He wasn’t sure whether he wanted Dmitri to wake up or not, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to his question. Still, he asked again: “Dmitri, are you scared of me?”
His brother turned to him. “Sometimes,” Dmitri said.
“Okay. Go back to sleep,” he said. “I love you. I do.”
Jesse felt it so strongly he couldn’t bear it. He wanted to tell his brother about the woman at the lake. He wanted to tell someone, anyone. It was so horrible that he didn’t like to think of it. It made him feel sick inside.
Someday he’d tell someone, but that day was not now.
He looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, then down at his brother.
He stood and rocked back and forth on his heels. His face was red and streaked with tears. He waited for a feeling of relief now that he was crying—but he felt nothing. A dullness perhaps. A sort of hollow sound echoing around in his brain. His hands were shaking. From this moment forward, he would do everything right. There was no room for new guilt of any kind.
The phone rang and he ran for it, desperate for it to be his father. Tell me what to do.
But there was no one on the other end. Silence, then someone breathing heavily, a click. He replaced the receiver and looked at the kitchen table, which was covered in sketches. His mother had started drawing. She drew court jesters, women in gowns, men in tuxedos. The drawings were beautiful—done in pencil and filled in with faint watercolours. He stared at the pictures, which at that moment were so lifelike he closed his eyes, terrified that they would start speaking.
The house was dark, silent except for the sound of the refrigerator and the wind over the water. He prayed that his mother would come home. She had said she’d only be gone an hour—she and the policeman wanted to watch the sunset—but it felt like longer. He prayed to hear her key in the door. When he was alone, he could feel the woman everywhere. She was in the corner. She was in the walls. She was in the closet. She was in the shadows. She was waiting for him in his bed.
His father had told him that when he died he would find a way to tell Jesse about the afterlife. They had made a pact. It would not be scary. It would not be a haunting. It would be a verification that his soul had not disintegrated, that life was not totally meaningless. That even after death, he was still there, here, there.
He had not seen his father since New Year’s Day. He wondered when they would see each other again. And what they would say to each other. It had been Jesse’s idea not to go to San Garcia. It didn’t seem possible to be in the same room as his father with what had happened hanging in the air between them.
Should he call the police, get it over with? He picked up the phone, then put it down. He picked up the phone again. Tell me what to do.
The sound of his mother’s key. The sound of the door opening. He hid in the dark of the hallway and watched his mother and the policeman in the doorway, the policeman’s hands on her lower back, sand falling like rain from their bodies. He had watched his mother and father kiss before, but this was a different sort of kissing, animal-like. If his mother and father had ever kissed like this, he had never seen it. The policeman guided his mother through the doorway and shut the door with his foot. He locked eyes with Jesse and they both froze.
“Hey,” the policeman said. He broke away from Jesse’s mother and ran his hands through his hair. “Hey, man.”
“Hey,” said Jesse. He hoped the policeman couldn’t see his tears.
“Just saying goodnight.” The policeman opened the door and stepped into the night air. “I’ll call you,” he said, and then he was gone.
Jesse ran to his mother, let her cup his face and kiss his wet cheeks. “What’s the matter, baby?” she whispered, taking him in her arms.
“She’s here,” he told his mother. “She’s here in the house with me.”
“Who is?” said his mother.
He could smell the policeman’s cologne on his mother’s dress. He let himself go limp in his mother’s arms.
“Vera is,” said Jesse. “She’s everywhere.”
VERA
She is not a man, and she is not a woman. Skin has grown over her eyes, over her mouth, her ears. Her body streamlines into something pale and cylindrical, cool to the touch. She stays in the troposphere for what might be minutes or years—decades, perhaps, eons maybe—the clouds in her way, the rain soaking her, the sun’s heat on her back, the earth five miles below. She feels the pull of time and gravity and love and sorrow. A part of her is still human. She is Denny’s wife, and her parents’ daughter. She is mother to no one but her dog, nosing through the leaves in their backyard. She searches her body for her hands, and finds them where they’ve always been, at the ends of her arms. She can swim through the air. She breaks free of her cylindrical form and her hair streams out in all directions, unbound by gravity.
“Denny, Denny,” she calls. But no one is up here. Up here she can see the earth’s horizon, the sun and moon, the stars so bright she has to squint. She rolls on her back and stares at the underside of a cloud. It is not how she imagined. It looks nothing like cotton candy. There is nothing soft about it. It is made up of a million jagged particles. She grazes it with her foot, and it is as sharp as glass.
Although the earth is five miles below her, she can—somehow—outstretch her hand and touch Scout’s back. Her touch is too light for him to sense or feel, but she is there, ruffling his fur—and she can feel his undercoat, the warmth of his skin. She can feel Denny’s breath on her fingertips, feels the force of his breath on her skin when he cries. She wants to climb inside his mouth, but there are limits to what she can do, even now. She presses her face to his face nonetheless, tries to pry apart his lips. I am here. Denny, I am here. Open your mouth, Denny, so I can slide down your throat.
