Lewis continued to walk toward him, and Leo found himself stepping behind the suitcase, as if somehow the little piece of luggage—the Remington swaddled within—could act as a shield.
“Don’t mean any harm,” Leo said and put up his hands. “I don’t even know why I’m here.” He looked away from Lewis and found himself inspecting the sidewalk with intensity. He supposed Evelina had gotten everything she wanted.
“It’s okay,” said Lewis. He gestured up and down the block. “Where’s your car?”
“Took the bus. In fact”—he looked at his wrist as if there were a watch there—“I should be going.”
“I’ll drive you,” said Lewis. He nodded toward the white beach house, where Leo could see the faces of Jesse and Dmitri in the front window. “We’ll go together.”
* * *
—
He sat with his oldest son in the bus station, a cup of coffee between his knees, waiting for the bus to arrive and take him back to San Garcia. It was the end of January; Jesse was eleven years old. The new year stretched out in front of them.
Leo raised his eyebrows, drummed his feet on the floor, and checked the big wall clock. He knew he was supposed to say something to Jesse before boarding the bus to San Garcia and disappearing once again from his life, but he didn’t know what. He hadn’t meant to see the boy again until he was older and more time had passed between them. He prayed for Evelina and Dmitri to come back from getting their hot dogs.
The bus’s engine started, and so he rose to his feet, and finally Evelina and Dmitri returned. Dmitri was eating his hot dog with both hands, mustard in the corners of his mouth. Evelina wiped his face with a napkin.
He eyed the engagement ring on Evelina’s finger. Not too expensive-looking: a simple band. He couldn’t help feeling as if he had been robbed of something, even though he would never want to live with Evelina again. But shouldn’t a life like this be available to him? Why wasn’t it?
The sound of the bus’s pneumatic door opening. The conductor announcing it was time to board.
Evelina smelled like lavender. In her heeled boots, she came up to his chin. They looked at each other, but there was nothing to say.
Jesse and Dmitri stood beside her.
“Take care, my sons,” he said and bent to their level.
He took Jesse and Dmitri in his arms. He remembered when they were babies and their heads smelled like baby powder and milk. “Goodbye,” he said.
He moved away from them and joined the long line of people waiting to board the bus. He stood a moment looking for Lewis before he spotted him, hanging back, almost out of sight, at the entrance to the bus station. He wondered if Lewis was hanging around in case Leo decided to bolt. But he wouldn’t bolt. He would go back to San Garcia and stay out of the boys’ lives. That had been his deal with Lewis. The deal they’d made, late one night on the phone.
But Leo felt certain he would resurface—he would see his boys again one day. Not immediately. Maybe not for years. And he would never speak of Vera Gusev or what had happened that day at the lake to anyone, not even Holly, who he hoped would be waiting up for him when he arrived.
“Dad,” Jesse called out. “What kind of car you drive?”
“I don’t,” said Leo.
The line wasn’t moving, and Leo imagined breaking out of it and going back to Evelina’s house for Chinese food. In his mind, he set the table, asked where she kept the placemats, napkins, and cutlery, and whether they should eat in the kitchen or dining room. He thought of the mismatched plates, the cheap knives and forks he and Evelina had gotten at a thrift store before they were married. He imagined that she now had chopsticks inlaid with abalone shells, and special dishes for dipping sauces, and a large rectangular platter that she would put in her oven’s warming drawer. He imagined himself inspecting the little sauce dishes, taking a liking to one shaped like an oyster shell, and turning it over in his hand. Bringing it to his ear as if it were a conch. Is this thing on? he imagined himself saying, waiting for laughter.
“Dad,” Jesse said. “You coming back anytime soon?”
“We’ll see,” said Leo.
His suitcase was like a dead weight in his hand.
