Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  In the picture, Michael’s sister lies on her back in a diaper on a sheepskin rug. She faces the camera, and there’s a fierceness there, a curiosity. Her eyes are blue, her hair as black as night. The year is 1983, the date stamped in the corner under Olan Mills.

  Michael passes the photograph to Thad.

  “She’s beautiful,” Thad says.

  “I’m sorry we kept her a secret,” their father says.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Thad says.

  He returns the picture to their mother, who puts her daughter away and returns the wallet to her purse.

  “I didn’t mean to kick him,” Michael says. “I didn’t mean to lose my grip.”

  He hasn’t planned to say this, to confess. But, spilling secrets, he finds he can’t stop.

  “The boy,” he says. “I had his hand. I had him, and I kicked him. I let go.”

  “You had to come up for air,” Thad says. “You would have drowned.”

  “I should have drowned before coming up alone.”

  “No,” his mother says. “Your children are going to need their father.”

  “You’re going to be a good father, Michael,” his father says.

  They keep talking, his parents, but Michael’s no longer listening. He’s thinking of the boy in the lake. He’s thinking of his sister.

  That evening, leaving the deer, Michael turned and watched the carcass through the rear windshield as the car pulled away. He half expected a vulture to land, but the body lay unaccompanied where they’d rolled it onto the shoulder of the road. It would lie intact a while longer until, by whatever transubstantiation, it turned to carrion. Michael likes that idea—the notion, however naive or childish, that there might be a period of grace that keeps buzzards at bay. That even the body of a wild animal might be afforded time to lie in state, ceremonial, untouched.

  And maybe this is benediction enough, to be a deer in the middle of the road, to be a boy at the bottom of a lake, to be an infant held fast in the folds of her bassinet. To lie a minute—fragrant and warm with life just left—to linger, to lie, before the rushing paramedics move forward in their rushing; before the dark fish paddle deeper in their deepening; before the truck, fender bent, hurries away, and the shadows circle darkly, and darkly drop.

  Just this. To stay awhile—missed, lost, loved—before the birds descend, and you’re picked clean.

  40.

  Lisa in starlight, stirring. Lisa Starling fast asleep.

  She wakes to the screen door’s slam. Out the window, beyond the open blinds, her family, minus Richard, sits on the dock around the old telescope.

  She only meant to lie on the bed a moment, but the weight of the weekend, how quickly it carried her off to quiet dreams.

  She’s slept an hour, maybe less. It’s very late. In the bedroom doorway, her husband watches her. In his hands, he holds the canvas that sat all night on the dock.

  “Jake gave it to Diane,” he says. “I told her we would keep it here to dry, then mail it later in the week.”

  Richard moves to the closet. He props the canvas against one wall, then shuts the closet door. Lisa sits up, and he joins her on the bed.

  “Thad brought the telescope down,” he says. “I forgot that kid knows all the constellations. Not just Orion’s Belt, but the obscure ones, and all the stories to go with them.”

  Richard stands and, by the hand, she pulls him back.

  “Please,” she says. “Just for a minute. Stay with me and watch our boys.”

  She wishes he knew her heart, but there are worse things than being given what is asked.

  She wants to believe that, in time, his indiscretion won’t haunt her, and, perhaps, if she wants this badly enough, it won’t.

  The night is clear, the moon a crescent. How many nights has she stood at this window and listened for owls, how many mornings has she watched the birds wake up?

  She’ll miss this room, this house, this lake. She’ll miss it all, but not enough to stay.

  Next summer, the Florida surf will touch their toes. The sand will squeak beneath their feet. Their back door will open not to flickers and cardinals and jays, but to pipers and terns and gulls. Maybe it’s the wrong change, but at their age, any change is good.

  God, let her not grow complacent in old age. They’ve had lucky lives. An insult to whatever force gives life not to appreciate those lives until the end.

  “We’re going to be grandparents,” she says.

  “Very old grandparents,” Richard says.

  “It’s going to be ridiculous how much we’ll spoil them.”

  Them. Already she’s delirious with love.

  She rises from the bed, and together, they move to the family room, slip on their shoes, and step onto the porch. Her favorite great horned owl offers her its signature four hoots.

  She catches Richard’s wrist, leans in, and kisses his stubbled chin. “Come on,” she says. Then they’re down the stairs and down the hill.

  They step over water onto the dock.

  The boat in the boathouse creaks. The stars smolder. Her children’s faces glow.

  Her children sit cross-legged on the dock, and what will become of them?

