Lake Life

by David James Poissant

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the difference between a hippo and a Zippo?”

  Michael smiles. Of course he’d know the punch line. He knows all his father’s jokes, but she can see he’s going to humor her.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “What is the difference between a hippo and a Zippo?”

  “The difference,” she says, before saying, “Shit.” She’s forgotten how it ends.

  Michael laughs. He pulls himself up and stands, hands on the exam table, laughing. She can’t remember the last time she heard him laugh, but the laughing loosens something in his mouth, then he’s choking, then spitting out a tooth. The tooth tumbles across the table and drops to the floor.

  “I failed to mention, I got punched in the face today,” he says.

  “Let me see,” she says.

  Michael retrieves the tooth for her, and she examines it. It’s a molar. To judge by the smooth, almost polished enamel of the crown, it’s one of the teeth he grinds at night. Somehow, the tooth has come out clean, the roots intact. She hands it back, and Michael tucks the tooth into his pocket.

  “Tell me,” she says. “How does the joke end?”

  “One’s heavy,” Michael says. He strokes her hair. He kisses her head. “And the other is a little lighter.”

  Then the woman in the white coat is back. A box sits in a wire basket by the door, and she pulls gloves from the box and stretches them over her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” Michael says. “Are you the doctor?”

  “Ultrasound technician,” the woman in the white coat says. “The doctor’s on the way.”

  She seats herself on a rolling stool and pulls several items from the drawers beneath the counter on the wall. When she turns, she holds a bottle. Diane knows from movies what comes next and lifts her shirt. Please, God, she thinks, wondering whether this is a meager prayer, or whether it’s the only honest one.

  “This won’t be fancy,” the technician says. “You want one of those 3-D imagings, you’ll have to go to Asheville or Atlanta.”

  A screen hangs on the wall just past Diane’s feet. What shows up there, or fails to show, will change her life.

  The technician holds the bottle over Diane’s belly, and gel uncoils, cold, translucent, from the tube. The gel is spread over her abdomen, then a device is lowered to her skin. The device looks like a computer mouse, the cord-free kind. The technician taps a few buttons on the machine by Diane’s head, and the screen on the far wall glows white, then black. Michael takes her hand. The black screen shivers, and suddenly the room is lit up with the image of her womb.

  The technician runs the mouse over Diane’s stomach, and there is a whooshing sound, like waves breaking on a distant shore. Water surrounds them. Water wraps the room.

  But what are they looking at? A flutter, movement, but nothing’s discernible. Nothing’s clear.

  Diane can’t breathe. The mouse travels her abdomen until she can’t take it anymore.

  “Is that it?” she asks.

  The technician smiles. “That’s them.”

  “Them?” Michael says.

  Diane searches the screen and sees not one shape, but two. As she watches, the shapes turn to bodies nuzzling.

  Her hand is released, and the table trembles with the weight of Michael catching himself, then holding himself up.

  “Twins,” the technician says. “Separate sacs, so fraternal, most likely. Too soon to say the sex. You’re definitely at ten weeks.” She pats Diane’s shoulder. “You can tell by the arm buds, the legs.”

  Buds. Diane pictures tulips trumpeting from flower beds, petals opening to taste the sun.

  “Twins?” Michael says.

  Before the technician can answer, a new sound fills the room.

  “What’s that?” he asks. He’s scared, and Diane loves him for it.

  “That,” the technician says, “is Baby A. Heartbeat is strong. One hundred and seventy-eight beats per minute.”

  “That’s good?” Michael asks.

  “One hundred and seventy-eight is perfect,” the technician says. “One hundred and seventy-eight is what we’re looking for.”

  She finds the second fetus. They wait. She moves the mouse in ever-widening circles, then steers it down Diane’s side, almost to her back.

  “What’s wrong?” Michael says.

  The technician says nothing. She returns the mouse to Diane’s stomach, and a heartbeat registers.

  “That’s Baby A again,” she says. “I think.”

  “You think?” Michael’s hands leave the table. “You think?” And he’s a father, just like that.

