Mania (15 page)

Nick was sitting in the shade of the birch trees in front of the house where he and Sam had grown up just outside Madison, on the short set of stairs where he had waited past midnight for Elizabeth to come home from the dance. He hadn’t thought about exiting the highway at the interchange. His flight to Seattle was leaving from Milwaukee in another few hours, and he should have been on his way to the airport. He had pulled the Taurus off the freeway without thinking, wending his way down rural streets crowded with memories, following the familiar path back to his childhood home. Passing in front of Lake Issewa, he had slowed the car nearly to a stop, peering through the trees down the hill to the still pool of water. A vision of the lake frozen in winter flashed in front of his eyes. He could hear Sam shouting at him and laughing, the scrape of their skates on the ice.

Behind him, his family’s old, three-story brick house was empty at midday. Nick had knocked on the Munroes’ door, too, but no one had been home there, either. The fall landscape was vivid with color. A light northern breeze was blowing, rustling the leaves of the birch trees high above his head. Nick, though, was unaware of the breeze and the sounds. Caught up all at once in the currents of a memory, staring down the gently sloping green lawn toward the street, he was blind to the tableau in front of him.

You boys don’t have to be skerred.

“Go!” Sam shouted to Nick. His voice sounded weak across the flat plane of the snowy, frozen lake. Nick was too afraid to move. “Go!” Sam shouted again. “Run!” Nick remained transfixed, looking back at Sam. He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice had deserted him. He leaned down, resting his hands on his knees and panting, trying to keep from vomiting. He couldn’t figure out what his brother was doing. Why had Sam stayed behind? Sam glanced over his shoulder at him. “Run, Nick,” he shouted. “Run!”

“Come with me!”

Nick watched as the man caught up to Sam. Nick’s face was squeezed into a small red ball, and he couldn’t think. His cheeks were wet with hot tears, and he realized he was crying. “Come on, Sam,” he said under his breath. “Come on. What are you doing? Come on!”

Then the ice broke. It happened so quickly Nick couldn’t figure out what he was seeing. The man had just reached Sam. He was grabbing him, about to wrestle him to the ground. The two of them went down into the water together. Nick remained where he was, motionless, unable to move.

Sam shouted for help as he plunged into the freezing water, before his head was submerged, and the sound of Sam’s voice woke Nick. He skated as fast as he could back in the direction he had come, toward his brother. Closing the twenty yards between them in a matter of seconds, he didn’t come to a stop until he was nearly in the water himself.

The ice began to crack underneath him, groaning beneath his weight, but Nick ignored the danger. He dropped to his knees, lay down on his stomach. Cold water seeped up onto the lip of the ice, soaking through his clothes, scalding him with its frozen heat. The hole was about five feet in diameter, and its surface had grown still. The lake was murky, opaque. “Sam!” Nick shouted. There was no sign of his brother or the man. He pulled himself forward, all the way to the very edge of the hole. “Sam!” He looked down into the water, but he couldn’t see anything at all.

Moments later, when the man broke back through the surface, the sudden torrent of movement and sounds made Nick yelp. It took him a few seconds to realize that the man was more scared and disoriented than he was. The man was gasping for air. His face had turned blue and his lips had turned purple and his eyes were wide with terror. Ignoring him, Nick pulled himself back to the edge of the hole, realizing with growing horror that his brother had gotten trapped under the ice.

Becoming aware of a thumping noise and a slight vibration underneath him, Nick twisted around, then was able to make out the shape of a hand where the ice was nearly translucent, about two feet back from the hole.

Nick didn’t consider his next move, he merely reacted. He crawled forward, thrust a hand into the water and, reaching back, caught hold of the sleeve of Sam’s jacket. The ice bent dangerously beneath him, but he strained with all his might anyway, dragging his brother’s limp body through the freezing water.

At first, there was no reaction from Sam. His body could have been a bundle of rags. All at once, though, Sam clasped Nick’s arm, sending a wave of shock coursing through Nick like a bolt of electricity. This burst of adrenaline was quickly followed by another when Sam also began to pull. The wet surface of the ice was slippery, and, suddenly terrified—fighting frantically to find some traction—Nick felt himself being drawn into the water. He gritted his teeth and planted his free hand into the ice and spread his legs out behind him. Finally, he was able to hold his position.

