What the Lake Wouldn’t Take: A Typewriter Diaries Story
She didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t say much of anything.
I came out of my office after twelve hours of writing, stopping only occasionally to eat, to an unusually quiet house. I expected the TV to be on. It was not. I couldn’t find the cat anywhere. Charlie usually sauntered right up to me when I came out of the office. When I walked past the closet on the way to make supper in the kitchen, it all started to make sense.
Marissa’s clothes, boots, and jacket were gone from the hall closet. Charlie’s food was gone. His water dish was too. The realization came to me that not only was I not likely to find Marissa, I also wouldn't find my cat. Then I saw it.
Sitting on the kitchen table, glinting faintly in the overhead light, was Marissa’s house key, sitting like the exclamation point at the end of the sentence telling me what an idiot I was. It finally hit me then that she was gone, never to return. Worse yet, she took my cat. But she left something, it seemed, and it stood like a life raft in the ocean of uncertainty.
At least she left the typewriter, I thought.
Marissa had gotten the typewriter at an estate sale. A Remington badge was prominently displayed across the front of the ribbon cover. I think it was a Quiet Riter, but I’ve blocked out so many memories since Marissa left that I’m not sure anymore. She’d given it to me for my last birthday. I’d said to her half-jokingly that I wanted to write on something that had some weight to it. It sat on the kitchen table where she’d left it, mocking me, a constant reminder of Marissa and that she wasn’t here. I knew she’d left it there on purpose, like an afterthought, or a message. I wasn’t sure which. After that first weekend on Lake Mariner, I stopped giving a damn.
I needed to get out of that house. Not only was Marissa gone without warning, but she took Charlie too. For the first time in three years, I was completely alone. Normally, that’s not a problem for me. I like my solitude, and I think Marissa took that the wrong way.
Maybe it is my fault. I thought.
With that final thought, I put Marissa’s key in the junk drawer, packed three days’ worth of essentials into a duffle bag, and threw it in the back of my truck. Before locking my house, I grabbed the typewriter, put it in its case, and carefully on it in the passenger seat.
Right where she used to sit.
I cleared the thought from my head and started the truck, and my destination was obvious, even if only to me. I’d hoped to share the cabin with Marissa this year, but I think Grandpa left it to me exactly for situations like this. I took one last look at my house before I pulled out of the driveway.
At least she can’t take that, I thought, and I turned onto the highway headed north, hopefully headed for peace of mind. I needed to write, and I needed quiet in order to do it.
You need quiet to fall apart, a voice in my head corrected. There’s a big difference.
***
Lake Mariner was always peaceful at night, and it hadn’t changed. Flat, black, and patient, the lake always provided a calming presence. Today, it would provide deliverance from the past.
I stood at the end of my dock, the same dock where my grandfather taught me to fish and taught me a lot of life lessons. I stood there with the typewriter cradled against my chest, as it could still hurt me. It could, I will admit that. Every key, every linkage on that machine was something Marissa had touched. Every time I looked at it, I heard the sounds her long, nimble fingers made as she typed anything from grocery lists to poetry while keeping her night owl hours. I hated how much I missed that sound now.
With a frustrated grunt, I heaved the machine as far as I could into the lake.
The Quiet Riter hit the lake’s surface with an unceremonious splash. I could make out a few rippling bubbles, her memory taking its last breaths, then nothing. I stood at the end of my dock, chest heaving, and felt something I hadn’t felt in over two years. I felt...free. That lasted all five seconds.
Exhausted both physically and emotionally, I made my way to my cabin and slept. But it wasn’t sleep, more like what happens when your body finally gives in to exhaustion. Shallow and dreamless, I relished the brief escape.
***
I sat on my porch the next morning, coffee in one hand, laptop set up in front of me, staring out at the sunrise. I figured if I was going to try to drown Marissa’s memory in the lake, I might as well get some writing done while I was at it. I almost choked on my coffee when I saw it, barely perceptible on the shoreline as the gentle waves rolled in.
