How a Woman Becomes a Lake Page 4

One night she took a wooden spoon from a drawer in the kitchen and, as an experiment, not really knowing her intentions, slapped it down upon the flesh of her upper thigh. She waited until the heat of the slap subsided, then did it again, harder, with force. A few moments of burning, the pain spreading then dissipating. If she were angry, though, wouldn’t she hit harder? What if she were really angry? What if she were in a rage? She glanced at her thigh, then at the kitchen counter, and down the spoon came, as hard as she could muster, on the plastic laminate. There it was. The force with which a parent would hit their child. And who ever hit a child once? She brought the spoon down on her own thigh, to a count of ten.

  The next time it happened, she sensed a meanness coming from Leo that hadn’t been there before. By then she suspected he was seeing someone else. He hadn’t touched her in such a long time. She rushed to Jesse, wedged her body between him and Leo. Get out, get out, she yelled, and when he didn’t move she dragged him into the bedroom, threw his clothes into his arms, told him she would kill him if he didn’t leave.

  * * *

  —

  She sat in the empty kitchen and felt the silence of the house close in on her. It was a beach house, supposed to be a summer rental. Really not much of a home. Too small. Poorly insulated. She should move inland, away from the relentless wind. But, wait, there was a sound. She held her breath. Was the water running? She checked the toilet, which sometimes ran, but it was silent. She put the toilet seat down—a point of contention between her and her sons—and headed back to the kitchen. Was the leak coming from under the sink? Her life felt so absurd in that moment, racing to check the toilet, sticking her head under the sink, the water bill escalating in her mind.

  She caught herself—she was going down the rabbit hole of despair—and laughed. There was no leak, no running water anywhere. Just the drip of an icicle melting outside the kitchen window. Her anger softened into sadness, and she closed her eyes. But where were her sons?

  Surely they would be home soon. What would she do if they weren’t? Call the police?

  Of course Leo hadn’t kidnapped them. They’d been in a car accident. That made more sense. A fender-bender, no one harmed. Well, then, all she had to do was call the hospital. The boys would be fine. Her husband arrested for drunk driving and put in jail. What a delight! What a way to start the year! She rifled through the phone book until she came to the number.

  Her fingers were thin from the cold and her wedding ring slipped to the top of her knuckle when she reached for the phone. It was stupid to still wear it. Leo had never worn his.

  There had been no car accidents involving children that day. She called the hospital twenty minutes outside of town in case they’d gone to that one, but there had been no accidents there either. Did that mean they were in a ditch somewhere? Waiting for the police and ambulance by the side of the road?

  Had Leo taken them for dinner and forgotten to mention that was part of his plan? She usually asked him when he’d be bringing the boys back, but today she hadn’t—he’d given her that look when she asked, as if she were his mother. She hadn’t felt strong enough to deal with that look today.

  She walked into the boys’ bedroom and tried to pass the time by tidying up their toys. She put their Smurfs and He-Man action figures back in the toy box. She picked up their shared Walkman off the floor and put it on top of the dresser. She put Dmitri’s stuffed bear, Brownie, back on his bed. Jesse’s Ghostbusters poster was coming free from the wall and she taped it back into place. In the trash can was a robot drawing Leo had done for Dmitri. Jesse had torn it up, like he’d torn up the picture Holly had drawn of him.

  Maybe she’d drive around, see if she could find them. Leo would take them to McDonald’s or Marco Polo’s Pizza. She hated moments like this—when there was, in fact, a right and a wrong thing to do. If she left and they came back and she wasn’t here, Leo would be forced to keep the boys with him.

  She could leave a note on the door, though, saying she’d be back by six. That might be okay. She wrote in capital letters with a black felt pen, then added a little drawing of a smiling dinosaur to make it look as if she wasn’t in agony—BACK AT SIX, PLEASE WAIT HERE WITH THE BOYS—and taped it to the front door.

