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
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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 ciga-
rette 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 hus-
band 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
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adorned in gold. Maybe she would be found a hundred years from
now, a dehydrated husk of herself, mouth twisted and torn, the alex-
andrite 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 atten-
tion to the other two.
Though the alexandrite was her favourite, the third ring was per-
haps 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,
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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 wil 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?
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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 fes-tival. When the movie ended, she turned to him as the lights came
up, and saw that he had already been watching her.
“Wel ,” 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 pro-
duced 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
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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, some-
how, 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.
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A p r i l 1 9 8 6
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C h a p t e r S i x t e e n
Denny
April took everyone by surprise. And now that the ceaseless win-
ter was over, Lewis sat across from Denny, in Denny’s living
room. The hot, dry air hung between the two men.
“She drowned,” Lewis said. “There’s no evidence of foul play.”
All this time, Denny had concocted a reality in which Vera had
run off—to Berlin, maybe, or to Rome. He could imagine it: her
being so angry after New Year’s Eve that she had fled. Leaving him—
he could fathom it, although it would have taken a heart full of hate for her to leave her dog behind. Maybe a heart full of hate was what
she had for him. Even that was a better reality than the reality that she had drowned and died. Better to imagine that Vera was making films
in Berlin. One day, maybe they would reconcile. He would write her
a long, beautiful letter. He would get on a plane. He would roam the
streets. Haben Sie diese Frau gesehen? Have you seen this woman?
Have you seen this woman who used to be my wife?
The only secret he had kept from Vera was the ugly truth that he
had loved one of his ex-girlfriends with a fiery, more intense passion.
It didn’t matter—the relationship had flopped and he never yearned
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to be back within its confines—but it was a small, polished stone of
betrayal that he carried in his heart. Had Vera known? Had she
known in the way that someone you don’t like always knows you
don’t like them?
He watched a news van parking across the street. He nodded
toward the stack of newspapers and hate mail he was keeping in the
corner in case Vera returned. He wanted to show it to her—he wanted
to show her how wrong people could be. Every time the paper ran a
story about Vera’s disappearance, they reprinted the same picture of
him—hunched over, getting into a police car with Lewis and one of the detectives. He knew that for some people, he would forever be guilty, no matter what had happened or why.
“What do I do now?” said Denny.
“You don’t have to do anything,” said Lewis. “Not right now.”
Denny looked at Lewis, this man who had become his caretaker.
For the past four months, Lewis had come over every day to walk
Scout. He called it “community policing.” He said it was as much a
part of his job as writing traffic tickets. At the end of January, a bottle of bourbon between them, they’d watched the Challenger explode.
“May I see her?” Denny asked.
Lewis hesitated. “There is very little to see,” he said.
He imagined Vera in the palm of his hand, the size of a worry
doll. “I’m sorry,” he said to Lewis. “I’d like to be alone.”
He hadn’t cried yet—that would come later—but already he could
fe
el a hollowness opening up inside of him. People would tell him he
could start again. People would suggest he start dating. Though it felt impossible to him at this very moment, he had loved women before
Vera, so surely it was possible to love again.
He flipped through the phone book until he came to Evelina
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Lucchi’s name. He had stared at it many nights, fingers poised to dial the phone. He rehearsed what he would say. Are you sure? Are you
sure you didn’t know my Vera? Evelina’s ex-husband, Leo Lucchi, was
unlisted. He imagined somehow calling him anyway. Are you sure
you didn’t drown my wife?
What was he supposed to do right now, standing here in his liv-
ing room? How was he supposed to get through the next hour? And
the next?
He wanted to gather all of Vera’s things in the middle of the living
room and lie down on top of them. He wanted to gather as much of her
as he could in one small space, and then surround himself, as though
he were building a nest. He would build a nest of her in the middle of the room and sleep in its centre until he was ready to let her go.
He walked into the kitchen and looked at the mess he had created
in the months Vera had been gone. At first he’d tried to keep it clean, thinking she’d turn up at any minute. But his old habits had come
back hard, and there were two weeks’ worth of dishes on the counter-
tops; the dishtowels hadn’t been washed for weeks; and, he noticed, the fridge door was ajar. Vera had been on his case about that. You have to shut it hard, Denny. Don’t let it close on its own. We’ll get a new one soon.
Until then, please. Standing in front of him with her arms crossed, her eyes shifting around the room to find some other transgression: a ring left on the coffee table by his icy glass of bourbon; a sock that had missed the hamper and ended up on the floor.
He should have gone with her. He poked his stomach. If he’d
gone on the walk around the lake with Vera, he might still have her;
he might not have this gut. The mail landed with a thud on his living room floor.
He supposed he would sell her car. Was it wrong to think of that
so soon? Did it mean he didn’t miss her enough? Did it mean he
wasn’t grieving the way a person was supposed to?
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