by Robert Clark
Emily believed that even a swamped canoe of this construction would still float: There were flotation compartments both fore and aft and these were supposed to be watertight and sometimes also filled with buoyant material, to prevent the canoe from ever sinking entirely. But the seams of Emily’s canoe’s flotation compartments were as porous as those of the rest of the craft, and contained mostly water and, now, ice; and the combined weight of this, the nearly knee-high water in the bilge, and Emily herself was more than the canoe could support.
When Emily saw that the bailing can had floated away, she reflected that she was happy she had not let go of the paddle, for it was now clearly time to leave off bailing and paddle hard, straight for shore or the shallows, wolves or no wolves. And with all her might, now restored a little by the adrenaline that was finally being released into her arteries, that was what she did. But by this time Emily was not so much on the lake as in it, no longer afloat upon it, and so she might as well have been paddling against air. Her paddle had nothing to push against, or rather, everything to push against, and so she could scarcely make the canoe move at all.
This dawned on her more quickly than the earlier phases of her predicament, came to her as quickly as the water reached her waist. But the cold was moving through her faster than any thought or even feeling, wicking up from the now immersed lower half of her body through her torso, past her heart and into her shoulders and the very last means of locomotion she possessed. So it came to her very slowly, as though she had been in a fever which had broken and from whose troubled sleep she was now just awakening, that she must swim for it.
Emily found some relief in this realization, for she knew that she was a good swimmer; that she was expert enough not only to look after herself in the water but (on account of her lifeguard training) to look after others. And in this case she had only herself to worry about. That was in her mind as she pushed off into the lake, the water now nearly up to the gunwales of the canoe, and began to swim.
She was surprised to find that the water did not seem much colder than the canoe had. Of course, she was wearing a great deal of clothing, but once this was soaked through, she was less conscious of the chill than the weight of the sodden clothes; and it was then that she recollected the Red Cross instruction that one should not enter the water so heavily attired.
When it first came to her that she might die, the thought arrived in the form of a negative proposition: that because she was such a strong swimmer, she would not, even so greatly laden, die on account of drowning. In this supposition, she was correct, and it followed from it that the true cause of her death would be the cold.
Already her body was in shock, and even then she could make a little forward progress in the water, the shock helping insulate her from the cold, or at least the sensation of the cold. But she was still well over 150 yards out from the shore, in the lake, on whose surface the sun was just now flaring up.
It seemed to Emily even then that she was still paddling or rather still swimming, still propelling herself onward, but in fact she was scarcely moving at all. She was going to die in a manner pretty much like falling asleep, by cold, gradually, almost painlessly, dark covering everything else over. She was going to die as lovers are meant to die, not from passion but from languor.
Emily must have comprehended at some point, however dimly, what was happening to her: that she had indeed died for love. What exactly she made of this cannot be said; whether it was worth dying for. There had been two loves in Emily’s understanding, earthly and spiritual, and she had always thought you ought to be able to tell them apart. But she had not begun to reckon with there being two deaths to go with them. She would have supposed that if divine love—the love of God and, for example, Saint Teresa—required death, it would be a sin to refuse it. Of this love, that of her and William, she had no time to be able to say yes or no, but she had surely not refused it in any way. She had given everything for it, and taken everything from it that it could offer her in return, down to the fetus inside her, which went on living for some minutes after Emily had begun to breathe water and then ceased to breathe at all.
9
WILLIAM AWOKE A LITTLE BEFORE SEVEN O’CLOCK, and he woke slowly, as he usually did; as did Emily most days. He did not notice her absence for some while, and when he got out of bed he imagined he would find her in front of the fireplace, stoking the banked coals of the previous night with fresh wood, or in the kitchen.
When he saw that she was in neither place, he was alarmed, for in the last two months they had scarcely been apart. Emily had taken the canoe out by herself a few times in fine weather and had of course walked the perimeter of the island many times and found, in the lap of one tree or another, places where she might happily read a book.
But none of that history accounted for her not being present now, on a bright but deeply cold morning just after dawn. William tugged on his clothes and his boots and went quickly out the back door. There was still some residue of yesterday’s snowfall, and he saw Emily’s tracks rounding the side of the house, and then, the strides much longer, bounding down the hill to the water. He saw the canoe was gone, and he began to scan the water for a sign of her. He saw nothing, and he ran back up the hill and into the house to fetch the binoculars that sat upon the mantelpiece. He took them outside, stood at the crest of the hill, and again searched the surface of the lake, all the way to the horizon. At one point, he glimpsed what appeared to be a long length of driftwood huddling low in the water, except that unlike most such logs this one gave off an almost metallic glint. But that was not what he was looking for, and he gave it no thought.
He spent more than fifteen minutes surveying the lake, and then he went inside. He had to rebuild the fire from scratch, having failed to feed it when he awoke. Once it was aflame, he sat before it and contemplated what must have taken place and what he ought to do about it. Twice, he heard what seemed to be footsteps outside, and raced out to investigate them. Only the second time did he realize that these sounds were nothing more than the dripping of melting snow from the eaves, and that it would persist and increase as the day went on.
