Truth in Advertising Page 0,116

for a time. I start to leave when he says, “What was his name?”

“What?”

“Your father. What was his name?”

“Ed Dolan.”

“Was he a good man?”

I’m surprised by the question, the personal nature of it, the intensity with which he asks it. James Taylor’s twin has turned and is looking at me, waiting for my answer.

Let me go, Finny, she said. Let us go.

“Not really,” I say. “But he tried like hell.”

• • •

I have searched online, late into the night. I have found the crappy-looking websites put together by liver-spotted old men. Sullystributetosubmarines.com; heroesofthesilentservice.org. I can picture them, these old men, shoeboxes of old photos, pristine memories of their war years, trying somehow to work the damned computer, peering over their glasses, looking around the screen, trying desperately to figure out how to make a website, put up facts, grainy old black-and-white photos. Their granddaughter/grandson/nurse’s aide helping guide them. HTML, not Flash, not interactive and cool like the Snugglies site that has music and movies and funny interviews with toddlers. How is it I am eighty-seven years old? they wonder alone, at night, widowed now. How will I be remembered? We fought in a war. We risked our lives for a cause. It mattered. We mattered. Didn’t we?

And so they share their history, their story, their moment in time.

The United States submarine service sustained the highest mortality rate of all branches of the U.S. military during WWII.

One out of every five U.S. Navy submariners was killed in WWII.

Take a steel tube, put it three hundred feet underwater, take away its sight except for the most rudimentary sonar, send it out into a war. But before you do, fill it with teenagers and tell them not to be afraid.

Would you go to work if you had a twenty percent chance of dying?

• • •

You are a camera with a fish-eye lens on a helicopter moving high and fast over a wide-open expanse of ocean. No land in sight. The fish-eye rounds the edges of the lens, giving a sense of curve to the shot. There, on the horizon, is a tiny dot. Closer now and you see that it is a ship, a large ship dwarfed by the sea. And on the side of the ship, being lowered down by motorized winch, is a lifeboat.

It was Swede Walker who suggested the lifeboat.

He said, “The ship can’t exactly stop on a dime and at this height it’s not really the ideal ashes dispersal vehicle. Also, there is the small matter of reversing course, which will take us an hour. Plus we need to conduct our monthly lifeboat training exercise anyway.”

His tone was different. He didn’t look at me, but he was trying. Later, James Taylor would tell us that Swede spent twenty years in the Navy on a Tender.

It is a new and terrifying experience, hanging sixty feet above the water. The lifeboat has a plexiglass top and is completely enclosed and rolls us in our seats when it hits water level, which changes with every swell. We motor away from the ship. The captain told James Taylor to go five minutes east, that that would be, approximately, the coordinates.

The ride is rough as we motor away from the ship and I can tell from Keita’s expression that this is hell on his stomach. The engine is loud and makes talking hard. After about ten minutes, James Taylor cuts the engines, the boat bobs to a stop, moves gently back and forth in the swells. He unhinges two of the plexiglass plates, rolls them back. There are no man-made sounds. We can’t hear the engines of the cargo ship at this distance. What I hear instead is the soft slap of swells against the lifeboat. Above, patches of blue sky, high clouds, seemingly still, and lower, faster moving, wispy clouds. The air is so clean. The wind comes in gusts, and sea spray flies in my face. I’m tempted to call Eddie or Maura or Kevin, some connection to family, some sense of ceremony, of meaning.

Keita says, “Maybe it is time, Fin.”

Once, a submarine broke the surface, here, near here, right here, and the hatch opened and my father climbed up and signaled to another ship during a training exercise and learned that the war was over. There was so much possibility for him then, everything in front of him.

Keita holds up his iPhone. “I will record it for you, yes?”

I nod.

I open the FedEx box. Inside is another box. I open that