  Michael. The name is Hebrew, Who is like God, at once an invocation and a question. Naming him, perhaps she hoped to save him, that her daughter’s fate might not befall her boy.

  He sits up straight, Diane’s shoulders to his chest, her head tucked underneath his chin. Lisa’s boy is bandaged, bruised, but he’s alive. He and Diane are happy, for now. And maybe the momentum of this night will be enough to get them through the pregnancy, through the twins’ first months, first steps, first words, first kisses, first cars. Perhaps Michael and Diane will be good parents, love their children, never fight.

  Lisa wants happily ever after for them. But what comes next will test them. Children are expensive. Lisa and Richard will help, but Michael and Diane will have to change their ways. And children are exhausting. There will be long nights, surprise trips to the hospital, a million unforeseen anxieties multiplied by the exponent of sleeplessness.

  And joy. So much joy.

  Who they are, who they’ll become, Diane and Michael, and their children—separately, together—Lisa can’t predict, won’t even try.

  She’ll pray. There’s still prayer, always prayer. Prayer to a God in whom Lisa still believes. If not an afterlife, God at least. And does it matter whether her prayers work? Whether they’re heard? If they’re fruitless, they’re no worse than hope.

  Thad rises. He points the telescope at the moon, then angles it toward the stars.

  Sweet Thad. Thad who suffers. Thad who is unhappy, smart, and good. The helix of possibility for him stretches on forever like one of Richard’s unsolved proofs. Thad will be a poet. Or a therapist. Or, like his brother, he may spend his life helping others try on shoes. There are worse lives, and far less honest ones.

  Thad sits, and Jake moves to be near him. Their arms find each other, and this does Lisa’s heart some good. She worries about Jake and how he treats her son. But most days, they make each other happy, so she’ll give this man some room to prove her wrong. She owes that much to the man Thad loves.

  “The folding chairs aren’t packed,” she offers. “I could bring them down.”

  But no one says a word, they simply sit. They sit on planks worn smooth by a hundred summer months, and rather than seat themselves in their Adirondack chairs, she and Richard join their children on the dock.

  Lisa settles into her husband’s arms. As for the two of them, what happens next?

  Perhaps the skin cancer will return.

  Perhaps they’ll live to see their grandchildren have children of their own.

  Most likely, Lisa will outlive Richard. What then? Will she stay in Florida, taking walks alone along the beach? Or will she move to be nearer to her boys?

  She studies her children, their bodies curled around the bodies they love best. Her boys love Jake and Diane more
than they love her. And that hurts, but that’s the way it’s meant to be. A mother’s love: impossible, forever unreturned, or returned, but at some dim, unpolished wattage, like a star seen through too many mirrors, too thick and aged a pane of glass. As a mother, you give your child all your love because your love—if it is real and good and right—was never yours to keep.

  Stars daguerreotype the night, light pushed through pinpricked tin. Orion’s Belt, the only constellation she knows without Thad’s help, hangs in place. A satellite winks. A distant aircraft bisects the sky.

  She stands and approaches the telescope. She bends. She looks.

  What is she looking for? Stars are not maps. What maps there are have been imposed on them. They do not tell the future, where to go, or why, or, going, what comes next. No, the stars she sees let loose their light long ago, light traveling decades, centuries, to reach this telescope.

  The future lies ahead, unseen, unknown. And maybe this not-knowing is a gift. To rest easy, to embrace surprises as they come. The longer she lives, the more each morning will be a surprise. A pleasure just to wake and greet the day.

  She hopes for heaven.

  If there’s no heaven, she’ll never see her girl again. Wendy will never see her boy.

  The world is full of wonder, and of love. This sky, these stars, this planet pinwheeling beneath. If this is all there is, it’s well and good. But it’s not enough. God forgive her, but one life on earth will never be enough.

  Let there be heaven. Let there be reunion, recompense for all. For each soul on this dock. For each soul underwater, underground. For the souls who’ve come before and those who go on in their wake.

  Scripture says that heaven is a wedding, and Lisa likes imagining that. Not the ceremony so much as the party after, the lights like crazy, reception in full swing. If it’s true that heaven stands outside of time, they’re there already. Look close, and you can almost see them. One of them is singing, one asking to cut the cake. And on the dance floor, all of them. Dancing.

  What wonder. What rapturous joy. Let it be.

  Lisa looks through the telescope. The eyepiece cradles her face, snug, binocular-tight.

  The moon, the stars. All that light—it’s traveled so far to meet her here.

