do it tomorrow: make the long-procrastinated appointment with the
ophthalmologist, have Lewis take her in their stupid fancy car.
There is a keyboard in the middle of the room with sheet music to
“The Joint Is Jumpin’” spread out over the music stand. A beat-up
leather couch, probably bought second-hand, with a pillow and balled-
up blanket. She guesses that he spent his nights here, and fell asleep with the television on. It is an old-fashioned living room—so unlike
her and Lewis’s, everything digital, blinking, so minimalistic that she still can’t figure out how to turn on the overhead lights. Leo would hate her new car. She hates it, too. But these things bring Lewis so much
happiness, and she wants Lewis to be happy, for now that she is grow-
ing old, she is aware that she will die many years before her husband.
She finds the pamphlets on the kitchen counter. Leo had attended
a timeshare seminar. That seems right. Mexico. He seemed like the
type of man who would spend a lot of time down there, then relocate
entirely. He should have died there. He should have died in a palapa, a margarita in his hand. A man alone on a beach.
His bedroom is also painted blue, even the ceiling. He had
striped sheets. She smells the pillow but it smells like any old man’s pillow. The coroner’s officer has given her a bag of Leo’s clothes and she removes the heavy scuffed boots from the bag and sets them
inside the closet, takes the T-shirt and the jeans with a torn knee and places them on the bed. She sets the pair of white tube socks and the ratty boxer shorts on top of the T-shirt. In the bottom of the bag is Leo’s old military jacket. She remembers the day he found it in a thrift store, how proudly he hefted it onto his shoulders and sauntered
around, searching for a mirror. Tore off the tag with his teeth, threw his arm around her, guided her out of the store and into the street.
It is threadbare now, the neck stained from sweat. She can’t believe
he still wore it. She breathes in, and there it is—the faint scent of his cologne.
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“You big idiot,” she says to the room.
On the bedside table are two pictures in silver frames: Jesse on his
wedding day (Jesse must have sent Leo the picture—Leo did not
attend), wearing a lilac shirt and a black tie, his hair slicked back with gel. He looks so thin in the picture that she finds it shocking. He
became a vegan as a teenager, and was always too skinny after that,
crow’s feet and laugh lines in his face. In the picture, he wears a tiepin in the shape of a dog.
“You should have been there,” she says to the empty blue room.
“It was such a nice day.”
She knows there are things, of course—ways in which Jesse has
hidden his damage from her. Drugs, she is certain, when he was younger.
But something else, too. A sense she had when Jesse was a teenager. Out-of-control promiscuity. What he actually got up to remains a mystery, though she saw glimpses of it: kids showing up at the house in the
middle of the night; empty bottles of antibiotics from a walk-in
clinic; even something Dmitri said once—that Jesse needed to always
be touching someone.
Evelina sets the frame down and picks up the one behind it. It is a
photo of Dmitri and one of his dogs, a dramatic mountain landscape
in the background. He, too, has chiselled his body down to what
looks like stone.
Jesse and Dmitri don’t speak anymore, though neither will articu-
late why. They didn’t have a falling-out. There was no argument. No
screaming match; nothing came to blows. She thinks she knows why,
though. She thinks it is because Jesse finally told him what happened.
Now, Dmitri lives in a loft five hundred miles away. He has three
dogs.
He isn’t lonely, he says.
He has found a life that works for him.
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She will call Jesse and Dmitri when she gets home. She will tell
them that Leo had a massive heart attack in his sleep, did not suffer, did not leave them anything, never updated his medical records to list anyone but her as next of kin, was living two miles away from her and Lewis for years.
She searches for a photo album, or more pictures in frames, a
Polaroid on the refrigerator door, but finds nothing. She guesses that he was the type of man who didn’t spend much time at home. She
might wander into the neighbourhood bar. That’s where she will find
out about Leo, not in this stale, cramped apartment, with its empty
refrigerator and its never-slept-in bed. Some guy in a newsboy cap
will tell her about Leo. Some guy with a beer in his hand.
In the back of a dresser drawer, she finds a Moleskine with a
bunch of pencil sketches. He must have been teaching himself how to
draw—or maybe Holly taught him before they split up. Gradually,
the sketches become less abstract and start to look more like people.
Mostly, the drawings are of old men—no, these are self-portraits. He
managed to capture his signature hangdog look. He figured out how
to draw his own eyes. She stares at him, staring back at her. When she comes to the portraits of her, she puts her hand on the dresser. This isn’t, of course, what she looks like now. No, these are drawings of her when they first met. Hair down to her waist; her face so much fuller.