  Billy’s Burgers, McDonald’s, Marco Polo’s. No sign of Leo or her sons. She sat in her car in front of the house, running the engine to keep the windows defrosted, rubbing her hands against her thighs to keep warm. She fingered the winning lottery ticket in her pocket. That would kill some time. She turned off the car and jogged up the street to the corner store, carefully, so she wouldn’t slip on the ice. The snow stopped and the sky cleared. The clerk cashed in her ticket and sold her two more, and she stood at the counter scratching off the numbers because there was no one else in the store and she knew the clerk had a crush on her and she didn’t want to be alone.

  “If it were me I might call the police,” the clerk said to her. He was a nice-seeming man. She could tell he cared about her. “What’s stopping you?”

  “I don’t want to do the wrong thing,” she said.

  “No harm in it,” he said and passed her the store’s phone.

  But she didn’t want to call the police, not yet. First she would go back to the house to see if Leo and her sons were there.

  The clerk offered to go with her but she didn’t want the additional complication of Leo seeing her with another man. She didn’t want to make Leo angry. She even felt a kind of yearning. She wanted to see Leo and the boys so badly she felt crazy. She wanted Leo to tell her one of his stupid jokes. He wasn’t all bad—he had never been all bad. There was a sweetness, a vulnerability, an unusualness. Something special, childlike even. Playful. That was what had drawn her to him. He was not like other people. He was not an evil man.

  “My boys,” she practised saying in her empty living room when she got home, one hand on the phone. “They spent the day with their father and never came home.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Leo

  Leo Lucchi wasn’t a hunter, but he’d picked up a thing or two from his father, and felt obligated to pass these skills on to his sons. Even more so since he’d left them. He wanted them to remember this day. He imagined them as men, telling their friends, or wives, or children, about the time their father had taught them how to shoot a rifle on New Year’s Day.

  But right now the need for a cigarette was like a stone in his chest. He cursed. He’d left his cigarettes in the car. He could drag the boys back with him, but it would take forever with them in tow, slipping every second in their rubber boots. And so he left his sons on the path—I won’t be long; I need you to stay right here; we’ve got such a fun day ahead of us—and hiked the quarter-mile back to the parking lot, his rifle over his shoulder, taking big steps until he could feel the burn in his hamstrings and in his calves.

  When he reached the parking lot, he leaned the rifle against the car and allowed himself to enjoy his cigarette. His boys would be fine for another minute or two. He closed his eyes and felt pleasantly, surprisingly, happy. There was no one in the parking lot except him.

  A new year. The first day of the year. The first day of a new year. He felt the snow landing softly on his shoulders and in his hair. He could do this. He was enjoying himself. So much of the time, he didn’t enjoy his sons. He loved them—that wasn’t it—but the grind of it: washing their sticky hands after they’d eaten something, getting their jackets on, finding their socks, making sure they had snacks—it exhausted him. It was tedious. He longed for them to be older—teenagers, and then men—people he could talk to, have a drink with. People who could pour their own juice without spilling the fucking stuff. People who didn’t need to be monitored so closely every minute of the day, always on the verge of disaster, always hitting their heads. But right now he felt a lightness. Maybe it was being inside that bothered him. Maybe from now on he should only take his boys here, Squire Point, or th
e beach. Maybe it was being cooped up with their whininess and their neediness that irked him. Maybe he could finally really love them, and be good to them—to Jesse—if they stayed outside.

  He smoked his cigarette down to the filter, crushed it under his boot, and set off for the place where he had left his boys, the rifle over his shoulder. As he walked toward the lake, he went over the first exercise he would give them, the first thing his own father had taught him about how to shoot.

  First, you have to determine your dominant eye. This is easy. Pick something specific, a bird’s nest, for example, and point at it with both eyes open. Without moving your finger, close your left eye. Is your finger still pointing at the target? Now open your left eye and close your right eye. Has your finger shifted? Your dominant eye is the one that is still pointing at the target when your other eye is closed. Get it?

