How a Woman Becomes a Lake Read online

  ALSO BY MARJORIE CELONA

  Y

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Marjorie Celona

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: How a woman becomes a lake / Marjorie Celona.

  Names: Celona, Marjorie, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190142138 | Canadiana (print) 20190142170 | Canadiana (ebook)

  20190142170 | ISBN 9780735235823 (softcover) | ISBN 9780735235830 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8605.E48 H69 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780735235830

  Cover design: Hannah Wood

  Cover image: Magdalena Wasiczek / Trevillion Images

  v5.4

  a

  for B, E, and BLT

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Marjorie Celona

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  January 1986

  Chapter One: Lewis

  Chapter Two: Jesse

  Chapter Three: Denny

  Chapter Four: Evelina

  Chapter Five: Leo

  Chapter Six: Jesse

  Chapter Seven: Denny

  Chapter Eight: Dmitri

  Chapter Nine: Evelina

  Chapter Ten: Denny

  Chapter Eleven: Evelina

  Chapter Twelve: Lewis

  Chapter Thirteen: Leo

  Chapter Fourteen: Jesse

  Chapter Fifteen: Leo

  Vera

  April 1986

  Chapter Sixteen: Denny

  Chapter Seventeen: Dmitri

  Chapter Eighteen: Denny

  Chapter Nineteen: Lewis

  Chapter Twenty: Evelina

  Chapter Twenty-One: Lewis

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Denny

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Jesse

  Vera

  September 1986

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Evelina

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Jesse

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Lewis

  Vera

  January 1986

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Jesse

  January 1987

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Lewis

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Leo

  2020

  Chapter Thirty: Evelina

  Acknowledgements

  JANUARY 1986

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lewis

  He found the car in the second parking lot at Squire Point, doors splayed, engine on. It was a fancy car—something Lewis Côté could never dream of owning. He climbed into the driver’s seat, scanned the expensive leather, ran his hands over the plush black steering wheel, and took the keys out of the ignition. Through the car’s open doors, the snow fell around him, landed on his thighs, and blew into his hair. Someone had drawn a pattern in the condensation on the passenger side window—crosshatches, as if to play tic-tac-toe. Lewis rooted through the glove compartment, checked under the seats, spun around. The back seat was covered in grey and white dog hair, so Lewis whistled and clapped, and after a few minutes a nice-looking dog—a husky, perhaps—emerged from the woods, its fur caked with snow.

  “Hey, boy,” Lewis said, patting the dog’s head and letting it lick his hands. “Help me out here.”

  They walked together, Lewis having fashioned a makeshift leash from a rope he had in the trunk of his patrol car. The trail was icy and Lewis’s boots slid out from under him. He walked like a duck to keep his balance. The cold air slivered his lungs. There was no reason to draw his gun, but his free hand hovered by his hip, in case.

  An hour ago, a woman named Vera Gusev had called the station from the Squire Point pay phone, saying that she had found a little boy. She was at the second parking lot, she said, the boy keeping warm in her car. He had been separated from his father in the woods and was cold but fine—and that was all she said. The sound of her dropping the receiver, it clanging off the side of the phone booth, a muffled cry that could have been “hey” or “wait,” then nothing. Lewis had driven cautiously to the scene, the roads slick. New Year’s Day was a quiet one on the job, everyone asleep, hung over, or in jail from whatever nonsense they’d gotten up to the night before. He cursed himself now for taking his time.

  When had it ever been this cold? The blizzard had come at the end of November, blanketing the whole region, and then the temperature had plunged. All anyone could talk about was the weather. Not in eighty years had so much snow fallen. Most people in Whale Bay didn’t even own proper winter coats. Usually it snowed once or twice a year, an inch or two, and melted by the morning. The blizzard was fun at first. School cancelled; everyone out walking. The army was called in to salt the roads. No plows—there wasn’t money for that. Anyone from the East Coast—or the Midwest, as was the case with Lewis—thought this was a non-event, silly even. The high comedy of shovelling a driveway with a cookie sheet, a casserole dish, the lid of a garbage can. The snow was so high that children knocked down foot-long icicles from the street lights and used them as swords.

  Only one death so far: a man whose car had filled with carbon monoxide as he waited for his windshield to defrost, the tailpipe clogged with snow. There wasn’t much sympathy for him. Should’ve known better. Maybe suicide then. A homeless man had almost died of hypothermia, but was fine—had been interviewed by the local news while eating a dish of ice cream in his hospital bed.

  Of course, the requisite traffic accidents and power outages. A fist fight in a grocery store over the last carton of milk. Some looting. A collapsed roof, a destroyed greenhouse. Mostly, though, the eerie silence that accompanies so much snow, and the inevitable camaraderie from enduring an out-of-the-ordinary event. A return to kindness, Lewis thought. The simplicity of survival. He had missed the snow.

