Lake People (17 page)

Back then, Cici had volunteered at the schoolhouse, teaching the little children. They had never known an outsider before, and they giggled at the way her accent was so very different from their own, but still she was able to teach them to read smoothly and with pleasure. She let them sit on her lap, she braided the girls’ hair, she laughed. The children loved her and she loved them and in time the head teacher retired and Cici took over.

Some days, the children wanted to go down to the beach. There they would lay dried seaweed on the sand and run back and forth over it and as the bells on the buoys echoed the children would shout, “The monsters are here, the monsters are here!” One day a girl began to talk about the van that had fallen over the ledge and now rested in the water.

“I don’t know, maybe forever ago.”

The girl said that the baby had died and the parents had left and now there was the ghost of the baby living in the van in their cove. That was why there were so many whales. They kept watch.

“It’s true,” the other children said. Their parents had told them the very same thing. Cici hadn’t heard this version before.

“The baby didn’t die down there,” she said, and she took them away from the beach.

When Alice knocked on Cici’s door, Cici was in her mid-forties. The girl would be twenty-four this fall, Cici knew.

“Yes?” Cici said shamelessly, her face revealing not an ounce of recognition. And Alice, too, revealed nothing. It was Sunday and the rain had finally quit and now sunlight poured into her small house so intensely that Cici had to grip the doorframe to keep herself from tipping over. That other life she had had.

Back in the days of Mike Shaw, when Alice was sixteen, she had asked her father for more details about this woman. He had let out a long breath, almost like a whistle, rubbed his rough
hands together as though to gather warmth, and then walked to his closet and taken an old map from the top shelf. He spread it on his bed and pointed to an unmarked spot in the eastern reaches of Canada. The place he suspected she would be.
My wife
, he had said, and then,
your mother
. Alice had clung to that word,
mother
, but it wasn’t until she drove away from Josh’s empty house that she found the courage to keep heading north and east until she landed at this remote point. Because now, with scarcely anything left inside of her, how much more could she lose? She had meant to ask questions:
Did you love me? Why did you leave us?
And finally,
Am I really yours?
Instead she said only, “I’m sorry. The man at the campground told me to come here. He said you know something about whales.”

That was true. Her shelves were lined with books about them; each time a family went south to the city she would send them with money to bring back one more book. She could say what kind of whale rose from the water when; she said she recognized each individual whale and knew how long it had been returning to the cove.

A foghorn sounded. That would be Oscar out on his boat, sending his ritual hello. Cici crossed the room, went to the porch, and gave a broad wave. When she turned back around, the girl was in the living room, looking at the walls. They were covered with paintings that Cici had collected over the years. Most were done by Oscar’s sister, who painted brave, colorful pieces on oversized canvases. She hadn’t had an ounce of training and for Cici this made the bravery of the paintings even stronger. The one the girl looked at now was Cici’s favorite. It was of a whale but it had a block-like quality to it, a child could have painted it, and it was so large that it overtook nearly an entire wall. Cici suddenly knew she was going to vomit.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ll have to go.”

It was no wonder that the man at the campground would next tell Alice to track down Oscar. He was the one who liked to talk to outsiders. He’d had a wife once, long ago, who had come here from the city. Eventually she left with their daughter—he could admit that his own drinking had done it. But he had long since quit that. Cici had been in his life for more than twenty years now. He wanted to marry her but she would not, but he loved her and was happy all the same.

At the wharf Oscar told the girl that he would take her on the boat the following day. He did it because she was young and nice enough and because it wasn’t often that someone had the courage to ask.

Also it might work out well for Oscar. He and Cici, after all these years, had had their first fight last month. It was over a vacation he wanted to take—he’d planned the whole two weeks, even paid ahead for some of it. They would go to the Bay of Fundy and then down to the city. They would eat French food and stay in hotels and they would be tourists and it would be grand. Cici had refused—she always refused, she would go nowhere—and Oscar had stormed out and now a month had gone by and neither of them had had the sense to apologize. Now with the girl Oscar could. Cici loved a visitor, so he could bring her over and the three of them would eat lobsters.

In the morning Oscar outfitted Alice in a yellow rain suit much too large for her and told her to expect to be sick, what with the waves and the stench of the bait. She said she wanted to see whales, that she had meant to be a scientist but had never done well enough in school. A camera hung from her neck and she said that she had also thought to be a photographer but had never been good enough at that, either. Just seeing them would
be enough, she said. And maybe the library in her hometown might like to hang a few photos.

She did marvelously on the boat. Not once did she hang her head over the edge. She didn’t complain and she didn’t speak too much and she had a way of speaking to Oscar’s teenage stern man that seemed to put him right at ease.

“I have a wet suit,” Oscar heard her tell the boy. “I don’t have the nerve to scuba dive but I’m going to snorkel. What are the chances of seeing a whale underwater?”

“Might see that old van,” Oscar called to her from behind the wheel. “Old town legend. Gus at the campground best to tell it. Says a young couple parked there and he watched their van go over into the water. Says their baby was inside. That’s why they disappeared. They stole his truck and it didn’t turn up until two days later, down in the city. Now the whales keep watch over the baby, that’s the story.”

Alice looked out over the still blue water, waiting for a whale to appear. Her father had told her of this place, and he was right—the beauty, she had seen nothing like it. But there was something else, too. The danger of the cliff, it may have been that. The poverty perhaps. Something here scared her. When she stood at the edge of the cliff in the night she became afraid not that she would fall over the ledge but that she might jump.

“Got lobsters,” Oscar said later, when she was back at the campground. It was just about dinnertime and she was going to heat a can of beans by the fire but here he was, wanting to take her for dinner. She got in his truck.

