How a Woman Becomes a Lake Page 7

  “Mom?” It was Jesse, in the doorway, in his plaid flannel pyjamas and bare feet. “A policeman called last night while you were gone,” he said. He handed her a scrap of paper where he had scribbled a phone number. “I told him you were asleep. He wants you to call him.”

  “That doctor,” said Evelina. “Oh for heaven’s sake. You’d tell me if your father hit your brother, wouldn’t you?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Denny

  The sky was a pale colour, neither blue nor white nor grey, and it took Denny until Lewis was pulling into his driveway to realize that it was dawn and he’d been at the police station all night. He let himself into the house and bent down to hug Scout. Miraculously, his wonderful dog had held his bladder, and Denny praised him and apologized, then stood in the backyard under the awful sky while Scout peed in the snow.

  The dresser drawers were open in the bedroom, the bedclothes thrown to the floor. He walked from room to room, shutting drawers and cabinets, picking up clothing, books, shoes. Had he done this or had the police been here in the night?

  He made the bed and got into it, and held his dog. He leapt up and turned on the heat, then rushed into bed again, his breath visible in the frigid air.

  A few miles from where he lay, a search team was trying to locate his wife. He should be there, too, searching. The detectives obviously thought he had killed Vera. What a thought! Imagine him going out to Squire Point with Vera and—then what—murdering her? Burying her body in the snow? To what end, he asked the detectives. Why would I do that? Marital problems, they said. Fertility problems. Infidelity. Life insurance policy.

  They would investigate every aspect of his life and marriage, the detectives told him. They would turn him inside out. He lay on his back and replayed the interrogation over and over, each time answering their questions better, differently, more honestly, more deviously. He imagined an action scene from a movie: jumping from his chair, overpowering the detectives, fleeing the station. His hands began to ache and he held them to his body. He didn’t want to examine the thought, but there it was, floating in his mind. Maybe she hadn’t disappeared at all. Maybe he had driven her away. Maybe he had driven her to suicide. Leave me alone.

  He was relieved his parents were dead so they wouldn’t be dragged into this. Vera’s parents were driving up to Whale Bay, would be here tomorrow. Or was that today? It was already seven in the morning. A bird that he called the “whistle bird,” for lack of knowing what it was, began its morning whistling. When he and Vera had first moved into the house, he’d spent hours researching bird calls. So many different kinds of finches. It had put him in a bad mood and he had given up.

  * * *

  —

  The pounding on the door startled him awake and he jumped from the bed and ran into the living room, where Scout was pawing the door with his big feet.

  It was Lewis, in plainclothes. Stylish jeans and a black parka, black leather boots with blue laces. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses. Denny regarded him as if for the first time. He hadn’t considered until this moment that Lewis was a real person. But here he was, holding two cups of coffee and a bag of pastries, the bottom heavy with grease. “My shift doesn’t start for another few hours,” Lewis said.

  “May I?” said Lewis, and Denny nodded and led him into the living room. They sat on the velvet couch and ate in silence and Lewis gave the last bite of his pastry to Scout. The dog looked back and forth between the men.

  “Scout and Vera are inseparable,” said Denny. “He’s nervous without her.”

  “A husky?” asked Lewis.

  “Mixed with something else, too, we think,” said Denny. “Lab or collie or shepherd.”

  “Heinz 57 variety then,” said Lewis.

  “Guess so.”

  “I had a border terrier when I was a boy,” said Lewis.

  Denny closed his eyes and felt the heaviness in his head, his heart, his hands. “You haven’t found her,” he said finally.

  “We haven’t.”

  “Well. Thank you for telling me, Officer Côté,” Denny said.

  “My name is Lewis,” Lewis said. “I mean, it’s okay to call me Lewis.”

  “I want you to know,” said Denny, “though I’m sure everyone says this, but I need to say it anyway. I don’t know where my wife is. And all I want is for her to come home.”

  “I believe you,” said Lewis. “I listened to what you said last night. And I believe you.”

