How a Woman Becomes a Lake

by Marjorie Celona

  She pressed herself even closer to him, until they were almost embracing.

  “I will keep your secret,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Because I think it’s the right thing to do.”

  He could feel Evelina’s heart. He could feel the space above her breast quiver, the rhythm of it. He wanted to touch her but instead he took a step back, turned away.

  “Is Dmitri okay?” he asked. He wanted to know, for instance, whether she knew that he had hit Dmitri, or if Jesse was sticking to their plan—their story—about Dmitri falling on the ice. How much did Evelina really know? “I mean, his face.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s healing.”

  He turned back to her and looked in her eyes, but there was no way of knowing what she knew. He fumbled in his back pocket for a cigarette but there was only a pack of matches.

  “What about Jesse?” he said. He looked at his feet.

  “I don’t know, Leo,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s okay.”

  He moved toward Evelina again until he was inches from her face.

  The question, of course, was whether the two of them had a right to be happy. Given what had happened. But there didn’t seem to be any way to ask that question.

  Her skin looked as soft as velvet. He thought about what it would be like to kiss her. “If I do one thing right in my life,” he said, “I want it to be this thing.”

  But she moved away from him and started rummaging through the sad offerings in his little kitchen. He watched her open and shut his cupboards, and he wondered why she didn’t tell him what she was looking for—or why he didn’t ask. It seemed to both thrill and annoy her, to rifle through his kitchen. She picked through his meagre cutlery until she found a teaspoon, then began inspecting his mugs. Eventually she settled on his favourite mug, and he wondered if she did this to be irritating. His tomato soup sat on the counter, cold now and untouched. Beside it, five empty cans of beer. She filled a little pot with water and set it on the stove.

  “Jesus, Leo,” she said. “If I wasn’t so angry right now, I’d feel sorry for you.”

  He was surprised she had found a teabag somewhere. Maybe she had brought her own. He wanted her to leave, but he knew he still had to talk to her about Holly. The wedding. And how he wanted the boys to be there. It was the right thing to do. The boys should see the Swami and be blessed. Have their pain washed away by the Swami’s words. How could he get remarried without his boys?

  “This may not be the right time,” he started. “But there’s something I wanted to say.”

  “Then say it,” she said.

  The headlights of a passing car appeared on the ceiling, and he watched the light with her as it crossed the room. Sounds from above, despite the hour: the clicking of high heels across a hardwood floor, water moving through pipes, the muted mumble of someone watching the news.

  “Holly and I are,” he said, “making arrangements.” It seemed to take him a long time to get the word arrangements out, but finally he said it, and he waited for her response. The water bubbled in the pot and she took it to the sink and sloshed it into the mug.

  “We’re not even divorced,” she said and turned to him. She held the mug of tea in both hands.

  “That’s a paperwork thing,” he said. “That can be done.”

  “Then do it,” she said.

  “The boys,” he said, “should be present for the wedding.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so. Not given what happened.”

  “In April,” he said. “During spring break. I’ll drive them down, drive them back up.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I’m not asking,” he said. He felt the pilot light of rage flicker in him again. “I’m not asking for your permission.”

  She set down the tea and stumbled into her boots and coat. Her mouth was tight.

  “They’re my sons too, Evelina,” he said.

  “And if I say no?”

  He shrugged. “Think about it.” He supposed the trip would be easier without the boys. Him and Holly. He supposed he could live with any decision she made.

  “You’re marrying her,” she said. “Holly.”

  “I am.”

  She shook her head. “Well, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

  He waited until he heard the sound of her car starting. He felt something building in him, like electricity. He took her mug of tea and whipped it against the wall as hard as he could.

  There was no sound in his neighbourhood now. No clank of dishes being washed in another apartment, no squeal of tires as someone sped down the road, no jangle of a dog’s collar, no birds. He waited to hear the familiar sound of the foghorn but it, too, was silent. The world seemed to have emptied out. He was thirty-eight years old.

  He gathered the little shards in his hand and laid them softly in the trash can. He filled a bowl with soapy water, and slowly cleaned the floor. He took a piece of the white mug out of the trash and considered it one last time, then dropped it back in with the other pieces, gathered the trash bag in his hands, and walked it out to the dumpster. He had bought the mug years ago as a souvenir on a trip to Scotland’s Isle of Skye. That and a white sweater, knitted locally. Would he ever go back there? It was almost at the top of the world. Now here he was, at the bottom of it.

  He let himself back into his apartment, then lay on his mattress and stared at the ceiling. He felt he owed something to the woman. At the very least, he owed her an apology.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  In the dead silence of his apartment, he told Vera Gusev that he was sorry, over and over. The ceiling fell away until there was only sky above him, the wind passing in waves over his body. High above the clouds, he imagined Vera, her hand outstretched, the light reflecting off the gemstones on her fingers, blinding him.

  VERA

  Overhead, the clouds were as thick and white as lambswool. She took in a deep inhalation of cold water that spread to her lungs, and then another, and this one found its way into her stomach. She sank twenty or thirty feet, past the phytoplankton and zooplankton, her body moving more and more slowly, at times moving sideways rather than downward.

