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His Mother's Son
Excerpt from Chapter 7 of His Mother's Son

On the cusp of sleep a memory fills her -- of the excursions she and Cooper used to take when he still had his fishing boat. They would motor out past Lummi Island into the fish-rich Straits of San Juan de Fuca. She would hold a line to be game, but mostly she watched him. His body balanced as perfectly as a gyroscope as he hopped around the boat, setting up lines, reeling in fish, removing them from hooks, starting and stopping the motor to get a better angle on things. The son of a fisherman, he took fishing seriously, almost reverently, even though he only did it for sport. He would hold his face up into the wind, sniffing, then gaze hard at the water, his body a highly sensitized instrument, a weathervane, a servant of the elements.

Around them, just water. A few passing boats. The islands floating in the distance, purple or blue, seemingly uninhabited, like mirages you could stick your hand through. A briny, fishy salty smell oscillating around them. The sound of the water slapping the sides of the boat. The gulls screeching in their perennial search for food. Sometimes it brought to mind the harbor where her mother’s shop had been. But how tame that harbor was compared to this experience of being cut loose from land. Here they were alone and at the mercy of wind and weather and currents. It was peaceful here -- but ominously so.

They didn’t talk much. Cooper was filled up with messages from the sea, with sensing peregrinations of fish, and she thought conversation would interfere. She envied his ability to lay his mental preoccupations aside and occupy the physical world so completely. She supposed that was what happened to her in ER, but it was a skill she wished she could take outside the hospital.

One day the motor broke down and they drifted without power under a glowering sky. Cooper went to work tinkering, tightening and loosening screws, checking gas and oil, verifying all the important connections. After a time – half an hour? forty-five minutes? – when he seemed to be having no luck and a light drizzle was thickening to rain, he stopped his tinkering. Overheated, he sloughed his wind breaker and put his hands on his bait-streaked thighs. He looked up at clouds moving pell-mell overhead, and he squinted as if he could see portents on the other side of them. His silence scared her. “My dad died out here,” he said. “Never even had a chance to get his nets.” Cooper went back to work. He never got the inboard motor working that day and he had to attach a small outboard. They motored ashore in a drenching, unfriendly rain.

From Cooper she understands how her mind has been warped. Everywhere she goes she sees disease; she sees the shapes and colors and rhythms of the human body in distress. The pulsing wind makes her think of gasping lungs. In the fibrillating rain she hears the damaged human heart. The smoke-spewing lumber mills downtown suggest projectile vomiting. She has been trained in the lexicon of pathology and it permeates her vision. The jaundiced skies. The inflamed sunsets. The tumorous seas. She has no other way of seeing and thinking. She has chosen biology though still she chafes against it.