Salvage

by Duncan Ralston

  It sounded vaguely familiar. He remembered he'd been so mad about some nonsense once that he'd refused to let her take him out for his own birthday dinner, and he hadn't backed down no matter how much she'd pleaded. He'd really been an angry little shit back then, screaming, crying in public for attention. Swearing at his teachers, his mother. Punching kids for no particular reason. The thought of it made him ashamed. He was glad his mother hadn't turned around to look at him right then or he might have broken down in tears.

  "Then Lori came along, and that all changed. I saw it in your eyes the first time she grabbed your finger in her chubby little hand." Finally she dared a look over her shoulder, her eyes filled with tears. "All of that fury you had stored up in you like a fire... it all just went away. In an instant, you became that perfect little boy I'd always known you could be."

  Owen offered a sorrowful smile. His nose tickled and his eyes felt prickly. He fought the feeling back, swallowed it bitterly. "She did that with everyone, didn't she? Brought out the best in them."

  "Yes," she smiled. "She did." When she nodded, the tears she'd been struggling against finally spilled down her cheeks onto her shoulders. These were the first tears she'd allowed herself all day, unless she'd wept in the bathroom while Owen had been sitting on the stairs. In many ways, he and his mother were the same. The dam broke, Owen thought, and the coldness of the thought stopped his own tears before they could come. Here comes the flood.

  Margaret swiped at them with the back of a hand, a thin smile on her painted lips, and sniffled.

  "G'night, Mom," he said.

  "Mmm," was her reply. The television had caught her attention again, and the volume came back on canned laughter. Owen stood looking at his mother a moment longer, this brave woman who'd raised two children on her own and had never asked for a thing in return. He studied her pale, shiny scalp through her thinning hair. Then he continued up the steps to the second floor.

  Lori's old bedroom was on the way to his own, the door closed. If it had been opened, he would have been obliged to go in, to look over her trophies and photographs; the notes from lovers she'd still kept in contact with, who'd likely held no hard feelings; the letters from orphaned children in Rwanda and countless other places she'd traveled to share her time and friendship. It would only make him feel bad about his own selfish life. But the door was closed, so he moved past to his own bedroom at the end of the hall.

  Aside from clean sheets and the lack of dirty clothes piled in every empty space on the floor, the old room was just as he'd left it. His mother hadn't even taken any of his clothes to Goodwill. He looked over the posters on the walls: Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Stevie Wonder—it was hard for him to believe he'd ever been into Creed, but there was the evidence above his old scratched-up rolltop desk. He seemed to recall something about the band had spoken to him back then, but he couldn't for the life of him imagine listening to them now.

  He slipped off his shoes and sat on the edge of the creaky single bed. The bedspread had a fabric softener odor he recalled fondly from childhood, some sugary-sweet flower like an old lady's perfume. Lying back against the spongy pillow, he thought about the box his mother had left on his sister's bed: inside was everything Lori had brought with her when she died, what the detective had called her "personal effects." His mother hadn't had the courage to go through it, and neither had Owen, though he could guess at some of its contents. The silver pendant in the shape of a unicorn he'd given her would be among them, with its recent addition of the small silver crucifix he'd thought at first was meant to be ironic: the unicorn and the cross. The macramé wallet she'd made in crafts class as a kid would be there with very little money inside—just a tattered birth certificate, a bank card, a social insurance card, maybe a few concert ticket stubs and receipts, and the picture of them at Wild Water Splash Park one summer when they were all young, even their mother, the great big colorful tubes of one ride or another in soft focus behind them.

  He yawned. Such a long day. Rest my eyes for a bit, maybe. Then do some reading…

  Owen peered out at the cold dark water, a landscape of lush green, a decrepit dock, knots missing in old gray boards leaving round holes where the water showed through if you looked down and covered your eyes. He stood at the edge of the water, holding his sister's hand. Somewhere, a loon called out, followed by the low rumble of thunder in the distance. Beyond the trees, streaks of slate gray reached down from the clouds, a curtain of rain darkening the horizon.

