In all their years of marriage, they had only one awful fight—decades ago, when he told her he wanted to have a child. She said no. Anyway, that is his life’s regret, not hers. And they have money. Lewis’s pension is not insignificant. And she isn’t a bookkeeper anymore for the Whale Bay Operatic Society—she has become their costume designer. For years, she kept a sketchbook filled with court jesters, people in gowns, men in tuxedos. She took it to work with her one day, and the director saw them, offered her a job. She has held the position since her early forties, thinks she’ll retire when her eyes finally give out. Even still, she has to remind herself that she doesn’t have to use rags instead of paper towels. She still buys only the cheapest four-pack of toilet paper. You never know. The wind could shift and you could find yourself, alone and homeless, at the edge of the world.
The truth is, not everything in her life is all right. She wants to explain to the woman in grey why she hardly sees Dmitri. Why they never speak, save for an obligatory Christmas phone call once a year. And why lately she feels such a coldness from Jesse, a coldness that seemed to start the day his daughter was born. But how can she explain such things? Where would she begin? She understands they are busy now, attending to their families and careers. Still, she suspects that it is more than their busy lives. She suspects they share too many memories that none of them want to revisit. The past is not buried. The past is right there, like a coin in a shallow pool, and all she has to do is reach.
In the last moments of the day, right before she falls asleep, she feels what all of them must feel—a small sliver of toxic bile running through her blood, the weight of what happened.
Maybe it is easier, then, to drift apart. To forget.
Still, on the rare occasions that she is invited to Jesse’s house, she finds herself watching him closely when he holds his daughter. Studying his hands. How tightly they grip the baby’s little thighs, her little arms.
Or did he get all the violence out of him that day at the lake?
She remembers the last time she saw Leo, right after Holly left him, and how he described to them over dinner, in detail, his ascetic lifestyle. He looked to her in that moment more like a small woman than a man. Something about the hips. The flesh having been winnowed. Punishing himself, that was the obvious answer. Searching for redemption. He barely touched his plate of food that night, though he drank plenty of their beer.
“A woman died here, years and years ago,” Evelina says, and takes a deep drag from the cigarette.
“I remember,” says the woman in grey. “We’re sitting on her bench.” She gestures behind her, where indeed Vera’s name is engraved.
“I wonder who donated it,” says Evelina.
“Her husband did,” says the woman in grey.
“My son,” Evelina begins. “My son—”
“Yes?” says the woman in grey.
“My son pushed her into the water.”
Evelina turns to see the woman’s reaction, but the woman has stood up and is a few paces away. The woman doesn’t respond, and Evelina wonders whether she has heard her. It is a bold thing: to tell a stranger the secret she has carried in her heart since she was thirty-five years old. She wants to shove the words back in her mouth.
The woman whistles, and then whistles again, and Evelina hears the dog’s footfalls before she sees him emerge from the woods, his fur slick with morning dew. The dog makes his way to the two women, and Evelina lets him run his warm tongue over her cold hands. “Hi, sweetie, hi,” she says to the dog, petting his head and scratching his ears. He reminds her so much of Scout she can hardly bear it. “Hi, sweetheart. Yes, sweetheart.”
“Come on, boy,” the woman says.
“I used to—” Evelina begins to say, but the woman and dog are already walking up the path. She feels her pulse quicken, her heart pounding in her chest. You’re dreaming. You’re dreaming. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up now.
“Wait,” Evelina calls out. “Wait.” She stumbles up the path but catches her moccasin on a root, and then she is on all fours, pine needles stuck to the palm of her hand.
“Please,” she says. “Come back.”
The sun is rising through the trees and the trail is backlit, but Evelina thinks she can make out the image of the woman and her dog. She blinks and there is nothing. What was she thinking? She shakes her head. She has come down hard on her wrist and she sits a minute, worrying it with her other hand. She feels a deep pressure building in her chest. She isn’t sure she has ever let herself feel anything for Vera, but now, her hand wrapped around her wrist, she feels a great pain. What wouldn’t she give to be able to tell Vera she is sorry? She feels, in this moment, that she would give almost anything.