She has left no will, no instructions. She was thirty years old. She hadn’t expected to die. It’s okay, Denny. I am up here. It doesn’t matter what you do to my body. It isn’t me. I am all the way up here. I will not feel it if you burn me. I will not suffocate if you bury me.
Relief, not panic. This is what she feels now. To have the anxiety of the moment—the fight for another breath—the anxiety of the days, the weeks, the months, the years, taken from her as gently as her mother would have removed a splinter from her hand. It is a pleasant feeling.
She is relieved not to feel bitter, rigid, locked into her routine, as she did before she died. Scared. Worried she had trapped herself into a life that was not meant for her (teaching, academia, a hot office with a flushed-face eighteen-year-old sitting across from her, trying to talk about Persona). So often she wanted to take her students by the shoulders and shout: Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get where I am? And you sit across from me, smugly thinking one day you’ll be more successful?
She dulled the feeling with exercise and an early bedtime, waking at 6 A.M., walking Scout at Squire Point before she taught for the day.
The night before she died, she dreamed of a man she had never slept with but wanted to—she dreamed he cut the wedding ring off her finger, slipped it into his own hand. What overt symbolism! She was no genius, and certainly not in sleep.
Leave me alone.
Denny’s last words to her. She had come out into the night air, heavy with smoke from the fireworks, and found him fumbling in his pockets for the key to his studio. Come to bed, please. Denny, come to bed. Softly, at first. So pathetic-sounding were her pleas that she began to shout it—come to bed, come to bed, come to bed—until her voice sounded ridiculous to her, a caricature of an angry woman. She wanted to go to sleep. Was it such a crime? Was it so awful to ask her husband to come to bed at a reasonable hour, even this night, New Year’s Eve? She imagined a baby wailing in a crib somewhere in the house, and Denny out in his studio, drinking. Denny, come to bed right now. I need you to come to bed.
Leave me alone.<
br />
She should never have started teaching. She should have pursued a career in film as some dogged man would, assured of his own genius.
So many doppelgängers. Daily calls from people all over the country to the police station, claiming to have seen her, even long after her body has been found.
One lazy afternoon, in a low-ceilinged room on the third floor of an abandoned office building, a group of men discuss various conspiracy theories about her death. There are six of them and they sit in the dark so as not to draw attention to themselves. A few cigarettes glow in the dimness. They are the same men who searched for her. The same men who found the rifle in the snow.
“Oh, well, I don’t think the missing boy is an alien,” says one man, much older than the others. “I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at that.”
“We’ll take a vote.”
“Why would he be an alien?” The old man shifts uncomfortably in his seat, the cigarette smoke burning his eyes.
“Okay, then,” says a man in a bowler hat. “Hands up for the theory of the child prostitution ring.”
* * *
—
No one tells her to do anything, but she knows that what she is meant to do is float. To stop dipping back down to the surface of the earth. To stop caring. To float. She feels she could float all the way to the edge of the universe, if she wanted to.
Her body decomposes, and it is the opposite of being born. No hips open to accommodate the passing through of her head; instead, it’s a narrowing, a narrowing of all feeling, and of light. Her body disintegrates; she blinks and she is no longer there. A single fragment of bone remains for a very long time, then it, too, is reabsorbed.
It’s okay, Denny. I am up here. I am up here. We did the best we could. We loved each other so deeply at first. Think of that. Think of how hard we laughed. She feels the absence of her own eyes and her own tears, and the absence of her own mouth and her own voice, and the absence of her own arms and the absence of the warmth of another person’s arms around her.
Again, the sensation of being pulled upward, as if by puppet strings. But there is no one working her. It is the pull of the exosphere, which she gives in to, letting herself float up like a helium balloon. So, this is death, she thinks. This is my heart breaking. This is me leaving you.
SEPTEMBER 1986
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Evelina
It wasn’t only Lewis who moved in, of course. She said that Scout could live with them for what she called a trial period. She wasn’t sure why she kept it vague—perhaps so that if Denny changed his mind there could be an out. Perhaps so he wouldn’t break her children’s hearts. Perhaps so that it was clear to Lewis that it was a trial period for the two of them, too. Bring your stuff over. Put the rest in storage until we get a bigger place. Do you want me to redecorate? I want you to have a say. I want you to feel like this is your home, too.
It was the end of September, the sky full of twirling leaves. Lewis had put an envelope of hundred-dollar bills on the table this morning—October Rent and Other Stuff, it said, in his careful cursive. She studied the R, the S, the flourishes of the two lower-case f ’s. She was often surprised by a person’s handwriting—disappointed in its sloppiness, in the way it seemed to belie intelligence. Leo’s, for instance. Chicken scratch, less legible than Jesse’s. Hard to take seriously. He held a pen as if he were frightened of it. Each letter differed in size. When their relationship started to fall apart, she found herself more and more hostile to Leo’s penmanship, believing it to be an outward manifestation of his brutishness, lack of sophistication. Lewis’s script, however, was elegant, feminine.