2020
CHAPTER THIRTY
Evelina
“You’re listed as next of kin,” the woman on the phone says to Evelina, who sits up in bed and fumbles to turn on the little bedside lamp. The room shoots into light, and she sees that it is almost seven. Lewis is snoring beside her. There isn’t any point in showering. She presses a hot washcloth to her face, brushes her teeth, steps into a pair of black stretch pants and slides a grey sweater over her shoulders, wiggles her feet into her driving moccasins. Her hair is completely white and cropped to the chin, and she combs it out with her fingers, checks her purse for her keys, and leaves a quick note for Lewis on the counter. It is shocking to leave the house before the sun is up. She feels like a fugitive. Her vision is poor and so she pushes the seat as far forward as it will go and drives with desperate, squinting eyes. The hospital is twenty minutes away. She clenches the wheel. She turns on the radio, hoping the music will comfort her. Her hands are shaking. The car cost a small fortune. She turns on the heated seats, lets herself sink into the soft warm leather. There is no one on the road at this hour, no reason to be nervous, no reason not to trust herself to get there, but still she scans the side of the road, waiting for something to leap out in front of her.
* * *
—
“Will I recognize him?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” the coroner’s officer says. “He looks different than he does in his driver’s licence photo.”
“He has a scar on his left ankle,” Evelina tells the coroner’s officer. “He was born with a club foot. His left leg—if you measure it—is smaller than his right.”
“That’s helpful, thanks,” says the coroner’s officer.
The coroner’s officer is a woman. The nurses hurrying through the halls are women. The janitor pushing the big custodial cart is a woman. Two doctors in white lab coats. The front-desk receptionist. Evelina can’t see another man in the cold white hospital except for the photograph of her ex-husband that the coroner’s officer places in her hand. Dead as he is, she thinks he still might burst through the double doors at any minute and ask her what the hell took her so long.
* * *
—
She takes a breath and unlocks the door to Leo’s apartment. He had been living two miles from her and Lewis’s house in Whale Bay. The television is on, muted, showing the news. She watches for a moment, then shuts it off. The apartment is in a low-income housing co-op, the units squished together, a small concrete courtyard in the back with a basketball hoop. Some graffiti. When did he move back here? Why didn’t he live in San Garcia still? Did her sons know he was here? She waits while the sun rises, waits for it to illuminate the living room. Someone (Leo?) had painted the walls varying shades of blue. Either that or the light is playing tricks on her old, tired eyes. She studies the walls, but can’t figure it out. It is possible she is going blind. She will do it tomorrow: make the long-procrastinated appointment with the ophthalmologist, have Lewis take her in their stupid fancy car.
There is a keyboard in the middle of the room with sheet music to “The Joint Is Jumpin’ ” spread out over the music stand. A beat-up leather couch, probably bought second-hand, with a pillow and balled-up blanket. She guesses that he spent his nights here, and fell asleep with the television on. It is an old-fashioned living room—so unlike her and Lewis’s, everything digital, blinking, so minimalistic that she still can’t figure out how to turn on the overhead lights. Leo would hate her new car. She hates it, too. But these things bring Lewis so much happiness, and she wants Lewis to be happy, for now that she is growing old, she is aware that she will die many years before her husband.
She fi
nds the pamphlets on the kitchen counter. Leo had attended a timeshare seminar. That seems right. Mexico. He seemed like the type of man who would spend a lot of time down there, then relocate entirely. He should have died there. He should have died in a palapa, a margarita in his hand. A man alone on a beach.
His bedroom is also painted blue, even the ceiling. He had striped sheets. She smells the pillow but it smells like any old man’s pillow. The coroner’s officer has given her a bag of Leo’s clothes and she removes the heavy scuffed boots from the bag and sets them inside the closet, takes the T-shirt and the jeans with a torn knee and places them on the bed. She sets the pair of white tube socks and the ratty boxer shorts on top of the T-shirt. In the bottom of the bag is Leo’s old military jacket. She remembers the day he found it in a thrift store, how proudly he hefted it onto his shoulders and sauntered around, searching for a mirror. Tore off the tag with his teeth, threw his arm around her, guided her out of the store and into the street. It is threadbare now, the neck stained from sweat. She can’t believe he still wore it. She breathes in, and there it is—the faint scent of his cologne.
