How a Woman Becomes a Lake

by Marjorie Celona

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jesse

  Jesse backed away from his father, his hands in his pockets. From a safe distance, he watched his father break the surrounding ice with his fists and plunge his head in again and again. He stared at the tendons in his father’s neck, so well defined that they were grotesque. Was his father actually this upset or was he acting? His father’s reaction—this crazed desperation—was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He felt embarrassed. He felt numb. He felt nothing.

  “Dad,” he said softly, in a voice he knew was too quiet to be heard. His father had made a hole in the ice, big enough now for a body.

  If his father died—one push, it would only take one push—he would be gone from their lives forever. No more fear. Could he even imagine it? His father had not hit him since he had moved out, but it was always there, between them, those moments, his arm wrenched out of its socket. The look on his face before it would happen.

  He stepped toward his father, but could not make himself raise his hand.

  Maybe Dmitri, then.

  After all, it did feel good to inflict pain on Dmitri. He got a little rush out of it—a quick pinch, a shove—even when he knew what the consequences would be. With Dmitri gone, his father might see Jesse as he truly was, not as a shadow over his brother, a dark figure looming over his brother’s head, but as a boy, a brave boy, a good boy. He prayed for the lake to swallow one of them—even himself—for the earth to rip open and carry one of them down to hell.

  When his father came up yet again for air he moaned, and Jesse felt a deep, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that what he was doing was not only wrong but also evil. It was an awful sound his father was making. It made Jesse think of men in medieval dungeons, wrists shackled, awaiting execution.

  “Dad,” Jesse said. “Stop.” But his father dove his head and shoulders again beneath the ice, searching frantically, his legs splayed.

  “Stop,” Jesse said, but his father had surfaced again and was punching the ice to make more room for his body, and his hands were bloodying the surrounding snow.

  “Dad. Please.” He rushed toward his father and grabbed one of his legs and pulled him with all his might. There was still a chance for happiness, Jesse thought, even now. Everything is temporary. Everything has an end.

  “Stop, Dad,” he said again.

  But his father continued to punch the ice, to make room to dive under the water. His face had turned a shade of purple, so dark it was almost black. His fingers were shaking from the cold.

  “Stop,” Jesse said, louder this time. “It’s a joke.”

  He let go of his father and scanned the trees. “It’s a joke,” he said again, but it was as if his father had entered a different dimension and could not be brought back.

  Whatever he had been unable to feel before, he felt now—a real sense of panic, tears forming in his eyes, a desire to reach up and peel back the sky to reveal some other universe, some other possibility. “Please, Dad, I’m sorry,” he yelled, tugging on his father’s leg again, but his father was preparing to dive under the ice. He raised his arms over his head.

  “Stop,” Jesse said again. “It’s only a joke.” He scanned the forest frantically, and at last caught eyes with Dmitri, who was crouched behind a row of white birch trees at the edge of the lake, out of sight, and he nodded at his brother that it was finally time to stand up, to run over, to put an end to this horrible game.

  There was still a way to recover from this, Jesse thought. If only he—but before he could complete the thought, Dmitri sprinted over the ice to their father, leapt onto his back and shrieked, “Daddy, I’m behind you. Daddy, it’s a game, I’m behind you.”

  And Jesse watched his father spin on the ice, his lips blue from cold. He watched his father turn to see Dmitri. He watched his father throw back his fist and bloody Dmitri’s nose with one quick punch.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Denny

  There would be an extensive search. Divers would cut through the ice and search the lake for bodies. If nothing turned up, they would have to wait for the spring thaw—a sad, morbid fact. But death wasn’t the only option. She could have fled. People did. She could have been kidnapped. People were.

  Denny set his wife’s diary down and turned to face Officer Lewis Côté and one of the detectives, who was removing long strands of Vera’s black hair from a boar-bristle brush. The three men stood in the bedroom, while Scout nosed at their feet. A second detective was outside, under the night sky, talking to the neighbours.

  “I’ve never violated her privacy like this before,” Denny said and passed Lewis the diary. It was a dream journal, and as much as he tried, he couldn’t find anything in it that pertained to reality—to Vera’s reality. She dreamed often, it seemed, of birds. Of tending to birds. There were some notes about films she wanted to make, things to say in upcoming lectures. Reprimands to herself about quitting smoking.

  His friends thought she was boring, despite her impressive accolades. Denny was outgoing—gregarious was the word people used—full of stories, always the one to host poker night, ready to laugh. He felt as though he were the only person on earth who knew Vera. Her parents kept in close contact with her, called every few days, but she didn’t like them as much as they liked her. They weighed on her, even though she was sweet with them on the phone (they hadn’t heard from her either—he tried to downplay the fact that there was a policeman watching him as he spoke to them over the phone—and the last thing he wanted was for them to show up, though he knew they would come immediately). He knew Vera, though. He knew she was secretly as funny as he was—and ten times as smart. She could have made a living as a filmmaker, though she was happy enough at her university job. Already, at thirty, an assistant professor at the expensive private liberal arts college down the road, envied by and more successful than her colleagues. Right after he’d met her, her film Mirror had screened at Cannes.