The portraits are so startlingly good that he must have drawn them
from a photograph. But where is the photograph? She would like to
have it. She would like to look at her young self. Her eyes flood with tears. She would do anything to go back in time, to take her young
self by the shoulders.
She rifles through the dresser, searching for the photograph of
herself, but finds instead a smal sealed envelope. It is affixed with insufficient postage, and thus the letter is not recent. She bites her lip Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 253
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and unseals it, carefully, as though the dead man will return at any
minute and she will have to quickly press it closed.
The letter is folded in thirds, two rings weighing it down. One is
a simple gold band with three rectangular-shaped diamonds, but the
other is an incredible feat of goldsmithing. The band is made of what looks like hundreds of tiny entwined gold wires, a small milky gemstone tucked in the centre, meant, Evelina presumes, to resemble a
bird’s nest with a little egg hidden inside. Or maybe the gem is meant to be Saturn, and the gold wires are its rings. She turns the ring over, studying it, but it is an optical illusion: she blinks and it is a bird’s nest; she blinks again and it is Saturn.
The letter consists of only two sentences, written in cursive so
shaky and tentative that it looks like a child’s.
They slipped off her fingers and into my hands.
She puts her fingers to her mouth. What was his name? Denny.
Denny, that’s it. She is holding a letter meant for Denny Gusev.
Why didn’t Leo mail it, or throw it away? Why has he kept it all
these years?
Is it too late to say I’m sorry?
The rings must be worth thousands of dollars. She could be hold-
ing thousands of dollars in her hand.
She wonde
rs if she should try to find Denny. To give him back
the rings. Yes, that is the right thing to do. Though he is probably
dead by now. Either that or eighty years old. He might not be alive,
but he might have children. Or other family. Or Vera might have
family who would want them. She will do it when she gets home:
search for Denny’s name, figure out a way to get in touch.
She slides the Moleskine back into the dresser drawer, the rings
still in her hand. She thinks she might drive all the way to Squire
Point and spend the morning out there. She roots around in Leo’s
closet, finds an old, moth-eaten overcoat. She tucks Vera Gusev’s
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rings into one of the overcoat’s secret pockets, so there will be no
chance of losing them.
“Goodbye, Leo,” she says, and locks the door.
It is nine o’clock when she reaches the first parking lot. The sky is bright with morning sunlight, and she finds herself alone on the trail that
leads to the lake, the wind lapping violently around her as she walks.
Years ago, city council voted to install a railing. You used to be
able to walk straight across the lake in winter, nothing but a sheet of ice between you and the water. You can’t do that now. She supposes it is safer, but you can’t install safety bars and railings all over the wonderful, dangerous parts of the world. It is good for the world to
remain a little bit dangerous, she thinks, though she isn’t sure where the thought comes from, or where it leads to. It seems like something Leo would have said to her in the early days. Maybe he once said
those very words, and now the thought is implanted in her mind as
her own. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The lake hasn’t frozen over in
years. In fact, she can’t remember the last time it snowed in Whale
Bay. But today the wind is vicious and so she draws the old coat
around her, tucks her chin into her chest. Ahead of her, she sees a
bronze plaque. mirror lake, it says. She is sure the lake didn’t have a name before. When did this happen, and who decided on the name?
“Mirror Lake,” she says aloud. The name isn’t altogether displeasing.
She walks quickly to the edge of the lake, where there is a bench
for people to sit and look out over the water. She is surprised to see a woman sitting there, a woman all in grey. For a moment, Evelina
thinks she is a statue. But instead the woman turns her head as
Evelina approaches and offers her a cigarette.
“Why not?” says Evelina, who hasn’t smoked since her fishing-
boat days. She sits next to the woman, and the woman holds out a
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lighter. Evelina lights the cigarette, sheltering the flame from the
wind with Leo’s coat. “My ex-husband was a smoker,” Evelina says.
“The smell—it brings me back.”
The woman looks about as old as Evelina, and wears a grey coat
that has seen better days, and thick, black-rimmed glasses.
“He died,” says Evelina. “Last night.”
“Just like that,” says the woman. “Like a bolt of lightning.” She
scans the lake while she speaks.
“Like that, I suppose,” says Evelina. “We hadn’t talked in years.”
“Will you have a funeral?” the woman asks.
Evelina shrugs. “No.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
She passes Evelina a tissue, and when Evelina presses it to her cheek she finds that indeed she is crying.
“You didn’t upset me,” says Evelina. “I’m just tired.”