  She met a school of rainbow trout suspended in the water, and she moved through their bodies as though parting them with her hands. The fish regarded her with no interest, and rejoined one another as soon as she had passed. Invigorated by the movement, a few rose to the surface where there was more oxygen, and lingered there, their bodies vertical, mouths open, gasping.

  The snow had dulled the colours of the landscape, and Scout was camouflaged by birch trees and low-lying shrubs. He was without his leash. He was a good dog. He was waiting. He barked at the lake. He barked again. If no one returned for him, Vera supposed he could live off rabbits and waterfowl, chickens from people’s backyards. He could wander into town at night and forage in garbage cans like a raccoon, then run back into the woods when gangs of children chased him with sticks.

  A sound in the distance. A whistle. Someone calling. Her dog ran through the forest, breathlessly, desperately, toward the sound, away from her, his paws kicking up snow.

  A search party appeared some time later, beams criss-crossing the snow-covered forest floor. It seemed to Vera that they didn’t spend enough time looking for her, were hasty, hungry, bored, cold, eager to get home. Things she thought were obvious—the thinness of the ice above her, where she had fallen through—these things were invisible to the searchers. At dawn, the search party returned and still they did not find her. The park reopened after a few days, but still some people wandered off the trail in search of her. The sound of her name in a stranger’s mouth. The sound of her name in no one’s mouth.

  On their hands and knees, a party of six men combed through the snow, painstakingly, as though they had no other place
to be in the world. She watched them for hours. Their faces reddened, their hands shook with cold. To pass the time, they told jokes. They discussed the plots of movies from their youth. And then one of the men was shouting, saying come quick, come quick, and holding something covered in snow. He shook it in the air like a revolutionary. He was an older man—in his sixties maybe—and he was triumphant. “I have found something!” he shouted. “I have found a gun!”

  A week. And another.

  The last thing she could remember was the boy and his father holding hands above her, the trees behind them and the bright sky overhead, before the small hole above her iced over and was covered by falling snow.

  She tried to hang on to the image, but time had unfurled and lay stretched in front of her, a ribbon cut too short, too soon, and she was overwhelmed by what she could see. She watched herself be born into this world, and she saw how frightened she was, only six pounds. No one understood that she was scared. It didn’t occur to anyone, not even her own mother. Whisked under hot lamps, scrubbed clean by male hands, weighed on a cold scale, the soles of her feet soaked in ink and pressed to paper. A nurse wrapped her tightly in a small blanket and pulled a cap over her head. She was not cold anymore but she was so frightened that she lay still and quiet, and soon she fell asleep. When she woke, her mother touched her nose.

  * * *

  —

  More days. Another week. Still, no one found her.

  A scraggly beard spread over her husband’s face. Bits of skin under her nails floated upward and were eaten by the school of fish. Late at night, her husband ate with his hands by the light of the refrigerator.

  She watched him struggle with the investigators. He didn’t know her shoe size. He punched the bathroom wall. He held their dog. They slept together in the bed, the sheets muddy. Her husband used the toilet in the middle of the night, his urine steaming into the air, then stumbled back into the unheated bedroom and curled himself against their dog. Dead leaves collected on the bedroom floor.

  In front of her house, news teams caravanned, satellite dishes on top of their vans. Coffee cups in the gutter. The smoke from a cigarette butt. Her dog’s face in the picture window, tongue hanging from his mouth.

  Alone, in the dark, her husband made lists of the places she might be. The policeman sat up with him late at night, drinking. Christ, Denny. Did he not realize every conversation was an interrogation in disguise? This small, unsophisticated town. Everyone thought her husband had killed her, especially her parents. It was, after all, the likeliest story. She watched the hate mail collect on the floor of her living room. Her parents stayed a week in a motel, her mother slowly pulling strands of her hair from her temple. Finally, her parents drove home without speaking.

  Her body would disintegrate—all the flesh on earth, given enough time, would disappear—but her rings would remain. The metal. She thought of the rotted mummies of ancient Egypt, gnarled fingers adorned in gold. Maybe she would be found a hundred years from now, a dehydrated husk of herself, mouth twisted and torn, the alexandrite ring on her finger catching the last light of the sun.

  Where were her rings? Had she lost them in the snow? In the water?

  She thought of how Denny would stumble out of his studio, believing only an hour had passed, when in fact it had been five or more. No one made rings like he did; no one listened to a client with as much empathy and intensity as he did. Time slipped away from him when he was working, like it was slipping away from her now.

  Her rings. They were so unusual that people stopped her on the street, in the supermarket, when they saw her hands. The rose-gold alexandrite ring was so ornate that it seemed different every time she looked at it. And indeed the gemstone did change colour—from teal green to a deep blood red, depending on the light. They had bought new cars with the inheritance from Denny’s parents, but Denny had also spent ten thousand dollars on the alexandrite gemstone. He never told her, but she’d found the receipt tucked away behind his metal bench. Ten thousand dollars, Denny! What were you thinking? Did you really love me that much?

