Mother Superior - fiction by Brandon Hansen

The Rock of Ages sank beneath Lake Superior's dark surface on a warm night in July. The lighthouse on its back went with it. Some Minnesotans camping on a satellite island of Isle Royale watched it happen while they sat around a fire—they dropped their beverages to the dirt as the striated granite and the heartbeat light sank like a fishing bobber into the depths.

At dawn, after a few sleepless hours, they rowed their canoes to the main island, sprinted down the trail, and burst through the screen door of the rangers' office, gasping. All four rangers, equipped with their Smokey the Bear hats and steaming cups of coffee, looked up in unison. They watched as the Minnesotans jumbled over the story with their Midwestern accents and mannerisms—the huge vowels, the outstretched arms. One of them opened and closed their hands to denote the flashing light, and said, "It went down, I swear, just like this," and he lowered his arm, blinking the light that was his hand until he was sitting on his heels.

"Well, hell," one of the rangers said. He set down his coffee and got in a canoe and confirmed it for himself. When he saw where the island wasn't, he took a deep breath, removed his hat, and held it to his chest.

It was true. The Rock of Ages, and its famous lighthouse, were gone.

In the spring, arriving at her RADR orientation, Emma was greeted by Larry as he opened the screen door to welcome her.

"Well, if it isn't our future aquanaut!" Larry said, taking Emma into a hug with his bony arms all wrapped in flannel. He looked just as he sounded over the phone, Emma thought. The classic Michigan man, Emma thought. The Upper Peninsula, specifically.

"Lisa, honey! Emma's here!" Larry shouted back into the house. He beckoned Emma into the kitchen, which Lisa walked into from the garden outside, her stormy hair tied into a bun over her head. She smiled, waved, then reached into the fridge to grab a pitcher of lemonade.

"Emma was our top candidate by a mile, isn't that right?" Larry said.

"That's right," Lisa said, as she handed a glass to Emma. "You might be more qualified than we are."

Emma, a fresh high school graduate, knew that there couldn't have been more than a dozen applications. Residency within a few miles of Houghton, Michigan (population 7,800) was a necessary factor for the underwater-research internship, the ad for which she found on a shoddy website online. She also knew she was definitely not more qualified than the doctorate and bachelor of marine biology that were Lisa and Larry, respectively, the husband and wife pair who founded RADR. The state-run aquatic research contingent focused solely on large bodies of freshwater: namely, the Great Lakes. Mostly, Lake Superior, for it being the only one wide and deep enough to justify the materials Larry managed to schmooze out of the government: diving gear, recording equipment, and a small submarine, pictures of which Emma saw on the website. The low-res photo of the little sub, which somehow reminded Emma of a baitfish and had "RADR" emblazoned on the side, made her smile.

"Reaching Abnormal Depths and Returning!" Larry had nearly howled through the phone on his call to accept Emma's application. "Can you believe they funded us with that name?"

The three of them sat on lawn chairs in the backyard for the orientation. A garden surrounded them, daisies and dahlias that swayed in the shade beneath the house's eave, clouds of baby's breath that rung the fence around the yard. Emma thought that it must have taken years to get the garden just so. She looked off past the fence, where Lake Superior, calm that day, shimmered in the distance.

Larry handed Emma a pile of papers to sign—"Some government junk," he said. As Emma wrote her name over and over on dotted lines that asked her to please not drown underwater or leak government secrets, Lisa stared at her. Emma tried to ignore the weight of her eyes, but she couldn't help but return the look.

"Oh, sorry," Lisa said, smiling. "I just love what you've done with your nails. Such a wonderful blue. I wish I had the gumption to do my own, lately."

Emma smiled. Her nails were ocean-blue, her necklace the shape of a starfish, her hairclip a little clam. She wanted them to like her.

Emma handed the stack of papers to Larry, who tossed them like a newspaper onto the doorstep.

"Alright!" Larry said, "Let's get the boring part out of the way."

Larry read from a pamphlet stamped with the National Park Service emblem and described the responsibilities of Emma's position. It involved mostly writing things down, calling out numbers, and carrying equipment. Emma did her best to listen, but couldn't help getting distracted by Lisa, who continued to stare at her. Emma kept her head down and watched the squiggly bits of pulp dance above the sediment of sugar in her lemonade.

"Alright! That's enough of that," Larry said, snapping the NPS binder shut.

"Emma, why don't you tell us about yourself?" Lisa asked, like the question had been waiting to leap from her the whole time.

