How a Woman Becomes a Lake (ARC) Read online

would come immediately). He knew Vera, though. He knew she was secretly as funny as he was—and ten times as smart. She could have

  made a living as a filmmaker, though she was happy enough at her

  university job. Already, at thirty, an assistant professor at the expensive private liberal arts col ege down the road, envied by and more

  successful than her colleagues. Right after he’d met her, her film

  Mirror had screened at Cannes.

  “Was she taking any medication?” the detective asked, but he

  was already rooting through her bedside table. Denny couldn’t

  remember whether the detective had asked permission to do this,

  but what did it matter? He wanted his wife to be found. They could

  ransack anything, he supposed. The detective held up a blister pack-

  age containing white pills. “Clomid?” he asked.

  “She was having trouble getting pregnant,” Denny said.

  “Uh-huh,” said the detective.

  The blister package was unopened. His head felt heavy. He

  thought she’d been taking it. She was taking pills for anxiety, too, but they were hidden in her makeup kit. He fought the urge to hit the

  detective hard, in the face, for putting his hands on her pills.

  The detective was a short man with a bland, forgettable face —

  there was something too soft about it to contain any intelligence.

  Lewis, on the other hand, seemed more capable. Lewis was young

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  stylish glasses with black frames. A person Denny might have gone

  to the bar with in another life. What was a person like that doing as a small-town cop? He was too handsome for this place. People who

  looked like Lewis didn’t live here.

  “We’ll need another photo,” said the bland detective.

  That old familiar stab of guilt. The policeman had asked him to

  do this over an hour ago. And what had he done but sit on his stupid

  velvet couch and cry?

  “Is she actually missing?” Denny said, though his voice seemed to

  be coming from outside the room, or under it, perhaps from the base-

  ment. “Has it been long enough to—I mean, what if she—”

  “This is a missing persons investigation,” said the detective.

  “There’s a child involved.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Denny. “I’m so sorry.” He turned to Vera’s dresser

  and studied the wedding portrait.

  “Something more natural?” said the detective. “More like how she

  looks every day?”

  Denny fought the urge to apologize again. Of course. She never

  wore her hair up, like it was in the photo. She certainly never wore

  a red flower in her hair! Flowers in people’s hair! What a thing.

  “Okay,” he said. He found their photo albums in the living room,

  flicked on the overhead light, and flipped through the images. She

  was usually the one behind the camera. But there was one of her on

  the couch, a snapshot, Scout curled in her lap like a baby. She

  looked like herself, her dark hair cascading over her shoulders and

  pooling at her waist. She looked happy, if not a little tired. He

  couldn’t remember when he’d taken the photo. What they’d done

  before, or what they’d done after.

  “I’ll need to know what she was wearing when she left the house.”

  “I was asleep,” said Denny. He didn’t have a mental inventory of

  her entire wardrobe. He couldn’t very well go through it all, then

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  announce, via a process of elimination, what she had on. “I don’t

  know—” He pushed past the men and studied the contents of the

  hall closet. “Maybe her parka? It’s cold. Her parka isn’t here. She has a green parka.” Was it even green? He was failing her. “She wears

  boots when she goes to Squire Point. Hiking boots.” He scanned the

  floor for them but they were gone. “I think?”

  “A hat?” said the detective, joining him in the living room.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Any defining characteristics on the jacket?”

  “No. I don’t know.” He couldn’t even remember what the jacket

  looked like. “If she’s out there, in the woods, she’s going to get cold—”

  “The boots? Brand?”

  “Brand?”

  “What kind of boots, what size.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your wife’s shoe size.”

  “Seven? Eight.”

  The detective nodded to the photo in Denny’s hand, and Denny

  passed him the photo of Vera.

  “Teeth,” said the detective. “One with teeth.”

  The air in the room had an awful quality to it: a stale, dead qual-

  ity. Denny took a gulp of it and gagged. The living room was full

  of pictures of him and Vera and he made a sweeping gesture with his

  arm. “Pick one?” He didn’t mean it to come out so exasperated.

  “Height and weight correct on her driver’s licence?” the police-

  man asked.

  “Yes,” said Denny, though he didn’t know. How would he know?

  Why wouldn’t they be?

  “Hair colour?”

  “Dark brown. Almost black. It’s very long. To her waist.”

  “Eyes?”

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  “They’re brown.”

  “Eyeglasses?”

  “Yes.” He imagined her, without her glasses in the woods. She

  could hardly see without them, and he pictured her with her arms

  outstretched, groping in the dark, in all that snow.

  He couldn’t remember Vera’s middle name.

  What was the matter with him? Was something wrong with his

  brain?