William did not worry that danger or evil might have befallen Emily. He knew she was on the water and that she was a better swimmer and canoeist than he was. Whatever she had done, she had deliberated, and it took him no time at all to comprehend what action it must be. He had prophesied it all, seen it all, well before she had herself done so. She had, from the very beginning, unlike him, held back a little from their relation, withheld some part of herself, and now she had left. He had, it seemed to him, always known this: right from the moment of their second date, when she had withheld her kiss. He had known this. He thought he had forgiven her that, had forgotten it, but here it was, palpable as the oily scent of the pine and spruce and the drip of the melting snow.
It was a clear, cold day, and he put on more clothes. He saw that hers, save for some underwear, was gone. He went back down to the beach to wait and to look and to plan. It occurred to him to call out for her. The sound would carry across the water. He shouted and then bellowed her name. “Em-me-lee!” it came out, and he felt foolish. Then, as he saw how pathetic he was, how forlorn in his abandonment by a smart and pretty girl, he felt humiliated. And with that he stopped calling out for her.
The plan he devised was this: that he would walk to Nelson’s on the road going out behind the cottage (for surely that was where it had to lead). There was no place else she would have gone, and perhaps he would find her there, or some sign of her. He left her a note on the kitchen counter, on the back of a used cribbage score sheet: “Dear Emily, I went to Nelson’s store to look for you. If you come back, just stay here. I hope you are OK. Love, Bill.”
It took William not much more than an hour to walk the road to Nelson’s. He scoured the whole vicinity of the store, from the beach to the edge of the woods into which the county road disappeared. He looked into the windows of a half-dozen summer cabins, but ther
e was nothing and no one inside them, and not so much as a footprint anywhere. He saw that there was no sign of the canoe on the beach or out on the water in any direction.
William decided that before taking any further action he ought to go back to the cottage to see if Emily had returned. He wondered if there was a telephone at Nelson’s, or anything else that might help in his present situation, and with no small pleasure he knocked out the window in the door using one of the paddles in the barrel under the eave. The interior of the store seemed identical to the last time he and Emily had been there six weeks earlier, if damper and more foul-smelling. There was indeed a telephone, but when William picked up the receiver, it was dead. Arnie Nelson had also turned off his refrigerator, but the little chest freezer next to it hummed quietly in the half-light of the store. William opened it. There were a couple of canisters of frozen orange juice and four packets of bacon. William took one of the latter, only one, shut the freezer, and went back outside, leaving Arnie Nelson’s door—which after all now had a broken window—hanging open.
He began to walk back to the cottage, and it was dusk by the time he came near to it. It seemed darker, because the road was deep in the woods. Just before he reached the cottage, a shape ambled across the road, stopped, and turned towards him. William stopped and moved to the shoulder, and as he did he could finally make out what it was: shaggy as he imagined, a little smaller perhaps, long in the legs, with a lascivious mouth, and deep and muddy amber eyes.
He thought—or perhaps he said out loud—“Come on. It’s all right. Just take me,” and he took a step forward to indicate the nature of the offer he was making. They stood regarding each other a long time, and William thought surely the wolf would at last surge toward him, for he showed not the slightest fear. But after a time, measured out in the forest’s dripping and the wind rising off the lake, the wolf, being merely a wolf, skittered away.
Four
Love
Among
the Ruins
1
IT WAS THREE DAYS LATER THAT EDWARD WENT TO see his daughter’s body. The day after she disappeared, the boy had had the good sense to use the telephone in the cottage. The operator contacted the sheriff’s office and the sheriff came out to Lac La Cache. By that evening they’d found Emily on the shore, not very far south of the cottage. And that was when they called Edward and Virginia. They said they would be calling the boy’s mother too.
Virginia did not want to go, to see, and so he went alone to the undertaker’s, which was housed in a mock-Tudor building not far from the river. He did not hear, or could not later on remember hearing, anything that was said to him by the morticians, although he at some point assented to a modest coffin and minimal preservation of what they called the “remains.”
They had, he had been assured, done nothing to her—had scarcely touched her—as yet, and he assured them that he had seen corpses before and that they could leave him alone with her.
She was cold, naked, and refrigerated, and covered with a light green sheet. He pulled the cloth down to just below her shoulders, and he thought, as though he were saying it aloud, and smiling kindly while he said it, “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do anything that would embarrass you. I won’t look . . . there. I just want to see you. Just this one last time.”
She was white as a pearl; as the inside of a fish’s mouth. Her hair looked redder than it had since she was five or six. On the undersides of her arms and on the lower parts of her sides, spreading upward from her back, there were dapplings and whorls of violet and green, as though her flesh were turning to marble. It was, he knew, only bruising and the pooling and settling of the fluids that her heart had once pumped through her, thoughtlessly and effortlessly, or so it had seemed at the time.