  Diane shuts her eyes. She feels the device’s slow slither over her. The room is quiet but for the hum of the machine. The sound is waves and she’s the shore.

  “Please,” Michael says.

  She wants to rise, to touch his face and tell him it’s okay, but there’s a chance, however small, that Baby B is well, the heartbeat strong. Until she knows, she will not move, won’t cough or curl a finger or open her eyes. She’ll lie forever on this table to hear her child’s heart hiccup to life.

  “Please,” Michael says.

  A drumstick strikes the air, prestissimo.

  “There we are,” the technician says. “Baby B.”

  Diane opens her eyes. Michael weeps.

  “Twins,” he says.

  “Twins,” she says.

  “Oh my God,” Michael says. “I’m going to have to sell a lot of shoes.”

  PART FOUR SUNDAY NIGHT

  37.

  Nico’s is crowded—the evening cool and cooling—bat-swoop and starlight, tree-sway and sliver-moon. Shrieks, laughs, owl song. A ricochet of children across the deck.

  It’s late for ice cream, but, dropping Michael and Diane off at home, Lisa suggested to Richard that the parents-to-be be given some space, which is how the grandparents-to-be wound up here.

  Ice cream cones in hand, Richard and Lisa cross the deck and head down the stairs.

  Under a tree, a boy strums a guitar. At a table, two girls examine each other’s sunburns, a bottle, aloe green, between them. Someone has planted tiki torches along the river’s mossy bank. Citronella-scented, the torches cast a flickering light onto the patio, its benches bolted to tables that remind Richard of the picnic tables at state parks.

  One table is empty, and Richard sits. Overhead, between the deck slats, he spies sneaker tread, a dog’s paw, a nickel that hangs wedged between two boards. If he stood and stretched, he might be able to tug the nickel free. He imagines doing so, imagines, absurdly, everything above following in the nickel’s wake—deck, bodies, shoes—as though the coin held it all in place.

  He licks the ice cream, and his heart beats with all he’s learned today, with all he wants to say. His wife watches the river, and Richard watches her.

  He’d been so angry at the hospital, had felt untrusted, unloved, to learn he was the only one who hadn’t known about the pregnancy. Then Michael stepped into the waiting room. Diane was well. Not only that, Richard would be a grandfather. To twins. In that instant, whatever resentment had been barnacling his heart was scraped away.

  Still, the body in the water. He can’t shake the image of the boy from earlier today, how pale the skin had turned with bloat.

  “Honey,” Lisa says. “Are you all right?” Her eyes have left the river to search his face.

  “I’m fine,” he says. His grief is his business. What goes on inside him has never come with a show. They almost divorced over this, long ago, when Lisa felt he wasn’t sorrowful enough from losing June. But there’s no wrong way to grieve. They learned that together, started over, bought a summer home, and, in this way, stayed husband and wife.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Lisa says. “I wanted Michael or Diane to tell you first. Honestly, I’ve only known a day.”

  “It’s fine,” he says. “I’m fine.” A rivulet of ice cream runs down the cone, and he licks his hand.


  “Just know, it wasn’t you specifically,” she says. “They weren’t planning on telling anyone until they were sure they were keeping it.”

  “Keeping it?”

  “I mean—”

  “No. That’s absurd. Married people don’t get abortions.”

  Lisa’s always said that, for someone so smart, Richard can be awfully dense, and the look on her face reminds him that there’s much about the world he doesn’t understand.

  “Married people get abortions for any number of reasons,” she says.

  “No one I know.”

  “Plenty you know. You just don’t know you know.”

  Halfway through his scoop, he’s had enough, but he keeps licking, just to keep the cream from running down his arm.

  At another table, a blue-haired boy, nine or ten years old, taps on a phone. His mother and father flank him, eating ice cream from pink Nico’s bowls with plastic spoons. The boy with blue hair asks for more ice cream, and his parents ignore him. He asks again, this time more loudly, and his parents tell him no.

  “They found him,” Richard says.