When Cici opened the door she was already a bit drunk. She embraced Oscar and whispered something in his ear and then she put her hands on Alice’s cheeks and asked, “Where are you from?”

“Kettleborough,” Alice said, as though that was a place people would know.

“Yes, yes you are,” Cici said back.

They ate lobsters and listened to Alice talk about the lake where she had grown up, the courses she had taken in college. Before the meal was through, Cici said, “And your father? Tell me how your father is.” Alice went still at that, and in a moment Cici just excused herself and went to the bedroom, closed the door.

“I’ve never seen her like this,” Oscar said. “I’m sorry.” To try to keep the conversation going, he told her again that maybe she’d see that van underwater. Maybe a whale lived in it, he announced foolishly.

Cici, in her bedroom and a little drunk but not near so bad as Oscar and Alice thought, heard that. She lay on her quilt with her arms spread wide. She had brought this quilt from home—the one belonging that stretched back into the space of her previous life. A woman out on Bear Island had sewn it for her when she’d first married, and she had loved it for the colors, which matched the lake. She turned over and dug her nose into the blanket as though there would be an old lake smell trapped in there from more than two decades ago. The love she’d had then, she thought of how desperate and vital it had been. The entire time she and Paul had been together, people had always mistaken them for honeymooners. She’d been pretty then, she knew that, pretty and self-assured, and he could have walked right out from a movie screen.

When she woke up it was still the dark of morning and Oscar was asleep beside her in all his clothes. He wouldn’t go out on the boat today. Cici started a fire and put a saucepan of coffee grounds and water atop it. When Oscar rose he stood in the
picture window for a long while. When he turned to her she knew he was angry. He’d always known there was something in her past that sent her away—a woman wouldn’t come here alone without that. He had accepted it. He didn’t tell her everything, either. But there had been rumors about her—Gus at the campground started them way back. He said she was the one who had killed her own baby. That circulated right around until Oscar put a stop to it without Cici’s ever knowing a word had been said.

“Ain’t her name, look right there in your book,” Oscar had told Gus.

“Changed it, maybe she has,” Gus had said.

Back then Oscar had understood that the town wanted her to be some criminal, at least just a little bit they wanted that, for it would provide excitement and years of storytelling. But Gus was wrong, Oscar had been sure of it, and on top of that Oscar had already begun to fall in love with her.

“I’ll go away,” Cici said now. “Anywhere you like.” On a trip with him is what she meant, but she knew it didn’t come out that way. Oscar left. He had intended to drive home but from the top of the cliff he could see Alice down there in her wet suit, a mask on her forehead and a snorkel hanging next to her mouth. She looked helpless and it would be cruel and even dangerous to let her go out there without someone watching. He drove down to the beach.

“I’ve practiced plenty,” she said.

“Who knows what’s down there.”

“I know,” she said. It wasn’t said in agreement. It was a claim she was making.

The lupines were out in full bloom, and before she went into the water she walked up the hill and took one careful photograph of the flowers. This morning, just when the light had begun to spread across the cliff, she’d heard a rustle and peered outside her tent. Cici, on her tiptoes. The woman had held her breath
as she opened Alice’s car door and placed something inside. She closed the door, turned, and then turned back, opened the door again. From her view in the tent, Alice could see only that Cici went to the car twice; she couldn’t tell that all Cici had done was move the envelope from the seat to the dashboard and then back to the seat. When the car door was closed once more, Alice expected her to walk off again, but instead she approached the tent. Alice froze in her upright position, unsure as to whether Cici could see in or not. Cici froze, too, and Alice felt certain that for a moment their eyes locked in that dim morning light that was dimmer still with the screen of the tent between them. Neither said a word. Cici left. When Alice was sure that Cici would be out of sight, she crawled out of the tent to see what was there. She had expected a letter, an explanation. An apology. Instead there was a deed for a cabin and a small plot of land out on an island on the lake, along with an old map and a scribbled note:
Left to you by a Kettleborough woman named Signe
. For a moment the coldness of the exchange shocked Alice, and her instinct was to chase Cici up the road and return the envelope to her. But then neither of them had ever dared speak bluntly to each other; Alice had made her attempt and now Cici had made her own. She left the envelope on the seat and returned to her tent until the sun was high.

Now, with flippers on her feet, Alice made her way into the frigid water. Her steps were awkward, but still there was no hesitation in them, though in truth she had not practiced, not in the ocean. She had practiced plenty in the lake, but that had been years ago, and anyway there was a current here and the water was so cold and there was that terror, too, this ocean so vast and the life in it unknown. Underwater, darkness occupied most of her sight, with only an occasional beam of light. She kept the edge of the cove in view but did not go too close to it, in case a wave should change direction and sweep against the side of the
rock rather than the shore. The seaweed was tall and she had the sense that she was drifting atop a forest canopy. There were no fish, none that she saw. When the light glinted she knew she had found the van. It was where she had imagined it to be. She came up and held tight to a rock, lifted her mask from her face and looked to shore. It wasn’t but twenty feet away. She had worn a life jacket but now she removed it and hitched it with its strap to a tangle of seaweed on the rock. She took a deep breath and plunged herself under.

The van still stood straight up, as though it had grown out from the seafloor and longed for light. Without knowing what she was looking at she might have known only that a large hunk of rusted metal lay beneath the water. The water down there was gentle, and in it one open door swayed lightly back and forth. So this was what she had come in search of. Not a thin, cold, unknowable woman whose features would never match her own, but the proof, drowned and rusted, that she herself had impossibly clung to life. That no matter how little she felt she belonged in this world, she had known, in her infant self, how to reemerge into it.