How a Woman Becomes a Lake Read online

  Leo felt the smoke from the cigarette catch in his throat. He must have dropped the rifle in the snow. He couldn’t remember putting it down, or even the last time he had held it. He could only remember the ice, and the pain that radiated from his forearms as he tried to bust through it. He’d been so careful to pick up his beer cans. He couldn’t believe it—he’d left the goddamn rifle out at Squire Point. His most prized possession.

  The detective reached for his pen and looked up at Leo. “It’s a real beaut. That mahogany, it’s really something.”

  “It was my father’s,” said Leo. He blew smoke out into the room and ashed the cigarette. He took another drag and looked at the detective.

  “Well then,” said the detective. “Now that we’ve established it’s yours, why don’t you walk me through what happened on New Year’s Day.”

  What was the worst thing that could happen—he might have to take parenting classes? Evelina wouldn’t be cruel enough to try to keep him away from his sons. She didn’t have that kind of spite in her. And, besides, he hadn’t meant to hit Dmitri. It had all been such a terrible accident. He would tell the story plainly to the detective, and surely he would understand. The rifle had nothing to do with anything.

  “We made these paper boats, see,” he began, then set the cigarette down and walked the detective through the little folds. “It was a way of starting fresh—new resolutions. Getting it right this time,” he said. But he’d left his cigarettes in the car. He left the boys on the trail, and when he returned Jesse was pounding on a little patch of thin ice in the middle of the lake, yelling that his brother had fallen through. But he hadn’t. It was a prank. An awful prank. Leo couldn’t understand it. The cruelty of it. Dmitri had jumped on his back and he had hit him, he told the detective, as a reflex. An unintended action.

  “I didn’t mean to hit him so hard. I was out of my mind. I take full responsibility for that. I am truly sorry about that.”

  “I might have killed my kid, had he pulled that on me,” said the detective. He then produced a piece of paper and thrust it on the table: the hospital report with a description of Dmitri’s injuries.

  “I told you I was angry,” said Leo. “I was. But I didn’t mean to hurt him like this.”

  A reflex. That’s what it was. He hadn’t been in control of his own hand. Besides, the punch had been meant for Jesse. But he couldn’t say that now.

  “I think what happened was you snapped,” said the detective. “And that poor woman saw you do it.”

  That poor woman. His cigarette was smouldering in the ashtray and the detective reached over and stubbed it out.

  “What woman?” said Leo. “I thought this was about my son.”

  The detective held up his hand to silence him. He put a photograph of a dark-haired woman down on the table. She sat on a grey velvet couch, her arms wrapped around a big dog. “She’s been missing since New Year’s Day,” said the detective.

  “I don’t know this woman,” said Leo. He pushed the photograph away from him. His voice was quiet and low. “I promise you, I’ve never seen her before.” He said it again: “I have never seen her before. My son—isn’t that what this is about?”

  “This woman called the police from the Squire Point pay phone on New Year’s Day, saying she found a little boy,” said the detective.

  “What little boy?” said Leo. He leaned toward the detective. He was lost. He raised his hands. He didn’t know what was happening anymore. The woman had called the police? When? Why?

  “One of your sons?” asked the detective.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Leo, but his hands had begun to shake. He put them down by his sides, out of sight.

  “Okay,” said the detective. “She also called your ex-wife.”

  “Evelina?”

  “Back to the rifle—so you were shooting, doing some kind of target practice? Maybe you shot the woman by accident?”

  “No,” said Leo. He could feel spit forming on the sides of his mouth and he wiped it with his sleeve, fought the urge to grab the detective by the lapels and beat his face. “I was going to teach the boys to shoot. My dad did that with me, you know? I was trying to do something like that for the boys.” He leaned across the table until he was inches from the detective’s face. “I never fired the rifle—I told you what happened already, with Dmitri. I needed to get away from Jesse is all. I needed to get away from him. I left him so I could calm down. I left for maybe twenty, thirty minutes. Dmitri and I drove around. Then we returned to Squire Point, got Jesse, and I drove the boys home to their mother.”

  “Okay,” said the detective. “Take a breath and calm down.” He offered his pen to Leo and continued: “It would help me to be able to visualize this. Can you show me”—at this the detective unfolded a map of Squire Point, the lake in its centre, the two parking lots both leading to it—“where you were, precisely? Retrace your steps for me, show me on the map.”

  “Which steps?”

  “All of them,” said the detective. “From the moment you arrived to the moment you left.”

  “Okay.” He paused a minute, considering where to start, what to say. “I parked here, in this parking lot,” said Leo. He tapped the picture of the first parking lot with the pen. “We walked here, on this trail, with the paper boats.” He dragged the pen along the map, showing the detective his route to the lake. “Then I walked back to the parking lot to get my cigarettes, then back to the lake. That’s when I saw Jesse in the middle of the lake. Do you follow? Okay, then I left Jesse on the trail and Dmitri and I walked back to the car and we left for a while.”

  “And when did you encounter Vera Gusev?”

