Echo Lake: A Novel (2 page)

Five years. Thinking about how long she’d been with Eric made her tired. She missed those early mornings, everything hatching, even the light weak and new, and being young enough to feel that you weren’t hurting anything or wasting any time by being awake when others were still sleeping.

Now, it pained her to stay up too late. So much of the next day was wasted.

Emily rose—she couldn’t go back to sleep now—and put the bed back together, tucking the blankets and sheets in tight. Her feet and hands were stiff with cold, but she couldn’t stand the look of an abandoned, messy bed. Her mother had never been much interested in made beds, washed dishes, or outward signs of order. Emily had developed that habit on her own. As a child, she’d made her bedroom an oasis of order and calm, her dresses organized by color, her toys displayed or tucked away, never on the floor. She had learned how to contain herself tightly in small spaces, like trailer bedrooms and corners of studio apartments.

At eight AM, still an hour and a half from when she had to clock in for work, she decided to bring Eric breakfast—she’d leave it at the door, of course, not barge in and disturb them. It would be like old times, when she used to go out in the clothes she’d slept in to buy juice and bread to soak up the night’s leftover alcohol.

The man at the bakery counter didn’t recognize her. It had been years since he’d seen her two or three times a week at ungodly hours, stumbling in with her skin and hair greasy from being in a close, hot space all night. She dressed differently now, too. A slim, pencil skirt, heels clacking. But she looked otherwise the same, she hoped. Same dirty-blonde hair, same thin lips and big eyes, same long, oval face. Had she become noticeably older? Probably. She wished she could see what the man at the counter saw, but his eyes swept over her face, uninterested.

Beautiful morning, he said.

She remembered the dream then, her mother driving, how she’d known that she was dreaming and hoped that she wasn’t all at the same time. In that car with the cracked window, the hissing, sucking sound, it had looked like a beautiful day then, too. Not a city beautiful day with its walkers and light streaming between buildings. It had been a beautiful day empty of people, all light and all sky from window edge to window edge.

It is, she said. She smiled at the man and walked out, enjoying the sound of her shoes, the feeling of her dress fabric whisking, the chill in the air that made her face cool and red.

She hadn’t intended to look through the window before she knocked on the door. It was only because the windows were wide, large as a double-door, curtainless, and because the white screen of a computer was on, casting its blues onto a couple on the floor. They lay on the opened insides of a sleeping bag, naked. It was Eric and a woman. Or a girl, more like it, blonde and small, her hands folded under her head like a child taking a nap. One breast fell out on to the floor, flattened and sad.

Emily left the coffee and bagels at the doorstep. She wrote a note on the receipt and went to work, her hands shaking.

Fool, she thought all day at work as she filed documents and made phone calls and input numbers flawlessly into a computer program. You’ve been a fool.

She was surprised at herself, the calm she felt below the anger, which roiled and sickened her, as she knew it should, but where did it come from? Below the tumult, she was still and small, a receding pool. She should be devastated, throwing plates at the walls as people did when angry in movies or books: coming home early to beat Eric’s chest, clawing his face, doing something more than feeling sick to her stomach and knowing that this would go away soon enough, and that when it was away, there would be hardly any trace of him.

•

Eric packed up all of his clothes, his instruments, and half of the music collection, though Emily had bought the Pixies and Velvet Underground boxed sets and protested when he packed them.

They were gifts, he said, his voice stuck in a permanent whine. He had cried when she told him what she’d seen, that she wanted him to leave, which had surprised her and then disgusted her when it happened again, after she insisted that yes, it was over, and he had to leave by the end of the week. She’d been crying, too, but he did not seem moved by her tears. She had been ready to be upset, to crawl into bed and stay there for days, to fall into a depression from the anticipation of missing him, but he had saved her from that. He so annoyed her with his attempts to make her feel responsible for his sadness that she couldn’t feel anything but anger toward him, which she liked. It was good to be angry, enlivening, even. It wasn’t a feeling she had indulged in before she’d found him naked, holding that girl on the floor.

It wasn’t just the girl, she realized as the tears and shouting unfolded. It was their entire life together. He had made her his wife. She was responsible for everything, and he was free to live as he liked on the back of her work. She wasn’t willing to do it anymore.

She refused to help him pack, refused to do anything but give him time and space to disentangle his belongings from hers.

Fuck it. Take anything you want, she told him, too tired, after almost five years of bending her desires to his, to argue. Leaving it all to him was a relief. He could choose to throw away what he wanted. When he finally left, she’d get rid of the rest.

Emily left him with his boxes, took a towering pile of mail from the kitchen counter, and stood at the end of the block where the walk sign blinked on. She didn’t cross the street. She leaned on an empty newspaper box and closed her eyes. She imagined he’d be in the kitchen, fixing something alcoholic, ready to assail her with his moping, the only thing he could do with much skill or gusto (he was only a mediocre guitarist, she secretly thought, and an execrable songwriter), when she returned.

Emily sat on the stoop of the tattoo parlor by the apartment and opened the day’s mail in the light of its fluorescent signs. Inside the shop, people were getting things stamped on their bodies—the names of lovers and children, bands and brands and flowers and pin-up girls. She could hear the whirr of tattoo guns from outside, the buzzing like a dentist’s drill.

She set aside everything addressed to Eric except for the things that she paid that happened to be in his name (so he could build some good credit to counteract the bad debt of old parking tickets and long-ignored student loans). It was mostly his mail—bills, fliers for gigs and bars, magazines for cigars and music. At the bottom of the pile, there was a letter addressed to her by hand from Oklahoma. The envelope was thick and heavy, the paper fine. She opened it carefully along a narrow edge. This was the most beautiful letter she’d ever received. Even the ink was rich and black, furred slightly at the edges where it sunk into the veiny fibers of the paper.

