By Mandy Lange

The moment I realize Winn and Charlie aren’t on the rickety observation deck, I check the shrouded clouds above Lake Superior. It’s more a spasm, a primitive impulse to seek answers in the atmosphere, than a conscious choice. This whole trip was a product of snap decisions: the secondhand purchase of scuffed kayaks, bribing my teens with the lure of doubled allowance, pulling into a hotel without booking ahead. 

My spontaneity failed to shock us into a heart-to-heart during the six-hour drive up I-75. The bend and break of Superior’s waves sound like an embrace, but we’re all still holding our feelings an arm’s length apart.

A gust of wind musses my hair, like Ray’s ax-weathered hands used to. Teens are nothin’ but whims, he’d probably say. Let ‘em figure it out. 

The twenty-foot drop off Superior Outlook ends in dry sand and swaying beach grass. No bodies, no footprints. No phones—I demanded we leave them in the Explorer and was thoroughly cussed out by Charlie for it. 

Flanneled tourists stomp across the soggy wood deck, angling for pictures of the lake or the flame-red foliage. Trolls, Ray used to call them. Crawling up from under Mackinac Bridge. There’s a woman posing with two depressed-looking pugs, a pair of old men in fishing hats. A father peels a babbling toddler off the bronze statue of a grizzly. 

Have they seen a girl with cat-eared headphones, whose auburn hair smells like sweat because she wouldn’t use the hotel shower? She’s hypersensitive to weird substances and loud sounds…Or a six-foot fifteen-year-old who spent forty minutes at the last rest area yet forgot to use the bathroom? He won’t discuss anything except that anime he likes, Punch-something…

The wind grazes my back, urges me forward. The trip to Pictured Rocks was Ray’s idea. I dragged him into the suburban muck of the lower peninsula, but home was forest, lake, and dune to him. Kayaking to the Rocks was something he’d looked forward to when the kids were old enough. 

“They got to learn a bit of life before they can appreciate how storms sculpt the cliffs,” he said.

It ended up being me who learned a bit of life: mostly how the loss of it made me a sundered scrap of myself, adrift in a throng of people without my children to cling to. 

Toward the edge of the crowd a woman in a colorful shawl stands on a stump, narrating to the tourists with a flourish of hands. Most pass her without a glance. But the pebbly grit in her voice reminds me of Ray, and I recognize her story: “The Legend of Sleeping Bears.” 

Mother Bear fled a blazing forest with her two young cubs. The only route to freedom was to swim across a Great Lake, but her cubs had never braved the water. Terrified, she forced them to swim. When she reached the bank on the other side, she realized her cubs had drowned. 

I stumble over one of the pugs, who snaps out of its melancholy to yelp. My hands graze a railing and I claw into it as panic surfaces, my heart flailing like paws against water, silt billowing up my throat to smother my screams for Winn, Charlie, Ray—

Wind stirs up a vortex of dune sand. Tourists duck and sputter, leaving quiet in their wake. I rediscover the deck, the lapping waves, the woman stepping off her stump. 

Today, Mother Bear watches over North and South Manitou, the two islands that formed out of her deceased cubs. I skid down the dune, legs trembling.

Her cubs drowned. Panic pushes and pulls with the waves. 

Ray drowned. I start to run. 

Superior’s frothy lips purse when I reach the beach and feel its intensity. The lake is an ocean from where I stand; it’s a whole world, rushing up to take and give everything I long for, everything I fear— 

The wind kicks up a melody. There’s music in the murmur. A sad, familiar song. Singing sand. Ray explained it the first time we summered up north. “At just the right humidity, the wind and sand’ll talk to you. Hear it?” 

Sand presses against my chest, stops me, holds me. Here. This step. Not a blink ahead or a breath behind. 

Look.

Someone’s bent over in the water, just beyond a sloped dune hidden from the outlook. 

The sand settles. I walk.

Winn dips her hair in the lake, face in her hands. At first I think she’s sobbing, that I’ve pushed her into deep memories before she was ready to swim. But she’s scrubbing her scalp. Charlie’s standing a little way off, hands in the pocket of his hoodie, her headphones around his arm. 

“She’s just washing her hair,” he says. Charlie gestures to the tiny bottle beside her. “That bougie rest area had her stupid apple shampoo. You were spazzing, so I bought it.”

Winn flips her head back, whipping water at us. Charlie curses. Suds fall over Winn’s brows, and her smile stretches—almost as wide as a year ago. 

I want to scream at them for leaving. I want them to understand that I’m not like Mother Bear. Even if they have to float on my buoyed corpse to shore, I’d ferry them against the fiercest rip currents. I want to tell them, It frightens me that I can’t be everything to you.

Instead I peel off my shoes, bury my toes in cold, wet sand, and listen.

Charlie sits beside me, close enough for our elbows to touch. Winn shakes out her hair and joins us. We keep vigil upon the waves with wind-kissed cheeks, until the sun nudges the lake’s horizon and we realize we’re shivering.