anemones.
She dug at the dirt underneath her fingernails and felt her anger
bloom—Leo, who’d gotten so angry when she’d confronted him about
Holly; Leo, who held her against the wall, his hand on her neck, when he suspected once—falsely—that she was having an affair.
Of course, all she could think of were his bad qualities. She had
read somewhere that after a separation a parent should not speak ill
of the other parent. So she tried to reminisce, as much as she could
with the boys, about Leo’s good qualities. How he used to take them
to feed the ducks on Saturday afternoons. Drawing with them at the
kitchen table. Long games of tag, leaping around the yard, letting
the boys tackle him, their little knees digging into his sides.
By filling their minds with the sweet things, she hoped she could
block out the things she wanted them to forget.
The relationship was still all tangled up in her mind. Sometimes
she felt she couldn’t trust herself or her version of things. For instance, sex. How could the same reality feel so different? Sometimes it felt as though her insides were coated in plastic and Leo’s penis was a dry
pink pencil eraser. Or it hurt. Worse, sometimes she felt nothing at
all. A kind of horror seized her in the moments before they made
love. She hated Leo during sex if she was honest, his penis as durable as only the hardest part of her was—her elbow, for instance, her knee.
The waterfall of pleasure that rushed over him. All that gasping.
What had ever felt that rapturous to her? Nothing. Nothing at all.
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He worked odd jobs, never staying at any place very long. Had big
plans for his life, he said, though he never told her specifically what those plans were. There was a type of person in this world who could
work a job, get married, have children, live in a house, mow the lawn on weekends, try out new chicken recipes, discuss what colour to paint the nursery. There was another type of person who could do half of
those things well but lived in secret misery, and so squeaked out and gambled or had affairs—this type of person was Evelina. Then there
was another type of person who didn’t have it in them to do any of
those things at all. Some of these people were homeless. Some—if they had money—travelled the world. Some, like Leo, pretended, forced
themselves to do it anyway. A person like that could kill you. You could spend your whole life trying to get them to be someone they weren’t.
He hadn’t wanted to marry her, even after she got pregnant, even
after Jesse and Dmitri were born. It’s not really my thing. But they had married eventually at city hall; Dmitri, a newborn in her arms, and
Jesse, four years old, already having ruined the day, Leo said, by wetting the bed that morning. Leo was better with the new baby than he
had been with Jesse, changed his diapers, got up with him in the
night. He seemed, like so many men, to be softening with age. Evelina felt hopeful. He got a steady job at the bottle depot.
She wasn’t sure whether he was still working there now. Holly ran
that touristy gallery at the harbour. He was probably sponging off her.
She supposed their life together had been okay before Leo had
turned on Jesse. There had been a short period of time, even, during
Dmitri’s infancy, when the four of them had functioned as a family
unit—Dmitri and Jesse sleeping between them, little hands balled
into fists. Dmitri was so much smaller than Jesse had been. She had
forgotten how small newborns were. She held him against her shoul-
der. He was like a baby squirrel.
It happened the first time a few months after he was born. She set
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Dmitri’s little sleeping body into the bassinet and slipped down the
hall into the bath. He was such an easier baby than Jesse, who would
have woken the second he hit the tiny oval mattress, screaming. She
remembered when taking a bath had been so sacred to her. Now she
was lucky if she bathed twice a week. She shaved her legs, scrubbed
between her toes, ignored the obscene roll of fat that spilled out over her stomach so that she couldn’t see the tops of her thighs. She hoped it would be gone soon. She was combing out her hair with her fingers
when she had the thought that something was wrong, that she needed
to get out of the bath. She fought it at first. Paranoia. Her inability to do something nice for herself.
It was the sound of glass breaking that finally got her out of the
tub. She grabbed a towel off the floor and threw it around herself, ran toward the nursery, her wet footprints sinking into the carpet—and
there was Dmitri, wailing in his bassinet. And there was Jesse, sitting on a stool in front of the bassinet. And there was a hole the size of a baseball in the lower-left-hand corner of the window, shards of glass on the carpet below. She asked Jesse what had happened but he didn’t
respond. Careful not to cut her feet, she walked to the window and
peered out, searching for whatever had made the hole.
“A bird,” Jesse said.
Had the bird flown in or out? What?
She walked toward her sons, Dmitri taking shallow, almost gasp-
like breaths as he cried. Jesse was playing with something in his
pocket—at first she thought he was playing with himself, something
he did when he had to go to the bathroom.
“Show me your hands,” she said, taking Dmitri into her arms.
