by Dan Chaon
Before the bodies were discovered, my father had a theory. He said that it would eventually come out that the father had embezzled a large sum from that real estate company. Sooner or later, he said, the authorities would catch up with them. They would find them living in a big house under an assumed name in some distant, sunny state. “Or maybe,” said my father, “maybe they’ll never catch them.” He paused, a little taken with this romantic possibility. “Maybe they’ll get away with it,” he said.
When he heard they’d been found, he seemed almost bitter that the idea he had repeated and embellished turned out to be so far from the truth. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said, and glared darkly down at his hands.
The two of us were out at a local bar, a place called The Fishhead that he frequented, and he was already several beers ahead of me. He was slurring a little.
“I just can’t fathom what could’ve happened. How do you drive your car into a God damn lake? And how do you get it out there as deep as they got it? Even if there was a drop-off?”
“It’s freakish,” I agreed. I sipped my beer. “A real tragedy,” I said.
My father shook his head: I had failed to get his point. “Do you know,” he said. “Every one of them was still buckled in. That’s what Buddy Bartling told me, and he was there. The woman was driving, and she was strapped in behind the wheel. It just doesn’t make sense. You know, if the water had been icy cold, it would’ve been just—bam!—hypothermia. But it wasn’t that cold.”
“Hmm,” I said. It sounded like he was concocting a new theory, and I waited. The barmaid came over and asked how we were doing and my father tapped his empty glass.
“You know what gets me,” my father said. He cocked his head at me, squinting one eye, and lowered his voice. “What gets me is your God damn mother. Here this happens not five hundred yards from her cabin. But she sees nothing, she hears nothing. That’s just how she is. You know it. I mean, it’s nothing against her really. That’s not what I’m saying. She’s your mother, and she’s not a bad woman.”
“No,” I said. He was drunk, I thought. I felt the alcohol moving thickly through my own body, and I couldn’t follow where he was going. I gave him the same one-eyed squint.
“You would think,” my father said, “a person would think they would’ve hollered. Those kids. They had to have screamed, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” I said, and he hunched his shoulders.
“I’m not saying anything,” he said, but his eyes had a strange intensity. “It’s just a shame there wasn’t someone else in that cabin other than your mom. That’s all I’m saying. They would have found those folks a lot sooner.”
My parents had been separated for almost three years by that time, though they’d never officially divorced. They had “parted ways” (as my mother said) sometime during my sophomore year in college, I wasn’t even sure when. No one told me. My mother moved out to the cabin, and my father remained at the house in Ogallala.
I didn’t quite understand the situation. My mother said that it had to do with his drinking—though, to me, he didn’t seem to be an alcoholic, at least not in the way that you read about. He never did anything outrageous or abusive. He just drank beer or an occasional glass of whiskey, the same as he always had, and generally all that meant was that he was a little out-of-it after about nine o’clock at night.
My father felt that it had to do with the difference in their ages. My mother was ten years older than my father, and once I had left home, he said, the differences had become more difficult. It was hard to get a clear answer from him. He hinted that it had something to do with menopause (what he solemnly called “The Change O’ Life”). She’d just—changed, he said.
Nevertheless, my father was out at the cabin regularly. All their finances were still intertwined, and whenever he got a check for work he did (he was a carpenter) he came out and gave it to her, rather than deposit it himself. It didn’t make much sense to me.
The morning after our conversation at the bar, I awoke to the sound of them arguing. It was an almost comforting noise, familiar to me since childhood, and lying there in half-sleep I might have once again been thirteen years old, or ten, or seven.
“Damn it, Everett,” I heard my mother say sharply, and I smiled because the phrase was so familiar, and because I knew it would make him blush and grow sullen. His real name was Everett, but everyone called him Shorty—he was five foot five, a compact, wiry little man—and some time in the distant past he’d come to see this nickname as a kind of badge of respect, and Everett as an insult, a sissified embarrassment. Even my mother used it only in anger.
I heard my father mumble back at her, a low stubborn sound. He was terrible at arguing, he always lost (even when he was right) and mostly he was reduced to petty, childish comebacks. He used to flip up his middle finger at her. “Sit and spin, darlin’,” he would say. For a while, this was his favorite final word.
By the time I came into the kitchen, they had lapsed into silence. He was sitting at the table, moodily sipping his coffee, and she was at the stove, frying eggs, wielding her spatula with venomous precision. “Morning,” I said, and my father raised his eyes and nodded. My mother said nothing. She flipped an egg and the grease crackled.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said after a moment, without turning from the frying pan. “If you’re going to be drinking and carrying on until all hours of the night, you can stay with your father.”
My father and I exchanged glances, and he rolled his eyes a little. The issue was sensitive, since the choice of whom I stayed with meant that one of them would feel slighted. The truth was that I had chosen my mother for selfish reasons—she cooked, and I had easy access to the lake. I kept my face neutral.
But no one said anything more. My mother set plates and silverware in front of us with an irritated snap of her wrist, and I saw plainly that their argument had been about me. It was an extension of earlier fights they’d had, when he’d taken me to bars before I was of legal age.