  She looks closer. She is not afraid.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  Lake Christopher shares much in common, geographically and characteristically, with Lake Toxaway, North Carolina. The painting remembered by Jake is Margaret Keane’s Waiting (1962), which belongs to the collection of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. For an eyewitness account of the inhumane torture of conversion therapy, I turned to Ted Cox’s AlterNet article “Undercover at a Christian Gay-to-Straight Conversion Camp.” SIDS statistics were provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while statistics on body decomposition came from information compiled by the National Underwater Rescue-Recovery Institute, as well as Daniel Engber’s Slate article “Dead Man’s Float.”

  Thank you to the editors of the American Literary Review, Chicago Tribune, Draft, Glimmer Train, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Best New American Voices, where some of these characters first appeared in different form.

  Thank you to Adam Ross and The Sewanee Review for excerpting a portion of this novel.

  Special thanks to the Bread Loaf, Clarksville, Longleaf, Sanibel Island, Sewanee, Taos, Tin House, and Wesleyan Writers Conferences, and to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, for their scholarships, fellowships, residencies, and support of my work during the writing of this book.

  This novel owes a debt to three editors: heartfelt thanks to Millicent Bennett for believing in this book before it was a book. You are an ever-present source of encouragement and an inspiration to me. Thank you to Ira Silverberg for your patience and for seeing this novel through its gangly adolescence. And thank you to Sean Manning for landing the plane. Your magnificent eye, ear, and edits have made this a far better book.

  Thank you to Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Marysue Rucci, Yvette Grant, Lake Bunkley, Stacey Sakal, and everyone at Simon & Schuster for your devotion and support.

  Thank you to Rodrigo Corral, Alison Forner, Carly Loman, and Ashley Inguanta for my dream cover, photography, and design.

  Sincere thanks to my agent, Gail Hochman, who has read this book more times than anyone on planet Earth and provided the kind of care, attention, and feedback that most writers only dream of. Thank you to Marianne Merola, Jody Kahn, and everyone at Brandt & Hochman for working so hard on behalf of the book.

  Huge thanks to Francis Geffard, Eugenia Dubini, Gioia Guerzoni, and all of the editors and translators who have supported this book across Europe and South America.

  Profound thanks to those who read the manuscript in its various incarnations over the past nine years: Michael Griffith, Leah Stewart, Mical Darley-Emerson, Heather Huggins Sharp, Naomi Williams, Michael Carroll, and Justin Luzader.

  Thank you to my friends and colleagues in the English department and MFA program at the University of Central Florida. Thank you, Terry Thaxton and Laurie Uttich, for your wisdom and your words.

  Thank you to Sandra Meek and Berry College for being my home away from home.

  Many thanks to Kevin and everyone at the Oviedo on the Park Starbucks team for keeping me caffeinated and giving me a place to write.

  Thank you to Alicia Ezekiel-Pipkin, whose gift of childcare allowed me to finish this book.

  Big thanks to Donald Dunbar and Mike Morrell for conversations that found their way into the novel, and thank you to Matt Pitt for a pep talk that came at just the right time.

  Thank you, John Holman and Frederick Barthelme, for the belt fish.

  Thank you, Thelma Lynch, for listening.

  Thank you to Jonathan Jones for your friendship, support, and nightly talks. Your love and generosity of spirit have made me a better person and this a better book.

  Thank you to my parents for sharing your love of lakes and for teaching me what it means to be part of a family. Without your unconditional love, this book would not be.

  All my love to my daughters, Izzy and Ellie. Your lives are my greatest joy.

  And to Marla, who saves me daily. You have my heart.

  More from the Author

  The Heaven of Animals

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © ASHLEY INGUANTA

  DAVID JAMES POISSANT is the author of The Heaven of Animals, in print in five languages, winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a Florida Book Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, One Story, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and in numerous anthologies including New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Best American Experimental Writing. A recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf, Longleaf, Sewanee, Tin House, and Wesleyan writers conferences, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

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  ALSO BY DAVID JAMES POISSANT

  The Heaven of Animals: Stories

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  Copyright © 2020 by David James Poissant

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2020

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  Interior design by Carly Loman

  Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral Design

  Jacket photograph by Fredrik Brodén

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Poissant, David James, author.

  Title: Lake life / David James Poissant.

  Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019043350 (print) | LCCN 2019043351 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476729992 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781476730011 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3616.O5467 L35 2020 (print) | LCC PS3616.O5467

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043350

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043351

  ISBN 978-1-4767-2999-2