How a Woman Becomes a Lake

by Marjorie Celona

  “What have you been doing all day?”

  Denny shook his head. “Nothing. I slept until around noon. I read the newspaper. I went to sleep again. I’m sorry, I’m trying to be honest, pathetic as it sounds.” He nodded at the bottle of bourbon on the table. “I overdid it last night. Doesn’t happen often. I don’t know—it’s been a waste of a day.”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Gusev?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. Vera asked me that very thing last night.”

  “You argued?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. It was simply a discussion.”

  A discussion. He glanced at the floor to see if the picture she had thrown at him was still there, glass in shards, but she had cleaned it up. The photograph was resting on top of the bookshelf. It was their wedding picture. He would get it reframed as soon as this nonsense was over.

  “And you make a living from your work?”

  “I do.”

  “And what does your wife do? Does she work, too?”

  Ah, that question would irk Vera. He raised his voice a bit. “Vera is a professor. Cinematography.”

  “A filmmaker?”

  “Experimental films,” said Denny. “I mean, if you’re about to ask whether you’ve seen her work—”

  The policeman gestured out the picture window, and it took Denny a minute to figure out that he was pointing at his car. His Mercedes. “You do well for yourselves.”

  “I inherited when my parents died. We bought nice cars.”

  “What brought you to Whale Bay?”

  “Vera’s position,” said Denny. “I mean, who lives here, right? It’s beautiful. Affordable. Ocean views. We talk about moving to the city. She could commute. We talk about being more normal. You know.”

  “Life insurance?”

  “What? I mean, I’m not sure. Vera might have taken out a policy when she was first hired. I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was she a drug user?”

  “Excuse me? No.”

  “Suicidal?”

  “No.”

  “Tattoos, piercings, or birthmarks?” said the policeman.

  “What? No. Her ears. But her rings—she’ll be wearing three rings I made her—one is extremely valuable, an alexandrite gemstone—”

  “Artificial limbs?”

  “No. No. Listen, the rings, the rings are distinctive—particularly the alexandrite—I can show you a picture—I made them for her—”

  “Her doctor’s name?”

  “What? I think she goes to someone at the clinic downtown. The rings—”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Gusev?”

  “I—you keep asking me that. I—” God, he was out of breath. He was panting like a rabid animal. He couldn’t feel his hands. “I need to tell you about her rings.”

  “I’ll need access to her dental and medical records. And a few photographs.”

  “All right,” Denny said. “Let me look. She—”

  The policeman stood and picked up a photo of Vera from the fireplace mantel. “Does she still look like this?”

  Denny looked at the picture. Her hair, as long and black as it ever was, her glasses, her formidable build. She wore a red blazer with shoulder pads, the French Riviera in the background. She wasn’t smiling but she was proud. “Yes,” Denny said. She was in her late twenties in the picture and looked essentially the same. Such a perfect square jaw. “You can take it, if you want.”

  “I’ll need another. One in which she’s smiling. Okay?”

  “I am a good man.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t, Mr. Gusev,” said the policeman. “Smiling. With teeth.”

  “Teeth?”

  “Teeth,” said the policeman.

  “May I ask why?” said Denny.

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do.”

  The policeman moved toward the front door and, with one finger raised to indicate that Denny should stay seated, opened it to reveal the snow-lit sky. “So—worst-case scenario—she can be identified by her skull.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Evelina

  Evelina Lucchi walked toward her small house, snow crunching beneath her boots. She could hear the foghorn and the ocean, and she wondered where Leo and her boys were, what road they were driving down; she wondered if he missed their life together, if he regretted his actions, if he ever thought about anything in a deep way, and whether he was serious about this woman, this Holly.

  It was only four o’clock—not late enough to panic, though it was getting dark already—and she let herself have the stupid thought that Leo had kidnapped her sons, taken them down to San Garcia to start a new life. But he was too selfish. He wouldn’t want the responsibility.

  Despite the cold, she sat on the front steps of her little beach house, waiting for Leo and the boys to return from Squire Point. She tucked her long skirt underneath the soles of her boots and buttoned her jacket up to her chin. After she’d kicked Leo out, she’d cut her hair, then dyed it a shimmering auburn that looked purple in the light. Leo had not said a word to her about it. She’d started wearing earrings again, too, long pendants that reached her shoulders—costume jewellery, Leo had said about the peacock feather ones that she was wearing now—and the occasional smear of red lipstick.

  Entering our “goddess” years, are we? she imagined him saying, for that was how most of their conversations happened these days: in her head.

  She tucked her earrings into her pocket, then produced the scratch-and-win card she’d bought at the corner store and rubbed off the numbers with the edge of a dime. After a few minutes, the card revealed she’d won five dollars. She was ashamed of her habit—though she could hardly call it gambling. She felt her mood grow lighter, tucked the winning card into her pocket, and pulled out the next one. A dud.

  She’d been a cook on a fishing boat before her sons were born. That was how she met Leo. A Christmas party at one of the captains’ houses. Beer bottles all over the coffee table, half-empty bowls of chips. Evelina was in a relationship—an on-again, off-again thing with another cook—but couldn’t stop herself from flirting with Leo. He cornered her in the kitchen, slipped his hand around her waist before she knew his name.

