Lake People

by Abi Maxwell

  None of them ever spoke of it. Those beasts finished their walk along the track and Alice and Martha and the children rose.

  On their walk home the ice stopped shooting in pellets and instead fell straight down upon them, as though whatever valve there had been in the sky had broken. Already the road was glazed over. Power would soon be out. Over at the mill, no, they could not be working. Ronny would be on his way home, or already there. Of course Martha realized this, too—probably even the children did. Together they locked arms and slid their way downward.

  But Martha made it home fine, back in time with what looked like nothing to worry over. And it was then, alone, that Alice felt pure joy. Ahead of her in the falling ice she saw a light. She didn’t identify it as a vehicle, a truck. It was the leader of those beasts, with a small, contained light hanging from its great neck. Look at it sway slowly in the cold night. It had come for Alice and Alice had not been afraid.

  Why, at that precise time, when the truck sped her way, was Josh called out into the night to find her? Alice would never ask him. Yet whatever it was that had inexplicably compelled him was surely connected to the piece of her heart that would break clear through by the time the ice storm was over and Josh was gone.

  It was Ronny in the truck that sped up and ran right into her, of course it was. Josh insisted it was not a mistake but how could Alice tell? That sore hip she’d had all winter—what did she know about mistake or purpose? After the disappearance of the light Alice’s memory did not restart until there was nothing but the falling sky above her and a faint cry of a loon in the distance. She thought she had died. She thought even that it was some creature from another world that wrapped his arms around her and carried her home. It wasn’t until he had set her in the bathtub that Alice knew it was Josh who saved her. He turned the water on and when it filled he slowly removed all her clothing. And even then he had done something for laughter, or at least she thought that’s what the intent had been. In all his clothing he stepped into the bathtub with her, and laid his legs up the sides of her naked body. With her like that, Josh stayed until she was ready to fall asleep.

  By morning the power had gone out, which meant the water, too. For one week that ice fell. Birds caught their feet in it and died that way, frozen to the ground. Trees were covered with a suffocating layer of ice more than an inch thick. Even people died, the old and frail without wood heat. Alice worried that Martha’s family would not make it, but in this ice and sore as she was, Alice had no way of checking in on Martha. It took a week anyway for Alice to walk again. When she did finally emerge from bed and down the stairs, Josh opened his arms and took her in and she knew then that he was leaving.

  Which he did, quick as that. During the storm, while she lay in bed, he had fixed her car for her and packed his own things. All that commotion, she thought he was cleaning up, rearranging. She thought he was just trying to keep warm. But there his truck was, loaded up in the dim purple morning. The sun had not yet risen when he walked out. It would take five days to drive back to the place he had come from.

  How long did Alice sit alone in front of that woodstove? When the sun fell into her lap she went out. The storm had ended and those rays of light now transformed the frozen trees into fountains. Water poured down in great streams. Light bounced and caught until it was a kaleidoscope of a world. And there Alice stood within it, unexpectedly embraced.

  In another day she walked the gully up to Martha’s house. Without setting foot on the porch she could already tell that no one was inside. Not that anything looked different—the curtains had always been pulled, and there was rarely a car in the drive. Perhaps it was the silence spread round the place. Alice went onto the porch and knocked, then moved over to the window and knocked there, too. She should have been afraid. To die, yes, or to discover Martha’s family dead. She imagined that, briefly, Ronny shooting his wife and then his children and finally shooting himself. Alice turned the doorknob and the door fell open.

  Twice Alice called Martha’s name, and then the children’s, and finally she called for Ronny. “Ronny?” she said. “Ronny, I’m not afraid of you.” When she had been through the entire house she went to the phone. Taped there beside it was a list, police and fire department, that sort of thing. If Martha had been allowed, Alice’s number probably would have appeared there. The school number was there, though, and Alice called that up, found out that Christy and Jason were not in today. But school had been shut down for the length of the ice storm, so it was impossible to know how long they had been gone.

  Ronny’s work number was posted, too.

  “He done gone,” the man said.

  “Sorry?”

  “You find him you tell him to get his ass to work.”

  Alice hung up the telephone and walked slowly through the house, opening the curtains of every single window. A little light, that was better. Martha had made this place a comfortable home. Above the sink she kept a line of glass animal figurines, and at the end of it one rock, upon which someone had painted “Pet Rock.” Throughout the house were more figurines, glass or porcelain, mostly of animals but some of ballerinas. By the couch was a table, and upon it, arranged perfectly straight, sat one TV guide and the remote control. There was a drawer in that table, and Alice opened it. Within was a small pink journal with a picture of a panda bear on the front. “My Diary,” it read. Keeping it shut was a small metal lock attached to the front and back cover. Briefly Alice looked for the key, but ended up tearing the lock from the cover and opening the book. She had thought it would be Christy’s—Alice had not considered that the diary would belong to Martha. From it a folded piece of paper fell to the floor. The map for seeing the ghost of the train—Martha had said she and her son had made that. It was drawn in crayon, and so detailed that Martha’s and even Alice’s house was marked. In the bottom left corner was a box labeled “Key”: Up to end of our road. Before road meets Perkins you turn in left, step over stone wall. Back way into woods, up and up and then you come to an edge you look down into a gully. Down there them old train tracks to run right into town. IMPORTANT: Full moon at midnight you see it! And in the bottom right corner, This detailed map by Jason and Martha Paquette (Missy Mom).