  The other two rings she wore stacked on her index finger. One was traditional—an eighteen-karat yellow-gold band with three baguette diamonds. Something traditional, Denny said, to call attention to the other two.

  Though the alexandrite was her favourite, the third ring was perhaps the most spectacular. The most artful. Her thirtieth-birthday present. It was made of hundreds of little criss-crossing gold wires, a moonstone hidden inside, meant to look, Denny said, like the world’s most beautiful bird’s nest. But to Vera it looked like a swirling galaxy—the moonstone, a tiny glowing sun.

  When had Denny lost his passion for it? When had he started sleeping all day, roaming the house in sweatpants torn at the knee, complaining about his hands? Lazy depressive slob. Denny, I miss you and I am sorry. I am sorry I didn’t love you as much as I should have. I’m sorry I didn’t commit to you fully. Maybe that is why you were depressed. Maybe if I had given myself over to you, we could have had a better life together. But instead I drowned, my mouth full of water. The slow descent to the bottom of the lake. I am sorry, Denny. You will be okay without me. You will find someone who will love you. You will find someone who loves you exactly as you are. That was the problem, Denny. I wanted you to be more like me.

  More like her: driven to the point of ruthlessness. The sign taped up in her university office—WORK HARDER THAN EVERYONE ELSE, BUT NEVER FEEL LIKE YOU’RE WORKING. The workaholic’s motto. She should have told Denny that she wasn’t taking the Clomid because she wanted to quit teaching and start making films again. She didn’t think there was room for a child in a life like that.

  Her film Mirror had screened at Cannes when she was twenty-eight, right after she’d met Denny. It was a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. Told in three parts, it consisted of her childhood, adolescent, and adult memories, thoughts, and emotions, in colour, black and white, and sepia, like Tarkovsky’s film. The goal was to make the viewer feel lost in terms of space and time. Where and when are we? Is the character dreaming? The film was plotless, non-chronological, and contained everything she had learned as a human being on this earth, every truth she had absorbed, everything she knew that needed to be passed along. How did she know so much at such a young age? She often wondered that herself. After it premiered at Cannes, it was sometimes shown on television.

  It was airing again, now that people were searching for her body. Most people turned it off after ten minutes. That was okay. She was not offended.

  What would she make a film of, if she could make one now?

  How would she cut and reassemble her life, now that she was on the other side? What would be the opening shot?

  Would she open it with her birth, now that she understood how terrified we are to enter this world? That we are more afraid to enter the world than we are to leave it?

  Would she open it with the day she met Denny? They were the only two people in a movie theatre on a Tuesday afternoon. A lousy turnout for a foreign film playing as part of the city’s annual film festival. When the movie ended, she turned to him as the lights came up, and saw that he had already been watching her.

  “Well,” he said and stood, a long cashmere coat folded over his forearm. “Not exactly a triumph.” He was a tall man who looked to be in his early forties, his hair and skin as colourless as wild grass in winter. He had a pleasant face with blue-grey eyes and a pointed nose, a flesh-coloured mole in its centre. Not traditionally handsome, per se, and a touch overweight. But distinguished.

  Within five minutes they were shoulder to shoulder, walking to an old diner, where she took out a cigarette and blew smoke rings into the air while Denny told her that he made jewellery. He produced a little gemstone from his pocket and held it up to the light while he talked. He was the son of old-fashioned Russian Orthodox parents, his father also a jeweller. He looked intensely at the gemstone
when he talked of his parents; they had died only months before. He had some guilt about not having visited them more often. They had died in Manhattan, all the way across the continent, where he had been born and raised. But years ago he had traded the clusters of yellow cabs for cresting killer whales.

  “I think,” she said, “you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

  Halfway through their meal, she discovered she could make him laugh until he cried. He was older than she was by at least a decade but she knew by the end of their meal that she was a little smarter—a little quicker. She felt like a man. She leaned across the table and asked him to go to bed with her. The most spectacular year, that year she had met him and gone to Cannes. How could so much change between two people in the two short years that had followed? The most interesting person she’d ever met in her life had become, somehow, the most predictable. The most dull. She wanted so badly to be in love again she could hardly stand it.

  * * *

  —

  Something was happening above her head. A shift, a crack. A sudden rush of water. She was dislodged from her place under the ice, and the sun began to warm her body. She was moving.

  Another week. Another. A month. And another.

  Halley’s comet entered the inner solar system and passed by the sun. The rain began. The snow melted and was gone.

  The spring thaw carried her body all the way to the reservoir, where it was found by a group of children having a picnic in the April sun. The frozen water had preserved her body, though the journey downstream had shredded her clothing. The children gathered around her. They thought she was a dog or an otter caught in the tangle of bushes and twigs at the water’s edge. They saw that she was face down, slick with black and gold mud, and they pulled her naked body from the water like a seal.

  APRIL 1986

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN