“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Look, this is destroying me,” he said to Lewis.
“Denny, what could the boy possibly have to say?”
“I need to know. I need to know what Scout ran after. I need to
know why Vera didn’t call him back to her.”
“What if he can’t answer that? What if he’s already told us every-
thing he has to tell?”
“If he had,” said Denny, “you wouldn’t still suspect Leo. I know
you do. I know a part of you wants to let me talk to the boy. Let me
talk to him.”
“I can’t do it officially. You know that.”
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“Then—I don’t know—bring him over to the house or some-
thing. We’re friends. Bring him over.”
“Denny, I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to scare him. I want him to get to know me. And
then—once he feels comfortable, comfortable enough to talk, com-
fortable enough to know that I’m not a monster—I want to ask him
about that day. I want to know what he knows.”
“I don’t know,” said Lewis. “I don’t want to upset him. And
Evelina—”
“I am dying,” said Denny. “I am dying here.”
“I can get you help.”
“I don’t want help. I want to talk to the boy.”
“I think—”
“Bring him over, please.” He was on his hands and knees, bear-
like, and he could feel the weight of his stomach reaching the floor.
He knew he looked pathetic, frightening. He did not care. He looked
at Lewis. He stared him down. He let his tears fall this time, he didn’t wipe them from his face, he let them fall, and he let his dog lick the salt from his hands, and he stayed this way, on all fours, until Lewis was saying, “Okay, okay, give me some time though, this can’t happen
right away, give me some time to figure this out, but, okay, yes, okay, eventually, when I feel the time is right, I’ll let you talk to the boy.”
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C h a p t e r T w e n t y - T h r e e
Jesse
The nights were merciless, the air still and heavy. Jesse felt the
blood slow in his veins. His feet swelled. His crotch itched ter-
ribly. Some sort of scaly looking thing was growing in the space
between his right testicle and thigh. He locked himself in the bath-
room, poked at it with tweezers, tried to cut it off with his mother’s tiny sewing scissors, poured Listerine over the wound and covered it
with a paper towel.
The woman’s face was all over the news since her body had been
found. Photos of the woman’s husband, too, a large-bellied man. He
was as pale as a zombie. Jesse dreamed that the man was going to
hunt him down in the night and eat his body. He dreamed that the
man was a great white whale with five hundred teeth. Some nights he
hoped that the man would come and eat him, and he left his window
open. He waited and waited but nobody came.
It was a good story, the one he and his mother had made up. The
dog jumped out of the car and the woman ran after him, into the woods.
I never saw her again. My father never saw her either. He found me in the parking lot and then we drove home. Dmitri was too young to contradict Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 172
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the story—he hadn’t seen the woman anyway, so it didn’t matter what
he said. And it had worked. And so what if her body had been found?
It wasn’t like his father had shot her.
Still, he dreamed of the woman at night, dreamed that they were
swimming together but then she would start sinking and he would
look down and see that her legs were encased in blocks of concrete.
Or he dreamed he was in line to get tickets for a movie and when he
stepped up to the cashier’s window, it was her, and she would reach
for him with cold, black limbs. He woke crying so hard from these
dreams that his pillowcase was wet and he was so congested he could
barely breathe.
His brother came home from San Garcia. Holly was the one who dropped him off—who knows where his father was. Maybe still
down there. His mother was on the beach with the policeman, so
Jesse put his hands on Dmitri’s shoulders and examined his brother.
His brother needed a bath, a change of clothes, and a good night’s
sleep, but seemed all right. “Was it okay?” he whispered in his broth-er’s ear. He wasn’t sure whether he was sad that he had not come
along, or relieved.
“Yeah,” said Dmitri. “We saw some flying people.”
“What are you talking about? How’s Dad?”
“Dunno. Fine.”
He led Dmitri into the bathroom and they watched as the tub
filled with water. His brother took off his dirty clothes and Jesse
looked over his body, the backs of his thighs, his butt. His brother’s skin was smooth and untouched.
“Hop in,” Jesse said, testing the water. His brother moved slowly
into the tub, heavy with fatigue, and Jesse handed him a washcloth to hold over his eyes while he shampooed his hair. He made two small
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tufts like devil horns, then handed Dmitri one of his mother’s com-
pact mirrors so he could see what he’d done.
