I stood on the planks of the Winchester Bay dock with Gus held against my chest and the second vessel in the hand of Shane, and the name on the engraving would not leave me alone. Ruth Anne Ostrander. Died at four years old, six years before my husband was born. Astoria, plot 112. The gulls wheeled and complained. Old Mr. Haskins put on his hat and took it off again. “Birdie,” he said gently, “your husband came to my office in 2011 with that receipt and eleven hundred dollars in cash, and he asked me to keep a secret.”
He told it slowly. When the mother of Gus passed that year, my husband went through her papers, as sons do, and found a cemetery bill from Astoria, paid every single year for six decades. Under it was a baby photograph, a little girl in a white dress, and a birth certificate. Gus had a sister. His mother had buried a child before he was born and never spoke the name again. “He sat in my office and cried like a boy,” Mr. Haskins said. “He told me that a four year old should not have to lie out there alone.”
I sat down on the nearest piling with Gus in my lap. I did not cry. I am a cannery woman, and my tears are slow and come late. I asked why the second vessel was so light. “Because it is empty, Birdie,” Mr. Haskins said. “He wanted to be divided. Half to the river, where he worked, and half to Astoria, to rest beside his sister. He said you would know what to do with the rest.” I looked at Shane. My son was standing there with the empty enamel box and the face of a child caught at the cookie jar.
“Mom,” he said, “I did not know any of this. I thought I was being practical. Tawny and I lost the lease in Eugene in January, and I did not know how to tell you. The house was the only thing I could think of.” His voice cracked on the last word. I told him I understood being scared. I told him that fear makes the whole world look like something you can sell. And then I told him that he could have simply asked me for a bed, and that I would have said yes before he finished the sentence.
A man can keep a secret his whole life and still leave a map for the one person who would follow it.
We did it together, there on the end of the dock where Gus always tied up. Mr. Haskins divided the ashes with a steady hand and a silver scoop, half into the river and half into the empty enamel box. The tide was going out. The water took him gently, in a gray cloud that spread and thinned and was gone, and the foghorn sounded across the bay as if on cue. Shane held my elbow. Tawny, who had come down from the parking lot without a word, stood a little behind us with her hands over her mouth.
The next morning we drove to Astoria in the rain, the three of us, with the box on the seat between us and the brass compass of Gus in my lap. The cemetery lay on a hill above the Columbia, with the wet green slope running down to the water and the ships lined up in the channel. Plot 112 was near the back, under a cedar. The stone was small and white, carved with a lamb. The grass around it had been trimmed that very week. At the foot sat a tiny toy tugboat, painted red, with a coat of fresh varnish.
The caretaker, a tall man named Mr. Nygaard, came out of the shed and took off his cap. He said that a gray haired man in a blue jacket had come every second Tuesday in October for ten years, and that he left a toy tugboat each time and took the old one away. “He never said his name,” Mr. Nygaard said. “He just stood here for an hour and talked.” I thought of every October for ten years, and the little lie that went with it. I am going to see about a boat. I had imagined everything but this.
I opened the compass with my thumb, and for the first time in forty four years I read the inscription inside the lid, because I had never thought to look. It was tiny and worn, engraved by a jeweler in Astoria. R.A. Always north. I sat down on the wet grass and laughed until I had to hold my sides. The needle trembled and settled. Shane knelt and dug a small hole with a trowel the caretaker handed him, and we laid the enamel box beside the lamb. I said a few words. Then I told Ruth Anne that she was not alone anymore.
Driving home, Shane asked in a small voice whether the offer of a bed was still open. I said it was, on one condition. He would work. The Tugboat Room had a waiting list through September, and I needed someone to scrub tubs and change sheets and fold the towels into swans. Eighteen dollars an hour, and Tawny could run the bookings and the website, since she knew all about that. He pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 101 and put his forehead on the steering wheel. “Yes,” he said. “Mom. Yes.”
They moved into the spare room above the garage in May. By July, Shane could fold a towel swan faster than I could. He learned to cook biscuits for the guests on the porch, and to tell the one about the gray whale that got turned around in the log raft, which he had never once heard from his father. The man writing a book on lighthouses came back, and brought three friends. We had four stars and a half in every review, and a waiting list through Christmas, and nobody once called my house too much for one lady.
Every second Tuesday in October, now, I drive to Astoria with a toy tugboat in my purse. Shane drives and Tawny rides in the back with a thermos. The river keeps half of Gus and the hill keeps the other, and between the two of them my husband has made himself at home. I put the old compass on the dashboard. The needle shakes a little and settles every time, pointing north, as if it knew something I was only beginning to learn about the people we keep with us.