“Do you want toast?” my mother said, and I nodded.
“Yes, please,” I said humbly. “With butter.”
“There’s oleo on the table,” she said, and put two slices of bread in the toaster. “There’s a knife by your plate to spread it with. There’s no butter in the house. I don’t buy it anymore.”
This was her all-I-do-is-serve-people tone of voice. And it was true, we sat and she waited on us—“hand and foot,” as she liked to say. On the other hand, if I were to attempt to fry my own egg, she would be right behind me, watching and making critical, disapproving faces. If I tried to get my own silverware she would say, “What are you digging for?”
In retrospect, I suppose that it was that morning when I first began to get a strange feeling about her. I realized that she must have an inner life—that she was a person who thought and felt and had memories and desires like the rest of us. But I sensed that there was something changed and hardened about that inner life. We had both become mysterious to one another, and I was aware that she wasn’t particularly interested in my adulthood. I was still her son, naturally; but at some level, I was also something else—an invader, a grown-up mind that was beginning to commandeer the body of the child she had loved so much.
I don’t know if I was an adult, really. That spring, for a variety of reasons, I had come close to failing my final semester of college, and, at the last minute, had managed to talk my adviser into helping me get an emergency withdrawal. I took incompletes in all my classes, and, two weeks before graduation, packed up my stuff and drove home. I left on the same weekend that the Morrisons disappeared.
I took a job at a video store in a little mini-mall near the lake, some five miles down the shore from my mother’s cabin. When I was a child, it was simply a gas station and convenience store that sold canned goods and bait. But over the years, it had expanded; now, in addition to the video store, there was souvenir “Shopp
e,” a McDonald’s, and a Domino’s Pizza. It irritated me a little. “They” were taking over the lake, I thought, though I wasn’t sure who “they” were—new people, I guess. I spent my days feeling scornful and superior to the movies most people rented.
Everyone was talking about the family who had died. My boss told me that there had been a number of reporters around, and even a TV news team from Denver. It was all a mystery. Had they simply run off the road, and perhaps been knocked unconscious before they hit the water? Had foul play been involved somehow? A pale fat man in cut-offs told me that he’d heard they’d been drugged, that it had been a mob hit—which, if true, never appeared in the papers.
What did appear that morning was an unnerving, posed studio portrait of the Morrisons, grainy and badly reproduced, on the front page of the Star-Intelligencer. They were all grinning for the camera, even the baby. The mother sat in front, holding the infant in her lap; the seven-year-old girl, plump and obviously proud of her waist-length hair, sat on the right; the five-year-old boy was on the left, his hair sticking up a bit, “a rooster’s tail,” my mother used to call it; the father was behind them, with one hand on each of the children’s shoulders.
Looking at their photograph, you couldn’t help imagining them all in that car, under the water. I saw it as a scene in a Bergman film—a kind of dreamy blur around the edges, the water a certain undersea color, like a reflection through green glass. Their bodies would be lifted a bit, floating a few centimeters above the upholstery, bobbing a little with the currents but held fast by the seat belts. Silver minnows would flit past the pale hands that still gripped the steering wheel, and hide in the seaweed of the little girl’s long, drifting hair; a plastic ball might be floating near the ceiling. Their eyes would be wide, and their mouths slightly open; their skin would be pale and shimmery as the inside of a clamshell; but there would be no real expression on their faces. They would just stare, perhaps with faint surprise.
I thought of all the times I’d been swimming in the past month, and I felt a vague need to scrub myself again, as if that vision of them had seeped into the water, as if the existence of those unknown bodies had left a film on my skin. My mother had gone through the freezer and thrown out all the fish she’d caught that summer for the same reason: It seemed contaminated. I was sickened to remember the catfish—a scavenger—that she’d caught a few weeks ago, and that we’d eaten, breaded and deep fried, one Saturday evening.
People who knew where my mother lived would ask about it. I said that she didn’t hear anything. I wasn’t back from school at the time, I said. I would talk about how strange it was. It didn’t seem logical; maybe the police would be able to figure out what happened. I honed small speeches for reporters, or news cameras, but I was never interviewed.
The police had stopped by to talk to my mother the day they’d found the car. She said they’d asked a lot of questions but wouldn’t go into specifics. All she could tell them was that she hadn’t heard anything. I could picture her sitting there on our old cabin sofa, the policemen across from her. I could see the stiff, official way she held herself, her careful monotone when she spoke. She felt as if she were being judged—like she was one of those Kitty Genovese people, who sat in their apartments and ignored the cries for help while a woman was murdered in the courtyard below.
She really was that type of person. It wasn’t that she didn’t care; it was simply that it was hard for her to take the initiative in a situation that wasn’t her business. She would have assumed that someone else had already done what needed to be done.
When I came home from work, I only briefly mentioned the things I’d learned: the photo in the paper, the TV news team, the speculation I’d heard. She rested her hand against her forehead. “Oh, oh,” she said softly. She shook her head, sadly, and was silent. Then she asked me if hamburgers were all right for dinner.
