What We Lost in the Dark (5 page)

Rob and I were going to go the classic competitive way, which is called constant weight. A diver wears a belt with enough weight so that it’s easier to roll your body into a pike position and go down, arms extended like Superman, kicking as little as possible as you descend (any effort uses up oxygen) until you see how low your body (and your mind, because your mind plays a big role) will allow you to go.

Free divers suffer convulsions. They pass out. They don’t pause to adjust their ears and end up blowing out their eardrums.

But they love the feeling.

Why? I was going to find out why. I’d never even gone scuba diving with Rob, although he pestered me all the time to go with him.

Last summer, he was certified as an open-water diver, his way of coping with Juliet’s disappearance. He’d taken instruction with Wesley, a guy legendary in Iron Harbor for his daring. Wesley had hang glided in the mountains, here and out West. He’d hiked the Appalachian Trail and then turned around and hiked back. He skydived, cave dived, and apparently, free dived, and also taught it all. He had a stack of teaching credentials—with no wall to hang them on—which was why Rob and I were on the way to see him at the Iron County YMCA pool. Rob had signed us both up for private lessons.

Rob was in a great mood.

He idolized Wesley—perhaps (not perhaps, in fact) because Wesley had unrestricted access to everything Rob had severely restricted access to—namely, the outdoors. Wesley also had that irritating nouveau hippie way of living life, so appealing to people with a Y chromosome: no girlfriend, but “special ladies” in his life, planted all over, and only in places like Maui and Taos, where he kept a bag of clothes
and a bedroll stashed in their coat closets. I’d met Wesley once, in the dark—but then, almost everyone I met was in the dark—when Rob did his open-water diver’s test. (Let me dis-recommend this experience to you even if you don’t have XP: if you’re not the one doing the test, and you’re watching from the surface, watching someone take an underwater diving test makes collating paper look like a ripper of a party in Hollywood or someplace.)

Despite that not entirely thrilling experience, I was in a pretty good mood myself.

THE NIGHT BEFORE, I’d finished up my lab training with a technician, Melissa, who daylighted as an undertaker. While I couldn’t assist at an autopsy, I could be an engaged observer. And luckily (though what experience that involves death can ever be considered “lucky”?) it was Bonnie’s turn, although she complained that she hadn’t performed an autopsy in years.

The subject was a boy, only a year older than me. There was no need to examine his two-year-old cousin, the child he had died trying to save. Drowning isn’t ordinarily a suspicious death, unless there’s a possibility of suicide, but both the little boy and the teenager died in shallow water. The older boy had gotten stuck under a tree root trying to reach the toddler.

“Do you think it matters, if you die alone?” I asked Bonnie.

She wasn’t normally sentimental about such things, but I saw her eyes fill. She was thinking of her own son, Chris, the same age as me.

“I think it matters,” she said. “I think it’s better, if anything like that can be better, if you’re not alone. I also think
that sometimes, if you’re between life and death, another person’s encouragement can keep you going.”

As she washed the dirt from the young man’s chest, Bonnie told me that the young guy had not suffered.

“Death, itself, at the actual moment, isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a good feeling. People don’t die, really
die
, in agony. The fear before is awful, and the knowledge. But, you’ve seen nature shows on TV. At the moment that the antelope in the tiger’s maw lets go, the brain gives you the gift of terminal endorphins so that you can at least surrender. The agony stops. I’ve experienced that myself.”

Between the births of her two sons, Bonnie told me she’d had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Apparently is one of the most painful events known to womanhood—which is, so far as I can tell, filled with them. In the ambulance, however, just before she would have died, when she’d lost so much blood that her pressure was about twelve over zero, she said she experienced a wondrous, warm euphoria, not only the cessation of the pain but the emotional assurance that her son, Chris, who was four years old, would be just fine, no matter who raised him. The paramedic, on his very first run, sensed this. When Bonnie felt his hot tears plink on her cool face, she roused herself and slipped back into achy consciousness. The medic was slapping Bonnie, and saying,
Don’t die. Please don’t die
. And so she didn’t. Despite its manifest anguish, the experience banished any fear of actually dying that she ever had.

She quoted the poet John Peale Bishop: “Tis not death, but fear of death that restores us to the crowd.”