Despite the lethal cold, Sam did the rest. Taking hold of Nick’s hands and then hoisting himself on his brother’s arms, he climbed up out of the water.

Nick had never seen his brother cry before. He had never seen Sam show a single sign of any weakness. He was crying now. He crumpled onto the ice next to Nick, coughing and shaking, sobbing, a huge, slick trail of snot seeping out of his nose and bubbling over his mouth. Nick, too, lay back on the ice, exhausted by the near disaster.

The man was still thrashing in the water in front of them, trying to pull himself up the way that Sam had. Without the benefit of anything to hold on to, though, he was being held back by the weight of his heavy coat and sweater and boots. In the freezing water, his muscles were stiffening, locking as he went into shock.

Sam was first to recover himself. “Come on, Nick,” he said. “Let’s go.” Wiping his face clean, he clambered to his knees, then, shaking, stood up onto his skates. “Let’s get out of here.”

Time had slowed down for Nick. From his prone position, he watched his brother getting up, then pushed himself onto his knees and stood up as well. Next to him, Sam was moving in a panic. Nick recognized that he should have shared his brother’s alarm. The day had taken on an unreal quality, however. Like he was standing back somewhere safe, watching all this from a distance.

“Now, Nick,” Sam said, tugging Nick’s sleeve. “We’ve got to run.” When Sam skated off, however, rather than follow him, Nick turned back toward the man.
They couldn’t simply leave him there, could they?
He picked up his hockey stick where he had dropped it, then, once again ignoring the ice threatening to break underneath him, reached toward the man with the taped blade of the stick as if he was trying to fish a piece of trash out of the icy water.

“Hey, mister,” Nick said. “Hey!” The man struggled to face him, and their eyes met. Without articulating the thought, Nick understood that the man was too crazed to see him. The man’s lips were so dark they were black. His eyes were so red that Nick thought maybe they were bleeding. Nick had the impression that the man’s skin had shrunk. That it had been stretched taut over the skeletal frame of his face. The man’s jaw was quivering with a mechanical intensity, like a machine plugged into a socket, syrupy spittle drooling out of his mouth.

Maybe it was because the man had wanted to rape them. He was getting what he deserved. Or maybe it was simply that, at ten years old, Nick couldn’t envision what might happen next. But Nick made no effort to rescue the man. He didn’t try to hook him with the blade. Despite the man’s distress, Nick simply stretched the stick out toward the man as though he had all the time in the world, waiting for him to react. He didn’t reflect that the man was practically comatose from the subzero cold.

When the man did reach for Nick’s hockey stick, he moved spasmodically. His body twisted ineffectually in the water, and he overshot the blade. The agitation destroyed his equilibrium with the water, and he sank. Nick leaned forward on his skates to watch him disappear, stunned by the abrupt silence, tracking the man’s movement beneath the turbulent green-black surface. When the man broke back through, gasping, screeching for air, the explosion made Nick jump. He wasn’t ready for it when the man grabbed hold of the stick. Suffocating, unable to control his muscles anymore, the man yanked so hard that Nick lost his balance.

Beneath his skates, Nick felt the ice bend. For a split second, he thought he would be pulled into the lake. He heard the ice crack and groan and start to give. Unthinkingly, saving himself, he let go of the hockey stick. He jerked backward as the stick landed with a splash in the icy water.

The man fought to remain afloat. Regaining his balance, Nick watched helplessly as he slowly lost his buoyancy. When the man once again dipped beneath the surface of the water, this time Nick lost sight of him completely. As before, the abrupt silence stunned him, bookending the intervening rush of sounds. The water became eerily still. Nick squinted, listening to the raspy hiss of his own breathing, leaning forward over the broken edge of the ice, trying to peer into the murky lake. He must have stared at its glassy surface for ten full seconds before he realized that the man wasn’t moving anymore. At last, comprehending, he dropped to his knees.

Nick wasn’t aware that Sam was standing next to him. He twisted in surprise at the sound of Sam’s voice. “Stop it, Nick,” Sam was ordering his younger brother. His voice was raised nearly into a shout. “Stop it! You’ll fall in.” Nick hadn’t realized that he had been straining to reach into the icy lake. Not until he became aware of Sam’s fingers digging into his shoulders, restraining him.