At the time, this weird juxtaposition, her insistence on switching to the mundane, seemed like pure irony. Sometimes I thought that she was so repressed she was more or less blank on the inside—or at very best, one dimensional, her consciousness a space where simple commands were given and executed: “Eat. Sleep. Make food for offspring. Sleep again.” Perhaps an occasional emotion or idea would flutter through, briefly, and then disintegrate. If anyone could fail to be curious about this horrific event, it was my mother.
This was our life together: dinner, dishes, perhaps a video I’d brought home from work, which she usually fell asleep in front of. When I asked her what kinds of movies she liked, she shrugged. “Oh, I don’t care, really,” she said. “They’re all about the same to me. Half of them don’t make any sense, anyway.” When I pressed her to name a film she’d liked, she at last came up with Wait Until Dark, about a blind lady being menaced by criminals. I brought home some thrillers after that, which she watched dispassionately but with interest—sudden deaths, killers hidden behind doorways, screaming women pursued down endless halls. When it was over, she always claimed that she knew how it was going to end.
Looking back, I realize that this was my last chance to get to know her. I would never again live at home—apart from occasional visits at Christmas or Independence Day. Sometimes I think that if I’d only been paying more attention, I might have been prepared for what happened to her later. It might not have happened at all, had I been watching for the signs that I can now only search for in my memory.
• • •
But back then, whatever puzzles my mother’s inner life presented were not nearly as interesting as the mystery of the Morrison family. I called my college friends and talked to them about it, feeling a little indignant that it hadn’t been picked up by the national news. “It’s pretty amazing,” I told my friends. “It’s almost like there’s no rational explanation, you know?”
I walked down to the site of the accident and examined it for myself. Here was the place where the car had inexplicably gone off the road. They must have been going fast down that curving dirt road—in the dark, one would assume, though no one knew. They had to have been going so fast that the young, man-high saplings didn’t slow them down. They flew over an embankment—since surely, if the tires had hit the strip of sand between the low cliff and the water, they would have stopped, merely bogged down in an unpleasant but eventually hilarious situation. Somehow, the car sailed over the sand. It hit the water and sank. The lake was shallow for several yards before it dropped off swiftly. Somehow, the car got past that, too.
“But don’t cars float for a while before they sink?” one of my friends asked. He was sure they did. And even then, there would have surely been time to roll down the windows, even while they were submerged, there would have been time for at least some of them to escape.
When I walked along the edge of the road, there were no signs of any accident—no tire marks at the edge of the ditch, not even a broken sapling. Of course, almost two months had passed; the elastic trees had straightened, summer plants had grown wild, rain had smoothed the ground.
As I came back to the cabin that day, walking along the line of shore, I saw that my father’s work van was parked in the driveway. He had probably stopped in for lunch. I came up the beachside steps—which my father had built many years before—padding barefoot, quiet though I didn’t necessarily intend to be. I could hear them talking in the kitchen. The sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the deck was open, and their voices floated out, clear and disembodied as I approached.
“Call her up,” my mother was saying. “Tell her that if she doesn’t pay you this week you’re going to take her to court.”
“I have half a mind to go out there and take down the whole damn addition, two-by-fours and all.”
“You should.”
He laughed. “Can you see the look on her face?” he said, and my mother chuckled deeply.
“I’d like to be there to see it,” she said.
I sat down at the top of the steps to listen. They were always at their best when the
y were talking business, making plans and strategies. I couldn’t help feeling sad, hearing them. It could be like this, I thought foolishly, we could all be friends, sitting around, joking, talking easily. That’s what it could be like.
“She probably thinks I owe her something,” my father said.
“Do you?” my mother said coldly.
“No,” my father said. “Not really.” He cleared his throat.
“Well, then,” my mother said.
Then they were quiet. I heard a plate being set down on the table. I got up and went inside.
They both looked up, startled. “Hey, bud,” my father said. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing,” I said. I watched as their expressions tightened, as whatever they were talking about was buried away, out of sight. I was coming to realize that I didn’t really know them very well. Somehow, twenty-two-year-old Shorty had fallen in love with my mother, a sharp-tongued, thirty-two-year-old telephone operator. Somehow, they’d stayed married for twenty years, and then, abruptly, somehow they’d decided to give up. It didn’t quite make sense, and I looked at them, for a minute aware of the other mystery in my life.
“Do you want some soup?” my mother asked, as if I were a customer.
Looking back, I wish that I’d gone about finding answers in a more systematic way. I don’t even know if “answers” were what I was looking for at the time. Mostly, I was thinking of myself—where would I be at thirty-two, forty-five, fifty-five? How did people go about falling in love, getting married, having jobs, families, living their lives? I wanted to frame my parents’ lives like scripts—plot, conflict, motivation, theme—anything that could be easily analyzed, anything that might give me a clue about how to proceed, or how not to.
Perhaps this was what I thought of as my mother and I sat on the deck, as we often did on hot nights. We sat, smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark shape of the lake—at the lights of houses on the other side, at the soft brightening and dimming of fireflies in the air, which reminded me of the way the lit end of her cigarette would glow more intensely when she breathed in, and fade when she exhaled.