When You Were Older (16 page)

I have no idea how long he stayed down there with that girl or what they did. I don’t even know who she was.

I just knew I couldn’t shake the look in Ben’s eyes as he pulled the trigger on me.

I’d always made comments about how Ben would kill me, or was lying in wait to kill me, but it was always a figurative murder. And I’m not saying this was a literal one, or even pointed to the possibility of a literal one. It was more that, suddenly, nothing was out of the question. I just wasn’t absolutely, positively, one hundred per cent sure any more that such a thing was impossible.

MY FATHER BAITED
my hook for me. Unfortunately.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t really like the worms.’

Ben smirked at me.

I liked the worms OK. It was running them through with the worm version of a bayonet that didn’t much appeal to me.

We were back at the lake, after taking one year off following the great canoe disaster. This year we’d rented a motor boat big enough for all three of us. My father never said so, but I’m sure he felt safer within arm’s reach of both me and Ben. I couldn’t help noticing that he’d bought a case of beer – not a six-pack or a twelve-pack but a full thirty-six-bottle case – at the dock store, and had the guys load it into the bottom of the boat for him. My mother would never have to know.

I opened the fishing reel and lowered my worm slowly into the water. I had one small split-shot sinker
on
the rig, just enough to take the worm down to the bottom of the lake, where I sincerely hoped I could snag the hook on some weeds and break the line.

I watched my father twist the cap off another beer.

I reeled back in. I felt a resistance, which I was sure was the snag I’d been hoping for. A second later I felt a sharp tug, and my heart fell. I held the rod perfectly still. What I should have done, by fisherman standards, was pull back quickly to set the hook. Instead I just froze, hoping the fish would finish the worm without hooking itself, and move on. The strategy backfired on me. He swallowed the hook, though I didn’t know it at the time. At the time I just kept hoping there’d be an opportunity to lose him again.

‘You got one!’ my father shouted. As if this should be one of the shining moments in my life.

I slowly reeled in. What choice did I have?

‘It’s a beaut!’ my father called out when it came to the surface.

I didn’t bring it into the boat. Sometimes they’ll wiggle off the hook if you allow a moment of pause, and a slack in the line tension. That is, if they haven’t already swallowed the hook. Which I didn’t yet know this one had.

‘It’s not so great,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe twelve inches, is all.’

My father shot him a grim look, and he turned his gaze down to the bottom of the boat.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.

Meanwhile my fish was still struggling just under the surface of the water, reinforcing the gravity of what I’d done to him.

‘Reel him in, Rusty. Get him in the boat.’

I looked up at my father, but it involved looking right into the sun, and I could only screw up my face and press my eyes closed. It was three thirty in the afternoon, with the sun at a slant. We’d been out a long day already.

‘I want to let him go.’

A long silence, during which I’d have liked to have seen my father’s face. But the sun was in my eyes.

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

He leaned over the side of the boat and grabbed my line.

‘Don’t take him out of the water!’ I yelled. ‘He won’t be able to breathe.’

My father sighed, and grasped the fish by the lower section of its jaw. ‘He swallowed the hook,’ my father said, and my heart sank even further. ‘Ben, hand me that knife.’

I watched in horror, thinking my father was going to stab the fish dead, or maybe even perform surgery to retrieve the hook. Instead he made a loop of the line close to the fish’s mouth, held it tightly so it wouldn’t pull on the swallowed hook, and sawed through the line. He let go, and the fish disappeared.

Before I could even ask, my father said, ‘It’ll rust out. That hook’ll just disintegrate in a week or two.’

‘I don’t want to fish any more,’ I said.

And Ben, who had his back to my father, smirked at me again.

‘Can I go back?’ I asked.

‘No,’ my father said. The kind of ‘no’ that leaves little room for dissent.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s a family outing. You don’t want to fish, fine. Don’t fish. But be with the family.’

It was literally after sundown when I started begging him to turn back for camp.

‘It’s only civil twilight,’ he said.

‘The sign said all boats off the lake by sundown.’