  “Was she taking any medication?” the detective asked, but he was already rooting through her bedside table. Denny couldn’t remember whether the detective had asked permission to do this, but what did it matter? He wanted his wife to be found. They could ransack anything, he supposed. The detective held up a blister package containing white pills. “Clomid?” he asked.

  “She was having trouble getting pregnant,” Denny said.

  “Uh-huh,” said the detective.

  The blister package was unopened. His head felt heavy. He thought she’d been taking it. She was taking pills for anxiety, too, but they were hidden in her makeup kit. He fought the urge to hit the detective hard, in the face, for putting his hands on her pills.

  The detective was a short man with a bland, forgettable face—there was something too soft about it to contain any intelligence. Lewis, on the other hand, seemed more capable. Lewis was young and handsome—he wore an interesting watch, European maybe, and stylish glasses with black frames. A person Denny might have gone to the bar with in another life. What was a person like that doing as a small-town cop? He was too handsome for this place. People who looked like Lewis didn’t live here.

  “We’ll need another photo,” said the bland detective.

  That old familiar stab of guilt. The policeman had asked him to do this over an hour ago. And what had he done but sit on his stupid velvet couch and cry?

  “Is she actually missing?” Denny said, though his voice seemed to be coming from outside the room, or under it, perhaps from the basement. “Has it been long enough to—I mean, what if she—”

  “This is a missing persons investigation,” said the detective. “There’s a child involved.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Denny. “I’m so sorry.” He turned to Vera’s dresser and studied the wedding portrait.

  “Something more natural?” said the detective. “More like how she looks every day?”

  Denny fought the urge
to apologize again. Of course. She never wore her hair up, like it was in the photo. She certainly never wore a red flower in her hair! Flowers in people’s hair! What a thing. “Okay,” he said. He found their photo albums in the living room, flicked on the overhead light, and flipped through the images. She was usually the one behind the camera. But there was one of her on the couch, a snapshot, Scout curled in her lap like a baby. She looked like herself, her dark hair cascading over her shoulders and pooling at her waist. She looked happy, if not a little tired. He couldn’t remember when he’d taken the photo. What they’d done before, or what they’d done after.

  “I’ll need to know what she was wearing when she left the house.”

  “I was asleep,” said Denny. He didn’t have a mental inventory of her entire wardrobe. He couldn’t very well go through it all, then announce, via a process of elimination, what she had on. “I don’t know—” He pushed past the men and studied the contents of the hall closet. “Maybe her parka? It’s cold. Her parka isn’t here. She has a green parka.” Was it even green? He was failing her. “She wears boots when she goes to Squire Point. Hiking boots.” He scanned the floor for them but they were gone. “I think?”

  “A hat?” said the detective, joining him in the living room.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Any defining characteristics on the jacket?”

  “No. I don’t know.” He couldn’t even remember what the jacket looked like. “If she’s out there, in the woods, she’s going to get cold—”

  “The boots? Brand?”

  “Brand?”

  “What kind of boots, what size.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your wife’s shoe size.”

  “Seven? Eight.”

  The detective nodded to the photo in Denny’s hand, and Denny passed him the photo of Vera.

  “Teeth,” said the detective. “One with teeth.”

  The air in the room had an awful quality to it: a stale, dead quality. Denny took a gulp of it and gagged. The living room was full of pictures of him and Vera and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Pick one?” He didn’t mean it to come out so exasperated.

  “Height and weight correct on her driver’s licence?” the policeman asked.

  “Yes,” said Denny, though he didn’t know. How would he know? Why wouldn’t they be?

  “Hair colour?”

  “Dark brown. Almost black. It’s very long. To her waist.”

  “Eyes?”

  “They’re brown.”

  “Eyeglasses?”

  “Yes.” He imagined her, without her glasses in the woods. She could hardly see without them, and he pictured her with her arms outstretched, groping in the dark, in all that snow.

  He couldn’t remember Vera’s middle name.

  What was the matter with him? Was something wrong with his brain?

  “Has she recently travelled internationally?” said Lewis.

  “Not since our honeymoon.”

  “Health problems?”

  “No.”

  He was shaking his head when the second detective came through the front door, tapping his notepad with a ballpoint pen. He asked Denny to sit down.

  “I don’t want to sit down,” said Denny. “I want to run. I want to go to Squire Point and find Vera. I don’t think I can sit down right now.”

  “Hey,” said Lewis. He put his hand on Denny’s shoulder. “It’s all right.”

  Was he acting flustered? Why was Lewis’s hand so forcefully on his shoulder? Denny stared at the well-manicured hand, its lack of wedding ring, its buffed nails with big white half moons. It was an unusually beautiful hand. Did he need to be comforted? He tried to soften his face. Or was acting flustered a good thing? Did a guilty man act flustered or calm? How about an innocent one?

  “Last night,” said the second detective. “Can you tell us about last night?”

  “Last night?”

