Free Lake People by Abi Maxwell Page A

mouth in the days before she was supposed to eat solids.
    But on this trip they drove over the mountains and when they crossed into Canada the land spread open and she opened the window and hung her head out to let her long hair trail behind her. She felt free as she ever had. They shared a few beers as they drove and they kept their hands on each other’s lap and the baby stayed silent, she usually did, and they together laughed.
    And look at those cliffs! Some red as a desert and others slick and black, all of them dropping straight down to that endless blue ocean. They didn’t take their time getting to the cliff that was nearly one thousand miles from Kettleborough, all the way on a northeastern leg of the continent, only a throw from Newfoundland, where they planned to park the van and spend a week. They just drove for nearly twelve hours, parked on a loggingroad and slept, and drove for twelve more hours. Clara keeps a photograph from that night on the logging road. The roadside was filled with knapweed, lupine, and Queen Anne’s lace. Paul balanced a steak on two sticks and cooked it over the fire. The baby was calm, and both Paul and Clara felt filled up with all they would ever need. The sun stayed late, and the photograph is dim, but there Paul is, up close, looking at the camera and giving for the last time that perfectly mischievous smile that she knew was reserved for her alone.
    The place they were headed to was a cove at least one hundred miles from any real feeling of civilization. The last leg of the journey—perhaps forty miles—took nearly three hours. It was that washboard dirt road, and the height. Out there the only place for living was atop the cliffs, so that’s where the road ran, right along the edge, and death became not a presence or an event but a place, just there, one step to the east.
    “Ease up,” Paul said once as he drove, because Clara wanted him to slow down even more.
    The road ended at a village of trailers and weak houses trapped on one side by ocean and the other by deep, wet forest. At the tip of the village—which was the tip of the land—there lay a field of grass dotted by picnic tables. This was the campground where they would stay. It was the only accommodation in the village. There was an outhouse and a water pump and a shower that they could feed dimes into. Paul chose their spot and Clara told him that she wanted one farther from the edge and again he said it, “Ease up,” so she did. The bells on the buoys clanged with the easy motion of the water, and this was as beautiful a place as Clara had ever been to.

    They ate lobster bought from the man who ran the campground. He had a strong accent born of this far-off place, and they did not understand everything he said, but Clara knew he said that whales lived out there in the cove, and that if she watched long enough she would surely see them. After the baby was asleep she lay down for a time with Paul, but when the moon rose she went back outside and sat on the grass with her heels touching the edge of the cliff, and she did not take her eyes off the gleaming water for hours. A ship went by, and though it was probably only a ferry on its way to Newfoundland, Clara imagined red carpets and a brass band, women in billowing dresses headed to a foreign land. Eventually she fell asleep out there. Paul woke her in the early hours of morning and she sat up wide-eyed, happy. There was a mass of birds above, Paul had been watching them for about an hour while Clara slept on the grass, and they circled and dove and circled and dove. They were terns; Paul knew their name. They would float on their cloud of air as if nothing in the world would disturb them, ever, and then one bird would decide to drop and bam, the bird was gone. Bam, bam, one after another, that is the only way to describe it. The birds dove down to the water and right through the surface with the force of a bullet.
    “Feeding grounds,” Paul said, and he