It was unmistakable, a waterlogged hunk of metal. The ribbon was a soggy, tangled mass of black cloth. A tangled strand of seaweed hung from the return level, as if the thing was wearing a soggy green scarf. The keys were jammed despite a distinct lack of rust. It took me the rest of that first cup of coffee to believe it was really there, as if the machine had swum back to shore.
“Coincidence,” I said aloud, knowing only I could hear. "Must have stormed last night and changed the current. Can’t be anything more than that.”
I gave it another toss. More distance this time, which surprised me. I watched the splash and ripples a little longer, hoping this time would be the last, and that watching it disappear would make the action count for something.
But the next morning, the stubborn hunk of metal was back.
I’m not going to tell you a typewriter walked itself out of a lake, let alone twice. I know such a notion is liable to land me on a funny farm. But as I stood on that dock at 6am in my robe, staring at a Remington typewriter that should have been forty feet deep, or at least rusted to show it had been there. But neither of those things were true. The only honest thing I could tell you is it felt less like a coincidence this time. As I stared in disbelief, I could not help thinking this was not a coincidence, but a refusal to go away.
That can’t be right, I thought. I’ve got to be going crazy. A typewriter can’t extricate itself from the bottom of a lake. It has to be in my head. Grief can play tricks after all.
***
Here’s the truth that I finally reached after two soggy and infuriating sunrises: I wasn’t trying to get rid of that Remington. If fact, I enjoyed working with it as much as Marissa did. What I was trying to drown was the version of myself who poured two cups of coffee every morning out of habit. I was trying to get rid of the part of me who instinctively reached for his phone to text her something funny before a sad reality slapped me in the face. There was no one on the other end of those messages anymore.
Drowning an object doesn’t drown a memory. I knew that well. I knew it the same why I knew scrolling on her Instagram at 1am would only make things worse. I tried to do both things anyway.
The typewriter wasn’t a memory. It was just something physical I could associate with her, hoping her memory would sink to the bottom of Lake Mariner along with it.
***
When the typewriter appeared in the same spot on the third morning, I opted not to throw it again. Instead, I hauled it onto the screened-in porch of my cabin. I took apart what I could with prayers and my dad’s old pocketknife. I dried the waterlogged ribbon spool in the sun, oiled the carriage with gun oil Grandpa had stocked in the shed since I was born, and worked some isopropyl alcohol through the typebars and segment. It took most of that day. My hands smelled of lake water, gun oil, and something that might have been grief. Did grief have a smell? After this week, I was convinced that it did.
By dinner time, I had it working. Rough. There were a few keys that still stuck from time to time despite cleaning. I’d work on it periodically while I stayed here, I decided. Even after extensive work, the “e” key still skips half the time, like it’s making some sort of point. I’ll address it somewhere down the road, but it was the least of my worries.
I sat down that night and wrote the first honest page I’d written since I met Marissa. It wasn’t about her leaving. I wrote about the two coffee cups I still grab out of habit sometimes, about the note that wasn’t a note, and about standing on the dock at midnight trying to get rid of something that apparently swims better than I do.
***
I drove to Lake Mariner in hopes of outrunning Marissa’s memory and outrunning the feeling of inadequacy that came with her sudden departure. This trip was supposed to be about closure, but I never found it. Marissa is still gone. My phone is still silent. The question I still haven’t answered is why. But, as I’ve learned over my years of reading and writing, sometimes the story doesn’t give you the payoff you think it owes you.
What I do have is a beat-up typewriter, the case now wearing a dry seaweed scarf. It sits on my desk as a reminder that no matter how hard you try to bury it, some memories will always find you. But perhaps the machine surviving two spiteful burials isn’t a metaphor after all. Maybe it’s just a machine, a lake, and an out-of-practice athlete trying to toss it.
Perhaps some things come back not because they’re haunting you, but because they aren’t quite finished with you yet. This typewriter clearly wasn’t finished with me, and now I write all of my first drafts on it. The lake knows best, I suppose.
End
I hope you enjoyed this story. Has anything ever sparked a memory you thought you’d left behind? Maybe a song on the radio, a specific object with sentimental value, or a person? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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