  Alice folded the map and tucked it into the back flap of the diary, but then reconsidered and put it into her own pocket. Then she flipped through the diary. The pages were predated from years back, but with a black marker Martha had crossed out each incorrect day of the week and replaced it with this year’s correct one. On days she didn’t write in the journal, Martha simply left the page—with the correct date—blank.

  SATURDAY, MAY 2: Macaroni and Cheese for dinner.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21: Christy says she got a solo in the chorus! I says Christy I promise I will hear you sing your solo. I just can’t believe it! I tell her that all my life I wants to sing a solo in the chorus! Can you believe it?

  Alice skipped ahead to when they had met. Here her own name appeared day after day. MONDAY, OCTOBER 19: Talked to Alice today.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20: Alice my best friend says I am a funny person!

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16: I been noticing my friend Alice’s hands, she got Hill hands just like me. My mom always says you want to know a Hill you just look at her hands. Then I get to thinking and I know one thing, God forgive me for writing it down, us Hills and them Wickholms have a secret child from my disappeared cousin Jennifer Hill and their dead son, I don’t know his name. That baby’s been adopted and kept a big secret but then I get to looking at Alice’s hands and I start thinking and I just have this feeling, forgive me if I am wrong, Alice, the secret is you!

  That entry Alice read twice, slowly, tracing her finger over the words. Hill hands. Of course it might not be true—that thought she had to reach out and grab, then coax back into her mind. But more present was this other one, the one where she could finally hear a sound that had always been playing. She reread the passage one final time, memorizing it, and then flipped fo
rward, found the last entry. It was dated a week ago, when they had gone to the tracks. This page Martha had filled in with the smallest of letters, all the details of their plan and everything she thought might happen there. Alice skimmed the page and then flipped back one more day.

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13: Finally I dared ask my best friend Alice why she limps and she says she got a bad hip and I ask her how she has a bad hip when she’s not even thirty, does it run in the family? You know what? She says her husband pushed her straight down the stairs. Then she says no, it weren’t on purpose. I says Alice, but then what? She admits something worse. She says when she fell she’d been carrying, but not no more. I says, does he love you? She says yes. Does he tell you he loves you? (How’d I know to ask that?!) And you know what, she says he ain’t once said that. Alice! I say. Alice, that’s your husband! She says “Martha” in that way she can say my name so I just slap her back and say it don’t matter. He made a mistake, I say, that’s the truth any way you look at it.

  Alice considered taking the journal with her. She even put it in her pocket, for she knew the police would show up eventually, and she didn’t want them reading it. But still she opened the small drawer and put it back in, the lock affixed as much as it could be. She pushed the drawer shut with care. “Martha?” she called one more time. In the kitchen she went back to the phone. Martha at four a.m. needing salt. Martha at six needs milk, too. I forgot to give Christy her cookies, you think you can run over to the school, just leave them in the office with the secretary?

  “I don’t like the way that woman treats you,” Josh had said. Well, no matter. Now they both were gone. Alice called the police and said that her dear friend Martha had disappeared.

  Alice lost count of days as she stayed on in Josh’s lonely place. At the start, with buckets of steaming water she scrubbed the house clean. Hours she worked at it, with hardly a rest. At night she would crawl into bed and take the novel she was reading from under her pillow and in spite of herself she would feel something like satisfaction. Not that her heart wasn’t broken clear through—just that in moments that solitude came to her so clean and arranged. Other times as she drove to the store or the library she would wonder what it might mean to drive straight off the cliff. She had no concept of how long she could last in this abandoned place, or of who might come to kick her out. Her savings were nearly half gone, and often she thought that she ought to pack her bags and head for her father’s in Kettleborough. But something kept her waiting. That view of the mountains in the distance—winter had passed its peak by now but would have one more soft, deep snow before ending. In spring how green it all would be. When bills came she followed the same rule she always had—they were in Josh’s name, she did not open them. Once in a while the telephone rang, and certainly a piece of Alice would wish wildly that Josh would be on the other end of the line. But then the person she allowed herself to expect was always Martha. Of course neither one ever called.

  Josh did send one postcard, though. The picture—sent from him, so clearly a joke—showed a stretch of parking lot and a large industrial building. The words on the back could have been written to anyone, from anyone. Alice was not in the mood to laugh. She put it back in the mailbox and she waited for a ring of bare ground to form beneath the trees. This came first. The rest of the ground still had a hard, dirty layer of snow atop it. But here was earth, musty and thick. And pine needles, their contrasting greens a blessing upon the melting snow. Her bags were already packed. She phoned her father but could not bear to admit the truth. Instead she said that she and her husband would be traveling for the summer. I will be out of touch, she said. When Alice could take a handful of dirt from beneath any one of the trees in the flat yard and let it sift down through her fingers, she left that cold place on her own.