Jesse took out his hands and showed her what he was playing
with: a mud-covered rock. She looked into Dmitri’s bassinet and saw
that there was a small pile of rocks in there, too, near where Dmitri’s head had been.
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“Did you break the window?” she asked her son but he insisted,
no, it was a bird. “Were you throwing rocks in here?”
When Leo got home, she told him what had happened, and he
braced himself in the doorway of the nursery and held Jesse up with
one hand as he hit him with the other. He hit Jesse until he admitted that he had dug up rocks from the garden and then thrown one at
the window. But Leo couldn’t get him to say why. He hit him until
Evelina made him stop. Her son flailed back and forth, his arm almost wrenched out of its socket.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you have children
before you’ve done all you’ve set out to do, she thought. She knew in that moment that Leo was starting to hate Jesse, and possibly her,
too—that for some men having a family had a dangerous side, that
marriage and children could create a counterblast of sorrow, of dis-
appointment, of rage.
He promised it wouldn’t happen again, and it didn’t, as far as she
knew, for a time. But then one afternoon Dmitri walked into their
bedroom complaining of an earache and the next thing Evelina knew,
Leo was rushing toward Jesse, yanking his arm over his head, hitting
him with those long, wild swings. She sensed, too, that there were
other beatings she didn’t know about.
And so it went in their house, year after year: Jesse the bad, Dmitri the good.
It�
�s just a spanking, Leo said.
Was that what it was? Her own parents had hit her with a wooden
spoon.
One night she took a wooden spoon from a drawer in the kitchen
and, as an experiment, not really knowing her intentions, slapped it
down upon the flesh of her upper thigh. She waited until the heat of
the slap subsided, then did it again, harder, with force. A few moments of burning, the pain spreading then dissipating. If she were angry,
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though, wouldn’t she hit harder? What if she were really angry? What
if she were in a rage? She glanced at her thigh, then at the kitchen counter, and down the spoon came, as hard as she could muster, on
the plastic laminate. There it was. The force with which a parent
would hit their child. And who ever hit a child once? She brought the spoon down on her own thigh, to a count of ten.
The next time it happened, she sensed a meanness coming from
Leo that hadn’t been there before. By then she suspected he was see-
ing someone else. He hadn’t touched her in such a long time. She
rushed to Jesse, wedged her body between him and Leo. Get out, get out, she yelled, and when he didn’t move she dragged him into the bedroom, threw his clothes into his arms, told him she would kill
him if he didn’t leave.
She sat in the empty kitchen and felt the silence of the house close in on her. It was a beach house, supposed to be a summer rental. Really
not much of a home. Too small. Poorly insulated. She should move
inland, away from the relentless wind. But, wait, there was a sound.
She held her breath. Was the water running? She checked the toilet,
which sometimes ran, but it was silent. She put the toilet seat down—
a point of contention between her and her sons—and headed back to
the kitchen. Was the leak coming from under the sink? Her life felt
so absurd in that moment, racing to check the toilet, sticking her
head under the sink, the water bill escalating in her mind.
She caught herself—she was going down the rabbit hole of
despair—and laughed. There was no leak, no running water anywhere.
Just the drip of an icicle melting outside the kitchen window. Her anger softened into sadness, and she closed her eyes. But where were her sons?
Surely they would be home soon. What would she do if they
weren’t? Call the police?
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Of course Leo hadn’t kidnapped them. They’d been in a car acci-
dent. That made more sense. A fender-bender, no one harmed. Well,
then, all she had to do was call the hospital. The boys would be fine.
Her husband arrested for drunk driving and put in jail. What a
delight! What a way to start the year! She rifled through the phone
book until she came to the number.
Her fingers were thin from the cold and her wedding ring slipped
to the top of her knuckle when she reached for the phone. It was stu-
pid to still wear it. Leo had never worn his.
There had been no car accidents involving children that day. She
called the hospital twenty minutes outside of town in case they’d gone to that one, but there had been no accidents there either. Did that
mean they were in a ditch somewhere? Waiting for the police and
ambulance by the side of the road?
Had Leo taken them for dinner and forgotten to mention that
was part of his plan? She usually asked him when he’d be bringing the boys back, but today she hadn’t—he’d given her that look when she asked, as if she were his mother. She hadn’t felt strong enough to deal with that look today.
She walked into the boys’ bedroom and tried to pass the time
by tidying up their toys. She put their Smurfs and He-Man action
figures back in the toy box. She picked up their shared Walkman
off the floor and put it on top of the dresser. She put Dmitri’s
stuffed bear, Brownie, back on his bed. Jesse’s Ghostbusters poster was coming free from the wall and she taped it back into place.