Emma didn't know what to say. Should she tell them about a childhood of walks on Lake Superior's rocky beaches, of hikes up modest mountains, through national forests? Or about thousands of school days, dozens of notebooks full of scribbled words and charts that somehow led her here? She felt like they had to know all this—they'd lived here for decades. They knew what it was like to live on the lakeshore, on a slice of a state that was a slice of a country. So she just shrugged and smiled. And seeming to accept that, so did Larry and Lisa, their figures going dark as the sun fell over the lake behind them.

That night, when Emma got home, she stepped around the broken-down cars with the hanging bumpers, the gas cans with their thick fumes, the oil rags coloring patches of her lawn like algae. She stepped inside, and as always, the house was bitterly cold, every window was still flung open from when the sun was still up, though the cold had creeped in hours ago. Her parents sat on separate couches, animated only by the glow of their phones on their sunken faces, the ever-changing light of the television. It burned her up every time. She went to bed, and as always, shivered beneath the sheets. She fell asleep fantasizing about shaking her parents, about asking—don't you know how embarrassing this is? Don't you know it's only truly warm in Michigan in the thick of summer?

Trips to Larry and Lisa's house became frequent in the summer weeks that followed. The trio was supposed to be job training, which they somewhat did. Afternoons were spent with Emma standing nervously on piers that jutted out into Lake Superior, and Larry or Lisa strapping oxygen tanks and goggles around her face before having her stand on the pier's precipice and giving her the gentlest shove.

Underwater, Emma would open her eyes to an explosion of bubbles, to the lake's sandy floor and all the fallen trees, volcanic rocks, and swimming, squiggly things that populated the bottom. After a minute, she would kick herself to the surface, burst through the cloud of bubbles. Above her, she would see Larry and Lisa, their hands folded over their mouths in anticipation.

They always went back to Larry and Lisa's house after training. At first, it was for an hour or so, just to chat. Later, the soirees lasted entire evenings, where Lisa would serve food with their drinks, then desserts. Some days, they would forget the training altogether and walk to the beach. Along the way Larry would regale the girls with memories from his youth—which mostly involved skipping school to backpack along the Great Lakes—or of RADR's achievements—which mostly involved procuring items from shipwrecks or confirming the existence of a certain underwater species in a certain cove. At the beach, Lisa would dig her toes into the pebbles, and watch as Larry taught Emma how to find beach glass, how to skip rocks across the lake's surface. Once, when Emma flung a thin slice of granite that skipped seven times, Larry threw his hands in the air and yelled "Wowee!"

Those nights, Emma would walk without a word through her freezing home and past her statuesque parents and listen to the distant ore freighters clanking around on the lake. And she felt better, somehow. She knew she was too young to know why people become stuck in place, knew only that it seemed to strike her demographic hard: people who live in a slice of a slice of a place. When she closed her eyes, she could see the perfect blue of Lake Superior, the endless expanse before her. And while she didn't know why people get stuck, she knew that she wouldn't. When she thought of bursting through the surface, of Larry and Lisa waiting for her up there, she could fall asleep as easy as sinking.

The summer night the Rock of Ages sunk, Larry and Lisa were having Emma over for dinner. The smoked salmon and fried spinach was one of the best meals Emma ever had. The old couple sat on one half of the table, swaying. Emma didn't know what was considered a lot of wine, but she felt like they drank a lot of wine.

Larry set down his fork, blinked like he was trying to reset his brain, then looked up at Emma and asked, "Have I ever told you what I've learned about life, being underwater?" Before Emma could speak, Larry held up one hand like he was weighing something, and said, "Perpetual motion," and then held up the other, and said, "Perfect stillness." He clapped his hands together, making Lisa jump.

"Larry, that doesn't make any sense," Lisa said, rubbing her eyes.

"No no no no," he said, shaking his head. "No no no. It makes a lot of sense, Lisa, and I'll tell you why."

"You'll tell me why?"

"I'll tell you why."

Larry stood up, then motioned for everyone to follow him to the living room. He and Lisa sat on one couch. Emma sat on the other. Lisa leaned her head against Larry's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"When we started RADR," Larry started, wrapping an arm around Lisa, "We could have done a lot of stuff, you know? We had great grades."

"Hmm," Lisa said at that, snuggling in tighter to Larry.

"Well, Lisa had great grades," Larry said. "But I got my degree. And anyway, we were good. I mean, we were good marine biologists."

He checked on Lisa, who was adrift between sleep and waking. He began to whisper.

"We could have moved to either coast, taken a shot at exploring the ocean." For the first time since Emma had known him, he seemed nervous.