Then, she gave me a long look and stopped the digital recorder she was wearing around her neck in a sports harness. She told me to leave.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s not that I don’t think you’re up to it. I’ll make sure you do your cadaver studies on my own. It’s just too soon for you, after Juliet.”

I nodded. We were both thinking the same thing:
What about Juliet’s dad?
Tommy Sirocco had come in with the teenage boy’s family. I’d watched as Tommy turned away and pressed his hand over his eyes when the guy’s mother used the corner of her sweatshirt to dry her dead son’s hair. The woman’s brother held her close; it had been a family vacation, and it now would be a family funeral. I left Bonnie to do her work on the cadaver and made Tommy a cup of coffee in the little break room where I did my studying. In the past three weeks, it seemed that he had lost twenty pounds. I didn’t even want to ask about Juliet’s mother, Ginny, who had gone to Ireland for an extended visit with her sister. When he sat down at the table, I cringed. I tried hard to grab for the book I’d left out, but he saw the cover,
The Geography of Murder
.

Embarrassed, I said, “I’m sorry.”

Tommy smiled at me. His smile was worse than his expression of perpetual worry: he had always been the closest thing I’d had to a father, knuckling my head when I was little, taking me to Juliet’s competitions when I was older. He peered at the book over his steaming Styrofoam cup. “I don’t know this one.”

“The idea is that that there are some places murderers are more likely to strike. Like Seattle.”

Tommy sighed. “It makes sense. A big city near a whole lot of wilderness. Mountains. Minnesota, now, except for here, Minnesota is pretty much fields of wheat. Some forest land.”

“You can hide victims in the woods.”

“Yes. Sometimes. Not usually forever.”

“But there are all those lakes,” I said.

“You’d be surprised how difficult it is to keep a dead person missing in a lake.” Tommy’s face constricted when he said that, and I know we both thought of Juliet—like a wounded mermaid, draped against someone’s pier, alone and waiting to be found. He took a sip and hugged my shoulder. Then he left.

“SO, WHERE DID those girls go?” I said to Rob as we turned up Harbor Road to the YMCA. “It’s not just that Tabor blends in and feels safe. It’s that he picks his victims wisely. They all do. Those girls in the apartments could have been runaways. They could have been tourists. They could have been hookers from Thunder Bay. Where are they now, though? He didn’t leave them in that apartment. He didn’t kill them there.”

Rob hadn’t said much the whole ride. He wasn’t curious; he was impatient. I knew that he wanted our time together to be a break from all things Tabor. But I couldn’t help telling the most important person in my life what was on my mind, could I?

“It’s a where-done-it,” Rob said, with a twitch of his lips that tried for a smile. “Who would know better than Tabor, because of his father being Dr. Stephen, how to remove anything that would tie him to a crime or to … anyone.”

“He knows how to get rid of evidence. And he knows this place, every inch. He controls it. How many times has he gotten away with it, Rob?”

“Honey, I know this question eats away at you. I know it does. But we’ve said all this before, Allie, and I can’t count how many times.” Rob let out a gusty breath and parked the
car. I kept quiet while he grabbed the dive bags and gear he’d bought online for both of us. “Just tonight, can we not talk or even think about him?”

I nodded. “I promise,” I said. “I won’t be able to talk about him.” I held up two fingers in a parody of the Girl Scout pledge. “I’ll be holding my breath.”

He smirked.

Already, in my head, I was making lists. On one side was making Rob happy and preserving the relationship we had. It wasn’t like that of other girls and guys. In most relationships I’d heard of, or seen on TV, the guy wanted to feel like some kind of protector—someone the girl extravagantly admired. Rob expected me to be as good as or better than he was at the things we did together. On the other side was my deep-seated gut feeling that if we did this, something would go wrong. I said to Rob, “This does seem kind of dull, doesn’t it? I mean compared to Parkour?”

“Are you kidding?” Rob answered, incredulous.

So he wasn’t even verging on ambivalence, let alone making mental ledgers with two columns, with headings like
Things I Want to Accomplish Before I Die
and
Ways I Definitely Do Not Want to Die
.

“Of course I’m kidding,” I lied. The truth was that I was deeply afraid of dark water.

