She doesn’t respond, and he wonders what it is, this thing in people, that allows some to move on from family altogether in adulthood, casting off the implied duties and ritual get-togethers, while others spend their entire lives shackled to blood clan? He supposes it is character, but also something deeper and more mysterious than quaint notions of being a good son or a bad daughter. People, even the best children, simply aren’t that selfless.
Years ago, when Ray was fresh out of college, Uncle Gaspar took him to one of their check-in lunches, during which he invited Ray to accompany him on a routine visit with his mother. Ray didn’t want to go, but something in the lawyer’s eyes made it difficult to say no. Ray had heard stories of Gaspar’s mother from Warren, back in his teen years, probably after some minor spat Ray had endured with his own mother.
Warren had told him, in a world-weary manner, that Gaspar’s mother had been abusing him his entire life. The Hungarian woman suffered through the Second World War in ways Warren did not care to detail, and, though she was never diagnosed, she displayed all the common symptoms of severe bi-polar disorder. During her episodes, which usually came late at night and for no discernable reason, she would beat Gaspar with a broom handle, with her cast-iron skillet, cut him with her fingernails. She was a short woman, stout and furious, with no husband to tamp the flames of her fury.
She broke Gaspar’s arm when he was seven. Broke his nose twice during his early puberty. Broke three of his ribs when he was a junior in high school. The physical beatings were the least painful expressions of her cruelty. Far worse were the insults, the inability to commend him for achieving honors in his class, making varsity squad in three sports, including as a state champion shot-put. She was bitter and withheld her love, Warren said, as though it were gold teeth and Gaspar was the little Nazi who would steal them on sight and give them to the first girl who opened her legs for him.
None of these horrifying anecdotes and Freudian asides was responsible, ten years later, for Ray agreeing to accompany Gaspar Riko, who was then in his late fifties, to the assisted living facility in south Boulder that day after lunch. In fact, Ray had forgotten all about the woman’s history of abuse until he observed the way her son behaved around her.
Gaspar’s withered crone of a mother was in the grip of Alzheimer’s, an almost perversely ironic disease to befall a woman who had been an emotional black hole for so much of her life. Perversely unjust for Gaspar, not the woman, who could no longer recall battering her son until he fled home and enlisted in the Army – and therefore could never apologize to him, or even suffer privately for her sins.
It was a small facility, more of a boutique hotel and spa than a nursing home. The cost, Ray understood later, must have been tens of thousands per year. On their way over, Gaspar had stopped at a Mercer Florists branch to buy her a bouquet of fresh flowers, two dozen white roses, her favorite, and in the trunk of his Mercedes was a soda crate he asked Ray to carry in. The box contained all kinds of special ointments, salves, perfumes, lotions, allergy medicines, gossip magazines, herbal teas, as well as a 24-count box of Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cup 2-paks. Her favorite treat.
Inside her sunny, modern art deco room, Gaspar’s mother accepted the attentions of her son without rebuke or insult, but she never thanked him either. Never acknowledged his kind remarks, the kiss on the cheek, the dusting and picking up after her, stocking her refrigerator with the candy, arranging the flowers, and his hour-long tour pushing her around the block and up to the nearby park, at Veely Pond, where he stood beside her on the small wooden bridge and talked to her about the ducks quacking and shitting below. She loves the ducks, he told Ray later, though Ray had not once, in the entire three-hour visit, seen the old woman smile at the ducks or anything else that filtered through her bifocals and hearing aids.
Gaspar performed the same routine three times per week, and sometimes on Sundays, as well as on all major holidays and her birthday, most of which she could no longer observe on a mental or paper calendar.
It was not a visit, Ray realized. It was a second job.
‘Goodbye, sweet Lydia,’ Gaspar sang in farewell, nudging Ray to the door. The music in his voice was neither forced nor laced with sarcasm. ‘All the boys love you, especially your son.’
Riding home in Gaspar’s yellow vintage Mercedes, Ray sat in stunned silence for a mile or two, until he could stand it no more.
‘Why do you do so much?’ he asked. ‘Dad told me what she was like. How do you find the energy for all that?’
The lawyer seemed briefly embarrassed that Ray found his doting excessive, and then a strange darkness passed over his features. Gaspar’s face slackened, his eyes seemed to withdraw in their sockets, and for the first time in memory Ray sensed a dangerous, calculating coldness lurking somewhere inside his father’s old friend.
Then the brooding malice vanished with a sad smile. Uncle Gaspar tilted his head as if in apology and said simply, ‘It’s what one does.’
Ray hadn’t thought about that day in many years, but he never forgot the words, and they come back to him now, walking down the beach, following his insane parents on their way to find his insane brother.