“Give me a mohawk,” Dmitri said. And so Jesse gathered his hair
into the centre of his head and spiked it. “Good,” said Dmitri. His
eyes were blinking rapidly, trying to stay open, and so Jesse moved
the washcloth once again over his eyes, tipped his brother’s head back toward the faucet, and rinsed his hair. He ran the slippery bar of soap over Dmitri quickly, not skipping over his brother’s private parts like he used to but washing everything with a businesslike efficiency. He
felt no urge to pinch his brother, or to pull his hair. No urge to make his eyes sting with soap or shampoo. He pulled the stopper and
wrapped his brother in a big red towel. They both liked to watch the
water spiral down the drain and so they stood a moment, staring into
the bathtub, waiting for the final loud glug as the tub swallowed the last of the water.
“Brush your teeth,” Jesse said to Dmitri and passed him his tooth-
brush.
“That’s your toothbrush.”
“I don’t know where yours is. Use mine.” While Dmitri brushed
his teeth, Jesse searched Dmitri’s drawers for clean pyjamas. But the laundry hadn’t been done and there was nothing clean for his brother
to wear. Dmitri’s bed was made, thank heavens, and so Jesse found a
pair of sweatpants and held them out for his brother and then tucked
him into the bed. He lowered the blinds and turned on their night
light. Somewhere outside, a car drove by.
“Who’s that,” whispered Dmitri.
“Shh,” said Jesse. “It’s no one.” For the first time in weeks, the
wind picked up and rattled the windows.
“Where’s Mom?”
“At the beach. She thought you were coming home later.”
He wished his brother were older, so he could tell him that his
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mother was on a date with the policeman who had been in their
house. He didn’t know how he felt about it. He wished someone else,
someone older, were there to tell him how to feel. He liked the policeman. He liked him a lot. And he could tell his mother liked him, too.
And yet. Would they have to keep the secret forever? His mother told
him to forget about it, to act natural. She told him that he would
have a happy life. And that she wanted to be happy, too.
Dmitri’s eyelids fluttered and he reached for his bear, but it wasn’t in the bed. “Where’s Brownie?”
Jesse glanced around, then darted into the living room, where he
found the bear in the bottom of Dmitri’s little suitcase.
“He almost suffocated,” said Jesse, and tucked him in with Dmitri
but his little brother was already asleep. He watched him for a very
long time.
When he was sure Dmitri wouldn’t wake, he walked into the
bathroom. He kept a stash of birthday candles, an empty jam jar, and
a pack of matches in a plastic bag taped under the sink. Three or four lit candles, dropped into the jar, were best. It was a special, secret task reserved for nights like this, when he couldn’t sleep and couldn’t stand to listen to his brother’s innocent breathing.
He had seen a movie once that talked about damaged people, and
that adjective— damaged—had surprised him. What did you have to do to damage a person? Was he already a damaged person?
He lit the candles. He stared at his face in the mirror. Every part
of it. And then he narrowed in on his eyes. It took a while—a few
minutes—but gradually his face disappeared. The space around his
eyes grew black. It was as if he were descending into himself, as
though a sinkhole had opened up on the other side of the mirror.
His father said there was a deeper place within him, within his
thoughts, and it was a quiet place. A silent place. Jesse wanted so
badly to go there. He searched the blackness behind his eyes for that Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 175
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quiet place. He searched for a long time. He dove down through his
spinal cord and exited somewhere around his heart, floated around
in his lungs, tunnelled through his veins. He tried to search his
thoughts for the quiet place, but the inside of his skull was hollow, and because it was round there were no corners or shadows. Nowhere
for him to hide.
He went back into the bedroom and put his hand on the back of
his brother’s neck. It wasn’t Dmitri’s fault the woman had died. None of this was Dmitri’s fault.
He laid his head on his brother’s back and smelled the soap, the
laundry detergent on the sheets.
“Are you scared of me?” Jesse whispered. He wished he could take
back all the times he had been cruel to Dmitri. All the times he had
pinched him, dragged him around their bedroom by his ear, threat-
ened to rip Brownie into a million little pieces.
He wasn’t sure whether he wanted Dmitri to wake up or not, and
he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to his question. Still, he asked again: “Dmitri, are you scared of me?”
His brother turned to him. “Sometimes,” Dmitri said.
“Okay. Go back to sleep,” he said. “I love you. I do.”
Jesse felt it so strongly he couldn’t bear it. He wanted to tell his
brother about the woman at the lake. He wanted to tell someone,
anyone. It was so horrible that he didn’t like to think of it. It made him feel sick inside.
Someday he’d tell someone, but that day was not now.
He looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, then
down at his brother.