  “Who? No, I never met her. I have never met her, I said. I drove around with Dmitri—then I parked where I’d parked before. Jesse was waiting for me. I simply took the boys home.” He removed the pen from the map and stared at the detective. “There’s nothing else to say. I don’t know this woman.”

  The detective clicked his tongue.

  “I don’t know this woman,” he said again, louder this time.

  The detective nodded. “So you’ve never met her. And you never fired your rifle. And you don’t remember dropping it in the snow.”

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  “What about her car? Do you remember Vera Gusev’s car in the parking lot?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. I was—as I said, I was upset, I’d had a drink—”

  “I’m thinking,” said the detective, “that Vera must have found Jesse in the woods when you left him.” He leaned back, capped the pen, and slipped it into his pocket. “And maybe she was calling the police when you and Dmitri returned to Squire Point. And when she saw that you had hurt your other son—perhaps she—perhaps she accused you of child abuse—”

  “No, that is not—”

  “And then, as I said before, you snapped.”

  “No,” said Leo, “that isn’t what happened at all.”

  The detective made a snorting sound. “Okay, well, you might, though—you might try to help me understand something then.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why Jesse’s fingerprints were found in Vera Gusev’s car.”

  Leo looked at the table, at the photo of the woman and her dog. He stared into her eyes. What a mess this was. What a monstrous mess.

  “His fingerprints?” he whispered. He wasn’t sure he could speak, even if he had to. Something had happened to his voice.

  “Indeed.”

  “What?”

  “It’s as I said,” said the detective. “We found Jesse’s fingerprints in Vera Gusev’s car.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jesse

  “Yes,” Jesse was saying to the other detective, his mother and Dmitri by his side. “Yes, I was in the woman’s car.”

  It ha
d been three days, but the leathery smell of her fancy car was still bright in his memory. And the dull scent of her cigarettes, like in his father’s car.

  He looked at the detective, then at his hands. What came out of his mouth next was a mixture of the truth and something he had rehearsed with his mother until it had felt true. He could feel the bruises forming underneath the skin on his shoulders, where his mother’s fingers had been.

  “It’s okay,” said the detective. “I’m listening.”

  Jesse saw a lollipop in the detective’s front pocket and wondered whether the detective would give it to him when all of this was over, as if he were a baby. It was a red lollipop. Dmitri was looking at it, too.

  “You can tell him,” said his mother.

  It was a very brightly lit room. So bright it hurt Jesse’s eyes. He knew his father was in the room next to him. Your story is the one that matters, his mother had told him. They won’t believe your father anyway, no matter what he says. It’s you who they will trust.

  And so Jesse took a deep breath and told the detective that his father had left him in the woods after he pretended his brother had fallen through the ice. That was true but it was difficult to say because of the shame he felt. He then said he met the woman on the trail. She had thought he was lost. That was true as well; she did think that.

  “We walked to her car. We drove to the other parking lot to look for my dad. She called my mom, and then she called the police.”

  He looked at the detective and then at his mother. The detective was writing down everything he said, nodding at him to continue. His mother was holding Dmitri’s hand and he wished she would hold his hand, too.

  He said the next bit in a monotone, his eyes cast downward, his foot tapping the floor. “I got scared and opened the door, and her dog jumped out and ran into the woods. She ran after the dog and I never saw her again after that. My father came back and he drove us home.”

  Another man entered the room, and Jesse saw that it was the policeman who had come into his bedroom. The one who had let Dmitri feel his badge. The one who had looked at him with kind eyes. Who had asked if he was okay.

  He wasn’t sure anyone had ever asked him that before.

  The policeman whispered something to the detective, then took a seat. Jesse saw that the policeman was staring at his mother. His mother straightened her back, crossed her legs at the ankles. She pushed her hair behind her ears. There was some small change in her mouth, in her voice.

  “I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful,” his mother said, looking at the policeman and then the detective. “This is really all he knows.”

  He thought again of his mother’s hands digging into his shoulders. His mother was so strong she could pull a drowning man out of the sea. She was so strong that she had pushed his father out of the house.

  “Why didn’t he say anything before?” said the detective. “About being in the woman’s car.”

  “What was he supposed to say?” said his mother. “He didn’t realize the woman he met was the same woman on the news. He is only a little boy.”

  “Yes, but why didn’t he say something to his father? Why didn’t he tell his father about meeting the woman?”

  “I don’t know,” said his mother. “He was scared.” She looked at Jesse, and he nodded. Yes, yes, he was scared. That much was also true.

  The detective squinted at his mother. “Surely his father would have noticed a car idling in the parking lot when he returned, presumably with his son sitting in it. Yes?” The detective turned to Jesse. “No?”

  “I got out of the car,” Jesse said, and that part was also true. “After she went after the dog. I got out of the car and I waited.”

  Besides, he didn’t know what his father did or didn’t see in the parking lot. It seemed impossible that the detective was asking him to comment on something he couldn’t possibly know. “I don’t know what my father saw,” he said.