That’s not true. I was afraid of
big
dark water.

Relative to most people, I think I could safely say that I was a decent swimmer. I’d spent far more time swimming than, for example, shopping. By a ratio of ten to one. I’d gone swimming and fishing in Ghost Lake almost every summer night since the three of us were eleven and got our ten-speed bikes. Ghost Lake had been like my bathtub. It was little and manageable and you could lap it three times in an easy
roll that barely got your breathing going. We didn’t go there anymore because Juliet’s ashes were scattered in Ghost Lake. Superior is scarier than Ghost Lake in the way that the North Atlantic is scarier than the Caribbean. It’s more than being deeper and wilder. It’s something else.

I’m sure the something is psychological.

I’m sure there’s even a name for it.

Too open and too much is as scary as too narrow and too little. It feels like claustrophobia, but for the opposite reason. Lake Superior was too damned vast. It was too vast before we started thinking about free diving; now, when I let myself think about being not just on its surface but under it, within it, its psychological immensity roared up at me.

Just as everybody has a story of her life, everybody who lives anywhere around here has a life story involving Lake Superior. Locals are driven to measure it and compare it with other things. In July, when its glistening surface invites us, we find everything from our fun to our food. In December, it raises its fists, and we run. People have always loved and feared it. The original locals, the Ojibway, called it the shining big-sea water, and some of them probably had no idea that there was anything on the other side of it, although they were pretty intrepid. If I didn’t have a TV, I wouldn’t have any idea that there was anything on the other side of it, either—and not just because I don’t get around. If you were a great quarterback, you could throw a rock across Ghost Lake, where the old cabin was that we horsed around in when we were kids, and where Rob and I made love before Juliet died. But when I say “lake,” a thing so big that it controls the climate is not what comes to mind.

Every school kid in Iron Harbor knows that Superior covers more than thirty thousand square miles. Only Lake
Tanganyika in East Africa and Lake Baikal in Siberia are bigger. I would bet, however, that people in Siberia are not walking around in sixty-below-zero weather trading zingers about Baikal’s sheer size, the way people do here—where it only gets to be about thirty below.

“You know, you could put the state of Maine in Lake Superior,” I said to Rob as he locked up his car.

“Good thing we’re only going swimming in a pool tonight.”

“And in the deepest spot? If you put the Sears Tower right down in that hole, only a few of the floors would be sticking out.”

“Imagine that.”

“But here’s what’s really interesting. If you drained it, you could cover all of North America and South America, too, with one or two feet of water.”

“Both of them?”

“Yep. Alberta to Argentina.”

And yes, that is so way not normal by any definition, to be so mystified by a hole with water in it that isn’t Loch Ness.

Rob just grinned. But I knew he was with me. There is something mystifying about the lake.

You can’t ignore it. You belong to it. Every day that I got closer to thinking of myself within Lake Superior’s own life story, I thought of all the lives that Lake Superior had taken into itself—in peril or simply in the way of things, with time. Hundreds and thousands. A great bowl of ghosts.

Superior never gives up her dead.

Down into that lake I was intending to go, for Rob. The love of my guy, Rob. He was lucky he had a sense of humor and unmanageable black curls because I would absolutely not be doing this for anyone else.

We arrived at the Y, and I caught myself repeating for the hundredth time:
Tonight, it’s only a pool, Allie. It’s the pool
.

“Ready to test your limits?” said a pebbly voice behind us.

I jumped about three feet straight up, and whirled around. There was the Famous Wesley. I let out a deep breath.

Wesley was one of those older guys who seemed cut from some kind of root, bleached brows over startling blue eyes, his nose and cheeks spare and brown as planes of teak. The only thing fat about him was his shoulder-length hair, plaited in a loose braid that managed to look utilitarian instead of affected. He could have been a Harvard MBA but would always look like he’d spent the night in a backpacker tent on a surfer beach in Malibu (which I’ve never seen but imagine) or Maui (which I’ve also never seen but imagine even more often). Surfing and diving, and camping and hiking, and taking photographs that looked like museum art with a camera from RadioShack—this was what Wesley did. According to Rob, Wesley also ate voraciously, four burgers at a sitting, five bowls of chili.