  “Found who?” Lisa asks, but he doesn’t have to answer, and she doesn’t have to ask again. “Oh, God.”

  “I tried to tell the parents. I thought it might be easier coming from someone who understands, someone not in uniform. But the police beat me there.”

  “You were there? You saw the body?”

  Richard nods. He’s sick of ice cream. His tongue is numb. His hand is cold.

  Two tables away, the boy with blue hair demands more ice cream, now. A commotion, raised voices, and soon, the boy and his father are arguing.

  “Fuck you,” the boy says.

  “Liam!” the mother screams.

  Richard doesn’t mean to laugh, but this night, this weekend, it’s all become a bit too much.

  “Fuck you,” the boy yells at his mother, then, across the patio at Richard, “Fuck you too!”

  At this, the boy’s father stands, wrenches the phone from his son’s hand, and flings it, the phone following an arc that ends underwater. The boy with blue hair screams and runs to the riverbank.

  By now, the din above deck has died down. Everyone’s attention is on the river, the boy. The boy turns. His hands are fists. Tears fatten his face. “Fuck you all!”

  His parents watch from behind their ice cream bowls, unmoved. But when the boy takes off, heads upstairs, and runs across the deck, the parents stand and hurry up the stairs. Then they’re gone. The conversations at tables start up again. The boy under the tree again plays his guitar.

  “That was exciting,” Lisa says.

  At the other table, the ice cream dishes sit, still mostly full. Richard wonders whether the parents will come back for them, or whether they’ll be too embarrassed to return.

  “Do you think they have any idea what they’re getting into?” he asks.

  “I’m sure that’s not the first time he’s acted out.”

  “Michael and Diane, I mean. Do you think they’re ready for that?”

  “Nobody’s ready for that.”

  “Were we ready?” he asks, regretting the words the second they’ve left his lips.

  “What are you asking me, Richard?”

  He has a choice, backpedal or forge ahead. “We were married, what, a year? Sometimes I wonder if we had kids too quick.”

  Lisa’s been licking her ice cream. Now she lowers her cone. “That’s like saying you wish June were never born.”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  Though some days he would, would trade the nightmares, anguish beyond compare, would trade away that month of love for a sense of peace, for three decades of uninterrupted sleep.

  “What are you saying?” Lisa says.

  He doesn’t know. He’s tired. He’s sad. He wants to go home.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  At the hospital, when Diane placed the printout in his hand, why had it made him, however briefly, dreamily, enraged? For an hour he’s wondered this, and now he knows. Because she gets two, and he didn’t even get to keep his first. And to think she might have thrown those two away.

  “Talk to me,” Lisa says. “Tell me what you mean.”

  Richard tries to speak and can’t. He’s tired, body heavy with the weight of all he cannot say. He stands. His legs ache, but he moves to a garbage bin and disposes of the ice cream cone before returning to the table.

  “Darling?” Lisa says.

  The table is cast aluminum, its grillwork sheathed in plastic coating, and it’s on this surface that Lisa rests her left hand. She’s not a jewelry person, but she’s always worn a wedding band and the engagement ring with which Richard proposed. The diamond was his grandmother’s. It’s small, but it’s been in his family for five generations. The thought of telling Lisa what he’s done, of watching her remove that ring, it’s unimaginable to him. But the thought of living this way another day is more than he can stand.

  “Why are you torturing me?” he says.

  He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t have to. He’s not some petulant, blue-haired boy. He’s a man old enough to know that his role in this universe is miniscule, small enough to be incalculable. He’s solved equations, proposed some theories that will collapse or rise with time. Making the woman across the table from him happy, loving her and being loved in return, that’s his life’s last goal. But he can’t do it alone.

  Their eyes meet, and he’s known this woman longer than he hasn’t. There won’t be a showdown. No yelling or screaming. They aren’t those people.

  “Once we’ve liquidated,” he says, “both houses sold, what’s your plan?”

  “My plan?”

  “Are you planning to leave me, or not?”

  “Leave you?”

  Her ice cream cone tips from her hand onto the table, where it splatters and drips to the ground below. She shuts her eyes. Her fingers grip the tabletop.