  Brother and sister jumped into the lake. The water was icy. She cried out and the two of them laughed. They treaded water. Swimming still felt somewhat unnatural to Owen, but after Lori had taught him how, he'd gradually come to enjoy it. He swam in a semicircle to face the opposite shore, languidly kicking his feet while a large turtle slipped off a rock into the water. When he turned back, Lori was gone. Where she'd been, the water rippled out in widening circles.

  He called out her name. He turned, thinking she must have gotten behind him, that she was playing. "Lori!" Another rough circle. He thought about the last time he'd seen her, looking up the stairs at him from the front door of their mother's house. He remembered calling out to her as he did now: "LORI!"

  Something grasped his leg, pulling him down. Not Lori. He sensed something dark in its scrabbling fingers… something sinister, yet familiar. It dragged him down; it had always dragged him down. He gagged, choking up water, thrashing his limbs, struggling against the thing below him in the deep. Drowning, just like Lori had.

  He woke himself with a shout, and inhaled deeply. His first instinct was to cough. No water came up; no water surrounded him. It had all been a dream. But the sensation of drowning was still there, too strong to be ignored... and the thought that Lori was somewhere nearby made him glance hopefully toward the open door, as if the events leading up to her funeral had been a dream.

  The night-light in a hall socket cast a dim yellow glow, throwing the shadow of the banister against the far wall. The hall itself was empty.

  Owen sighed and rolled over, still fully dressed, and peered out the window at the darkened sky, the halo surrounding a streetlamp. The alarm clock he'd used in high school, SNOOZE worn off the button from pressing it so often, showed the time at just past two. He'd been sleeping maybe three hours. Mid-July, and the little room was stifling. He'd sweated through the sheet, which he supposed would explain the sensation of drowning. The sweat-dampened sheet had knotted itself around his ankles, explaining the creature that had pulled him under.

  Lori had still drowned. Nothing would change the stark and irrefutable fact of her death. She'd gone night diving alone at a lake up north, and her oxygen had run out. Some deeper part of him had always expected Lori to leave and never come back. Each trip she took, a voice would speak up in his mind: This could be the last time you see her. He'd imagine Lori falling under the spell of some Svengali or religious guru, her mind so open to new experiences and ways of seeing the world, she'd let anything in. He would see her parachute sailing out into the blue, detached from its pack, and Lori hurtling, freefalling toward the earth. He would picture her mangled body in the high branches of a tree or some farmer's field, a cow grazing nearby, oblivious. He'd see her flung from her airboat in the Everglades, splashing into the swampy reeds to be gobbled up by gators. He'd watch her two-prop plane take a sputtering nosedive into lush green mountains; see her take a wrong step during a jungle trek into a waist-deep pool teeming with piranhas; the small, wooden planks on the sheer face of a cliff snapping beneath her feet; approaching an isolated South American tribe with her hands held out in peace only to be gunned down by a naked tribesman's Kalashnikov. Each time she left, he'd suffer these vivid premonitions and hug her with a ferocity that would make her laugh. "I'll only be gone a month!" she would assure him—or a week, or a day—as she readjusted the hefty knapsack on her strong shoulders. Lori must have thought she was invincible, her life as elastic as a bungee cable. But Owen had witnessed her death a hundre
d times. Her world was limitless, while his was well-ordered, routine.

  She had never told them her purpose for going up there, nor what she'd felt had been so significant or interesting about that particular lake, this Chapel Lake. She'd just left. He supposed she might have gone up there to some religious retreat, considering the name. Religion had never been a part of their household, yet Lori had embraced it, always going against the grain. He'd guessed it had something to do with her burgeoning relationship with her father—a concept Owen couldn't understand, his own father having left his life at the same age Lori's had left them—and his recent involvement with the cult of sobriety.

  The last time the Saddler children had been home together, Lori had shown up to dinner with a crucifix nestled against the unicorn pendant he'd bought her when they were kids. She'd claimed to have had a religious awakening while trekking through some war-torn country, and their mother had replied that it was all well and good, but she politely and firmly asked that her daughter remove it at the dinner table.

  Never seen Mom so mad, he thought.