“You big idiot,” she says to the room.
On the bedside table are two pictures in silver frames: Jesse on his wedding day (Jesse must have sent Leo the picture—Leo did not attend), wearing a lilac shirt and a black tie, his hair slicked back with gel. He looks so thin in the picture that she finds it shocking. He became a vegan as a teenager, and was always too skinny after that, crow’s feet and laugh lines in his face. In the picture, he wears a tiepin in the shape of a dog.
“You should have been there,” she says to the empty blue room. “It was such a nice day.”
She knows there are things, of course—ways in which Jesse has hidden his damage from her. Drugs, she is certain, when he was younger. But something else, too. A sense she had when Jesse was a teenager. Out-of-control promiscuity. What he actually got up to remains a mystery, though she saw glimpses of it: kids showing up at the house in the middle of the night; empty bottles of antibiotics from a walk-in clinic; even something Dmitri said once—that Jesse needed to always be touching someone.
Evelina sets the frame down and picks up the one behind it. It is a photo of Dmitri and one of his dogs, a dramatic mountain landscape in the background. He, too, has chiselled his body down to what looks like stone.
Jesse and Dmitri don’t speak anymore, though neither will articulate why. They didn’t have a falling-out. There was no argument. No screaming match; nothing came to blows. She thinks she knows why, though. She thinks it is because Jesse finally told him what happened.
Now, Dmitri lives in a loft five hundred miles away. He has three dogs.
He isn’t lonely, he says.
He has found a life that works for him.
She will call Jesse and Dmitri when she gets home. She will tell them that Leo had a massive heart attack in his sleep, did not suffer, did not leave them anything, never updated his medical records to list anyone but her as next of kin, was living two miles away from her and Lewis for years.
She searches for a photo album, or more pictures in frames, a Polaroid on the refrigerator door, but finds nothing. She guesses that he was the type of man who didn’t spend much time at home. She might wander into the neighbourhood bar. That’s where she will find out about Leo, not in this stale, cramped apartment, with its empty refrigerator and its never-slept-in bed. Some guy in a newsboy cap will tell her about Leo. Some guy with a beer in his hand.
In the back of a dresser drawer, she finds a Moleskine with a bunch of pencil sketches. He must have been teaching himself how to draw—or maybe Holly taught him before they split up. Gradually, the sketches become less abstract and start to look more like people. Mostly, the drawings are of old men—no, these are self-portraits. He managed to capture his signature hangdog look. He figured out how to draw his own eyes. She stares at him, staring back at her. When she comes to the portraits of her, she puts her hand on the dresser. This isn’t, of course, what she looks like now. No, these are drawings of her when they first met. Hair down to her waist; her face so much fuller. The portraits are so startlingly good that he must have drawn them from a photograph. But where is the photograph? She would like to have it. She would like to look at her young self. Her eyes flood with tears. She would do anything to go back in time, to take her young self by the shoulders.
She rifles through the dresser, searching for the photograph of herself, but finds instead a small sealed envelope. It is affixed with insufficient postage, and thus the letter is not recent. She bites her lip and unseals it, carefully, as though the dead man will return at any minute and she will have to quickly press it closed.
The letter is folded in thirds, two rings weighing it down. One is a simple gold band with three rectangular-shaped diamonds, but the other is an incredible feat of goldsmithing. The band is made of what looks like hundreds of tiny entwined gold wires, a small milky gemstone tucked in the centre, meant, Evelina presumes, to resemble a bird’s nest with a little egg hidden inside. Or maybe the gem is meant to be Saturn, and the gold wires are its rings. She turns the ring over, studying it, but it is an optical illusion: she blinks and it is a bird’s nest; she blinks again and it is Saturn.
The letter consists of only two sentences, written in cursive so shaky and tentative that it looks like a child’s.
They slipped off her fingers and into my hands.
She puts her fingers to her mouth. What was his name? Denny. Denny, that’s it. She is holding a letter meant for Denny Gusev.