  “Stop,” she whispered. “I’m with someone.”

  “Oh, shut up,” he said. And they laughed.

  She wasn’t beautiful—he told her that on their first date. But up close, Leo said, her features were difficult to reconcile, and that’s what made her fascinating. He could look at her face for hours and never understand it, he said. Something about her bone structure, its lack of symmetry. From every angle, she looked like a different person.

  “For instance,” he said, taking her face in his hands on their first night together, “if I tilt your head this way, I can see you’re sort of old-fashioned. This is your serious side, the side of you that’s mad at me for being better-looking than your boyfriend.”

  “I am not,” Evelina said, but she was.

  “Now look at me straight-on.” He scanned her eyes. “Here’s your vulnerability. Here’s your sad-little-person face.” He pushed her chin down toward her chest. “From this angle, you are the most beautiful.”

  “When I’m not looking at you?”

  In those days, she felt wildly out of control, like a ripped-open sofa cushion, the exposed springs bouncing around like a Slinky. She liked Leo’s matter-of-factness. She liked that he claimed to know her better than she knew herself. She liked that he was taller than she was. Often, when she was around other women, she felt like a giant or a man in drag.

  Leo pressed his mouth to hers, lifted himself on top of her and pushed her legs apart. “Open sesame,” he said, and she knew she would have to forget that li
ne, to bury it somewhere deep within her mind.

  * * *

  —

  A weirdo. A weird person. Leo had grown up in San Garcia, a coastal city twelve hundred miles south of Whale Bay. Was estranged from his family and wouldn’t say why. Didn’t speak to Evelina for a week when his brother died because he felt she hadn’t comforted him in the right way. That was his signature move—to not speak to her if something was bothering him. It made Evelina crazy.

  But how she loved being seen with him in those early days, his broad shoulders in his green military jacket, his square jaw, the way he nodded at strangers to say hello. The way he always held onto her in some way—his hand on the back of her neck, his hand slipped up the back of her shirt, his hand in hers, his hand on her leg. Sometimes the only way she knew he was mad was if they were out in public and he wasn’t touching her.

  She was a weirdo like him. A misfit. A depressed teenager, high-school dropout. Lived here all her life, unlike her sister, who had left for the city the minute she’d gotten her high-school diploma. Evelina spent her summers tree planting until she found steady work on a fishing boat. Paid well. Hard work but long stretches of time off. Felt happiest out on the water, especially once the shore disappeared. Didn’t feel much like a woman. More like a fish. Or a water bird. She’d never met a woman like herself before. She’d never seen herself in a book, or in a movie. Was more comfortable around men because then she didn’t have to talk.

  The first boat she worked on was a heavy wooden seiner, about forty feet. Just Evelina, the captain, and another deckhand. She learned how much food to purchase and how to cook easy, hearty things. She made ten thousand dollars in her first three months. It seemed like a fortune then.

  She never thought she’d get married. Never thought she’d have children. Thought she’d be on the deck of a steel trawler forever, even as an old woman, white hair down to her waist, maybe own a fleet someday. There was one woman she knew who was a captain. She was large and wild, and Evelina used to think she’d end up like her: oblivious to sexist remarks, insensitive, ready to pull out a gun and shoot a seal if it got caught in the net. Ready to shoot another boat if it got too close to hers. All the boats had guns.

  But then she met Leo at that Christmas party, and right away he started talking about wanting to have a baby. When they made love he would put his hand on her belly and close his eyes.

  Now here she was, on the cusp of becoming his ex-wife. With two boys. She spent her days inside now—had gotten her GED and a job as a bookkeeper for the Whale Bay Operatic Society. A steady paycheque, but dull. It was why she was addicted to the cards—that little rush, seeing if she’d won big. Such a pale comparison to the feeling of walking the docks, her pockets stuffed with cash, the wind in her hair, only nineteen years old.

  Today she’d bought two cards—she had a strict two-a-day limit—and she fidgeted with the dud card, then went inside to wait for her sons. She’d left the kitchen window open—stupid, so stupid, the heating bill—and the counter was damp with a dusting of snow. She washed out three soup bowls and made the table lovely for her boys—two nubby candles, her old tobacco-leaf placemats, paper towels folded diagonally, even a wine carafe filled with yellow dahlias she’d bought the day before, as round and alien-looking as sea anemones.

  She dug at the dirt underneath her fingernails and felt her anger bloom—Leo, who’d gotten so angry when she’d confronted him about Holly; Leo, who held her against the wall, his hand on her neck, when he suspected once—falsely—that she was having an affair.

  Of course, all she could think of were his bad qualities. She had read somewhere that after a separation a parent should not speak ill of the other parent. So she tried to reminisce, as much as she could with the boys, about Leo’s good qualities. How he used to take them to feed the ducks on Saturday afternoons. Drawing with them at the kitchen table. Long games of tag, leaping around the yard, letting the boys tackle him, their little knees digging into his sides.

  By filling their minds with the sweet things, she hoped she could block out the things she wanted them to forget.