  In the bathroom, the faucet dripped.

  Curious, Owen pushed himself out of bed. How long has that been running? he wondered. Since I shaved for the funeral? He skirted past Lori's room, past his mother's, to the bathroom. The floor was dry. That was a relief, at least. He watched the sink for a drip, and quickly realized the sound was coming from the shower behind him.

  He peered down into the darkened hall, to the lighted stairwell where the muted sound of canned laughter floated up, to his own doorway and the foot of his bed. The slit of darkness under Lori's door unnerved him. Anyone could be in there, lurking about. Anyone.

  Another heavy drop, not the hollow plink of water on enameled steel but the large plunk! of water into a tub already full of it. The plug must have fallen in and lodged itself in the drain. But the shower curtain was drawn. He'd left it open this morning, and he'd been the last to shower, he was sure of that much. Maybe his mother had drawn it closed before they'd left for the funeral. It seemed like something she might do.

  A shadow moved behind the clear frosted vinyl of the shower curtain. He saw only its dark, gauzy reflection, and he froze, his heart beginning to hammer.

  Owen forced himself to approach the tub, more cautious than he'd meant to, the hesitation in his approach redoubling his fear, imagination running amok. He'd seen something, the shadow of the door in the hall light, or his own shadow caught in the corner of his eye, and he'd mistaken it for the figure of a man or a woman standing in the shower. Or a girl, his mind whispered, before he could prevent the thought from surfacing. The dark, ethereal shape moved again behind the shower curtain. Whatever it was, it hadn't just been his imagination. The head of the figure moved slowly back and forth, as if assessing him, and the water continued to drip. Drip.

  Drip.

  He tore the curtain aside—

  His heart leapt as he saw it, the empty shower, the tub devoid of water, not knowing quite what to think of that, nor the fact that he no longer heard the drip that had drawn him to the bathroom in the first place. The plug lay where he'd left it, where it had been before his morning shower, beside his mother's shampoo and body wash. One of Lori's tar soaps was still tangled with her blonde hair from her last visit; no mistaking it for anyone's but Lori's, as Owen and his mother both had dark brown hair. He remembered thinking just that morning how unlike his mother it was not to wash the hair down the drain, or to have thrown away the soap, for that matter, and buy Lori a new bar the next time she visited. With lavender shampoo running down into his eyes, he'd considered it was as if she had somehow known Lori would never be home again, that she'd kept the soap and hair on purpose. She couldn't have known—of course she couldn't have. But that was what he'd thought.

  He continued to the toilet, used it, and flushed before washing his hands, eyeing himself in the mirror in the semi-dark. Unshaven, hair a mess, brown eyes sallow, as if he hadn't slept in days—he certainly hadn't slept well since they'd heard about Lori. He ran a finger over the old scar on his eyebrow from an injury he didn't recall, the vertical scar that made kids in later grades call him Vanilla Ice. It stood out stark white against his dark eyebrow, a constant reminder of the lost memories from his early years.

  As he stepped back from his reflection, his gaze fell on Lori, standing in the shower behind him. Nerves freezing, he held himself perfectly still, afraid if he moved she would vanish, heart pounding as he studied her in the mirror. She wore a plain white robe he'd never seen before, dampened up to her knees, blonde hair wet and hanging in her face. She opened her mouth to speak, voicing words he could neither hear nor discern by the shapes her lips made.

  "Lori…" he said, and before he could ask her what she'd meant to tell him, her form shivered, became translucent, then broke apart into tiny droplets, like water, and splashed down heavily into the tub.

  Owen whipped around from the mirror, falling to his knees at the edge of the bath, reaching it as the last of the water—the last of Lori—gurgled down the drain.

  "God, Lori…" he sobbed. "Lori… Lori…"

  A door creaked open down the hall. He looked up as his mother stepped out of her room, bleary-eyed and blinking. "Owen? What's going on?"

  Owen cleared his throat, pushing himself up from the bathroom rug. "Nothing," he said. "I just… I lost a contact, that's all."

  Dressed in a nightgown a similar shade to Lori's white robe, she gave him a skeptical look. "Since when do you wear glasses?"