  He was twenty-four, attractive yet baby-faced, unmarried and without children—still a boy in some ways, even though he carried a baton and a gun. He got a little thrill when he told people what he did for a living. “So young!” they said and he wanted to say, “Do you think I haven’t paid my dues? Do you think I don’t deserve it?” He wondered when he would stop being young. When he would cease to be the baby of the department. When all the joshing, the incessant joking around about his boyish looks, would stop. He felt himself to be a deeply earnest person. A good person. Even as a boy, he had a knack for reading people, a skill he attributed to his father, who was crazy in an invisible, functional way, so that Lewis had spent much of his life trying to piece together what had made his childhood so fraught, and why as a ch
ild he had been so nervous and unhappy. His mother had died so long ago that he had almost no memories of her, but there was an uncle he planned to contact someday, who he hoped could provide answers. But Lewis hadn’t gotten around to it yet. It seemed like such a huge undertaking: to go after the truth like that.

  It was snowing again. It had been snowing all day and the forest was silent except for Lewis’s footfalls and the heavy panting of the dog. The dog pulled hard on the leash and Lewis had to brace himself on a tree trunk so he wouldn’t spill forward.

  “Whoa, boy,” he said, then again more forcefully, snapping the leash a bit. But the dog was unrelenting and led him off the trail and into the woods. The snow fogged his glasses and Lewis could taste it on his lips, metallic and cold. He hoped he wasn’t about to uncover some grisly scene, though he did feel something bubbling up within him, something like excitement. He looked behind him, trying to memorize his way back to the trail. Squire Point was a confusing place. There were two parking lots with trailheads—both led to a large reservoir with a swimming hole that locals called “the lake”; the second trail cut through a small campground. The trails were unmarked and it was easy to go in circles. People often got lost, but all were usually found within a few hours. There were only so many ways a person could go.

  “Vera Gusev? Hello?”

  Why come out here in such bad conditions? Why not stay home? The dog leapt over a fallen tree and Lewis scrambled over it, caught his pant leg on a branch. He felt the snow creep into his socks, cold water between his toes. His hands burned. He passed the abandoned campground, and then he and the dog were standing at the edge of the lake, frozen over and covered with a dusting of snow. The dog whined and pulled against the leash, wanting to go out onto the ice.

  “No, no,” he said to the dog. “Bad idea.”

  Although the snow was falling fast, Lewis thought he could make out a trail of footprints on the ice. He squinted, snow in his eyelashes. Nothing. The footprints were gone. He hoped Vera and the boy hadn’t wandered onto the ice. People thought frozen lakes were stable, and they walked out onto them. People did this sort of thing all the time. They drove snowmobiles and trucks onto lakes! Lewis had done this as a boy every winter, in his father’s red pickup truck, on Lake Mendota. Even there, two or three people fell in every year, fishermen mostly, their bodies pulled out—sometimes alive, sometimes not—covered in icicles. That was the trouble with frozen lakes. There was no way to tell the thickness of the ice, nor the depth of the water beneath.

  “Okay, boy,” Lewis said to the dog, and the dog sat, obediently, by Lewis’s side. The snow stopped, as if someone had flicked a switch. Now that the sky had cleared, Lewis could see the great iced-over expanse of the lake, a pale blue colour like a wolf’s eye, and the bright swatches of beach sand that lay below the ice, looking almost tropical despite the cold. A bird loitered on a branch, repeating its song. Lewis put his hand on top of the dog’s warm head. His hand seemed to mould perfectly to the shape of the dog’s head, as if it was meant to be there, meant to fill the emptiness of his hand. How did anyone get through life without a dog? He’d had a border terrier when he was a boy, and perhaps that was why he was largely okay, despite what he had been through with his father. Someone had to love you unconditionally in order for you to survive. Someone had to love you as much as you needed to be loved.

  He scanned the lake, but there was no one. No signs of anyone having fallen through. He looked at the dog, tongue out, expectant. He heard the rumble of an airplane overhead. What can you see that I can’t see? What do you know that I don’t know? If Vera Gusev and the lost boy were out there, in the forest or under the ice, the lake, the dog, the plane, the sky—they gave away nothing.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jesse

  The paper boats were difficult to make, and Jesse’s hands were clumsy from the cold. It was New Year’s Day, and his father had brought him and his brother to Squire Point. They were supposed to write their wishes for the New Year on the paper boats, then set them on the surface of the frozen lake and wait for spring. When the ice melted, their father said, their wishes would come true.

  Jesse was ten, and Dmitri, six. They sat in the back seat of their father’s car with the heat on high, each with a sheet of pale blue paper and a black felt pen. Theirs was the only car in the parking lot. Their father told them that most people preferred to go to malls. They had gone to the mall once, but the crying babies had upset their father and he had been short with his sons, annoyed. What was there to do with your children when you didn’t live with them anymore? And, so, they drove around.