Sitting here, on the little bench at the edge of the lake, she wishes she could tell the woman how unhappy she was for most of her life,
how she spent her twenties and thirties trying to stop herself from
backing into a corner and screaming until the blood vessels burst in
her eyes—but how nothing is wrong anymore, not really, and how
every day she has to remind herself of this, and some nights she has to repeat to herself that everything is okay now, and some nights she
can’t believe how many times she has to say it before she begins to
believe it herself.
She has a wonderful group of girlfriends now, and they are even
planning a beach holiday this summer, their husbands left at home.
And Lewis. She has Lewis. That is something—to have loved some-
one for so long and so deeply—though in truth they are more like old
friends. He was so muscular when they first met that she laughed the
first time he took off his shirt. You’re like an action hero, she said, running her hands over his biceps, his chest, pulling him toward her.
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And yet when was the last time she kissed his lips? She still finds him handsome, though he doesn’t tend to himself like he used to.
In all their years of marriage, they had only one awful fight—
decades ago, when he told her he wanted to have a child. She said
no. Anyway, that is his life’s regret, not hers. And they have money.
Lewis’s pension is not insignificant. And she isn’t a bookkeeper any-
more for the Whale Bay Operatic Society—she has become their
costume designer. For years, she kept a sketchbook filled with court
jesters, people in gowns, men in tuxedos. She took it to work with
her one day, and the director saw them, offered her a job. She has
held the position since her early forties, thinks she’ll retire when her eyes finally give out. Even still, she has to remind herself that she doesn’t have to use rags instead of paper towels. She still buys only the cheapest four-pack of toilet paper. You never know. The wind
could shift and you could find yourself, alone and homeless, at the
edge of the world.
The truth is, not everything in her life is all right. She wants to
explain to the woman in grey why she hardly sees Dmitri. Why they
never speak, save for an obligatory Christmas phone call once a year.
And why lately she feels such a coldness from Jesse, a coldness that
seemed to start the day his daughter was born. But how can she
explain such things? Where would she begin? She understands they
are busy now, attending to their families and careers. Still, she suspects that it is more than their busy lives. She suspects they share too many memories that none of them want to revisit. The past is not
buried. The past is right there, like a coin in a shallow pool, and all she has to do is reach.
In the last moments of the day, right before she falls asleep, she
feels what all of them must feel—a small sliver of toxic bile running through her blood, the weight of what happened.
Maybe it is easier, then, to drift apart. To forget.
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Still, on the rare occasions that she is invited to Jesse’s house, she finds herself watching him closely when he holds his daughter.
Studying his hands. How tightly they grip the baby’s little thighs,
her little arms.
Or did he get all the violence out of him that day at the lake?
She remembers t
he last time she saw Leo, right after Holly left
him, and how he described to them over dinner, in detail, his ascetic lifestyle. He looked to her in that moment more like a small woman
than a man. Something about the hips. The flesh having been win-
nowed. Punishing himself, that was the obvious answer. Searching for
redemption. He barely touched his plate of food that night, though
he drank plenty of their beer.
“A woman died here, years and years ago,” Evelina says, and takes
a deep drag from the cigarette.
“I remember,” says the woman in grey. “We’re sitting on her bench.”
She gestures behind her, where indeed Vera’s name is engraved.
“I wonder who donated it,” says Evelina.
“Her husband did,” says the woman in grey.
“My son,” Evelina begins. “My son—”
“Yes?” says the woman in grey.
“My son pushed her into the water.”
Evelina turns to see the woman’s reaction, but the woman has
stood up and is a few paces away. The woman doesn’t respond, and
Evelina wonders whether she has heard her. It is a bold thing: to tell a stranger the secret she has carried in her heart since she was thirty-five years old. She wants to shove the words back in her mouth.
The woman whistles, and then whistles again, and Evelina hears
the dog’s footfalls before she sees him emerge from the woods, his fur slick with morning dew. The dog makes his way to the two women,
and Evelina lets him run his warm tongue over her cold hands. “Hi,
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ears. He reminds her so much of Scout she can hardly bear it. “Hi,
sweetheart. Yes, sweetheart.”
“Come on, boy,” the woman says.
“I used to—” Evelina begins to say, but the woman and dog are
already walking up the path. She feels her pulse quicken, her heart
pounding in her chest. You’re dreaming. You’re dreaming. Wake up.
Wake up. Wake up now.
“Wait,” Evelina calls out. “Wait.” She stumbles up the path but
catches her moccasin on a root, and then she is on all fours, pine
needles stuck to the palm of her hand.
“Please,” she says. “Come back.”
The sun is rising through the trees and the trail is backlit, but
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