  His old Remington was too heavy for the boys, but he figured they could watch at first. He would buy them BB guns once he got some money together and they could go out every Sunday. He would do this at the start of next month, set a little money aside, maybe one gun for them to share at first, see how they took to it. He’d seen guns on sale somewhere, the hardware store maybe—a cheap one would do. His boys wouldn’t know the difference. They could spend the spring and summer shooting at foam targets; by next winter, he would have saved enough—and they would be good enough—to buy them each a real rifle. What else was he supposed to do? Take them bowling? He could hear Evelina’s voice of disapproval in his head.

  Oh, what the fuck. He was who he was. No, that wasn’t true. Every day was an opportunity to become a better person. And today was the first day of the year.

  It is a sin in hunting to wound an animal. At some point, you will shoot something and it will not die. It will escape to suffer. To hunt is to have an intimate knowledge of life and death—

  He tried to remember the words of his father’s lecture so many years ago, but he found himself thinking of the Swami’s lectures instead. Holly had given him one of the Swami’s tapes on consciousness, which had sat untouched in his glove compartment until the night Evelina kicked him out. He’d driven to a lookout, put the tape in the stereo, and pressed play.

  Leo had worried that the Swami would be boring but he sank easily into the Swami’s words. The Swami said each person must reach the source of his thoughts in order to achieve self-realization. Where did his thoughts come from? Leo wondered, alone in his parked car, a can of beer in his hand. And how come his thoughts seemed to come from a place outside of himself? And how come he couldn’t control them? If they were his thoughts, surely he should be able to control them. Surely, he ought to be the source of them. Whose thoughts were they then? And how come he never ran out of them? They were like tidal waves crashing upon him, and within him, and it was ceaseless.

  The brain is a chaotic place, the Swami said, filled with thoughts of the past. Yes, yes it is, Leo wanted to shout, yes! And how can I stop it from being this way? Tell me, please.

  After listening to the tape, he wanted, more than anything, to see the Swami in person. He imagined the Swami picking him out from the crowd as a kind of chosen one, and then travelling the world. Leo knew in his heart that he was special. He was not like other people. He would not die, for instance, in some sort of freak accident—a car crash or avalanche. He was on this earth for a reason. In the car, after listening to the Swami’s words, this conviction deepened. He knew he had to see the Swami one on one; he had to be really seen by him. He had to be elevated from this basic life.

  Little things, said Holly. Start with little things, little changes. Don’t try to change yourself all at once. It was her idea to make the paper boats with the boys. She told him that they should write down their resolutions—call them wishes, Holly suggested, every child knows what a wish is—and set them on the frozen lake at Squire Point. Leo believed in things like this—in writing down what you wanted, in visualization. Visualize a better future. Write it down. He shut his eyes and imagined his life after he married Holly and devoted himself to the teachings of the Swami. He was such a finer version of himself in this vision. A man in linen slacks, with a leather wallet. A soft-spoken, patient man. A wise man. He straightened his back and slicked his hair behind his ears.

  Sure, he had flaws, but he’d never done anything horrible. Nothing really wrong. He’d only been arrested once, and even that was a misunderstanding—he meant to pay for the watch but had just forgotten. And he hadn’t actually ripped out some of Evelina’s hair the night he left. She’d been screaming at him—for Christ’s sake, her goddamn anger—with her fists up like a boxer, and before she could hit him he grabbed her arm and twisted her away from him, and some of her hair got caught on the button of his coat.

  Jesse and Dmitri had come into the room afterwards, when Evelina was standing with her back against the wall, wailing, a few strands of hair in her hands. A few strands of hair! Calling him a monster. Telling him to leave and never come back. There wasn’t time to explain to his sons what had happened, and everything he had tried to say since—You know, you think you saw something, but—came out like a lie. Evelina was so hysterical when they fought. He was never that angry—just got his feelings hurt easily and needed some space for a few days—but she’d storm into whatever room he was in, foaming at the mouth.