  Outside, a rattling, a garbage can being knocked over. “Shit,” said Denny. He raced to the back door and into the yard, Lewis close behind him. A raccoon or possum, he couldn’t be sure, skittered away. “During the day? Really?” He bent down and righted the garbage can. Two trash bags sat a few feet away, ripped open, their contents spilled onto the pavement. “Oh, come on,” said Denny. He turned to Lewis. “You people are welcome to ransack whatever you want of mine if it will help you find my wife. But please.” He dragged the trash bags back into the garbage can and wiped the tears that were falling fast down his face with the back of his hand. “Please don’t destroy my property in the meantime.”

  “Let me help you.” Lewis gathered the remaining trash and scooped it into the garbage can. One of the bags had torn and the ground was littered with cigarette butts.

  “You a smoker?” said Lewis.

  “It’s Vera. She’s going to quit. She’s down to two a day.”

  “Looks like a lot more than two,” said Lewis.

  “Well,” said Denny. “She was trying.”

  The men tossed the butts into the garbage can in silence, then returned inside and took turns washing their hands.

  “Listen,” said Lewis. “Why I’m here. There was a call placed on the Squire Point pay phone a few minutes before Vera called the police. We think Vera may have made this call.”

  “Okay?” said Denny. His eyes were heavy from lack of sleep.

  Lewis told him that someone—maybe Vera—had called a woman named Evelina Lucchi but the call had not gone through.

  “I don’t know anyone with that name,” Denny said. “As far as I know, Vera didn’t either.”

  “They’re about the same age. Maybe Vera had friends you didn’t know about?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Denny. “Look, I’m not that out of touch.”

  “We don’t know for sure that Vera placed the call. But we’re going to interview the woman to see if she knew your wife.”

  Who knows. Maybe Vera did have friends he didn’t know about. A secret life. He almost liked the idea. It was a better reality than the one in which he had driven his wife to flee him, or to kill herself. Some other friend. A secret romance. He smiled. Vera the lesbian. Why not?

  “What about the little boy?” said Denny.

  “We have no new information.” Lewis took off his sunglasses, and Denny saw that his eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted. “No one has reported him missing, and the search team has found nothing.”

  Denny felt himself softening toward this man, who seemed so genuinely worried about his wife, him, even his dog. “Well, I hope the little boy is okay. Whoever he is.”

  The pastries had awakened a kind of deep hunger in Denny, and he knew if Lewis left he would eat a dozen eggs, then a whole box of cereal, and who knows what else.

  “I was going to make some eggs,” Denny said, not looking at Lewis but at Scout, who was lying on his side, panting slightly. Denny watched as Lewis knelt and patted Scout’s head, scratched him behind the ears.

  “Sounds nice,” said Lewis.

  * * *

  —

  They ate in the kitchen, standing up, not speaking much, while Scout nosed around in the snow outside. Denny dipped his toast into his egg yolk and raised it to his mouth. The food had perked him up a bit. He felt more rational and less guilty—more convinced that Vera was only lost in t
he woods somewhere and would soon be found. She was resourceful. She could build a lean-to, a shelter. He thought of her on her hands and knees, rubbing two sticks together.

  “A lean-to,” he said aloud, not meaning to, and Lewis raised his eyebrows but didn’t respond.

  The men looked at the ocean, visible between the snow-covered trees. Lewis gestured out the window toward Scout. “He’s got big paws, hasn’t he?”

  “We thought he’d be a lot bigger. Never did grow into his feet.”

  “Like me,” Lewis said, wagging his foot at Denny. “Twelves. And I’m not even six feet.”

  “Like flippers,” said Denny, and the policeman laughed.

  The sound of laughter disturbed him. What if Vera was dead and could hear them laughing? “You know,” he said to Lewis, “she’s a wonderful filmmaker—her eye—she meant to make a living that way, to really pursue it, instead of teaching it. This kind of thing—when it happens—you realize you have to do the things you meant to do. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  Lewis set his plate on the counter and looked at Denny. “I think so. Maybe.” He gestured toward the wedding ring on Denny’s finger. “Did you make that?”