There could be no question that Gaspar was behaving as a good son. But that wasn’t what troubled Ray, and troubles him now. The question is, was it real? Chosen? If his mother’s psychological and physical abuses were not enough to break him, is it not reasonable to suggest that Gaspar and all children like him are damaged hostages? Where does that leave Leonard, Colt, me? Why are we still here, in this surreal nightmare with each other?
‘It’s what one does,’ Ray says.
Megan looks at him, waiting for an explanation.
‘Never mind.’
Sierra watches them over her mother’s shoulder and Ray thinks of smiling and waving to the girl but doesn’t. How strange that I don’t know her, the little girl. I would like to. Someday.
They cannot have been strolling for more than twenty minutes, but Ray feels as though they have been walking all afternoon. Even though he is wearing his battered Paul Smith sneakers with their little rainbow stripes, the soles of his feet are hot. The sand must be scorching his mother’s bare feet, but if so, she shows no sign of discomfort.
Ten or twenty paces ahead, Warren’s hand hovers at Francine’s back, but Ray can’t tell if his palm is actually touching her or if he’s simply cupping air, preparing to catch her if she falls. Neither, he is suddenly certain. Dad’s afraid. He wants to touch her but he’s been wary of her for years, and now he is afraid to disturb her, afraid he might awaken something else.
Then, a short minute or two later, she does fall, slowly and of her own volition. Francine kneels less than ten steps from the water, extending her arms in what would be, in the context of a health club or studio, a yoga pose. Ray can see the soles of her feet, callous-cracked and coated with sand. She is praying, he realizes.
Ray’s father moves beyond her, stepping into the lake.
Megan releases Ray’s hand. ‘You should go on,’ she says, and he resents her letting go, urging him forward.
Off to their right, a strangled cry issues from Colette. She twists away and runs from their parents, heading up the water line with Sierra stuck to her chest. She watches the water, then darts away, turning back to camp.
‘I won’t do it again!’ Colt shrieks. ‘It’s not real!’
No one calls to her or chases her down. Colt carries Sierra over that last rise, and Ray wonders if she will wait for them or simply keep walking until she finds the highway and another ride home.
Ray looks to his father for some explanation. Warren removes his sunglasses and studies something in the water, then looks back at Ray with a stark openness no child ever wants to see in his father’s eyes. It is fear but only a little, mixed with unfathomable sadness.
Sixty or seventy feet beyond Warren, something bobs near the surface, a solid black shape, its turning motion releasing a burst of white wash.
&n
bsp; Warren rushes after it, the lake rising up the nylon bottoms of his fly-weight pants as he dives after it and begins to swim.
Ray is only vaguely aware of the cool water enveloping his own ankles and then rising over his shins as he follows hesitantly, not understanding what the old man is up to but beginning to worry he has become possessed, lured by some spectre light or black creature of the sort they glimpsed last night, the one that surfaced at the end of Megan’s recollection.
Warren pulls up, treading water. He looks back, shouting, ‘Hurry! We have to hurry!’
Ray does not see the black spot, but the surface ripples off to his father’s left, and then smoothes itself into an oval depression as if something is about to rise up. Warren strokes out a little farther, draws a deep breath, and dives. He is under for only a few seconds, and when he bursts through again he seems to be dragging something heavy behind him. He strokes with one arm until his feet catch bottom. He stands, water draining, sticking his shirt to his chest, towing the bulging black thing behind him like a boy with his inner tube. His face is a mask of agony.
Ray rushes out, taking his father by the arm, holding up while trying not to look at the rubbery misshapen thing behind them. After a few more steps, Warren pushes Ray aside and muscles the slick mass onto the wet beach.
Francine rises again, hands folded at her chest, her expression blank. Beside her, Megan screams, covers her mouth and backs away from the water. From them.
From this thing.
The orb is almost eight feet long, thicker than two bodies, and some kind of dense weight inside the filmy shell seems to continue propelling it even after Warren lets go. In daylight, the outer skin shimmers, silver in certain round sides, coal-black everywhere else. It makes Ray think of membranes, jellyfish, tar balls like the kind that wash up after an oil spill.
‘What is it?’ Ray hears himself whispering. ‘Dad? What is that thing? Dad? No, don’t touch it!’
His father has removed something from his pocket and dives over the swollen slug. His torso lands on its center and the sides all around bulge out. Warren slashes down, puncturing the membrane with what looks like a pocket knife. Black fluid fans out in a wide fine spray, coloring the sand like ink. A metallic odor like burned wires and stale lake water fills the air and Ray turns away, gagging. He looks for Megan through watering eyes but can’t find her.
‘Oh God!’ Warren cries. ‘Please! Not yet, not like this!’
Ray turns to find his father on his knees in the sand, the black sac deflated and tearing apart like tissue and sticking to his arms, other pieces dissolving into the beach. For a moment, Ray is sure the black stuff is hurting his father, pulling him down, and he runs a few steps before sliding in the muck and falling. He lands on his side, rolls over in a panic, and stops.
