How a Woman Becomes a Lake

by Marjorie Celona

  “I can’t remember the last time I was so obsessed with the news,” the clerk said. “This woman, Vera Gusev—”

  “Yes,” said Evelina. “I’ve been following it, too.”

  “Some kind of filmmaker,” said the clerk. “They showed a clip from one of her movies last night, but I didn’t think much of it. Endless shots of trains.”

  “Trains,” Evelina repeated.

  “What a thing,” said the clerk. “So horrible to think about. I mean, the possibilities. I hate not knowing.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Horrible.”

  “Is she out there, walking around in the snow? Lost? Stuck in a snowdrift somewhere? Maybe she fell into one of those tree wells and couldn’t escape?”

  “I don’t know. I should go, get home to my sons.”

  “I’m going out there tonight,” said the clerk. “I’m going to help them search. There’s a boy—there’s a child out there. Weird thing, though, that no one has reported him missing. Weird, yes? I just think no one’s doing enough.”

  She nodded her head, her teeth clenched. She wanted to tell the clerk about the policeman and the detectives who had visited her, and their questions about the phone call from Vera Gusev, and about how she felt she couldn’t trust Leo, though she didn’t think, of course, that he could be guilty of such a thing—murder?—but she wanted to talk it out nonetheless. There was no one for her to talk to anymore. No one in her life. She wanted to bury her head in the clerk’s sweater—wanted someone, anyone, to take her in their arms.

  “Yes, it is weird, yes,” she said. It was indeed weird that Leo and her boys had been at Squire Point that day, too. Her son’s bruises. Her sons’ silence. Why had Vera Gusev called her house?

  She hurried out of the store, her tea still steaming on the counter. Her face was soaked with tears by the time she reached her house. The trouble was that she’d let her friendships lapse after she’d gotten involved with Leo. She could call her sister, or her parents, sure, but they had been so disapproving of Leo from the beginning and Evelina didn’t want to deal with any smugness. And what was she supposed to say anyway?

  On the answering machine, a message from one of the detectives who had been in her house.

  “We’d like to bring you and your boys in for further questioning,” he said, his tone so friendly and exuberant it sounded as if she’d won a prize.

  “Why?” she said to the answering machine. “What do you want now?”

  She shoved herself next to Jesse on the couch, moulded herself to his body, slid her hand under his pyjama top and pressed it flat against his warm back. He smelled like baby detergent. She still used it, even though it was expensive. She wanted to remember the smell of her boys as babies. She breathed him in.

  “Don’t,” he said. He wiggled his body away until she removed her hand.

  “What happened on New Year’s Day?” she whispered. She glanced at Dmitri but he was completely absorbed in the television.

  “I can’t tell you,” Jesse said.

  “You have to,” she said. “You have to tell me.”

  She took him by the shoulders. She stared at her son.

  “Stop,” said Jesse. “Let me go.”

  But years of working on fish boats had given her a kind of superhuman strength and she channelled it, pressed her thumbs into her son’s flesh. She thought of the cold and the wet and the eighteen-hour days, four in a row, how the net would go out and then come back in, over and over until it was time to run downstairs and cook.

  In front of her was not the ocean, though—it was her son’s beautiful face, and she saw that her son was about to break apart in her arms. She was hurting him. “I’m sorry,” she said. She put her hands over her eyes. “I don’t know what to do here.” Should she scream at him? Threaten to gather up everything he loved in a black garbage bag and drag it outside until he told her the truth?

  “Okay,” he said. He moved toward her, speaking softly so that Dmitri wouldn’t hear. “But you can’t tell anyone.”

  They left Dmitri in the living room and she locked the door to the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, and took her son’s hands in hers. “The only person you need to tell is me.”

  * * *

  —

  When he finished speaking, she leapt for her coat and the car keys. She would drive over to Leo’s apartment and she would kill him. Her son was begging her not to tell his father that he had told her what had happened, but she was so angry that she couldn’t hear his words. She found herself racing through the streets of Whale Bay toward Leo’s apartment. The cars parted for her. The red lights turned green. She sped through the town as if in a dream.

  Away from the ocean, across the train tracks, past the industrial part of town, the street lights fewer and fewer, a corner store, a liquor store, some kind of seedy-looking bar, and then the row of depressing apartment buildings, the stucco discoloured and water-stained, none more than three storeys high. By the time she reached Leo’s building, it was too late. A patrol car was pulling away from the curb, the unmistakable shape of the back of Leo’s head in the back seat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lewis

  The pained look on Evelina’s face troubled him. It could be the look of someone who was lying. Regardless, Lewis excused himself to use the bathroom so that he could snoop around. She couldn’t have lived in the beach house for long. There were unopened boxes in the living room, and her envelopes bore the yellow stickers of forwarded mail. The house was old and wind-battered, in need of a renovation. Probably had been a tourist rental for decades. Creaky floors. Ornate moulding on the large windows, dark wooden picture rails. Presumably gorgeous hardwood under this cheap carpet. The house smelled of food and dust and mould.