  “Yeah,” said Denny. “It’s meant to match Vera’s—the alexandrite.”

  “What is alexander—”

  “Alexandrite. It changes colour depending on the light—red to green. They call it nature’s magic trick.” He tried to keep speaking but felt something in his chest, in his throat. “I can’t—”

  “Hey,” said Lewis. “She’s going to come home.”

  Was she? He looked at Lewis. “I think I’m going crazy, you know? Could we get out of here, take a walk with Scout?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I think I’m bored. I mean, bored out of my mind with worry. I need something to happen. I need something to happen besides what has already happened.”

  “I get that,” said Lewis.

  Denny whistled for Scout and the dog trotted into the kitchen and sat at his feet. The two men left the house. There was an owl somewhere in one of the Garry oak trees and Lewis and Denny stopped a minute to listen.

  “A barred owl,” said Denny. “This one I know. He’s here a lot. The neighbourhood is full of birds.”

  “Is that so,” said Lewis.

  They trudged through the snow, past the other houses, some still lit up with Christmas lights. Professors’, accountants’, doctors’ houses. Denny imagined his neighbours rushing to their windows, watching him walk past. The Hill, the neighbourhood was called. The only way to walk was downhill, toward the town, and Denny felt an ache in his knees as he and Lewis navigated the slippery sidewalk.

  He thought of Vera stumbling through snowbanks, trying to find the road. Sticking out her thumb. Or waving wildly at a passing car. “I think I’m done walking. I don’t want to be out if she comes home.”

  “I should get going anyway,” Lewis said. “But, listen, if you remember anything, anything at all, or anything Vera said, call us.”

  They trudged back up the hill, and Denny watched the policeman drive off. And then he and Scout went back into the silent, empty house. He looked at the ceiling. He looked out the window.

  Who did he have left? Who was there to talk to? Who could he tell about his day if Vera never returned? What he wanted to do was tell Vera about all of this. “Vera! Vera, you’ll never guess what happened!” he wanted to say. “You disappeared!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Evelina

  The bruises unfolded over Dmitri’s face like butterfly wings. The white light of the early morning came in through the slits in the blinds and Evelina watched her son play with the stripes of light on the floor. He ran to the window, hearing something. He told her there were two taxicabs outside and so she went to the window to see what was happening. “No,” she said, her hand resting on top of Dmitri’s head. “Those are police cars.”

  * * *

  —

  A woman named Vera Gusev had gone missing at Squire Point on New Year’s Day. She didn’t know anyone by that name. She sat at the kitchen table with two detectives and a police officer—nice men, gentle men, snow in their hair—her sons in their bedroom with the door closed. She was wearing the peacock feather earrings, something Leo would have chastised her for had he been there. His voice was in her head. She offered the men coffee.

  “This woman called my house?” she asked. She picked up a dime she kept on the table for her scratch cards and fiddled with it. “A wrong number?” she asked. “I don’t know anyone named Vera Gusev. And my boys—well, neither of them is missing. They’re in their bedroom.”

  She felt a kind of ticking in her brain, like a fire crackling, something about to ignite. She held her coffee cup to her face and looked at the detectives, at the policeman, who, she noticed, had a beautiful jaw.

  “Can you explain your phone activity on New Year’s Day?” one of the detectives said.

  “My phone activity?”

  “You placed two calls to local hospitals.”

  “I—” The ticking was getting louder in her mind, so loud it must be audible to the men. She took a loud sip of her coffee, hoping to muffle the sound.

  “We’d also like you to tell us about that evening, when you brought your boy in to be treated for bruising.”

  “I—”

  “We’re trying to piece together what has happened.”