  “Okay, so walk us through it one more time,” said the policeman. “The woman called the police while you waited in her car, and then what happened?”

  Was this the moment that would divide his life into two? What would happen if Jesse told the truth right now? What would happen to him and his father? He imagined his father’s neck snapping as he fell from the gallows. He imagined being next in line, the noose slipping over his head, the roughness of the rope.

  But it was easy enough to lie. Play pretend, his mother had said. You can do this, she had said.

  This day has never happened. This day has never been.

  Pretend you’re in a movie, his mother said. Pretend you’re in a play. It’s a role, she said. It’s okay to mumble. It’s okay to act scared. It’s okay to correct yourself, to have to start again. Don’t worry, she said, they will believe you. It’s all going to be okay.

  And so Jesse spoke in a low voice, slowly, as his mother had told him to do. The detective and the policeman leaned in when he started to speak, even though he had told them these things already. He wondered how many times he would have to repeat himself. “She called the police and I got scared and opened the door, and her dog jumped out of the car,” he said.

  “What were you scared of?” asked the policeman.

  “I was scared,” said Jesse, “I was scared of my father.” Also true. Always had been true. Still, why was it hard to say? Why were his eyes filling with tears?

  “And you didn’t see the woman after that?”

  “No. She ran after her dog.” He hung his head and watched his tears land on his pant legs. “After a while my father came back. I got in his car and we drove back to my mother’s house.”

  “Your father,” said the policeman, “why didn’t he go after her?”

  “No,” Jesse said again, though at this point the lies were burning through him like battery acid. He reached for his mother’s hand under the table and it was right there, waiting for him. “He didn’t see her. She was gone by the time he came back.” He squeezed his mother’s hand.

  “It has been such a long day,” his mother said, “and we are so very tired.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Leo

  That night, Leo did not join Holly at her studio, and he did not call her. He sensed that it was better if they spent some time apart. He pressed his face into the cold fabric of his pillow, and it smelled like peppermint—like Holly’s hair. He looked around the room, grateful that he was not in jail. He opened a can of tomato soup, not because he was hungry, but because he could.

  Evelina knocked on his door at one in the morning, in her winter coat. She kicked off her boots and said the boys were sleeping, would never know that she was gone. She scanned the wall for a place to hang her coat, then dropped it on the floor. She looked as if she were about to take a dance class. A leotard, that’s what it was called. And jogging pants. He’d almost forgotten how muscular her arms were, and he fought the urge to squeeze her biceps, which looked like they were made of steel. She looked strong and she looked furious, but she also looked tired. There was something funny she was doing with her mouth. She took off her hat and shook out her hair, which was shorter now, dyed and cut to her collarbone. He preferred it long.

  “Is Holly here?”

  “No,” he said. He moved toward her. He watched her take in the single, airless room: its barren white walls, his foam mattress and navy-blue sleeping bag, the kitchenette. The bathroom, which had only a toilet. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The one window barred, impossible to open. Nowhere to sit down, which hadn’t bothered him until this very moment when it seemed like the only thing to do was say, Will you sit down?

  She stood in front of him and folded her arms across her chest. He watched her skin prickle in the cold. “Jesse told me what happened,” she said. She stepped toward him, so close that he could smell the toothpaste on her breath.

  “Everything?�
�� he asked.

  “Everything,” she said.

  He thought of his blue paper boat sitting in the middle of the frozen lake. He thought of the letter—his resolution, his wish—that he had written on New Year’s Eve, Holly by his side. It could have been discovered by the search and rescue team as they looked for the woman. It could have fallen through the ice. Picked up by a curious bird. Shredded and stuffed into a nest by a squirrel.

  “What did you tell the police?” she asked. It was horrible to be this close to her and to see the hatred she had for him in her eyes.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing, Evelina. What did you tell them?”

  “That Jesse met the woman after you left him alone—”

  “Jesus Christ—”

  “But that her dog jumped out of the car and she went after him. And Jesse never saw her again. And you didn’t see her either.”

  “Okay.” He put his hands on his knees. He had to catch his breath. He could live with that story, with that version of things. “Okay,” he said again. “Look, I didn’t know Jesse had been in the woman’s car.”

  “You couldn’t have known that,” she said, her voice rising. “You left our son alone out there—”

  “And I am sorry for that, Evelina.”

  “I think, Leo,” she said, “I might kill you. I might kill you right here in this grubby apartment.”

  She leaned into him, her fists raised, and he felt a familiar flicker in his chest, a small pilot light of anger.

  “Look, Evelina,” he started. He took her fists in his hands. “I’m not all bad.”

  He looked down the length of Evelina’s body and let go of her hands. She could hit him right now, and he would deserve it. He would let it happen. He would let her hit him, if that’s what she needed to do. He waited for the blows.

  But instead she looked around, as if the room might be bugged, and he saw the seriousness in her expression—that she was, in fact, worried someone might be listening. “The important thing is that you say nothing further,” she said. “To anyone.”