"But when I was in school, hell, when I was a kid, and I would dive in a lake, I would see the little particles, the tiny fish, the bubbles, the bits of seaweed just sort of floating along, not necessarily going anywhere but always moving, and it occurred to me that, if you're stuck doing something, like you have to do something because of the nature of the world, the current, whatever,—you're still stuck. It's just… am I making any sense?"

Emma nodded. She wasn't sure what was going on.

"I'm just saying—if you're stuck either way, stuck in a current or stuck in the muck, why not just be comfortable? I don't know."

Larry hiccupped.

"So we moved up here, to stay close to our parents. The ones that are left, anyway," he said. Then he shook his head. "That's not it. Or that's only partly it. The thing is—I would've been no good in those cities, honestly. I didn't have the grades, the bylines, the accolades. I spent my summers up here. Lisa spent them in labs all around the country."

He looked back at her. Then at his feet.

"God, I've really slowed her down," he said.

Everything was quiet then. Emma's blood spun around in her veins uncomfortably.

"There were things Lisa wanted, though," Larry said. "We had those things. And anyway, I made this proposition to the National Park Service. I told them they could use professionals to conduct ‘Extra-ordinary sub-nautical exploration in the Great Lakes region.'" He chuckled.

"You should've seen the executive. He put his head on the table and told me that ‘sub-nautical' was not even a word." Larry leaned his head over the back of the couch and sighed.

"We sort of had the best of both worlds for a minute there, hey Lisa?" he whispered, before seeming to drift into that same place as his wife—neither asleep nor awake, their heads not quite above water.

Emma wrung her hands together, unsure of what to do. She looked around the room. Pieces presumably taken from shipwrecks lined the wood-paneled walls: a ship's rusted steering wheel, a fishing hook the size of a boomerang, a warped chunk of iron ore that resembled a heart. There were framed fish, splake and salmon and cod, all bigger than Emma knew they could be. There were colorful rocks and bits of beach glass all along every surface—the coffee table, the bookcase, the shelves above the windows. The two must have taken hundreds of walks to the lake's shore, she thought. There were framed pictures, mostly of darker-haired, fuller-faced Larry and Lisa, standing outside of their research ships and submarines, the bodies of which grew sleeker as the quality of the photos improved. By all accounts, it looked like they had built a beautiful life together. But still, in the pictures, Emma couldn't help but notice that Lisa's smile, once nearly preposterously huge, had shrunken as the years went on. Now, the light of it didn't quite reach her eyes.

Larry groaned, shifted a little. Emma's eyes snapped to him, then drifted upward to the small, intricately framed picture that hung over his head.

She could recognize the figures of a younger Larry and Lisa. There was a shape between them, something small. She couldn't quite see. She leaned forward, squinted. She still couldn't tell. It was one of the older photos, though, she knew that much. She leaned until she was basically standing when Larry snorted and snapped himself back to reality.

"Wow, sorry," Larry said, blinking himself awake. "Hey, it's awful late. Why don't you crash in the guest room? We've had it all made up for you."

Emma nodded and smiled. Larry gave her a thumbs up, then closed his eyes and leaned his head into Lisa. Emma walked through the living room to the guest room at an awkward angle—she hoped the couple wouldn't notice—and through her periphery she saw the photo clearly. Standing between the young, mustachioed Larry, the long-haired and beautiful Lisa, was a little girl. She held a rainbow trout with both hands and smiled a partly toothless smile.

As Emma blinked herself to sleep in the cozy room, much warmer than she was used to, she saw the little girl in flashes behind her eyelids. As much as she tried to think about it any other way, she thought she looked just like her when younger.

The morning was intense.

Larry burst through the doors of the guest room at five a.m., jolting Emma awake. She inhaled in that way people only do when they're ripped from that deep place. She blinked away the fog of waking as Larry spoke.

"Sorry," Larry said, vibrating. "But we got an assignment—we need the plane."

Emma tilted her head at Larry.

The plane?

Everything was a blur. Lisa stumbled from the bedroom in her robe, her stormy hair exploding in every direction from her head.

"Good morning, dear," she said to Emma. She started to put on coffee.

"I don't know if we have time for coffee, dearest," Larry said as he zipped through the kitchen, pulling his arms through the sleeves of his RADR uniform.

"Larry, the island isn't going anywhere," Lisa said as she measured out the grounds.

"Okay," Larry said, buttoning his shirt. "Except it might be, Lisa—that's sort of the whole thing."

She only shook her head.

Emma stood awkwardly in the living room, still in her crumpled clothes from the day before. Larry seemed to teleport behind her, tossing a uniform over her shoulder.

"Get dressed," he said, "I'll explain in the van."

