Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  It was a bad idea, and it was the best decision they ever made.

  The lake didn’t just save their marriage. That summer set their lives on track. Over the next two years they completed their degrees, defended dissertations, Richard landed the Cornell job, and Lisa found work at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a dream spousal hire coup that would never happen in 2018. Thad was born, and the Starling family settled quietly into what they would come to think of as their lives for the next thirty years.

  “Are you coming to bed?” Richard calls from the bedroom.

  Lisa leaves the bathroom. She should put peroxide drops in her ears. They swam in lake water today. But she’s so tired. She wants to burrow into bed and never leave.

  Dinner was bad, ice cream worse. Is she forcing the week? Should she let them go? But how to sell the house before giving everyone the chance to say goodbye?

  “I’m going to make some tea,” she says in the doorway. “Would you like some?”

  In bed, Richard reads. The book is one of those Florida noir things, garish cover and dead girls. He puts the book down. His smile is thin, forced. Lines radiate from his lips the way she’s seen with smokers, though Richard’s never smoked.

  “Sleepytime?” he asks. She nods, and he nods in return.

  In the kitchen, she fills the kettle. Her crockery and pans are packed. She’s kept just enough unboxed to get them through the week: six plates, six glasses, six tumblers, six mugs, six sets of silverware. A roasting pan. A teakettle. A pot. A carving knife. She likes cloth napkins, but she’s conceded paper and plastic for the week—recyclable, of course. “Just do Styrofoam,” Richard said, and she’d given him a look like Don’t you know me at all?

  She touches the kettle to the burner, listens for the sizzle, and flips on the stovetop fan. In the kitchen light, wallpaper ivy climbs the walls, leaves like trowels. This happens to her: Once she sees things one way, she can only see them that way forever after. For years, the leaves have been trowels.

  She locks the front door. She rinses a wayward dinner plate. She walks a wet hand towel to the laundry room and pulls a dry one from its drawer. In the morning, one son will slice a grapefruit, leaving the counter slick with juice. The other will leave his bowl on the table, Rice Krispies clinging to the lip. These she’ll clean without complaint. She’s a proper hostess, but it’s more than that. She misses feeling like a mom. Her sons no longer need her the way they did in their youth. This is good. They shouldn’t need her. They’re in their thirties. But it hurts, not being needed. So she’ll scrub their bowls. She’ll pick up after them. It’s how she says I love you, whether the boys notice or not.

  She misses her boys at eight and eleven, eating sandwiches cut out by cookie cutter, surprise Oreos tucked underneath. She misses Michael on the dock, pole in hand, always a fish at the end of his line. She misses Thad, her beamish boy, forestalling bedtime, reciting “Jabberwocky” from memory before he lets her tuck him in.

  But those boys are gone. In their place are men, furious men, bewildered and afraid. Her whole life she’s been surrounded by men—men and the voices of men, urgent, demanding, and oh-so self-assured. The house is for sale. Who cares if it’s too much to ask of them? Haven’t the men been asking all their lives?

  In the kettle, the water churns.

  She anticipated resistance from Michael, but not a scene. He even pulled a sorry from her, and for what? For selling her house without his permission? He has no right. Although, the house is a family home, Lake Christopher the place he met his wife. If Michael must be mad, she hopes it’s this, not money, that he’s mad about.

  No more apologies. If Richard suspects the reason for the move, fine. One day he’ll confess to his affair, or he won’t. So be it. Confession isn’t the thing she needs. The thing she needs is change.

  When June died, a grief counselor encouraged them to slow down. “Don’t make any huge life changes,” he said. “Escaping grief isn’t as simple as crossing state lines.”

  Isn’t it, though? Hadn’t it been? And wouldn’t it work again? Plenty of people live just that way, forever crisscrossing a vast geography of despair and keeping hope alive.

  A whistle, and Lisa lifts the pot and tips it, steaming, over one mug, then the other. The tea bags spin. The water swirls. She turns a knob, and the burner’s coil shrinks to black. She returns the kettle to the stove and stirs her tea.