Warren holds up the pale slippery corpse as if offering it to Ray, begging him to look, to help. He is gasping in a deep and horrible rhythm, suffocating on the clean Nebraska air.
‘Do you see?’ Warren sobs. ‘Do you see now what it does?’
The stranger in his father’s arms is slender, not yet a man. He has no stubble to make a beard and his crew cut is from another era. His belly is hairless, the legs loose and dragging over the sand like the tentacles of a washed-up squid. Ray hates the boy; whoever he is, he is not worth such anguish.
Ray reaches for his father, to stop him, shake him away from this mess, and the cold body presses against his thighs. He doesn’t want to see the face but he can’t bear to look at his father’s any longer, and so he does.
The recognition comes gradually, as if he were gazing down through the pages and years of a family photo album, up at gap-toothed Sears portraits lining the bedroom hall. Ray grew up in this house. He has seen this boy’s face. In those years he was always trying to keep up with it, chasing it through bedsheet forts and treehouses filled with baseball cards and switchblades, across playgrounds where the boy was always three steps ahead of him, tricking him with stolen lighter fluid that turned his hands flaming blue, leading him into the cellar on Friday night to catch the ghost, daring him to stand in front of the apple tree and hold perfectly still as the bowstring was drawn, promise I will never hurt you, and in a blink the arrow flew true.
Ray understands now. The lake has folded him back thirty years, asking him to forgive all that went wrong and take his brother home.
Digging
By the time sunset electrifies the sky over Blundstone Lake, Ray feels the day has been both the longest he has ever known and that its end, inevitable nightfall, has come too soon.
He knows the things they have done since finding Leonard in the water (if that teen Leonard-ish thing could by any sane standard be considered his brother) are real, he has the calloused hands and sore back to prove so. But the past three hours exist now in his mind like jump-cut scenes from a poorly spliced Super 8 home movie, footage belonging to some other family, something from a hoax.
The sort of stunt Leonard would have appreciated, if he were around to see it. But he’s gone now. At least, Ray is pretty sure his brother is still missing.
The alternative is unacceptable.
Megan helps Francine make her way back to camp. Colt and Sierra have not returned, and Ray feels like the last line of defense against his father’s insanity. He is still in some form of shock, oscillating between terror and numbness, Warren’s bizarre logic wearing him down.
‘We can’t leave him down here, away from the family. Not where anyone could find him. In some tent on the beach. Middle of the afternoon.’
‘I wish you’d stop talking about it like that,’ Ray says. ‘Calling it “him”.’
‘The heat,’ Warren says. ‘Not to mention, how would we explain this to an outsider? We have enough problems as it is. I’m saying, get him out of sight, figure the rest out later.’
Ray can’t stop seeing the bloated Leonard of last night, naked in the dark. At least that Leonard had been warm, alive, with a nice lead on his tan this summer. This kid version was white as a striped bass and cold, too cold, as if they’d found him in a mountain river instead of a lake almost as warm as a swimming pool.
‘Is this what Mom expected?’ Ray says. ‘You’ve all seen this before?’
Warren rests his hands on his knees, breathing deeply. ‘Last time was different. Worse, in some ways. We can discuss that later. Right now we have to act. There’s no telling where this goes. What comes next. I’m asking you to help me get him in the ground, for now. It’s the right thing – the only thing to do, no matter what he is or isn’t.’
‘For now?’ Ray repeats.
‘We have a responsibility here. Raymond, please.’
They stop at the Overton tent, making a shroud of two sleeping bags. Ray worries that his seventy-six-year-old father will not be up to the task of carrying the body another hundred or more yards up the beach, into the clearing. But Warren’s grief seems to have been replaced by the steel-spined determination of a soldier who’s been trained never to leave a man behind.
Ray hefts the thicker, now padded end over his shoulder while Warren supports the legs. One horrible reality of the thing is also a relief: the boy is thin, not all that difficult to walk under, couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and forty pounds. Old Leonard would have crushed them both, blown out one of his father’s knees.
The hard edges of the ribs pressing into Ray’s neck and shoulder muscles make him think of the winter they were skiing in Vail when Leonard fell over in the lift line. Ray had been standing there watching the other skiers shuffle over the red line as the chair scooped them up. Leonard was joking around and trying to poke Ray in the balls with his ski pole, until Ray caught the pole and shoved back. Leonard lost his balance and fell through the rope partition, landing sideways on the packed, icy snow.
What seemed only an embarrassing nuisance in front of the other skiers had broken Leonard’s collarbone, a fact confirmed by two resort medics only after the boys had ridden to the top
of the mountain and skied back down a black diamond run without incident, whereupon Leonard complained of ‘some soreness’ and Ray saw a disturbing lump through his sweater. Had Leonard been fifteen that year? Fourteen?
Beneath the Lake Page 19