  Everything in Whale Bay stank of mould to Lewis, who was unaccustomed to such constant dampness. He felt spores might be growing on his lungs. He’d been here three years now, had just stopped working nights. A small department: the chief and six officers, including Lewis. He hadn’t expected it to be so boring; sometimes weeks would go by without an interesting call. The town wasn’t altogether bad. Some would say it was a step up from Wisconsin, but the kinds of people who said that had never been to Wisconsin, couldn’t tell the difference between Iowa and Idaho. Here he was, on the West Coast, in a small fishing town a stone’s throw from Canada. From his apartment’s roof deck, he could see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A peaceful place, the harbour crowded with tourists in the summer, deserted in winter, half the sky obscured by the Olympic Mountains. His Wisconsin friends talked unseriously of visiting. He hoped he would meet someone. He didn’t want to admit, young and ambitious as he was, that he was lonely here.

  The bathroom in Evelina’s house had two doors—one for access from the hallway and one for access from a bedroom. Lewis ran the water and opened the second door—a peek, he told himself. He liked to see how people lived. Maybe he would apply to be a detective next year. He didn’t think much of the guys he was working with on the Gusev case. Surely he could do a better job. For instance, what he was doing now, while they sat at Evelina’s kitchen table, drinking coffee like lumps.

  “Hi there,” he whispered.

  The boys were sitting cross-legged on their beds. The older boy had dark hair and a darker complexion than his mother but the younger one looked just like her. The younger one was drawing with crayons. The older boy was staring out the window and didn’t look up when Lewis came in. Their room was unsurprisingly a disaster—clothing, books, stuffed animals, toys everywhere. Come to think of it, the kitchen had been kind of a sty as well. It was the chestnuts in the corner that caught Lewis’s eye, however. His own father had done that: put chestnuts in the corners of his bedroom at night, to ward off spiders. He hadn’t thought of it in such a long time. Little lines of cinnamon on the windowsills, too, to keep out the ants.

  But n
ow was not the time to be haunted by thoughts of his father. He shook off the memory of the chestnuts and the cinnamon and looked at the two little boys sitting on their beds.

  The younger one’s face had a spread of bruises, fresh ones, purple-blue. The boys were in their pyjamas. “Oh,” Lewis said, looking at the little boy’s face. “Oh.” He had read the hospital report before they had driven to Evelina’s house, but to see the little boy’s face with his own eyes was another thing.

  “He fell on the ice,” the older boy said. “It was my fault.”

  The little one hopped off his bed and walked to Lewis. He wanted to inspect his badge. Lewis knelt and let the little boy run his hands over it. The boy didn’t ask to see his gun and Lewis felt relieved.

  “When did this happen?” said Lewis, though he knew the answer from the hospital report. The detectives had found a mug shot of a younger Leo Lucchi, arrested for shoplifting, his lips curled in a faint smile. He and Evelina were supposedly separated.

  “New Year’s Day,” said the older boy.

  The boy was staring at his hands. A rich inner life. It was a phrase that had been used to mock Lewis as a boy and it haunted him sometimes. Bet you have a rich inner life, don’t you? Lewis knew—with the logical side of his brain—that it was harder in this world to be a girl than a boy. There was no disproving it. And yet deep down, Lewis felt that in fact there was nothing worse than being a sensitive boy. A sensitive boy who would grow into a sensitive man. It was worse than being a girl but no one could ever say it. Still, he wanted to find a way to tell the boy this.

  “Anybody else live here?” he said to the older boy. “Your father?”

  “No,” said the boy. “No, sir.”

  The boy’s hands were shaking slightly but his voice was clear. He was looking at Lewis from his perch on the bed, and the younger one joined him there. The older one put his arm around the younger one and they stared at Lewis that way, bodies together. What a thing it must be to have a sibling. Whatever had happened or was happening in the boys’ lives, they had each other. What he wouldn’t give to be able to call someone who was related to him—a brother or sister, preferably one who was older, one who could help him make sense of his father, of his childhood, and one who could help him make sense of his father’s death. What would Lewis have done if a police officer had shown up at his house when he was ten years old?

  “Our dad’s getting married again,” said the younger boy.

  “Is that so?” said Lewis. He walked toward the boys and sat on the opposite bed. For some reason he held out his hand, though he didn’t expect the boys to take it. “Can you tell me what you got up to New Year’s Day?”

  The boys looked at each other, then down at Lewis’s hand, but didn’t say anything. The younger boy was chewing his lip.

  “It’s okay,” said Lewis. “I can ask your mom.” He began to get up, but the older boy moved toward him.

  “We went to Squire Point,” the older boy said. “With our dad. It’s a sacred place.”

  “Sacred?” Lewis asked. He thought about standing at the edge of the frozen lake with the dog, the wind through the snow-covered trees, the dog wanting him to step out onto the ice. “Is it haunted?”

  “No,” said the boy. “I don’t think that’s what my dad means.”

  A rich inner life. The boy reminded him so much of his own young self that he could hardly stand it. But surely this boy was not dealing with as much pain as Lewis had. This boy had a mother who seemed capable and kind. A sensitive mother, at least at first glance. And yet if a police officer had appeared in Lewis’s childhood bedroom, he knew his young self would have been as polite and helpful as this boy in front of him was being. And if the police officer had asked, his young self would have said that everything was fine.

