How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC)
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Evelina thinks she can make out the image of the woman and her dog.
She blinks and there is nothing. What was she thinking? She shakes
her head. She has come down hard on her wrist and she sits a minute,
worrying it with her other hand. She feels a deep pressure building in her chest. She isn’t sure she has ever let herself feel anything for Vera, but now, her hand wrapped around her wrist, she feels a great pain.
What wouldn’t she give to be able to tell Vera she is sorry? She feels, in this moment, that she would give almost anything.
“Come back,” she calls again, but there is no one on the path
except her.
Evelina rises to her feet and walks back to the lake. The cigarette
has made her dizzy and she opens the coat a little, lets the cold breeze off the water enter and wrap around her chest. She cranes her neck
and lifts her face to the sky. Her cellphone is ringing, and she knows it is Lewis, newly awake and having discovered her note, calling to
make sure she is okay and to ask why she didn’t wake him. But certain things in life you have to go through alone.
The wind picks up and Evelina watches it move over the surface
of the lake. Now that the sun has fully risen, the water is a deep, rich Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 259
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gold colour, and she relaxes for the first time that morning, lets the coat fall open a little more, does not shield herself from the cold.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the lake, “I’m sorry.” She stands at the
water’s edge, and fishes Vera Gusev’s rings out of the coat pocket and holds them in front of her. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
She thinks of her own desperation as a young woman, furiously
scratching away at a lottery card in the hope of winning a million dollars. In the hope that happiness could be that simple.
As though she is skipping stones, she sends one of Vera Gusev’s
rings, and then the other, over the surface of the lake until they
reach its centre, then waits until she feels certain they have sunk to its depths.
At the morgue, she had held the photograph of Leo away from
her body and stared at his face. It could’ve been any old man in the
photograph. The morgue was as cold as she had imagined it to be,
and she was grateful that she had worn a sweater. Still, someone—one
of the assistants, maybe—should’ve wrapped a blanket around her.
There should’ve been some gesture of kindness, of comfort, of warmth.
In the photograph, the old man’s face was thin, drawn, his head
entirely bald. But it was Leo, yes, in the photograph. Yes. She could identify him, yes. That is Leo. That is Galileo Dmitrius Lucchi.
She hadn’t said his name aloud in so very long.
“How did he die?” Evelina asked the coroner’s officer.
“Technically?” said the coroner’s officer. “A heart attack. But if
you want my opinion, your husband drank himself to death.”
Now, staring into the lake at Squire Point, she thinks of Leo when
they first met. The sudden red rock and desert sprawl of San Garcia.
A wormhole has opened and on one end, she stands at the edge of
the lake in her black stretch pants and moccasins, her hair as white as crushed ice; and on the other, she stands on the deck of an old
wooden seiner, throwing a silver fish into the sea for a harbour seal.
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Well, she wants to say to the dead man, were you reincarnated? Are
you flying around currently as some little bird? Are you an earthworm, nosing your way through black soil? Are you coming out of your
chrysalis, wings spread in the gold-coloured light? Are you a great
white whale, breaking through the waves, while I watch alone from the shore? Are you a sea anemone, slowly moving along the ocean floor?
Are you being born? Did you hear music when you died? Did you
feel happy? Were you ready to go? Have you risen above it all and are you looking down on me? Are you watching me watching you? Am I
the only one you ever loved? Do you care what happens to your body?
Where are you now?
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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
With immense gratitude to my agent, Claudia Ballard, and to my
editors, Nicole Winstanley and Sarah Savitt, who transformed this
book (and my life). To Lara Hinchberger, Deborah Sun de la Cruz,
and to everyone at Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House
Canada; Virago/Little, Brown UK; Malpaso Ediciones; and William
Morris Endeavor. To Brian Trapp and Jeanne Shoemaker, especially.
To E., my greatest creation. To Patrick O’Keeffe, Tania Hershman,
Kate Soles, Leah Stewart, Sara Peters, Mika Tanner, and all I’m
forgetting whose eyes moved over the pages of this book. To Gary
Dawson, Roger Denley, Michael Harvey, Jim Hewes, Officer J., and
the late Jennifer Schmidt. To the Center for the Study of Women in
Society, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ohio Arts Council; the Mineral
School; the Writers OMI at Ledig House; and the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, where this book began. My title comes from Jia Tolentino’s
essay, “How a Woman Becomes a Lake,” published in The New Yorker
in November, 2018. (Thank you for your blessing.) Always and for-
ever to Lorna Jackson, the inciting incident of my writing life. And
to Brian Hendricks, somewhere out there and dearly missed.
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A n o t e a b o u t t h e T y p e
The body of How a Woman Becomes a Lake has been set in Adobe
Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach,
the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561).
Garamond was a pupil of Geoffrey Tory and is believed to have followed classic Venetian type models, although he did introduce a number of
important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letterforms we now know as “old style.” Garamond gave his characters a sense of movement and elegance that ultimately won him an international reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.
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