She watched for it—a conspiratorial glance between them, a swift
kick to a shin—but the boys continued to eat, elbows on the table,
mouths open as they chewed, forks in their hands like spears. They
shook their heads.
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“You are such animals,” she said. “Sit up. Mouths closed. For
heaven’s sake.”
When they were done, her sons sat in front of their empty
plates. They were still as statues. They could sense her mood, she
could tell. They were waiting, she realized, for her to pick up a glass and smash it into the sink. To slam her bedroom door, to not come
out for hours. To leave the house in a fury. She had done all of these things before. She stood in front of her sons, her fingers in her
mouth to keep from screaming.
She felt her heart, too large, in her chest. Her sweet boys. Dmitri,
who had cried on Christmas Day when she suggested throwing out
his stuffed bear to make room for his new toys. “I thought you might
be embarrassed by it now,” she had rushed to say, hoping the words
would stop his tears. “Of course we’ll keep Brownie. Of course.”
“Got some new ones in today. Winter Wonderland,” the clerk said,
holding up the silver cards. “Twenty-five thousand.”
“I’ll take two.” Evelina handed a five-dollar bill to the clerk and
hesitated a moment, waiting for him to gesture to the stool at the
end of the counter.
“Tea, Evelina?”
Oh, thank god. “Herbal, if you have it.”
“I do.”
“Thanks.”
The clerk came around the counter and Evelina saw that he was
taller than she had expected—at least a full head taller. He handed
her a coin for the scratch-and-win cards and disappeared into the
back of the store. She heard the kettle. When the clerk returned,
she told him that the cards were duds. She fought the urge to buy
two more.
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“Ah well,” he said. He handed her a red mug full of tea. He took
the cards from her and tossed them into the trash. For the first
time, the counter was not between them. Evelina sipped her tea and
stared into the clerk’s familiar face. Still, she could not imagine
accompanying him to a church potluck. She wished religious people
would wear signs, or hats—something to identify them, so she would
know. She was too much of a misfit to get involved with someone
who believed in God.
“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
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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.
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“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 super-
human 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 beau-
tiful 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
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 tel 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
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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.
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C h a p t e r T w e l v e
Lewis
The pained look on Evelina’s face troubled him. It could be the
look of someone who was lying. Regardless, Lewis excused him-
self 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
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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 apart-
ment’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 now 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.
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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
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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 bed-
room, 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.
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“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
How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC) Page 9