  The Village

  1982

  IN THAT FAR-OFF village that lay on the top of the cliff, visitors would be told only that whales could be seen. Scarcely anything else was ever said of the place. To the east, Newfoundland could be spotted in the distance, and the drop from the village to the ocean was at least eighty feet. The lush green forest and mountain looked the same as they had for hundreds of years, as did the cliff and ocean. The man who ran the campground would in time pass it on to his son, as his father and his father before that had done. Now the man was nearing seventy and with the tourists he kept his mouth shut most of the time.

  “Whales,” he said, and also, “Bundle of wood five dollars,” or whatever the price might be that year, and “Don’t move the picnic tables,” and “Emergency brake please.”

  There wasn’t much privacy there and each year the stretch of grass got more and more crowded, but the beauty of the cove, people came and loved it all the same.

  In that place there lived only one outsider, and she never did say where she was from. She claimed her name was Cici, and people understood that she must have had some trouble. She’s so beautiful, they would say. Why would she come here alone? She had arrived in the midst of her twenties, dressed in brighter clothing than anyone from around there wore. That was more than twenty years ago. Back then she had attempted to befriend people, she brought flowers on May Day and she picked apples from all the wild trees she could find and then she tracked down a press and invited the village over for a cider party. People showed up to these sorts of events because they were curious about her. Her earrings dangled down to her chin and for a necklace she wore an oyster shell large as a hand.

  “Whales,” she said when people asked her why she had come. “Whales, of course, why else do people come here?”

  “She must be rich,” they said to one another, and in comparison she certainly was. None of these people would move from the land their great-great-grandfathers had settled, not unless it was for a thing like marriage. But back then she really hadn’t had much money, and nearly all she had saved—three thousand dollars—had been spent on the trailer that she would, in later years, convert to a real house. She had no car. Oscar had been coming back from the city when he picked her up on the road. He liked to think that if it had not been for him she would not have stayed, which certainly might have been true. Oscar was a little different from most people in the cove: thanks to his grandmother he had been to college, and now together he and Cici could talk about Rilke and Keats and the greater world.

  Back then, Cici had volunteered at the schoolhouse, teaching the little children. They had never known an outsider before, and they giggled at the way her accent was so very different from their own, but still she was able to teach them to read smoothly and with pleasure. She let them sit on her lap, she braided the girls’ hair, she laughed. The children loved her and she loved them and in time the head teacher retired and Cici took over.

  Some days, the children wanted to go down to the beach. There they would lay dried seaweed on the sand and run back and forth over it and as the bells on the buoys echoed the children would shout, “The monsters are here, the monsters are here!” One day a girl began to talk about the van that had fallen over the ledge and now rested in the water.

  “I don’t know, maybe forever ago.”

  The girl said that the baby had died and the parents had left and now there was the ghost of the baby living in the van in their cove. That was why there were so many whales. They kept watch.

  “It’s true,” the other children said. Their parents had told them the very same thing. Cici hadn’t heard this version before.

  “The baby didn’t die down there,” she said, and she took them away from the beach.

  When Alice knocked on Cici’s door, Cici was in her mid-forties. The girl would be twenty-four this fall, Cici knew.

  “Yes?” Cici said shamelessly, her face revealing not an ounce of recognition. And Alice, too, revealed nothing. It was Sunday and the rain had finally quit and now sunlight poured into her small house so intensely that Cici had to grip the doorframe to keep herself from tipping over. That other life she had had.

 
Back in the days of Mike Shaw, when Alice was sixteen, she had asked her father for more details about this woman. He had let out a long breath, almost like a whistle, rubbed his rough hands together as though to gather warmth, and then walked to his closet and taken an old map from the top shelf. He spread it on his bed and pointed to an unmarked spot in the eastern reaches of Canada. The place he suspected she would be. My wife, he had said, and then, your mother. Alice had clung to that word, mother, but it wasn’t until she drove away from Josh’s empty house that she found the courage to keep heading north and east until she landed at this remote point. Because now, with scarcely anything left inside of her, how much more could she lose? She had meant to ask questions: Did you love me? Why did you leave us? And finally, Am I really yours? Instead she said only, “I’m sorry. The man at the campground told me to come here. He said you know something about whales.”

  That was true. Her shelves were lined with books about them; each time a family went south to the city she would send them with money to bring back one more book. She could say what kind of whale rose from the water when; she said she recognized each individual whale and knew how long it had been returning to the cove.

  A foghorn sounded. That would be Oscar out on his boat, sending his ritual hello. Cici crossed the room, went to the porch, and gave a broad wave. When she turned back around, the girl was in the living room, looking at the walls. They were covered with paintings that Cici had collected over the years. Most were done by Oscar’s sister, who painted brave, colorful pieces on oversized canvases. She hadn’t had an ounce of training and for Cici this made the bravery of the paintings even stronger. The one the girl looked at now was Cici’s favorite. It was of a whale but it had a block-like quality to it, a child could have painted it, and it was so large that it overtook nearly an entire wall. Cici suddenly knew she was going to vomit.