  To trust scripture, God never gives you more than you can bear. Ha. Tell that to any parent who’s lost a child. It’s been a long time since Lisa’s looked to the Bible for advice, a long time since, eyes closed, in bed or back against a pew, she’s felt the hand or heard the voice of God. Still, morning and evening, she prays. She prays for comfort. She prays that she might be a comfort to others. She prays that she’ll be heard.

  With a spoon, she presses a tea bag to the inside of the mug. Don’t, Richard always tells her. Let it steep. But she can’t help herself. She likes the way the water tans when spoon meets mesh. She moves the spoon to Richard’s mug and presses, hard.

  In the bedroom, Richard is asleep. She removes the book from his chest and pulls the chain on his bedside lamp. In the kitchen, she pours his tea into the sink.

  Down on the dock, her boys are talking. The rest are in their rooms, asleep or pretending to be.

  She moves to her favorite chair and sits. How many birds has she watched from this seat? How many books has she read? What will the rest of her life with Richard be?

  Be still, the Psalms say. Be still and know that I am God.

  Stillness she has covered. It’s the knowing part that gives her trouble every time.

  Lisa tucks her feet beneath her and sips her tea against the house’s air-conditioned chill. She watches the water, waiting for a child to rise. She waits, she watches, and soon, the tea has done its job. She must move to bed or risk falling asleep in the chair and waking sore.

  She will not be here when her boys come up from the dock, will not be here to kiss their foreheads and send them to bed. But she can imagine it, how, her sons asleep, she might crack their doors and look at them, ignoring the arms in which their lives are wrapped, ignoring the bodies of the men they have become. How she might stand in their doorways, watching their chests rise and fall, and remember nights not so long ago when she would watch her children sleep—how she could hardly bear it, all that love.

  12.

  Nights used to be better. Before the resort and golf course, before builders bought up land on other bays, used to be you saw more stars. The stars are there, but faint, sky pinholed where, once, the night hung gouged and leaking light.

  Michael sits on the dock beside his brother. Their feet are in the water, and Thad casts a fishing pole, a joint smoldering at his side. Michael drinks, the tumbler sweaty in his fist, the fuzzy love-buzz of moonshine quietly decapitating the bats inside his head. He drinks too much, a fact he’s hidden so well from others that there are days he hides it from himself.

  Once, as a boy, Michael had the flu and his fever hit 103 degrees. The worst part of being sick wasn’t the chills or aches, or all the weight he lost. The worst part was being unable to think clearly. His brain, at 103 degrees, was fat in a skillet, sizzling, his thoughts sautéed. Grown Michael, sober, feels the same. He has to drink, or he’s that boy again, his brain a pan, his thinking fried.

  The worst is in the morning, waking up. He has yet to drink before 10:00 a.m., and if he’s proud of nothing else, he’s proud of that. Of course, he used to wait until noon. Then eleven. But something in him says that a drink before 10:00 a.m. means problems. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t have the drink poured and ready by nine thirty.

  In the evensong of frogs and night bugs, Michael sips. Thad smokes.

  “I don’t want to talk about the house,” Thad says.

  “I don’t want to talk about the boy,” Michael says.

  The bay before them is three football fields wide, a spit of land reaching a rocky point halfway across.
A flagpole rises from the point. Someone’s forgotten to lower the flag for the night, and it flaps in the wind. As boys, on a night like tonight, they would swim to the point, climb the rocks, touch the pole, and race back. Michael always won.

  “What’s your bait?”

  Thad reels. A lead sinker hangs steel gray at the end of his line—no hook, no lure, only weight.

  “Just trying to get it out there,” Thad says. Then he pulls his Southern accent out. “Practicin’ my castin’. Been a year since I wet a line.”

  Michael smiles. All their lives they’ve played the fake-twang game, though less lately than when they were boys. “Don’t make fun,” their mother would say. “How a person speaks is no indication of their intellect.” Michael knows this. He was never making fun.

  As a Northerner turned part-time Southerner turned Texan, he’s always been fascinated by ways of speaking, how a day’s drive earns everyday objects new names: Shopping carts become buggies, wolves become woofs, and what goes out isn’t your power, it’s the ’lectric. And don’t even get him started on Texas. Texas has a language all its own.