  “Has she recently travelled internationally?” said Lewis.

  “Not since our honeymoon.”

  “Health problems?”

  “No.”

  He was shaking his head when the second detective came through

  the front door, tapping his notepad with a ballpoint pen. He asked

  Denny to sit down.

  “I don’t want to sit down,” said Denny. “I want to run. I want to

  go to Squire Point and find Vera. I don’t think I can sit down right

  now.”

  “Hey,” said Lewis. He put his hand on Denny’s shoulder. “It’s all

  right.”

  Was he acting flustered? Why was Lewis’s hand so forcefully on

  his shoulder? Denny stared at the well-manicured hand, its lack of

  wedding ring, its buffed nails with big white half moons. It was an

  unusually beautiful hand. Did he need to be comforted? He tried to

  soften his face. Or was acting flustered a good thing? Did a guilty

  man act flustered or calm? How about an innocent one?

  “Last night,” said the second detective. “Can you tell us about last

  night?”

  “Last night?”

  “One of the neighbours claimed he heard shouting. Saw you leave

  the house around midnight. Can you tell us where you were going?”

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  “I went to watch the fireworks,” said Denny. “That’s all. Vera

  didn’t want to go with me. We argued about it. We certainly weren’t

  shouting—”

  “The broken glass in your garbage can—was that from last night?”

  “She—what I’m trying to say—Vera broke it. You see, it wasn’t

  like that. We were arguing, yes. It got maybe more heated than it

  should have. It’s just a broken picture frame.”

  The detective raised his eyebrows. “When was the last time you

  hit your wife, Mr. Gusev?”

  “I have not. No. Never.”

  “Did you strike your wife last night, Mr. Gusev?”

  “I told you—I have never—”

  “Around what time did you come home from watching the fire-

  works?”

  “Right after,” said Denny. “I was only gone an hour.” He could

  feel the heat of Lewis’s hand on his shoulder, and wanted to shrug it off. Years ago he’d read a book about a man falsely accused and

  imprisoned for thirty years before finally being released. Was this

  how it started? Was this the beginning? The moment life took a

  wrong turn?

  He put his hand on top of Lewis’s, gently, tentatively. “Please,”

  he said to Lewis, and Lewis removed his hand. He hoped that would

  be the end of it, but the second detective began firing more ques-

  tions at him.

  “And did you come back to the house?”

  “I went to my studio for a while.” He closed his eyes, trying to

  remember the night before. In his mind, he saw his hand reaching

  for the door to the studio, opening it, the bottle of bourbon in his

  other hand. Then what?

  “And this was before or after you and Vera fought in the yard?”

  “In the yard? Excuse me? I don’t recall—”

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  “The neighbours said it was quite a show,” said the second detec-

  tive.

  “In the yard? Like animals? I assure you, we did no such thing.”

  “You like to drink?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The bottles in your studio—”

  “I take a drink from time to time, yes,” said Denny. His hands

  were tingling, and he took a deep breath, cracked his wrists, then his knuckles, willing the blood to return to them. The oak tree. His neighbour must still be mad about that. How else to explain these false

  accusations? Fighting in the yard? He hadn’t meant to kill the neigh-

  bour’s tree last year. And so what, anyway. The goddamned thing was

  half-dead. This was a hell of a way to get revenge. “We never fought in the yard,” he said.

  “Sounds like you did last night,” said the second detective. “Look,

  a number of your neighbours told me about it.”

  “I don’t remember any such thing,” said Denny. He searched his

  mind. What? When? What time? What did he say? What did Vera say?

  “Listen, my neighbours are—how should I put this—assholes? There

  was this oak tree—”

  “An oak tree,” said Lewis.

  “A Garry oak. You know, they have a society—about the trees. My

  neighbour is a member and, you see, a Garry oak was right on the

  border of our properties and it was dead already—a hazard—”

  “Hey,” Lewis said. He shook his head. “Let’s sort this tree stuff out later. The important thing is we need to better understand what happened between you and Vera last night.” He reached out his hand, as

  if he was going to place it, once more, on Denny’s shoulder.

  Things were coming back to Denny, horrible things, about the

  fight they’d had in the yard. Yes, in the yard, like animals. He could remember it now. He had told her she was awful, that she was

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  smothering him. He had called her a control ing monster. An awful

  monster.

  “We had a fight,” said Denny, ducking his body so Lewis’s hand

  would not touch him again. “Look, I’m so tired right now. I can barely keep my eyes open. I am so worried and I am so goddamned tired.”

  “Tell you what,” Lewis said to Denny. “Let’s go down to the sta-

  tion and get this sorted out. We’ll get you some coffee, let your head clear. You can tell us more about Vera.”

