find a middle-aged man in a suit and feathered trilby knocking at the door to Daniel’s stall.
“You must understand,” the man says in a European accent. “The other toilets here are in repair. I must use this one.” He turns to me. “I am next.”
The man bends down to look under the door, and I do the same. Daniel’s legs are swinging, pants bunched above his little sneakers. He’s a four-year-old who’s never been in a rush, who doesn’t consider how his actions might affect the patience of others, who has been taught to ignore strangers. He is unperturbed by the man’s “You must be done now, little boy. You must!”
Little boy is humming.
I could tell Daniel to hurry, but that’s never done any good. A child is a creature who slows down time. I’m not sorry for prolonging the man’s agony, either. No one should be allowed to ask anything of a boy who has lost his mother.
Daniel emits a dog-like whine and a puff of gas.
“I must use it now, you understand?” the man says. He is sweating and swaying, the crisp creases of his trousers buckling. He takes hold of the top lip of the stall door and shakes it back and forth. “It cannot wait! It cannot wait!”
Heat shoots through me. I grab the man by the back of his neck and force him into the lobby, then out to the parking lot, where I shove him forward.
“Stay the hell away from my son,” I say.
The air is cool and fresh from a drizzle, but I feel disgusted. I reenter the lodge behind a bride, groom, and videographer. Beads of water leap from the bride’s dress. The groom’s suit glistens. The bride turns from the camera and drops her smile. “Enough. I don’t want to remember this,” she says, reading my mind.
Daniel appears beside me, tugging at my arm.
“I’m done, Daddy.”
His hands are wet, pants buttoned, cheeks apple red from his palms having pressed against them for…was it really fifty minutes?
“Good job,” I say.
We join Sara in the lodge’s dining hall and place our orders. Sara suggests we book a room for the night, given how the day has gotten away from us. Daniel, tired of sitting, isn’t interested in coloring the kids’ activity place mat, so I take him outside and down to the lakeshore. Silver rowboats lie upturned where the grass and gravel intermingle. I don’t tell Daniel that he was here before, as a baby. I don’t tell him of the life I thought was ahead for the three of us. How would telling Daniel more things about his late mother — about a life he doesn’t even remember — help him feel anything but an undercurrent of loss? Instead, I gather flat stones and hand him the best ones. We skip them across the water and into the curls of mist, the quick dimples on the surface of the lake looking like the tracks of an invisible creature sprinting from shore. Some of Daniel’s throws miss completely and clang on the boat hulls behind us.
“We should head back before Sara starts on your mac and cheese,” I say.
Daniel sprints up the lawn and manages the doors on his own. Following behind, I take in the lodge and have the peculiar sensation that my recollections have waited here to ambush me, each colored by a sorrow I would never have imagined could attach itself to memories of a woodpecker outside our room’s window, the banana slug on my jacket, the giant raccoons that woke us in the night as they fought up in a tree.
To derail the heartache, I imagine it was Sara I had Daniel with, that this is our return trip instead of an unscheduled stop. But the soulless trick works for only a moment. The love I have for Sara is different. A necessary love. Maybe not love at all.
Seeing Daniel take his seat in the dining hall, I stop at the front desk and learn that the lodge has a few vacancies — if I don’t mind a bit of ruckus from a wedding party. I’m handed earplugs with the room keys. I fetch our bags and take them upstairs, then reenter the restaurant where Daniel is showing Sara a terrifically long French fry. She leans forward and nibbles it all the way to his fingers as he giggles. I give her one of the room keys and finish my meal alone, looking at the wall of sepia photos showing the lodge under construction: the horse-drawn logs, the record snowpack, the work crew posing amid beams and joists, people who’d left behind their efforts but not themselves.
On my way out, I spot the European man in the gift shop. He comes toward me haltingly, like he’s just learned how to walk.
“You must accept my apology,” he says, removing his hat. “I was desperate, you understand. I was not thinking.”
“Neither of us were thinking,” I say.
“Yes.” He beckons me toward the gift shop. “Let me buy your boy a trifle. What does he like?”
My eyes pass over the polished rocks, miniature license plates, pocketknives, and vials of gold flake, knowing that accepting his offer is necessary so we can both forget our earlier altercation.
“What about a train whistle?” the man says. “Does he like trains?”
“Loves them, but it’s not necessary,” I say, playing the game.
He pays and returns to me.
“One train whistle for your son,” he says, his face soft and kind. He hands me a second whistle. “And one for the father.”
“Thanks,” I say, feeling utterly removed from the person who saw malice in this man.
We shake hands, finalizing our peace treaty. For the first time all day, a moment of lightness fills me. It holds steady upstairs in the hallway where I give a whistle a try and enjoy the little four-tone toot. In our room, I find Daniel out from his bath and in fresh pajamas, Sara ruffling his hair dry with a towel. He runs into my arms, his body still hot-water warm and smelling sweet, a precious wonder of a being whom I hug hard, even when he’s let go. I hand him a train whistle and pass mine to Sara. “One for you, too.”
I want to thank Sara for waiting for us in the dining hall, for giving Daniel his bath, for being here. But she’s already chugging around the room with Daniel, both of them blowing their whistles, the air rich with pleasant downy harmonics. Around and around me they go until a firm knocking on our door halts them. The man in the hallway says he’s from the room downstairs. His wife has a headache. Could we keep it down?
“Sorry,” I say. “We’re just letting off some steam.”
Daniel’s brief toot undercuts my apology. Sara turn away in laughter.
“I wish you’d do it outside,” the man says.
And we do. We walk along the water’s edge, Daniel blowing his whistle and insisting that we answer.
When Sara and I first got together, she had the two of us set aside an entire weekend where I did nothing but share everything I wanted to share about my late wife and our time together. But I’ve found that there are always more memories. And though Sara didn’t set a limit on disclosures, what would be the point of telling her how Daniel’s mother, here at the lodge, fell down the stairs, laughing so hard at her tumble that she could barely breathe? The running gag of her clumsiness was really just the first sign of what was to come, though we didn’t know it then.
I keep the memory to myself and pretend she never passed away. That she’s an ex, living abroad, a woman I’m under no obligation to think about daily. This trick works for a few moments, then my thoughts jump to Daniel, who is waiting for us at the first plank of a boat dock. We take his hands and lead him out onto this long and narrow in-between space that’s not quite land, not quite water. We walk to the end, where we swing him repeatedly out over the deep, dark water to Daniel’s fearful delight.
Members of the wedding party come out onto the dock. They’re laughing, ties loosened, bridesmaid’s dresses the color of the trees in the dusk. We cede the dock and watch them imitating us, two of the women swinging a young man over the edge by his arms and legs, once, twice, then losing their balance, all three of them falling into the lake. They shriek, laugh, splash each other in water that turns out to be only a few feet deep, there where it looked like it went down forever.