  His parents are Southerners who came by their accents honestly, though those accents were stronger when Michael was a boy, the Starlings fresh transplants from Atlanta. Michael never picked up their accent. Neither did Thad. But summers at the lake were enough to learn the cadences. By nine, ten years old, Michael could do a spot-on imitation of the neighbors, of Clyde at the marina or the butcher at the meat market. He’s always slipped other’s voices on with ease.

  “Wanna cast?” Thad asks.

  “I reckon,” Michael says, and Thad hands him the pole.

  The rod’s a cheap one. It’s fitted with a Zebco spincaster, the closed-face kind with plastic push button and metal cone. When he was a kid, this was the only kind of reel Michael could cast. Others tangled the second his thumb left the line.

  Michael sets his drink on the dock. He weighs the rod in both hands.

  Thad’s not practicing casting. They both know what’s at the bottom of the lake, what Thad’s hoping not to hook.

  Michael whips the rod like a willow switch, and the weight sails over the bay before smacking the water and sinking, enough moonlight tonight to make a show of where the sinker’s hit, far out, rings multiplying then widening toward the dock.

  It’s been a year, but he’ll be damned if it isn’t a perfect cast.

  “Damn,” Thad says. “That was a perfect cast.” Brothers.

  Michael reels the sinker in, drops the rod, and lifts his glass. He takes a long swallow. The moonshine, on top of the painkillers, is doing its thing. He can’t feel the stitches anymore. He can’t feel his face. He extends the glass, and Thad takes it, sips, and passes the glass back.

  “You still get high?” Thad asks.

  “Can’t. Pot shows up on drug tests.”

  “You get drug tested?”

  “I could any time. It’s in my contract.”

  There’s a joke to be made about the price one pays for holding down a job, but Michael doesn’t make it. Thad’s proven sensitive to the suggestion that he’s sponging off Jake, though not so sensitive that he’s looked for work the past two years.

  “Better hold your breath,” Thad says. He lights the joint, which has gone out, and takes a drag. He exhales away from Michael, but the wind blows smoke in Michael’s face.

  Fuck it. All the years he’s been there, not once has his company followed through on the threat of random screenings. Too expensive. Too much work. The threat is the deterrent.

  He extends his hand.

  “You sure?” Thad says, then passes the joint.

  Michael inhales. His throat burns, but the bats are gone. Better yet, the bats, the cave, all of it has been detonated, his skull cracked open, cupping night. He feels good.

  He returns the joint and lies back on the dock. His feet leave the water. His limbs loosen, and it’s as though he’s in a hammock, as though the dry, warped boards beneath him are rocking him to sleep.

  “This is not the shit we smoked in high school,” Michael says.

  “No shit it’s not that shit. This shit is light-years beyond the weed we smoked as kids. We’re talking hydroponics, grow lights, engineers.”

  “They found a way to science the shit out of pot?”

  “They found a way to science the shit out of pot.”

  Michael wants another hit. It’s as if all his life he’s eaten TV dinners. Then along comes steak. Steak with, like, a side of shrimp. And scallops. With butter.

  “This weed is butter,” Michael says.

  The stars shimmer. The breeze is fingers up and down his arms. Thad is laughing, and the sounds around them, frog song and cricket call, keep time with the laughs. Not just time, the creatures seem to be in tune. For a second, Michael can make out the opening bars of “Sweet Caroline.”

  “Dude,” Michael says. “The crickets are doing Neil Diamond tonight.”

  But Thad can’t reply. He’s laughing too hard. Is he laughing at Michael? It would appear that he is.

  “I’m gonna be a papa,” Michael says. He laughs, but Thad’s not laughing anymore.

  “What did you say?”

  “ ‘Hands,’ ” Michael says. “ ‘Touching hands. Reaching out. Touching me, touching you.’ ”

  The dock is silk. The stars won’t stay in place.

  “ ‘Sweet Caroline!’ ” he sings. “ ‘Good times never seemed so good!’ ”

  Thad’s hands shake him. “Too loud, buddy. Way too loud.”

  But Michael can’t help it. His body wants to sing.