Eventually, Emma and Larry were out the door in the dark morning. Larry sat in the driver's seat. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, glanced at the van's time display every few seconds. Emma sat in the back, hands crossed in her lap, head still fuzzy.

"Come on, Lisa," Larry whispered.

Eventually, she sauntered out of the front door with her coffee and lurched herself into the front seat. Larry took off before her door was fully closed.

As they zipped down the highway, Larry explained the situation. He said a very ancient island of volcanic rock, with a very old lighthouse on top of it, sank into the lake last night. Some Minnesotans saw it happen. He said he trusted a fellow Midwesterner.

Emma thought of how peaceful she felt last night, that as she sank into the depths of sleep, the island disappeared.

"Larry, can you be careful, for once?" Lisa said, rubbing her eyes. "We'll never get there if we're just a smear on the goddamn road."

"We need all the daylight we can get, Lisa," Larry said, squinting through the windshield. He was pushing eighty, Emma could see from her angle to the driver's seat. She also saw Lisa shake her head almost imperceptibly. That motion silenced the car for the rest of the drive.

Larry could, in fact, fly.

The engines of the float plane were deafening. Emma white-knuckled the pleather as they got to speed on the runway and took flight. It was her first time in the air. She was breathless from the one-two punch of the fear, and then the awe as Lake Superior stretched out before her, blue and boundless, revealing itself completely as the sun rose and burned away all the mist shrouding its surface. When the land turned into only colors beneath them, when the lake became all she could see, she felt so small. Just like another small, squirming thing that sometimes played in its depths, and she realized why some of the locals called the lake Mother Superior.

"Sure enough," Larry, in his aviators and huge puffy headset, shouted through the roaring engines and pounding wind. "It's gone." He pointed downward at a patch of islands that rose out of the ceaseless blue.

"Without a trace, Larry," Lisa said, staring at the chain of islands.

Emma, with no frame of reference, could only imagine where the island, with the spear of a lighthouse on its back, used to be—much less where it had gone.

"RADR here. That is, Reaching Abnormal Depths and Returning. We've reached bottom."

Now in the submarine, Larry set the microphone down, cracked his knuckles hard enough to cause an echo around the metal cabin, then stared like a goldfish down at the submarine's console, which bleeped and blooped and blinked and glowed in ways that Emma thought looked and sounded surprisingly like the submarines in the movies.

"Roger that," HQ, some National Park Service representative, said. His somewhat official voice, like a school principal, crackled through the center console. "You're looking at one hour before you reach the island's former location. Keep us in the know."

Larry waved his hand dismissively, as if he could swat HQ's vibrations from the air.

"I don't know why you insist on using that ridiculous name, Larry," Lisa said. She snapped a headset around her ears. Emma, who sat on a metal bench in the rear of the mini sub, flinched.

"Sorry dear," Larry said. He bent over to read a radar display. His nose touched the warm glass. Lisa looked at this and smoldered. Usually, Larry's eccentricities—the denial of his farsightedness, the way he explained things about the water that Lisa knew better than him, the way he told the old stories of their first founding RADR over and over—would roll off Lisa's back. But this morning, it seemed like he couldn't do anything that wouldn't infuriate her. Painful silence filled the sub's cabin, save for the radar, which pinged out into the lake every five seconds. In the hundreds of pings since descent, there was never a return. Lake Superior seemed lifeless.

Emma stared past the faint reflection of herself, out the porthole, and into the endless blue. She could only think of the little girl in Larry and Lisa's picture, of her smile with the gaps, her tiny frame the source of some massive gravity that pulled her parents together.

Larry and Lisa had done so much for her, Emma thought. Maybe she could make some small talk. Maybe she could unstick the two from the brooding place they were glued to.

"Do you guys have a daughter?" Emma said, breaking the silence.

Larry lifted his face from the radar. Lisa pulled the headphones from her ears. Larry sighed. His shoulders dropped like he blew all the wind from his own body. Lisa gave Emma the same stare she'd been giving her since the day they met.

Emma, in that moment, remembered what it was like to dissect a frog in biology class. She remembered looking at charts that explained where all its nerves ran, and what those nerves were for. She learned that many aquatic creatures sense things in unique ways—crayfish graze the sand with antennae to detect electricity in aquatic worms, schools of bass swim in harmony due to their pressure-sensitive lateral lines, frogs detect everything from chemical changes to subtle vibrations through their permeable skin.

In that moment under the water, Emma could feel vibrations she couldn't comprehend. It was palpable in Lisa's far-off eyes, Larry's crushed stature. The radar pinged all the nothing in the lake.

"I'm sorry…" Emma started to say before Larry held up a hand.

"No," Larry said. "Don't be sorry." He stared out the porthole nearest to him.