  “Is—” Lewis started. “Is everything all right?”

  The younger boy looked up at his brother, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Lewis.

  “Yes,” said the older boy. “He fell on the ice is all.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Lewis, though he wasn’t sure what he did mean. “I mean, are you both doing all right?”

  The little one looked up at his brother again. “Are we all right, Jesse?” he asked.

  “We’re fine,” said the older boy. He turned away from Lewis and his brother and went back to whatever he had been watching out of his bedroom window, which, Lewis could see now, was the white-capped and roiling ocean.

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you both,” Lewis said. He backed away from the boys and disappeared back into the bathroom.

  A pink canister of shaving cream and a pink disposable razor lay on the counter. Women’s deodorant. Child-sized toothbrushes and bubble-gum-flavoured toothpaste, comic books on the back of the toilet and old copies of Redbook and Vogue. The toilet and bathtub were both pink. The tile was pink. No sign of a man. No pictures, no mail with his name on it, no men’s shoes by the front door. Lewis turned off the water. He thought again of the little boy’s face, and the way the older boy had looked at him.

  When he returned to the kitchen, the detectives were thanking Evelina for speaking to them, for the coffee. Now what? They were going to leave? This Vera woman needed to be found. He felt something slimy in the pit of his stomach. What if they never found her? No matter how smart he felt himself to be, he felt the limitations of his own knowledge so strongly it was almost unbearable. The detectives had brushed Vera’s car for fingerprints and he hoped the results were back, and that something would come of it.

  Of course it had to be Denny, right? The husband was always guilty! Lewis couldn’t quite believe it. He liked Denny. But anyone, even affable Denny, could make a death look accidental. All day and all night, news vans sat parked in front of Denny’s house, as if waiting for him to burst forth from the door and offer his confession. And what to make of the phone call? Why had Vera called Evelina? This clue was far more interesting to Lewis than the broken picture frame in Denny’s garbage can. It was too much of a coincidence that Evelina’s sons had been at Squire Point that day, the little one’s face all busted up like that.

  He lingered a moment in the doorway, surveying the house one more time, and then Evelina. Her peacock earrings caught the light coming in from the open door, and Lewis saw they were many shades of dazzling blue. Something about her face—how it caught the light—made him hope he would see her and her boys again. He hoped this wasn’t the end.

  “Thanks again,” he said to her, and then they were out the door.

  * * *

  —

  When he got back to the station late that night, a group of men were waiting, grinning. It was after midnight. The men’s clothes were wet, their noses and fingers bright red. They were old men, and some of them held steaming cups of coffee. Some had unlit cigarettes dangling from their mouths.

  The oldest among them stood. He had something cradled in his arms, wrapped in a blanket, so that at first Lewis thought he was being handed a baby.

  He stumbled back, not wanting to take it. He’d never held a baby before, let alone a dead one.

  The old man frowned and turned to one of the detectives instead. “I found this,” the old man said, his arms outstretched, “buried in the snow out at Squire Point.”

  The detective took the bundle from the old man. He opened the blanket bit by bit, and Lewis looked over the detective’s shoulder.

  “Oh,” said the detective. “This is a beaut.” He opened the blanket and looked at Lewis. “Look at that mahogany.”

  Lewis looked down at the mahogany stock, the nickel-plated receiver and gold inlay. He supposed anything could be beautiful, if made by the right hands.

  “It’s an old Remington,” the detective said to Lewis, and the old men nodded at them, beaming.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Leo

  He couldn’t remember how
to walk. How to swing his arms. Whether he took long strides or short ones. He thought an interrogation room would have a two-way mirror, like on television, but there was only a metal table and two chairs. Concrete walls, a fluorescent light overhead. He sat, and the detective sat across from him, a stack of files on the table. The detective tapped out a cigarette and offered it to Leo.

  “Thank you.” He put it between his lips and leaned into the flame of the detective’s lighter. The detective slid a black plastic ashtray toward him and sat back in his chair.

  Evelina had told Leo once that he was made of stone, impossible to hurt, that nothing she could ever say or do would hurt him. It wasn’t true. Nothing had ever made him feel as bleak as this: the reality that Jesse hated him so much that he had pretended Dmitri had drowned. And now this detective, saying he wanted to speak to him, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. He assumed Evelina was pressing charges against him for Dmitri.

  He took a deep drag of the cigarette. “Well, look,” he said. “Let me tell the story from the beginning.”

  Dad. Dad, it’s Dmitri. Do something.

  He hadn’t meant to hit Dmitri so hard. Surely the detective would understand, once he had told him the full story. “I was trying to break through the ice,” he said. “I have these bruises.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and pushed up his shirt sleeves to reveal his beat-up forearms. He showed the detective his scabbed-up hands.

  The detective stared at Leo’s wounds for a moment, then sifted through the file folders on the table. “This your rifle?” he said, and slid a picture of Leo’s old Remington across the table.