“Please, Sam,” he said. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

Sam dragged his smaller brother roughly back from the edge of the hole, forcing him down onto the ice a few feet back. Then he took his own hockey stick and used it to lift Nick’s from the water. After that, stepping as close to the edge as he dared, he reached his stick into the water and searched for the man with the end of its blade.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked his brother.
He wasn’t trying to fish him out
.

Sam continued to prod the hole with his hockey stick. He didn’t bother trying to explain. Nick was too young to understand that the longer the man went undiscovered, the less likely anyone would be able to piece together the series of events that had led to his untimely death. Too young to understand that they couldn’t leave behind any evidence that they had been there. “He’s dead,” Sam said matter of factly. He didn’t try to say more.

Once he found the corpse, Sam balanced himself on his skates and took the blade of his hockey stick and gave the dead man a firm shove backward, wedging him under the thick, frozen shelf. Nick turned away from the blurry image of the man beneath the frosty layer of ice. He lay backward. He was still breathing hard, but his tears had gone dry. He looked up at the sky. The clouds had thickened again, and it was beginning to snow. The lake would freeze over tonight, the hole would close. It would be months, he knew, before the man was found.

Sitting on the stairs in front of his family’s house in Madison, Nick shuddered. The recollection felt unreal. Like a dream.

As far as Nick knew, if the body was ever discovered, the police hadn’t conducted an investigation. The boys had never seen or heard anything about the man. Over time, Nick had suppressed the memory.

Fifteen minutes passed, and then, rousing himself, Nick walked down the lawn to the Taurus. He was cutting it short if he wanted to catch his scheduled flight back to Seattle. Shaken by his flashback, he was pulling the rental car’s heavy door open when he heard an engine approaching. He turned and waited for the car to pass, his eyes connecting with Elizabeth Munroe’s as she slowed to a stop in front of her parents’ house.

Elizabeth’s daughter looked just like her mother. She had long, dirty blond hair and light blue eyes, paper-white skin and freckles on her nose. She stood between her mother’s legs, considering the strange man. She felt safe with the comforting weight of her mother’s hands on her shoulders, her mother’s fingers tangled in her wispy hair. She had yanked her mother’s sweater hard enough to pull her off balance when she leaned forward to give Nick a quick kiss on the cheek.

“I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” Elizabeth said.

Nick shrugged. “That’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you anyway.”

“So what brought you back?”

Elizabeth’s daughter was listening to every word. “I was passing through,” he said innocuously. “I just wanted to see the neighborhood again.”

Elizabeth smiled. “I can’t believe how much older you are.”

“Have I changed that much?”

She smiled, nodding her head. “Yeah. I’d like to tell you no. But yes, you have.”

“You, too,” he said. He looked down at her daughter. “How old is she?”

“How old are you, Emily?” Elizabeth gave her daughter’s shoulders a soft squeeze. When Emily didn’t answer, she tousled her hair a little. “She’s four,” she said to Nick.

“She’s beautiful,” Nick said.

“She’s shy.”

“That’s how I remember you. Not like this.”

Elizabeth’s smile turned into an awkward laugh.

“I never would have imagined you with a daughter. So you’re married now?”

“I’m Catholic. What do you think? Yes, I’m married.”

“So it all turned out okay, then. In the end, I mean.”

Elizabeth’s eyes darkened. A gust of wind tossed a few strands of hair across her face. “How is Sam?” she asked.

Once again, Nick glanced at Emily. He didn’t want to answer. When Elizabeth covered her daughter’s ears with her hands, the girl struggled indignantly, craning her head to look up at her mother.

“Did something happen to him?”

Nick didn’t respond.

“Did something happen to Sam?” Elizabeth asked again.

Nick shook his head, unable to find words to tell her that his brother had been murdered. In the end, he didn’t have to. Elizabeth was able to read it in his face.

“I can’t say I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.

“What?” Nick was surprised by the callous remark.

“I guess I don’t mean it,” Elizabeth said. “But he deserved whatever he got.”