He stood and rocked back and forth on his heels. His face was red
and streaked with tears. He waited for a feeling of relief now that he was crying—but he felt nothing. A dullness perhaps. A sort of hollow
sound echoing around in his brain. His hands were shaking. From
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this moment forward, he would do everything right. There was no
room for new guilt of any kind.
The phone rang and he ran for it, desperate for it to be his father.
Tell me what to do.
But there was no one on the other end. Silence, then someone
breathing heavily, a click. He replaced the receiver and looked at the kitchen table, which was covered in sketches. His mother had started
drawing. She drew court jesters, women in gowns, men in tuxedos.
The drawings were beautiful—done in pencil and filled in with faint
watercolours. He stared at the pictures, which at that moment were
so lifelike he closed his eyes, terrified that they would start speaking.
The house was dark, silent except for the sound of the refrigera-
tor and the wind over the water. He prayed that his mother would
come home. She had said she’d only be gone an hour—she and the
policeman wanted to watch the sunset—but it felt like longer. He
prayed to hear her key in the door. When he was alone, he could feel
the woman everywhere. She was in the corner. She was in the walls.
She was in the closet. She was in the shadows. She was waiting for
him in his bed.
His father had told him that when he died he would find a way to
tell Jesse about the afterlife. They had made a pact. It would not be scary. It would not be a haunting. It would be a verification that his soul had not disintegrated, that life was not totally meaningless. That even after death, he was still there, here, there.
He had not seen his father since New Year’s Day. He wondered
when they would see each other again. And what they would say to
each other. It had been Jesse’s idea not to go to San Garcia. It didn’t seem possible to be in the same room as his father with what had happened hanging in the air between them.
Should he call the police, get it over with? He picked up the phone,
then put it down. He picked up the phone again. Tell me what to do.
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The sound of his mother’s key. The sound of the door opening. He
hid in the dark of the hallway and watched his mother and the police-
man in the doorway, the policeman’s hands on her lower back, sand
falling like rain from their bodies. He had watched his mother and
father kiss before, but this was a different sort of kissing, animal-like. If his mother and father had ever kissed like this, he had never seen it.
The policeman guided his mother through the doorway and shut the
door with his foot. He locked eyes with Jesse and they both froze.
“Hey,” the policeman said. He broke away from Jesse’s mother
and ran his hands through his hair. “Hey, man.”
“Hey,” said Jesse. He hoped the policeman couldn’t see his tears.
“Just saying goodnight.” The policeman opened the door and
stepped into the night air. “I’ll call you,” he said, and then he was gone.
Jesse ran to his mother, let her cup his face and kiss his wet cheeks.
“What’s the matter, baby?” she whispered, tak
ing him in her arms.
“She’s here,” he told his mother. “She’s here in the house with me.”
“Who is?” said his mother.
He could smell the policeman’s cologne on his mother’s dress. He
let himself go limp in his mother’s arms.
“Vera is,” said Jesse. “She’s everywhere.”
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V e r a
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She is not a man, and she is not a woman. Skin has grown over her eyes, over her mouth, her ears. Her body streamlines into something pale and cylindrical, cool to the touch. She stays in the troposphere for what might be minutes or years—decades, perhaps, eons
maybe—the clouds in her way, the rain soaking her, the sun’s heat on
her back, the earth five miles below. She feels the pull of time and
gravity and love and sorrow. A part of her is still human. She is
Denny’s wife, and her parents’ daughter. She is mother to no one but
her dog, nosing through the leaves in their backyard. She searches
her body for her hands, and finds them where they’ve always been,
at the ends of her arms. She can swim through the air. She breaks free of her cylindrical form and her hair streams out in all directions,
unbound by gravity.
“Denny, Denny,” she calls. But no one is up here. Up here she can
see the earth’s horizon, the sun and moon, the stars so bright she has to squint. She rolls on her back and stares at the underside of a cloud.
It is not how she imagined. It looks nothing like cotton candy. There is nothing soft about it. It is made up of a million jagged particles.
She grazes it with her foot, and it is as sharp as glass.
Although the earth is five miles below her, she can—somehow—
outstretch her hand and touch Scout’s back. Her touch is too light
for him to sense or feel, but she is there, ruffling his fur—and she can feel his undercoat, the warmth of his skin. She can feel Denny’s breath on her fingertips, feels the force of his breath on her skin when he
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cries. She wants to climb inside his mouth, but there are limits to
what she can do, even now. She presses her face to his face none-
theless, tries to pry apart his lips. I am here. Denny, I am here. Open your mouth, Denny, so I can slide down your throat.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC) Page 18