  “One of the neighbours claimed he heard shouting. Saw you leave the house around midnight. Can you tell us where you were going?”

  “I went to watch the fireworks,” said Denny. “That’s all. Vera didn’t want to go with me. We argued about it. We certainly weren’t shouting—”

  “The broken glass in your garbage can—was that from last night?”

  “She—what I’m trying to say—Vera broke it. You see, it wasn’t like that. We were arguing, yes. It got maybe more heated than it should have. It’s just a broken picture frame.”

  The detective raised his eyebrows. “When was the last time you hit your wife, Mr. Gusev?”

  “I have not. No. Never.”

  “Did you strike your wife last night, Mr. Gusev?”

  “I told you—I have never—”

  “Around what time did you come home from watching the fireworks?”

  “Right after,” said Denny. “I was only gone an hour.” He could feel the heat of Lewis’s hand on his shoulder, and wanted to shrug it off. Years ago he’d read a book about a man falsely accused and imprisoned for thirty years before finally being released. Was this how it started? Was this the beginning? The moment life took a wrong turn?

  He put his hand on top of Lewis’s, gently, tentatively. “Please,” he said to Lewis, and Lewis removed his hand. He hoped that would be the end of it, but the second detective began firing more questions at him.

  “And did you come back to the house?”

  “I went to my studio for a while.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember the night before. In his mind, he saw his hand reaching for the door to the studio, opening it, the bottle of bourbon in his other hand. Then what?

  “And this was before or after you and Vera fought in the yard?”

  “In the yard? Excuse me? I don’t recall—”

  “The neighbours said it was quite a show,” said the second detective.

  “In the yard? Like animals? I assure you, we did no such thing.”

  “You like to drink?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The bottles in your studio—”

  “I take a drink from time to time, yes,” said Denny. His hands were tingling, and he took a deep breath, cracked his wrists, then his knuckles, willing the blood to return to them. The oak tree. His neighbour must still be mad about that. How else to explain these false accusations? Fighting in the yard? He hadn’t meant to kill the neighbour’s tree last year. And so what, anyway. The goddamned thing was half-dead. This was a hell of a way to get revenge. “We never fought in the yard,” he said.

  “Sounds like you did last night,” said the second detective. “Look, a number of your neighbours told me about it.”

  “I don’t remember any such thing,” said Denny. He searched his mind. What? When? What time? What did he say? What did Vera say? “Listen, my neighbours are—how should I put this—assholes? There was this oak tree—”

  “An oak tree,” said Lewis.

  “A Garry oak. You know, they have a society—about the trees. My neighbour is a member and, you see, a Garry oak was right on the border of our properties and it was dead already—a hazard—”

  “Hey,” Lewis said. He shook his head. “Let’s sort this tree stuff out later. The important thing is we need to better understand what happened between you and Vera last night.” He reached out his hand, as if he was going to place it, once more, on Denny’s shoulder.

  Things were coming back to Denny, horrible things, about the fight they’d had in the yard. Yes, in the yard, like animals. He could remember it now. He had told her she was awful, that she was smothering him. He had called her a controlling monster. An awful monster.

  “We had a fight,” said Denny, ducking his body so Lewis’s hand would not touch him again. “Look, I’m so tired right now. I can barely keep my eyes open. I am so worried and I am so goddamned t
ired.”

  “Tell you what,” Lewis said to Denny. “Let’s go down to the station and get this sorted out. We’ll get you some coffee, let your head clear. You can tell us more about Vera.”

  “But who is looking for her? What is anyone doing right now to find Vera?”

  “Denny,” said Lewis. “I really do need you to calm down.”

  But how could he calm down? How could he explain his marriage—or the fight last night—to hostile people who thought he had done something wrong? All marriages had dark corners. He was trying to be honest, but what was honesty anyway? What was the honest answer to why they didn’t have children yet, to why Vera had an unopened package of fertility pills? How could a person be honest about ambiguity, about contradiction, about how one minute, children seemed like the perfect and natural solution to their failing marriage, and the next, they seemed like something that happened only to other people—happy people. What was the honest answer to why he hadn’t been worried when she’d been gone all day? He couldn’t explain even the simplest of his choices, let alone why he had told her she was a monster.

  Leave me alone. It had been the last thing he’d said to her. And she had. He was alone.

  Maybe if they hadn’t fought, she wouldn’t have taken Scout for a walk. Maybe they would have had breakfast together. Oh, for Christ’s sake. They wouldn’t have done that, even if they hadn’t fought.

  “Denny,” Lewis was saying. “Come on, Denny.”

  Gently, as if he were a child, or a drunk, Lewis linked his arm through one of Denny’s and the bland-faced detective did the same on the other side, and they led him out of the house.

  Under the snowy sky, a man no older than twenty walked toward them. He stopped and fished a camera out of his messenger bag, pointed it at Denny and clicked. And that was the picture that appeared in the paper the next day: Denny’s hunched-over body, escorted by the Whale Bay Police Department, getting into a patrol car in front of his house. It landed on the stoop of every house in Whale Bay with a thump.