Why didn’t Leo mail it, or throw it away? Why has he kept it all these years?
Is it too late to say I’m sorry?
The rings must be worth thousands of dollars. She could be holding thousands of dollars in her hand.
She wonders if she should try to find Denny. To give him back the rings. Yes, that is the right thing to do. Though he is probably dead by now. Either that or eighty years old. He might not be alive, but he might have children. Or other family. Or Vera might have family who would want them. She will do it when she gets home: search for Denny’s name, figure out a way to get in touch.
She slides the Moleskine back into the dresser drawer, the rings still in her hand. She thinks she might drive all the way to Squire Point and spend the morning out there. She roots around in Leo’s closet, finds an old, moth-eaten overcoat. She tucks Vera Gusev’s rings into one of the overcoat’s secret pockets, so there will be no chance of losing them.
“Goodbye, Leo,” she says, and locks the door.
* * *
—
It is nine o’clock when she reaches the first parking lot. The sky is bright with morning sunlight, and she finds herself alone on the trail that leads to the lake, the wind lapping violently around her as she walks.
Years ago, city council voted to install a railing. You used to be able to walk straight across the lake in winter, nothing but a sheet of ice between you and the water. You can’t do that now. She supposes it is safer, but you can’t install safety bars and railings all over the wonderful, dangerous parts of the world. It is good for the world to remain a little bit dangerous, she thinks, though she isn’t sure where the thought comes from, or where it leads to. It seems like something Leo would have said to her in the early days. Maybe he once said those very words, and now the thought is implanted in her mind as her own. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The lake hasn’t frozen over in years. In fact, she can’t remember the last time it snowed in Whale Bay. But today the wind is vicious and so she draws the old coat around her, tucks her chin into her chest. Ahead of her, she sees a bronze plaque. MIRROR LAKE, it says. She is sure the lake didn’t have a name before. When did this happen, and who decided on the name? “Mirror Lake,” she says aloud. The name isn’t altogether displeasing.
She walks quickly to the edge of the lake, where there is a bench for people to sit and look out
over the water. She is surprised to see a woman sitting there, a woman all in grey. For a moment, Evelina thinks she is a statue. But instead the woman turns her head as Evelina approaches and offers her a cigarette.
“Why not?” says Evelina, who hasn’t smoked since her fishing-boat days. She sits next to the woman, and the woman holds out a lighter. Evelina lights the cigarette, sheltering the flame from the wind with Leo’s coat. “My ex-husband was a smoker,” Evelina says. “The smell—it brings me back.”
The woman looks about as old as Evelina, and wears a grey coat that has seen better days, and thick, black-rimmed glasses.
“He died,” says Evelina. “Last night.”
“Just like that,” says the woman. “Like a bolt of lightning.” She scans the lake while she speaks.
“Like that, I suppose,” says Evelina. “We hadn’t talked in years.”
“Will you have a funeral?” the woman asks.
Evelina shrugs. “No.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” She passes Evelina a tissue, and when Evelina presses it to her cheek she finds that indeed she is crying.
“You didn’t upset me,” says Evelina. “I’m just tired.”
Sitting here, on the little bench at the edge of the lake, she wishes she could tell the woman how unhappy she was for most of her life, how she spent her twenties and thirties trying to stop herself from backing into a corner and screaming until the blood vessels burst in her eyes—but how nothing is wrong anymore, not really, and how every day she has to remind herself of this, and some nights she has to repeat to herself that everything is okay now, and some nights she can’t believe how many times she has to say it before she begins to believe it herself.
She has a wonderful group of girlfriends now, and they are even planning a beach holiday this summer, their husbands left at home. And Lewis. She has Lewis. That is something—to have loved someone for so long and so deeply—though in truth they are more like old friends. He was so muscular when they first met that she laughed the first time he took off his shirt. You’re like an action hero, she said, running her hands over his biceps, his chest, pulling him toward her. And yet when was the last time she kissed his lips? She still finds him handsome, though he doesn’t tend to himself like he used to.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake Page 21