“Come back,” she calls again, but there is no one on the path except her.
Evelina rises to her feet and walks back to the lake. The cigarette has made her dizzy and she opens the coat a little, lets the cold breeze off the water enter and wrap around her chest. She cranes her neck and lifts her face to the sky. Her cellphone is ringing, and she knows it is Lewis, newly awake and having discovered her note, calling to make sure she is okay and to ask why she didn’t wake him. But certain things in life you have to go through alone.
The wind picks up and Evelina watches it move over the surface of the lake. Now that the sun has fully risen, the water is a deep, rich gold colour, and she relaxes for the first time that morning, lets the coat fall open a little more, does not shield herself from the cold.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the lake, “I’m sorry.” She stands at the water’s edge, and fishes Vera Gusev’s rings out of the coat pocket and holds them in front of her. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
She thinks of her own desperation as a young woman, furiously scratching away at a lottery card in the hope of winning a million dollars. In the hope that happiness could be that simple.
As though she is skipping stones, she sends one of Vera Gusev’s rings, and then the other, over the surface of the lake until they reach its centre, then waits until she feels certain they have sunk to its depths.
At the morgue, she had held the photograph of Leo away from her body and stared at his face. It could’ve been any old man in the photograph. The morgue was as cold as she had imagined it to be, and she was grateful that she had worn a sweater. Still, someone—one of the assistants, maybe—should’ve wrapped a blanket around her. There should’ve been some gesture of kindness, of comfort, of warmth.
In the photograph, the old man’s face was thin, drawn, his head entirely bald. But it was Leo, yes, in the photograph. Yes. She could identify him, yes. That is Leo. That is Galileo Dmitrius Lucchi.
She hadn’t said his name aloud in so very long.
“How did he die?” Evelina asked the coroner’s officer.
“Technically?” said the coroner’s officer. “A heart attack. But if you want my opinion, your husband drank himself to death.”
Now, staring into the lake at Squire Point, she thinks of Leo when they first met. The sudden red rock and desert sprawl of San Garcia.
A wormhole has opened and on one end, she stands at the edge of the lake in her black stretch pants and moccasins, her hair as white as crushed ice; and on the other, she stands on the deck of an old wooden seiner, throwing a silver fish into the sea for a harbour seal.
Well, she wants to say to the dead man, were you reincarnated? Are you flying around currently as some little bird? Are you an earthworm, nosing your way through black soil? Are you coming out of your chrysalis, wings spread in the gold-coloured light? Are you a great white whale, breaking through the waves, while I watch alone from the shore? Are you a sea anemone, slowly moving along the ocean floor? Are you being born? Did you hear music when you died? Did you feel happy? Were you ready to go? Have you risen above it all and are you looking down on me? Are you watching me watching you? Am I the only one you ev
er loved? Do you care what happens to your body? Where are you now?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WITH IMMENSE GRATITUDE to my agent, Claudia Ballard, and to my editors, Nicole Winstanley and Sarah Savitt, who transformed this book (and my life). To Lara Hinchberger, Deborah Sun de la Cruz, and to everyone at Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House Canada; Virago/Little, Brown UK; Malpaso Ediciones; and William Morris Endeavor. To Brian Trapp and Jeanne Shoemaker, especially. To E., my greatest creation. To Patrick O’Keeffe, Tania Hershman, Kate Soles, Leah Stewart, Sara Peters, Mika Tanner, and all I’m forgetting whose eyes moved over the pages of this book. To Gary Dawson, Roger Denley, Michael Harvey, Jim Hewes, Officer J., and the late Jennifer Schmidt. To the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ohio Arts Council; the Mineral School; the Writers OMI at Ledig House; and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where this book began. My title comes from Jia Tolentino’s essay, “How a Woman Becomes a Lake,” published in The New Yorker in November, 2018. (Thank you for your blessing.) Always and forever to Lorna Jackson, the inciting incident of my writing life. And to Brian Hendricks, somewhere out there and dearly missed.
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