In the trash can was a robot drawing Leo had done for Dmitri.
Jesse had torn it up, like he’d torn up the picture Holly had drawn
of him.
Maybe she’d drive around, see if she could find them. Leo would
take them to McDonald’s or Marco Polo’s Pizza. She hated moments
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she left and they came back and she wasn’t here, Leo would be forced
to keep the boys with him.
She could leave a note on the door, though, saying she’d be back
by six. That might be okay. She wrote in capital letters with a black felt pen, then added a little drawing of a smiling dinosaur to make it look as if she wasn’t in agony— BACK AT SIX, PLEASE WAIT HERE WITH
THE BOYS—and taped it to the front door.
Billy’s Burgers, McDonald’s, Marco Polo’s. No sign of Leo or
her sons. She sat in her car in front of the house, running the engine to keep the windows defrosted, rubbing her hands against her
thighs to keep warm. She fingered the winning lottery ticket in her
pocket. That would kill some time. She turned off the car and
jogged up the street to the corner store, carefully, so she wouldn’t
slip on the ice. The snow stopped and the sky cleared. The clerk
cashed in her ticket and sold her two more, and she stood at the
counter scratching off the numbers because there was no one else in
the store and she knew the clerk had a crush on her and she didn’t
want to be alone.
“If it were me I might call the police,” the clerk said to her. He
was a nice-seeming man. She could tell he cared about her. “What’s
stopping you?”
“I don’t want to do the wrong thing,” she said.
“No harm in it,” he said and passed her the store’s phone.
But she didn’t want to call the police, not yet. First she would go
back to the house to see if Leo and her sons were there.
The clerk offered to go with her but she didn’t want the additional
complication of Leo seeing her with another man. She didn’t want to
make Leo angry. She even felt a kind of yearning. She wanted to see
Leo and the boys so badly she felt crazy. She wanted Leo to tell her
one of his stupid jokes. He wasn’t all bad—he had never been all bad.
There was a sweetness, a vulnerability, an unusualness. Something
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special, childlike even. Playful. That was what had drawn her to him.
He was not like other people. He was not an evil man.
“My boys,” she practised saying in her empty living room when
she got home, one hand on the phone. “They spent the day with
their father and never came home.”
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C h a p t e r F i v e
Leo
Leo Lucchi wasn’t a hunter, but he’d picked up a thing or two from
his father, and felt obligated to pass these skills on to his
sons.
Even more so since he’d left them. He wanted them to remember this
day. He imagined them as men, telling their friends, or wives, or children, about the time their father had taught them how to shoot a rifle on New Year’s Day.
But right now the need for a cigarette was like a stone in his chest.
He cursed. He’d left his cigarettes in the car. He could drag the boys back with him, but it would take forever with them in tow, slipping
every second in their rubber boots. And so he left his sons on the
path— I won’t be long; I need you to stay right here; we’ve got such a fun day ahead of us—and hiked the quarter-mile back to the parking lot, his rifle over his shoulder, taking big steps until he could feel the burn in his hamstrings and in his calves.
When he reached the parking lot, he leaned the rifle against the
car and allowed himself to enjoy his cigarette. His boys would be fine for another minute or two. He closed his eyes and felt pleasantly, surprisingly, happy. There was no one in the parking lot except him.
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A new year. The first day of the year. The first day of a new year. He felt the snow landing softly on his shoulders and in his hair. He could do this. He was enjoying himself. So much of the time, he didn’t enjoy his sons. He loved them—that wasn’t it—but the grind of it: washing their sticky hands after they’d eaten something, getting their jackets on, finding their socks, making sure they had snacks—it exhausted him. It was tedious. He longed for them to be older—teenagers, and then
men—people he could talk to, have a drink with. People who could
pour their own juice without spil ing the fucking stuff. People who
didn’t need to be monitored so closely every minute of the day, always on the verge of disaster, always hitting their heads. But right now he felt a lightness. Maybe it was being inside that bothered him. Maybe from
now on he should only take his boys here, Squire Point, or the beach.
Maybe it was being cooped up with their whininess and their neediness that irked him. Maybe he could finally really love them, and be good to them—to Jesse—if they stayed outside.
He smoked his cigarette down to the filter, crushed it under his
boot, and set off for the place where he had left his boys, the rifle over his shoulder. As he walked toward the lake, he went over the first
exercise he would give them, the first thing his own father had taught him about how to shoot.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC) Page 4