  "A while ago, Mom. Go back to bed, okay? You had a long day."

  She scowled. "I don't need you telling me what to do, Owen. I haven't before, and I certainly don't now."

  He nodded. "Okay, Mom. G'night."

  She half turned. "You really should put on the light, if you're looking for something." Her peace made, she went back to her room, closing the door behind her.

  "Seeing things that aren't necessarily there," he muttered to himself as he headed down the darkened hall, remembering what Lori's dive instructor had said about that syndrome with the peculiar name. "And I'm not even underwater…"

  He blew out a breath through his teeth, trying to relax himself. Still, he couldn't shake the idea that Lori had been trying to tell him something. That she'd come back for a reason. These troubles followed him into sleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  Baptism

  1

  OWEN FELT CONFLICTED leaving his mother alone when he returned to his downtown condo late Sunday night. She was a strong woman, he reasoned. She'd survived years before him, before Lori, and she'd survive even now that one of her brood was gone for good.

  He knew he was just making excuses for abandoning her, but he needed to get back to work sooner or later—sooner seemed the best option for his own health, if not for his sanity, considering what he'd seen, or thought he'd seen, in her bathroom. The wind farm project wasn't going to finish itself, and although Teri Avery, his business partner, could handle herself in the boardroom and the work site, it wasn't fair to leave her to handle the protesters, too. So he determined to throw himself into his work. It was the best way to get through the grieving process, he decided, to move beyond all the morbid imagery and imaginings, to stop his mind from wandering to thoughts of death and drowning and lakes up north where the water was dark and cold and deep enough to drown in.

  All well and good, as his mother might have said, except that it didn't work. By Tuesday, he found himself stopping in front of a dive shop on his way out of town, and on Thursday, he actually dared to go in. An hour later, after a quick call placed to Avery to let her know he'd be a little late, he came out with a shopping cart full of stuff, some of which he didn't even know what to call, let alone what they were for: wet suit, fins and booties, a regulator, something called a "safety sausage," another thing the sun-ravaged clerk had called a "pony" (which looked like a smaller version of the large scuba tank), and an underwater camera. It all came with a free T-shirt brand
ed with the store logo on the lapel and DIVERS DO IT DEEPER stenciled on the back. The clerk had a good chuckle over this, and Owen laughed along amiably even though he hadn't found it funny. It would make a decent rag, at the very least.

  Driving to the job site with the equipment heaped on the passenger seat, he felt incredibly pleased with himself, as if he'd taken a big step toward recovery, and hadn't just plunged headfirst into the initial stages of obsession.

  Protesters were there in large numbers when he finally made it to the site. So many angry faces, their rage directed at his car as he passed, shaking their signs like swords at their enemy. Since they'd broken ground on the site three weeks back, the marshy area leading up to the site had been packed with the usual suspects: the environmental activist groups (Save the Wetlands was in charge this time, since the wind farm project was otherwise a benefit to "Mother Earth"); a First Nations group, some wearing traditional garb and waving the flags of their tribes; the youth groups, their faces and bodies painted with slogans, their chants aggravatingly catchy ("One, two, three, four," they sang, "we know what we're fighting for!" Do tell, Owen thought with gentle mirth); the NIMBY people, who weren't protesting the project, but its location, and their polar opposite, local citizens who would benefit from the jobs created, there to protest the protesters. Hence, the final component necessary for any good protest, the Provincial Police, a half dozen officers standing sentry in strategic positions between the factions.

  With so many reasons for protest, their signs were an odd jumble. A silver-haired man shook a NO MORE WIND TURBINES sign at Owen's windshield. Flanking the car was a group with matching professional SAVE THE GRAY TREE FROG! signs. Many of them likely didn't know exactly what to make of Owen driving through in a hybrid. Standing side-by-side among the environmentalists were others who likely did: they held hand-painted signs demanding Owen and his partners STOP GREEN FASCISM and LEAVE JACKSON'S FIELD ALONE! The few enviro kiddies caught up in this group appeared lost, but continued their chant, calling out like the gray tree frog to prospective mates.