  The relationship was still all tangled up in her mind. Sometimes she felt she couldn’t trust herself or her version of things. For instance, sex. How could the same reality feel so different? Sometimes it felt as though her insides were coated in plastic and Leo’s penis was a dry pink pencil eraser. Or it hurt. Worse, sometimes she felt nothing at all. A kind of horror seized her in the moments before they made love. She hated Leo during sex if she was honest, his penis as durable as only the hardest part of her was—her elbow, for instance, her knee. The waterfall of pleasure that rushed over him. All that gasping. What had ever felt that rapturous to her? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  He worked odd jobs, never staying at any place very long. Had big plans for his life, he said, though he never told her specifically what those plans were. There was a type of person in this world who could work a job, get married, have children, live in a house, mow the lawn on weekends, try out new chicken recipes, discuss what colour to paint the nursery. There was another type of person who could do half of those things well but lived in secret misery, and so squeaked out and gambled or had affairs—this type of person was Evelina. Then there was another type of person who didn’t have it in them to do any of those things at all. Some of these people were homeless. Some—if they had money—travelled the world. Some, like Leo, pretended, forced themselves to do it anyway. A person like that could kill you. You could spend your whole life trying to get them to be someone they weren’t.

  He hadn’t wanted to marry her, even after she got pregnant, even after Jesse and Dmitri were born. It’s not really my thing. But they had married eventually at city hall; Dmitri, a newborn in her arms, and Jesse, four years old, already having ruined the day, Leo said, by wetting the bed that morning. Leo was better with the new baby than he had been with Jesse, changed his diapers, got up with him in the night. He seemed, like so many men, to be softening with age. Evelina felt hopeful. He got a steady job at the bottle depot.

  She wasn’t sure whether he was still working there now. Holly ran that touristy gallery at the harbour. He was probably sponging off her.

  She supposed their life together had been okay before Leo had turned on Jesse. There had been a short period of time, even, during Dmitri’s infancy, when the four of them had functioned as a family unit—Dmitri and Jesse sleeping between them, little hands balled into fists. Dmitri was so much smaller than Jesse had been. She had forgotten how small newborns were. She held him against her shoulder. He was like a baby squirrel.

  It happened the first time a few months after he was born. She set Dmitri’s little sleeping body into the bassinet and slipped down the hall into the bath. He was such an easier baby than Jesse, who would have woken the second he hit the tiny oval mattress, screaming. She remembered when taking a bath had been so sacred to her. Now she was lucky if she bathed twice a week. She shaved her legs, scrubbed between her toes, ignored the obscene roll of fat that spilled out over her stomach so that she couldn’t see the tops of her thighs. She hoped it would be gone soon. She was combing out her hair with her fingers when she had the thought that something was wrong, that she needed to get out of the bath. She fought it at first. Paranoia. Her inability to do something nice for herself.

  It was the sound of glass breaking that finally got her out of the tub. She grabbed a towel off the floor and threw it around herself, ran toward the nursery, her wet footprints sinking into the carpet—and there was Dmitri, wailing in his bassinet. And there was Jesse, sitting on a stool in front of the bassinet. And there was a hole the size of a baseball in the lower-left-hand corner of the window, shards of glass on the carpet below. She asked Jesse what had happened but he didn’t respond. Careful not to cut her feet, she walked to the window and peered out, searching for whatever had made the hole.

  “A bird,” Jesse said.

&n
bsp; Had the bird flown in or out? What?

  She walked toward her sons, Dmitri taking shallow, almost gasp-like breaths as he cried. Jesse was playing with something in his pocket—at first she thought he was playing with himself, something he did when he had to go to the bathroom.

  “Show me your hands,” she said, taking Dmitri into her arms.

  Jesse took out his hands and showed her what he was playing with: a mud-covered rock. She looked into Dmitri’s bassinet and saw that there was a small pile of rocks in there, too, near where Dmitri’s head had been.

  “Did you break the window?” she asked her son but he insisted, no, it was a bird. “Were you throwing rocks in here?”

  When Leo got home, she told him what had happened, and he braced himself in the doorway of the nursery and held Jesse up with one hand as he hit him with the other. He hit Jesse until he admitted that he had dug up rocks from the garden and then thrown one at the window. But Leo couldn’t get him to say why. He hit him until Evelina made him stop. Her son flailed back and forth, his arm almost wrenched out of its socket.

  This is the kind of thing that happens when you have children before you’ve done all you’ve set out to do, she thought. She knew in that moment that Leo was starting to hate Jesse, and possibly her, too—that for some men having a family had a dangerous side, that marriage and children could create a counterblast of sorrow, of disappointment, of rage.

  He promised it wouldn’t happen again, and it didn’t, as far as she knew, for a time. But then one afternoon Dmitri walked into their bedroom complaining of an earache and the next thing Evelina knew, Leo was rushing toward Jesse, yanking his arm over his head, hitting him with those long, wild swings. She sensed, too, that there were other beatings she didn’t know about.

  And so it went in their house, year after year: Jesse the bad, Dmitri the good.

  It’s just a spanking, Leo said.

  Was that what it was? Her own parents had hit her with a wooden spoon.