  “ ‘I’d be inclined,’ ” his voice echoes across the bay, “ ‘to believe they never would!’ ”

  Thad’s hand is suddenly on his mouth—sweaty, meaty—and Michael licks it, at which point Thad yelps and lets go.

  Stars cartwheel. The moon melts. Michael stands, strips off his clothes, and the water, when he hits it, is cold and wakes him up. The bandage slips over his eye, and he pulls it off, dropping the patchwork of tape and cotton, sopping, onto the dock.

  “Michael,” Thad says. “I don’t think you’re supposed to get those stitches wet.”

  He tries to remember what the surgeon said. Either way, lake water’s gross. It’s got amoebas in it. He wants another drink. He doesn’t want a kid. Although, a boy might be cool. But expensive. Kids are expensive. Everyone says so.

  He treads water, and the water is cold. The animal sounds have returned to burps and chirps. No more Neil Diamond, no more “Sweet Caroline.”

  He misses the music. He misses his brother and the way things used to be, that got-your-back blessedness of boyhood and the certainty that one would walk through fire for the other, through shit and sharks and chainsaw-wielding clowns. At what age is that love lost for good?

  Michael swims to the ladder and pulls himself onto the dock.

  “Don’t move,” Thad says, and he’s up the hill. A minute later, he returns with a towel, fresh bandages, and rubbing alcohol.

  Michael dries himself and slips his clothes back on. He’s not embarrassed by his nakedness. He’s not embarrassed to be drunk and high in front of his brother. Mostly he’s concerned that he may have just confessed the pregnancy, though perhaps Thad missed that amid the singing and the jumping in the lake.

  What Michael needs now is a distraction. What he needs is a different secret. He seats himself on the edge of the dock, feet in the water, and Thad sits beside him.

  “Diane and I are broke,” he says. He towels his hair. He smells like the lake, which, for all its silt and goose shit, is a smell he loves. “We both work our asses off, and we still can’t pay the bills.”

  “That’s awful,” Thad says. “But how is that possible?”

  Michael drops the towel. He finds his glass empty and eats the ice.

  “Too much house,” he says. “We were approved for the loan, but we shouldn’t have been. Not for that much, and not at an adjustable
rate. We should have done the math. Our salaries, her loans, two cars, credit card debt. We bought in ’07, just in time for the collapse, then Diane’s school district took pay cuts. Our house will never be worth what we paid for it. The developers didn’t even finish the neighborhood.”

  Thad pours rubbing alcohol onto a cotton ball, which makes Michael thirsty. These days, even at the scent of Windex, his throat aches.

  “Your turn,” Michael says.

  “My turn what?”

  “Your turn to tell a secret.”

  Thad presses the cotton ball to the stitches, and Michael winces. Even through the giddy radiance of marijuana, of moonshine and pills, pain envelops his head at his brother’s touch.

  “I didn’t know we were playing that game,” Thad says. “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “The cotton ball,” Thad says. “It’s stuck in the stitches.” He tugs at the cotton, and it Silly Putties, wet and cirrus-stretched. “The stitches, they’re like Velcro.”

  “Just stick a bandage over it.”

  “I don’t know if—”

  “It’s fine,” Michael says. “Pop a Band-Aid on and tell me a fucking secret.”

  Somewhere, a dog barks, and a second dog barks to answer it.

  “You’re a mean drunk,” Thad says.

  A third dog joins the fray, and for a minute, the world is blotted out with barks. Across the bay, lights come on and the dogs are brought inside.

  “I think Mom and Dad threw away my comics,” Thad says.

  “That’s a shitty secret. Give me something good.”

  Across the bay, the lights go out—one, two, three.

  “We fuck guys,” Thad says, “me and Jake.”

  Michael laughs. “How is that a secret?”

  “No,” Thad says. “Guy-zuh. As in ménage à trois. As in couples seeking couples. As in open relationship.”

  Michael isn’t sure what to say to that. Without a drink, he never knows what to do with his hands. He takes up the fishing pole, but his arms feel too heavy to cast. Instead, he holds the rod tip over the water. He lets some line out, and the sinker taps the surface of the lake. More concentric circles. The quiet’s killing him.