  On these long drives, they listened to the marine forecast. Their father had a transistor radio that bleated small-craft advisories, swells, wind waves, and knots. It was always on, though their father hadn’t gone sailing in years. Something he had done in a previous life—that was how he put it—when he still lived in San Garcia, a two-days’ drive away.

  Their father had driven them out to Squire Point slowly, the roads unplowed. The car hit a pothole and their father swore. The Pineapple Express, their father said, and Jesse thought he was talking nonsense again. Their father talked of spiritual things sometimes—the universe and reincarnation; ghosts, spirits, telepathy—and he began to do so now. Squire Point was a magical place, their father said, a sacred place. It wasn’t all crazy talk, like their mother, Evelina, said. Jesse felt that Squire Point was indeed sacred; he felt it in his bones. He knew Dmitri would feel it soon, too. You had to be old enough to feel things like that.

  They pulled onto the highway and their father told the boys about his old days in San Garcia, about his new girlfriend, and about his ex-girlfriends, an impressive list. He farted. He farted again and again. He sang and they made up songs. He hollered at a woman in a bus shelter, called her “chicky-poo.” He lit a cigarette but did not roll the window down. He didn’t wear a seat belt, though the boys were buckled in tight. It seemed to Jesse that it was a very long drive out to Squire Point, but time slowed when he was with his father—whether because he savoured the few afternoons they spent together, or dreaded them, he couldn’t tell.

  Their father’s name was Leo, short for Galileo, though hardly anyone knew that. He was muscular, though too thin, with a curved neck like a heron’s and a big nose. Jesse knew he looked like his father—olive skin, so dark in summer it was almost black; the same dark hair; that same nose. Remarkable was the word people used—it’s remarkable how much you look like your father, they said. At first glance his father was a handsome man. The closer Jesse looked at his father, though, the less handsome he became. His eyes darkened when he drank: glassy and black, sunken into his face. He’d been born with a club foot and it had been corrected with surgery, but an ugly scar ran across his ankle that to Jesse looked like the face of a monster. His left foot and leg were smaller than his right—another thing hardly anyone knew. Who would notice such a thing? Most people didn’t notice much—even at ten, Jesse knew that to be true.

  But Jesse noticed everything. His father kept a little bottle of tequila in the glove compartment and a slice of lemon in a plastic bag, smoked hand-rolled cigarettes from butts he’d picked off the ground. Their mother had kicked him out six months ago. Before he left, they all lived in an old house with a giant monkey-puzzle tree in the front yard. Now the boys lived with their mother in a small white beach house, and their father lived in a one-room apartment in what was said to be the seedy part of town. He slept on a foam mattress, with a travel pillow and a navy-blue sleeping bag, an extra blanket wadded in the closet for the boys. Nothing on the walls. A suitcase in the corner. No washer or dryer. A red toothbrush beside the kitchen sink. Nothing in the fridge except a half-empty bottle of wine. Jesse sensed that other people didn’t live this way. His father’s clean-shaven face, the medicinal smell of his aftershave, the specks of blood on his chin stopped up with toilet paper. The sight of him, the sound of his voice, made Jesse
feel as if his whole body might shatter. Every time he’d seen his father these past six months—once a week was their current arrangement—his mother asked whether he’d had a nice time. He understood that he had to say yes. He knew, on some primal level, that it was better to have a bit of a father than no father at all.

  Besides, his father was smiling and telling Dmitri a joke about a football-playing centipede. He pulled into the first parking lot at Squire Point, reached into his jacket, downed a can of beer in three gulps, then threw the empty can out the window and into the snow. “So the coach says to the centipede,” his father said, “ ‘Where were you during the first half?’ ”

  Jesse watched his father glance at Dmitri, pause, pause some more, then, when the silence had become almost unbearable, his father erupted: “And the centipede says, ‘I was putting on my shoes!’ ”

  He seemed to be in a good mood. He told his sons that after they made the paper boats, he would let them shoot his rifle. They were not to tell their mother this, though they could—they should—tell her about the paper boats.

  “You hear me?” he said, and Jesse nodded, remembering not to act too excited—their father was easily irritated, and the day could darken. That was the problem with his father, his mother had told him—he was neither good nor bad, but rather half of one and half of the other.

  Outside the fogged-up windows of the car, the spindly birch trees, encased in ice, looked as though they were made of glass. Jesse wrote his wish on one side of the paper, turned it over, folded it, made a crease, and brought the edges together to form a V. The next part was difficult, and his father spoke in a slow, loud voice, holding up his piece of paper to demonstrate how, with the right folds, it could become a little hat that could then be flattened into a diamond.