"We did have a daughter, once," he said. Pale blue light poured from the window and onto his face. He looked older than he was.

"How do I say this?"

"We lost her in the lake," Lisa said. She seemed to age right before Emma's eyes.

"I lost her," Larry said. "I lost her in the lake."

"Oh, shut up Larry," Lisa said.

Larry shrugged.

"You told me to be careful," he said. "And I ignored the signs. The riptide just pulled her out of my arms."

"Shut up!" Lisa shouted. She threw her headset at Larry. It bounced off his back. The cord tangled around his shoulder. It dangled from him. He just kept staring outside.

"Who would have thought a lake could have that kind of strength?" he said.

Lisa buried her face in her hands. Larry was still. Emma doubled over. She felt sick.

The center console crackled.

"You should be close to the island's original position," HQ said. "Please respond."

Without looking away from the porthole, Larry grabbed the mic.

"Still looking," he said.

"Please surface in thirty either way," HQ said.

Larry hung up. His breath fogged up the window's glass.

"We're going to look until we find it," he said to himself.

"There's nothing to find, Larry," Lisa said, springing to her feet. "There's nothing to find in this freezing, forsaken lake."

Larry tilted forward just a touch. His head rested on the glass.

"You just want something interesting to happen for once," Lisa said. She shook her head in that tiny, heartbreaking way again. "All we know right now is that they can't see the island. You shouldn't get your hopes up that there's any special reason for it."

Larry sighed, fogged up the whole window.

"And," Lisa said, sinking back down, "you won't find Ella down here."

Emma uncrumpled herself. Ella?

Larry looked deeply at Emma. Were his eyes apologetic?

"That's enough, Lisa," he said in a voice that Emma didn't think he could ever muster.

Then, the radar blooped.

This was distinct from a ping. Everybody's eyes shot to the display. There was a single, blinking dot closing in on the ship. Larry and Lisa whipped around and stared out the front window, Emma stared out of her porthole. Whatever darkness was vibrating through everyone's skin before, it was cut now with some strange excitement.

"By god, look at that!" Larry shouted.

A single turtle, red-shelled and no bigger than a dinner plate, floated by the submarine.

Everybody looked at everybody. Lisa started ripping through a wildlife book, Larry started writing furious notes. Emma stood up, not really sure what to do.

"It makes no sense, Lisa," Larry said, "It makes no goddamn sense for that thing to be down here."

"We're 300 feet underwater," Lisa said, "You're damn right it makes no sense. And that thing is not native here, no way."

The radar blooped again. Larry and Lisa were too busy chattering to notice. "A new species? Did we find a new species?" "Maybe some yuppie chucked it in here from Canada or something." "That doesn't explain how it lives at this depth." "And that color! I've never seen such a thing."

The radar blooped and blooped again. Emma gasped.

Turtles. Hundreds of turtles with shells of different, brilliant colors swam before her eyes. They were green like pine needles, and blue like Emma's nails, and white like the baby's breath in Lisa's garden. They were every color imaginable. The turtles and their infinite hues swirled together in a meandering way. They orbited each other and knocked into each other and went spinning off in every direction, like looking into a kaleidoscope.

Emma turned from the window, and shouted, "Hey!"

Larry and Lisa turned, startled. They saw Emma pointing out the porthole, her eyes bulging from her tired face, and then they looked for themselves.

Their arms dropped to their sides, the books and pens and sheets with their little scribbles falling to the floor.

"Larry," Lisa said. The many colors of the turtle's shells shone prismatically on her face.

"Lisa," Larry said. He was trembling.

The submarine floated through the tunnel of kaleidoscopic turtles, the explosion of life. Lisa leaned into Larry and he wrapped an arm around her. Emma, compelled, stepped forward tentatively. Lisa turned, smiled, and opened her free arm. Emma let herself be pulled into the embrace.

They all stood there like that, sharing each other's warmth, cruising through the tunnel of unusual life, heading somewhere unknown.

"Well," Larry said. "It's not the ocean."

"It sure isn't," Lisa said. She hugged Larry a little tighter.

"It isn't Seattle."

"Or Miami."

"Or Los Angeles." "Or New York."

"But it's beautiful," Lisa said.

Larry rested his chin on Lisa's head.

"It's like you brought me to the ocean," she said. "In your own way, of course."

Larry closed his eyes very tightly.

"And you even brought the kids," Lisa said.

Something in Emma's stomach lifted. Larry buried his face into Lisa's hair. Looking at him, Emma thought that for the first time in a long time, he didn't know what to say. That everything he knew, everything he was never able to give her, was all right here.