  “But who is looking for her? What is anyone doing right now to

  find Vera?”

  “Denny,” said Lewis. “I really do need you to calm down.”

  But how could he calm down? How could he explain his

  marriage—or the fight last night—to hostile people who thought

  he had done something wrong? All marriages had dark corners. He

  was trying to be honest, but what was honesty anyway? What was

  the honest answer to why they didn’t have children yet, to why Vera had an unopened package of fertility pills? How could a person

  be honest about ambiguity, about contradiction, about how one

  minute, children seemed like the perfect and natural solution to

  their failing marriage, and the next, they seemed like something

  that happened only to other people—happy people. What was the

  honest answer to why he hadn’t been worried when she’d been gone

  all day? He couldn’t explain even the simplest of his choices, let

  alone why he had told her she was a monster.

  Leave me alone. It had been the last thing he’d said to her. And she had. He was alone.

  Maybe if they hadn’t fought, she wouldn’t have taken Scout for a

  walk. Maybe they would have had breakfast together. Oh, for Christ’s

  sake. They wouldn’t have done that, even if they hadn’t fought.

  “Denny,” Lewis was saying. “Come on, Denny.”

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  Gently, as if he were a child, or a drunk, Lewis linked his arm

  through one of Denny’s and the bland-faced detective did the same

  on the other side, and they led him out of the house.

  Under the snowy sky, a man no older than twenty walked toward

  them. He stopped and fished a camera out of his messenger bag,

  pointed it at Denny and clicked. And that was the picture that

  appeared in the paper the next day: Denny’s hunched-over body,

  escorted by the Whale Bay Police Department, getting into a patrol

  car in front of his house. It landed on the stoop of every house in

  Whale Bay with a thump.

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  C h a p t e r E i g h t

  Dmitri

  The passenger seat was reserved for Jesse— oldest gets to sit in the front— but right now things were different. Dmitri searched for himself in the side mirror, and once he found his little face, he tried to see if he looked different now that his father had hit him. His nose had stopped bleeding but his face was sore. He could feel it swelling under the skin. Did he look older than six? He jutted his chin. He

  sneered. Despite feeling something in his chest that was either ner-

  vousness or fear, he wanted to ask his father if he could sit on his lap, like he used to do, and take the steering wheel, ducking down if his

  father saw a police car.

  “I’ll quit for you, Dmitri, I will, I will,” Leo sai
d and pushed his

  cigarette into the metal ashtray. He pulled out of the parking lot,

  and they left Squire Point. It was starting to snow more heavily. The birch trees looked as though they’d been dusted with icing sugar, and Dmitri wanted to lick them.

  His father glanced at him as he drove, ruffled his hair, patted his

  knee. He frowned and pulled over, fetched an old washcloth from the

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  trunk and filled it with snow. “Hold this to your face,” he said to

  Dmitri. “You’ll be all right.”

  He asked his father when they would come back for Jesse, and

  Leo said that Jesse needed to be punished, and they would return

  when the time was right.

  Northwest wind ten to twenty knots becoming north five to fifteen knots after midnight.

  His father switched off the transistor radio.

  Dmitri pressed the washcloth to his face, the snow melting and

  running through his hands. His face was numb but he couldn’t tell

  whether it was from the cold or his father’s fist. The seat of his pants had soaked through from crouching in the snow for so long, and his

  fingertips tingled and stung. Jesse had said it would be a fun game.

  His eyes had narrowed after he’d unfolded the blue paper boat and

  read his father’s wish. What does it say, Jesse? What does it say? Jesse told him it was too wet to read, that the ink was smudged. He said they

  had to play a game so their father wouldn’t be angry at them for com-

  ing out here and reading his wish. But how will he know we read it?

  he asked Jesse. He just will. Jesse told Dmitri to crouch in the bushes by the edge of the lake and not move a muscle, and not say a word.

  Don’t ruin it, Jesse said. Dmitri wanted to ask more questions but his brother’s face was fierce. So he agreed to Jesse’s game and slid over to the edge of the lake, Jesse shouting at him to crouch lower, to move

  to the left a bit, no the right, no the other way you idiot, until he was completely out of sight. It didn’t matter. Their father would be back soon and put an end to the silly game.

  Jesse banished for the time being— Stay right here and think about what you’ve done— his father drove to the lookout and he and Dmitri Celo_9780735235823_4p_all_r1.indd 57

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  looked over the town and beyond to the ocean. His father pulled out

  a flask and took a swig. He seemed to always have a drink within arm’s reach, a can of beer or flask in his pocket, the glove-compartment