  He didn’t mean to be so tough on Jesse. Besides, he wasn’t a quarter as tough on Jesse as his own father had been on him. That had to count for something. It was easier with Dmitri—he was so small, sweet, affectionate. His needs were simple. Love me, hold me, feed me. Fine-boned, goofy-looking. He loved drawing. He loved it when Leo drew robots. He had the little robot drawings taped up all over his bedroom walls.

  “Can you draw me a robot, too?” Jesse would ask. But that wasn’t what he was asking. Can you love me as much as you love Dmitri? That was the question behind every question.

  He did love Jesse. It wasn’t that he didn’t. A few weeks ago, he’d drawn them each a robot, and told them to tape the drawings to their bedroom walls, something to look at when they missed their dad. What was he supposed to do when he came back inside after a cigarette to find the drawing of Dmitri’s robot ripped to shreds? What was he supposed to do, Evelina?

  * * *

  —

  The trail shot out in front of him, empty and white. He was out of breath, and he couldn’t see his boys in the distance. He whistled, told himself that they were behind a tree, for some no-good reason invisible to him at this moment. There was no need to be angry, no reason to panic. He would not let his mood ruin the day. He would not let his anger seep into this day, the first day of the year.

  “God damn it, god damn it,” he said, trying to shake off his mood. Why should he be angry? Why should he be afraid? He had felt so light a few minutes ago, before he’d started thinking about Evelina and the boys. The Swami said that when he felt himself about to lose control, he should imagine floating upward, high above the clouds, until the earth was the size of a marble. Now look down, the Swami said. Look down at the marble and see how little your panic matters. Now zoom out even further, to the edge of the universe, where the marble is no longer visible, where it is smaller than a single grain of sand.

  But that wasn’t helpful, at least not at this moment. Even at the very edge of the universe, Leo wanted to know where his boys were. He whistled again, called out their names, stopped walking so he could listen for signs of them. Hadn’t he told them to wait right here, under this tree? Not to travel more than two feet from this point? He called out their names again, angrier this time, he couldn’t help it. He felt the sweat on his neck, the anger at himself for leaving them, the anger at Evelina, the anger at the boys for walking off, the anger at them for being improperly dressed, their stupid rubber boots.

  He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his mind, his anxious thoughts.

  But, wait. There was a voice to his left, a
soft voice, but a voice nonetheless. Leo snapped his eyes open and stomped toward the voice, through the deep snow and toward the lake, which he could see now through the trees.

  What—what was that—

  Jesse was in the middle of the lake, Jesse was hunched over and pawing at something—where was Dmitri?

  “Jesse!” It startled him how hard it was to speak—to scream. “Jesse!”

  He dropped his rifle and broke into a run over the ice, his feet catching and slipping out from under him, every muscle in his body willing him toward the middle of the lake—“I told you not to move—”

  Jesse sat on his knees pounding furiously at a puddle of water in a patch of broken ice, his eyes full of fear. “It’s Dmitri,” he was saying, “it’s Dmitri, Dad, do something, help, Dad, Dad please, he fell in, please, Dad, please.”

  In an instant, Leo broke through the thin layer of ice with his fists, crashed against the frozen lake with all his weight until cool black water bubbled up beneath the surface and spilled out under his knees. He unzipped his heavy jacket, threw it behind him and reached frantically into the water, gripped the sides of the ice and dunked his head, brought it up, sputtered and choked, then braced his feet on either side of himself, his arms searching helplessly under the frozen water for his son. He dunked his head in again. His eyes burned with cold, his legs scrambled—and he wrenched his head out of the dark water to take a breath, a sensation that burned his lungs, and he plunged underneath again, scanning the blackness.

  What was he supposed to do? Should he dive in? The hole was not big enough for his body. It was not big enough, even, for Dmitri’s body. Could his boy have slipped through, like a mouse through a crack in the wall? He felt the hot sting of tears and the awful panic of not knowing what to do, and he plunged his head in again, coming up only to scream, a howling wail, then plunged down into the ice once more.