Scout lay under the kitchen table. Evelina crouched and petted the dog’s head. The window was open and she could hear the surf. Maybe later they’d go for a walk on the beach. Jesse and Lewis were growing closer. She watched Jesse absorb Lewis’s goodness like a sponge. Whatever nervousness she had felt about Vera was dissipating. It all seemed like some distant dream.
She couldn’t tell if she was healing Jesse by not talking about what had happened, or damaging him further. And now this romance. This lust she felt for Lewis. Was it at the expense of her son? She knew that a truly good person would ask themselves that difficult question. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to.
She picked up her drawing pencil and started to sketch the dog. She hadn’t drawn an animal before—only people, and clothing. Maybe she should become a fashion designer. She had an eye for it, despite growing up in a place where people wore rubber boots all year round.
“Oh,” said Evelina, rubbing her ankle furiously. “Oh for heaven’s sake.” She pinched the flea between her fingers and carried it to the toilet. She added flea shampoo to her grocery list.
“Fleas,” she said when Lewis got home from his shift and the boys were back from school. She pointed at Scout and then at her ankle, in a mock angry voice. There it was: they were playing house together. Here she was, in the role of angry wife.
“Okay,” Lewis said, though he was obviously enjoying himself, too. “We’ll give him a bath. Jesse can help.”
Evelina patted the dog’s head. “You stay off my bed now,” she said, wagging her finger at Scout. All of them—they were laughing.
* * *
—
Her bedroom was cool in the morning now that it was fall, and she turned to face Lewis. His skin was smooth, no moles or pimples or weird tufts of hair. He squeezed her upper arms as though he were working icing out of a pastry bag. He was a decade younger than she was. She felt ashamed of this but couldn’t say exactly why. She wanted to be his age, she supposed. The young, innocent one. She liked older people. She liked being the baby. Well, nothing was perfect. Choose happiness. Love didn’t have to be thrilling.
“You’re my baby,” she said to Lewis.
He fiddled with her pyjama top and, finding her skin, put his hand on the small of her back. His face was heavy with sleep and he closed his eyes. She could smell the beer on his breath from the night before. He’d only had two, even though he didn’t have to work today, and she made a mental note of it: when Leo started drinking, he didn’t stop until there was no more alcohol around for miles.
“What do you think about,” Evelina said after a time, “when you drink?”
Lewis opened his eyes and stretched his arms above his head, groaning a little. “I think,” he said. “I think about my life. I think about what Denny’s doing. He sleeps on the floor. I think about that.”
“How is he going to manage?” said Evelina. “I mean, financially.”
“He’ll be okay. His doctor thinks the arthritis will get better.” Lewis looked at her. “He also—well—he inherited a shit ton of money when his parents died.”
“Must be nice,” she said. She thought of her own family suddenly, how her parents had moved away to be with her sister. She felt so alone in the world, even with Lewis right beside her and her sons asleep in their bedroom on this lazy Saturday morning. “What else do you think about?” she said.
“My father,” said Lewis.
“What was he like?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He was a really difficult person, Evelina. I don’t know how to sum him up in a few words.”
“Do you ever think you’d like to do something else? I mean, for work.”
“Like what?” asked Lewis.
“Something less upsetting.”
“Oh,” said Lewis. “You’re worried about me?”
She nodded. To some extent, she was. His stories about his job haunted her, especially when they involved children. She worried she was too absorbent, that his stories would get into her bones and become her own.
He’d told her once that if a child committed a crime by age twelve, he could help that child turn things around. He could have a huge impact on that child’s life. But if that child was fifteen
? Forget about it.
She had thought of Jesse, of course. He was eleven now, ten when it had happened. Why was fifteen the cut-off for redemption? The point of no return?
“I like my job,” he said to her now. “I have the constitution for it. I believe in people. I believe people are good.”
“I don’t know if I do,” she said, and they looked at each other. “I believe my sons are good. I believe you and I are good.”
Already she could feel Lewis’s desire to tell her he loved her. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to hear it. He was lovely. Kind to Jesse. Gentle. But also no-nonsense, like the night he’d sat Jesse down and asked him matter-of-factly if the kids he hung around with were good people, who did good things, who wanted good things for their lives. The best intentions in the world, Lewis said, can be so easily undermined by the decisions of others. It seemed to her that Jesse had a reverence for Lewis. She noticed he was better behaved, more polite, sweeter, now that Lewis was around. And so much nicer to Dmitri. It was good for both of her boys to have a man around whom they could trust. Lewis had come to her a few nights ago, smiling and shaking his head, and told her that he was going to take Jesse to the drugstore the next day for some antifungal cream. “He’s got a wicked case of jock itch, Evelina,” he said, “and he’s too embarrassed to tell you. He says he had it earlier this year and cured it with Listerine! Listen, don’t tell him you know.” Leo, of course, would have swatted the back of Jesse’s head. Get your filthy hands out of your pants.
She wanted to love Lewis, to let herself fall into his arms and let him say what he wanted to say. What was stopping her? She hoped, desperately, that she didn’t still have feelings for Leo. She hoped she wasn’t taking up drawing as a weird way to be more like Holly.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake Page 16