Eric was in bed by the time she came back inside, the television and stereo quiet, the bedroom door closed. She pushed a week’s worth of magazines and scarves and jackets onto the floor and lay on the couch without getting a pillow, sheet, or blanket. Usually, she took the room and he took the couch, but tonight she didn’t want to try to wake him from his boozy, red-eyed sleep.

The letter from Oklahoma was nestled in her purse like a golden ticket.

3

The lake was not clean. The bottom went down farther than anyone could see. What would they find there if they could swim down the bottom and look? Was there even a bottom anymore?

Connie sat on the wooden dock next to her, looking much as Emily remembered her before she grew sick and thin.

Look, Connie said. There’s a whole town under there.

Emily imagined people swimming to work, the underwater grocery store with melons and apples floating in the air above their bins, the vacuum packs of sandwich meat spinning.

What do you mean? Emily looked down at her hands and saw that they were her adult hands—scarred in three places, older than her years, a few dim, silver rings.

You’ll find out, Connie said.

They sat for a while longer, not speaking. Emily wanted to reach out to her mother and hug her. It seemed like an appropriate time—a sunset, a lake, the air warm and without even a shift of cold in its wind—but she was afraid. What if she hugged her too close and dropped them both into the lake? What if they fell down into the lake town and nobody knew them and they were not welcome?

4

She couldn’t place the accent of the man on the telephone. His voice was quick, the inflections sharp. He shouted, but without anger. It was simply the way he spoke.

It’s good to hear from you—we prayed that we had the right address and that our letter would find you!

Thank you. Emily wondered if they really had prayed or if it was only an expression.

You never know with them,
she heard her mother’s voice, gravelly between mouthfuls of smoke (she never inhaled, only filled her mouth with smoke, a habit which had not saved her from cancer).
They’ll pray for most anything. Pray you find a parking spot. It’s a way to make you beholden to them and their prayers.

But that wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? Maybe what she needed were some prayers.

Emily pushed the thoughts aside. The voice was open and kind. It was her escape.

So what are the next steps? She asked.

Emily took a notepad from a stack of yellow pads that Eric had left. On the first page, he had started a lyric:

Black fingers break

the lake gray and hard as a nickel

She ripped the page free and crumpled it into a tight ball. She didn’t even feel a twinge of guilt, though she had to admit these lyrics were better than his usual grade-school rhyming couplets. She made her list, clean, simple, and freeing. Better than any of Eric’s lyrics had ever been.

She had been rootless before the letter. Sure she wanted to leave Eric and Columbus, but she was unsure where to go. She had no family that she knew and had few friends that were not his friends, too.

She was unused to doing things on her own. In the last five years, she’d hardly driven more than half an hour by herself, had not seen a movie alone or eaten dinner alone at a sit-down restaurant, had never thought of her money as her own, only our money. The only significant time she’d had to herself was when she had visited her mother in the hospital, early on in their relationship. She had relied on Eric to be the one who introduced her to the world. He was good at it. His big, open face and easy talk invited people in, not to mention his music. She had once been like this, too. She’d been popular in college, had even played drums in a band, that’s how she’d met Eric, but during her years with Eric, she’d forgotten how to be the object of other people’s attention.

He had made her the responsible one, the boring one. Or she had let him do this. Or, more likely, she thought, she’d done it to herself. She couldn’t blame him, really. They had created a system, and she had not stopped it. She had even taken comfort in it for a while, in the lulling rhythms of everyday life and her clear role in it.

But all of that was over now. She’d received the letter from Oklahoma, where her mother had grown up, where her mother’s side of the family had lived for decades. And her mother had come to her in her dreams and said she was going back home, finally, and Connie hadn’t been angry or sick or thin in those dreams—she was the woman Emily had loved in the few times when she’d loved her mother purely without the complication of fear and dislike that was so familiar in their relationship.

The Connie in her dreams was the mother she had wanted and had seen only sometimes, like when Connie was dancing in the kitchen, or putting up Christmas lights, or when she’d pull Emily into her arms and unpin her hair and brush it straight around her shoulders before bed.

Emily knew now that she’d had a great aunt in Heartshorne the entire time. Connie had said that nobody was left there, that everyone had scattered, and good riddance to them, too, but she’d been wrong: Frannie Collins had remained. And if a great aunt had been there all of this time, there might be others. Maybe she would meet her family.

She’d wanted to meet them so badly and had asked until her mother shouted and told her to give up.

I don’t know where they are, Connie had said, and they don’t know where I am, and that’s how I like it.

Emily would finally see the place she might have grown up, if her mother hadn’t left. She had a house waiting for her, paid in full, her inheritance for being Connie’s only living relative.

•

After two weeks of anger at Eric and the realization of the years she’d wasted, Emily finally felt nothing but a muffled annoyance and tenderness toward the remnants of her old life.

Her lack of anger surprised her. She felt not only calm, but triumphant, as though she’d done something to be proud of, though she’d done nothing but be the last surviving member of a broken family and a woman who had the courage to leave a philandering man who had never committed himself to her to begin with. Still, it was something—she had somewhere to go. She’d never been the one going, the one with a direction out. Eric would be in the same city, under the same rain and clouds, walking past the same gutters clogged with leaves and potato chip bags and ripped posters of bands who would never get anywhere beyond Columbus, and she’d be somewhere else, starting afresh.