  “My boys spent New Year’s Day with their father,” she said carefully. Her heart was pounding as loudly as the ticking sound in her head. She pressed the soles of her feet to the floor. She felt she might float away from the table and through the kitchen window, get sucked out to sea by the wind. Surely Leo couldn’t have had anything to do with this. “They were late getting home. I got worried. Paranoid. I called the hospitals, to see, to see if there had been any accidents—”

  She looked at the men, but their heads were bowed; they were writing things down.

  “—but they came home shortly after. My youngest—Dmitri—hurt himself while he was with his dad. He fell on the ice. That’s why I took him to the hospital. Anyway, it’s just bruising. There’s really nothing more I can tell you.”

  “But the boys, and your husband, you can confirm they were at Squire Point on New Year’s Day?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They were. It’s a large—”

  “It’s a big park, yes,” said the handsome policeman. “We know. We’ve been there.”

  * * *

  —

  When they left, Evelina bolted the door. Her legs were shaking. She felt the caffeine in her bones, behind her eyes. She felt the weight of what the detectives had asked her deep in her abdomen.

  “They’re gone,” she said to the empty kitchen and seconds later Jesse was beside her. She decided to make a big breakfast to distract herself—boiled eggs, toast, potatoes, bacon, and fried tomatoes—and she put on music while she cooked. Her sons sat at the table. They listened to Al Green, then Sam Cooke. Dmitri was drawing a picture of Jesse. She kept reminding herself that everything was okay. They were eating breakfast together in their pyjamas. They were safe and warm. Dmitri’s face would heal. Jesse would turn eleven this year. They would be her boys forever. She did not know this woman named Vera Gusev who had called her home and then vanished. A coincidence. An anomaly. Also a coincidence that Leo and her boys had been at Squire Point that day.

  Still, she found herself unable to think of anything else.

  Why had the boys been so late getting home? Why had Leo seemed so sad when he dropped them off? Why had his clothes been wet?

  “Did you,” she began, her sons shovelling the breakfast into their mouths unceremoniously, “meet a woman out at Squire Point?”

  She watched for it—a conspiratorial glance between them, a swift kick to a shin—but the boys continued to eat, elbows o
n the table, mouths open as they chewed, forks in their hands like spears. They shook their heads.

  “You are such animals,” she said. “Sit up. Mouths closed. For heaven’s sake.”

  When they were done, her sons sat in front of their empty plates. They were still as statues. They could sense her mood, she could tell. They were waiting, she realized, for her to pick up a glass and smash it into the sink. To slam her bedroom door, to not come out for hours. To leave the house in a fury. She had done all of these things before. She stood in front of her sons, her fingers in her mouth to keep from screaming.

  She felt her heart, too large, in her chest. Her sweet boys. Dmitri, who had cried on Christmas Day when she suggested throwing out his stuffed bear to make room for his new toys. “I thought you might be embarrassed by it now,” she had rushed to say, hoping the words would stop his tears. “Of course we’ll keep Brownie. Of course.”

  * * *

  —

  “Got some new ones in today. Winter Wonderland,” the clerk said, holding up the silver cards. “Twenty-five thousand.”

  “I’ll take two.” Evelina handed a five-dollar bill to the clerk and hesitated a moment, waiting for him to gesture to the stool at the end of the counter.

  “Tea, Evelina?”

  Oh, thank god. “Herbal, if you have it.”

  “I do.”

  “Thanks.”

  The clerk came around the counter and Evelina saw that he was taller than she had expected—at least a full head taller. He handed her a coin for the scratch-and-win cards and disappeared into the back of the store. She heard the kettle. When the clerk returned, she told him that the cards were duds. She fought the urge to buy two more.

  “Ah well,” he said. He handed her a red mug full of tea. He took the cards from her and tossed them into the trash. For the first time, the counter was not between them. Evelina sipped her tea and stared into the clerk’s familiar face. Still, she could not imagine accompanying him to a church potluck. She wished religious people would wear signs, or hats—something to identify them, so she would know. She was too much of a misfit to get involved with someone who believed in God.