He had not known he was weeping until a tear fell and beaded on her skin, near her collarbone and just to the side of her armpit. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he realized that he had said this out loud.
Edward dragged his hand across his eyes and then, for only a moment, he rested his hand, very lightly, on the round of her shoulder. “There,” he said. “There.” It all came down to this, to the body; this slight and created thing that was supposed to be a splinter of being joined to love. It all came down to a great deal, or not much at all; in either case, merely this.
That was what he had come to see: the body and its inexorable gravities, that drew down hunger and desire and pity and joy upon itself as it drew his eyes; as it had drawn the boy’s. It was every bit as good as the soul, and the soul, created with and for it, was nothing without it. The soul would languish, however comfortably, without the body; and the body would waste away for want of the soul. They would pine for each other until the end of history when mercy would bring them together again, these sundered lovers.
Edward took his hand off Emily’s shoulder and brought it to his face. It was cold, but it smelled of Emily, he could swear it did, as Emily always smelled. He pulled the sheet over her head and to himself he said what he always said to her at bedtime, and they had a little laugh about that. But out loud he said the thing Virginia said, for his sake and all their sakes: “Pray for me.”
2
THERE WAS A REQUIEM MASS FOR EMILY BYRNE, aged sixteen, of this city, three days later. Virginia wore a black, Spanish-style veil, and sometime afterward she realized that this was the first time she had worn a veil since she and Edward were married, in this very church; where she had not too long ago begun to picture Susan and then Emily being married to young men as fine and handsome as Edward had been twenty years ago.
There was not much to Edward today. He looked pallid and slight. His hand was in hers, but it was brittle and weightless and inanimate, like a dried leaf. She stole a look at him, although she could rest her eyes on whatever she chose without discovery from behind the veil. He was not the man he used to be, or at least the man she had pictured him being when she was, twenty years ago, still almost a girl.
He had gone to see Emily at the funeral home, and that was, she knew, no small thing. She had looked at peace, he said. He had given her both their blessings. Virginia had not wanted to go. She had known how it would be; that she would merely be seeing what she already felt inside. She had lived in Emily and Emily had quite truly lived in her, and then, at birth, had been parted from her. Now she had been torn from her body again. Virginia could feel it. Really, palpably. There was a sensation in her gut, in her womb, of something moved, displaced, and pressing against the rest of her, an absence that was a presence. There was no need to go down to the mortician’s to see what it was.
Virginia had always believed God had given her two daughters, Martha and Mary, Susan and Emily, one steady and practical, the other headstrong and rather too curious. And one tended the kitchen and the hearth, and the other sat at Love’s feet, listening. And who knew, thus enchanted and charmed, what she might pick up and do, where she might go?
Now she had one daughter and a husband, and it was her lot from this day forward, for better or worse, to tend them and care for them no matter how diminished she felt. She could see, still gazing at him, Edward’s diminishment, and she supposed her own was visible to anyone who cared to look.
The mass went on without incident. Virginia could scarcely say she was even there, although she went through all the motions and heard the beads of a rosary clattering in the pew behind, Granny Byrne’s, with Susan alongside her. She heard the Dies Irae, clearly in Latin; and she remembered this the following year because by a coincidence or vast pretense the protests that occurred in Chicago just then took the same name, the days of rage. These were in reaction to the prosecutions brought in the aftermath of the events at the convention the previous summer.
Virginia, too, knew something of rage. It had been the most natural intuition for her last October to drive by the boy’s mother’s apartment on several different afternoons and see that Edward’s car was parked nearby. She had spent forty years being nobody’s fool and she comprehende
d precisely what was taking place. She had planned on saying something, and was in fact going to do so the very night the police called about Emily. But then what Edward had done was no longer the very worst thing that had ever befallen her.
Virginia’s grief was very deep, but it was also broad, and lent her life a capaciousness, a sympathy for the larger world and its troubles, that it had perhaps before lacked. She took it in and made herself at home with it, and while it claimed her life entirely for a while, it gave it back more or less whole, if not intact; altered not entirely for the worse. She could imagine how losing Emily, and the other matter too, might also be the worst things ever to happen to Edward.
But Virginia and Edward both kept their silence, not about Emily, but about the other thing for as long as they had left together. It is so hard to be alone and yet so hard to be with others, to speak the truth without doing injury, without unraveling the net of memory—of the sweet and delectable past, but also of slights and secrets set aside, of bonds we wish had never been made—upon which all our affections rest.
3
THE CORONER SPARED EDWARD AND VIRGINIA the news that Emily had been pregnant; Edward and Virginia spared Granny Byrne the news that the circumstances of Emily’s drowning had been other than a late-season school camping trip; and Jane and William spared everyone concerned by not attending the mass or otherwise making their presence felt. (It would be “in poor taste,” Jane explained to William, invoking a moral logic she had last heard from her own mother perhaps thirty years before.) Thus are we spared not so much pain as agonies of the imagination; so we are spared, if not the death of our loved ones, the death of our love for them as they were, as we need them to remain.