  “How did you know?” he says.

  Her head turns. She’s listening to the river. “She could never tie a tie like me.”

  Richard scoops up her ice cream, walks it to the trash, and takes his seat again.

  “Whatever you do to me, I deserve it,” he says.

  “Who knows what anyone deserves. I only know what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “For what happened not to have happened. Short of that, I’d like us to find a way forward. Would you like to find a way forward with me, Richard?”

  “Of course. Of course I would.”

  Her eyes open. She’s calm.

  “Was she underage?”

  “No.”

  “Was she a student?”

  “No.”

  “Good, then I don’t want to know. You feel the need to get it off your chest, tell someone else. You made your choice. You don’t get to burden me with the details.”

  Lisa’s arm crosses the table, the ice cream puddle, and she takes his hand.

  “How do we move forward?” he asks.

  “We keep going. That’s the only way. We just go on.”

  “Like it never happened?” he says.

  “Of course not. It will always be there, what you did. I hate you for it. But I love you too. I’m learning to love you and hate you at the same time.”

  For a year he’s longed for absolution. But this is better. This is marriage. This is love. Love is dragging things behind you—dead children, houses fallen into disrepair, infidelities lassoed to your back—and continuing on.

  He wants to tell her his theory on this, but he’s been expounding on his theories to her for decades. Better to shut his mouth. Better to spend their last years listening, or learning to.

  “I feel like you’re letting me off too easy,” he says.

  Lisa smiles. “I am.”

  She watches the water. Somewhere in that river is a phone.

  “It doesn’t have to be Florida,” she says.

 
“No,” he says. “Florida’s fine.”

  She lets go of his hand. She lifts her arm and sees the mess the ice cream’s made.

  “You remember what you said when we met?” he asks. “I introduced myself. I said, ‘I’m Richard Starling,’ and you said, ‘Starlings are terrible birds.’ ”

  Lisa nods. “They are. They’re invasive, non-natives. They tear up farms and fill fields with their droppings. They kill other birds and steal their nests. But they make gorgeous formations, I’ll give them that. Those patterns you see, like fish schooling in the sky? That’s them. A murmuration of starlings. Still, awful birds. I thought about not taking your last name.”

  She smiles. She stands.

  He wants to say he’s sorry for what he’s done, but the time for apologies has passed. He stands, and Lisa moves into his arms.

  “Hey,” she says, “we’re going to be grandparents.”

  His turn to smile. He smiles holding his wife, smiles watching her climb the stairs to find napkins to clean her arm, smiles following the gravel path to the river’s edge.

  And that’s when Richard sees it, by torchlight, the reflection. Underwater, lodged between two rocks, the boy’s phone glows. A video game that will never be finished is on pause, a little man suspended, mid-jump. He hovers, ready to crush his enemy, waiting to land. He’ll hang there, Richard thinks, midair, until the phone dies or the current carries him away.

  38.

  Thad drives, the hospital behind them, high beams on and one eye out for deer.

  They’re close to home, crossing the bridge, the dam that keeps Lake Christopher’s water level in check, when he steers the car into the crumbly, light pole–lined parking lot that overlooks the ravine. At the lot’s perimeter, a handful of shut-up shops disintegrate into brick and dust, particleboard rectangles warped by rain in window frames. Down the street, the new RaceTrac, Pizza Hut, and Walgreens that put these mom-and-pop shops out of business gleam their neon gleams.

  “Why are we here?” Jake asks.

  Thad parks and leaves the car. He walks to the guardrail that holds the parking lot back from the ravine overlooking the dam. To the west, the lake is glass. To the east, the craggy valley floor is rubble and rock. The dam leans between, a tower of cement hundreds of feet high. Insects whine. It’s a clear night, everything starlit: the bridge, the railing, the ravine. The guardrail is the highway kind, corrugated with rivets, scars where skidding cars have been repelled. Every dent is a car kept out of the air, every scrape a heart still pumping blood behind a wall of ribs.