‘This is the best time to fish,’ he said. ‘Catfish bite right around now, when it’s so dark you can barely see your hand in front of your face. I want to hook one of those big channel cats. I don’t want to go in empty-handed.’

Bizarrely, I was the only one who’d had any luck all day. If you can call my previous experience luck.

I looked down at the case of beer and saw only three bottles left with their caps on. I wondered if it was more about the channel cat or more about not wasting good beer.

I forced myself to be silent for another few minutes, then whined, ‘What if we can’t see to get back to camp?’

‘That’s why I brought that great big flashlight. Get it out, Rusty. It’s in that little backpack under your seat.’

I pulled out the pack and rummaged around. I found the last sandwich and sniffed it, disappointed that it was only peanut butter. Then I found the flashlight. It was heavy and vaguely comforting. I sat in the front of the boat, chewing miserably on the sandwich and shining the flashlight off into the dusk. It was a strong light, but it didn’t help you see very far. Just what was right in front of you.

But I didn’t dare say more.

What felt like hours later, but was probably fifteen or twenty minutes, my father’s head came up, and he looked around as though his surroundings were entirely unfamiliar to him.

It was close to full-on dark.

‘We better get back. Reel in,’ he said, apparently having forgotten that I hadn’t been fishing, and Ben had reeled in over an hour ago and seemed to be napping curled up on his bench. ‘Shine that light, Rusty,’ he said, pulling the outboard motor into noisy, smelly life.

I shined the light in what I was sure was the direction of camp.

My father took off in the exact opposite direction.

‘You’re shining the light the wrong way,’ he shouted to be heard over the motor.

‘No, you’re driving the boat the wrong way!’ I yelled.

Ben raised his head to complain. He said, ‘What are you guys yelling about?’

I leaned in close to him and said, ‘Dad’s going the wrong way.’

He sat up suddenly. Looked around. ‘He knows where he’s going,’ Ben said. But he didn’t sound convinced.

I said something that surprised me at the time, and still surprises me now. I said, ‘Yeah, maybe twenty beers ago, he did.’ Of course, I didn’t say it loudly enough for my father to hear. But I was surprised I even said it to Ben. ‘Look,’ I said, and pointed to the big stand of trees that marked camp.

‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered. ‘I think you’re right.’

By this time we’d built up quite a head of steam. He had that boat flying over the lake at a good clip.

‘Dad!’ Ben and I both shouted it in exact unison.

He looked at us, to see what we were yelling about. But he never found out. Just in that moment the light of my big flashlight illuminated something huge and gray. Did I instinctively know it was the dam? Or did I just register that it was big and hard, and that we were about to hit it?

Just to give some idea of how far we could see by flashlight, by the time I saw the dam, my father did not have time to change the course of the boat. In fact, I didn’t have time to tell him to. The dam was so close that I could only do what reflexes dictated, which was to jump out of the boat.

We’d been so close to the dam by the time we saw it that the boat hit the dam before I hit the water.

Everything I recall after this should be taken with a grain of salt. I remember flashes of it vividly, too vividly to possibly be wrong. But in some cases I can tell that
time
is compressed, while in other cases I’m stretching the sequence out without meaning to. More to the point, some of my vivid memories conflict with others just as vivid.

But I’m doing my best here.

I plunged into the surprisingly warm water and watched the flashlight sink, turning end over end, its light illuminating spooky tentacles of lake vegetation, and, at one point, a broken beer bottle as it, too, sank. In that sort of disconnected crisis ‘thinking’, I remember marveling that a flashlight could be built so well as to sink to the bottom of a lake without going out.

My face broke the surface and I saw only two things floating at the crash site. A life jacket. And a hand.

At first I had a horrible jolt of fear that the hand was only that. A hand. All by itself and attached to nothing. But I dog-paddled closer to it, and the angle of the hand in the water made it clear that it was attached to a body below the surface. By the time I got to the hand, it had sunk just out of sight. I grabbed the arm under the water and pulled hard, and Ben bobbed to the surface. He was unconscious, and his head was banged up just above his hairline. There was a lot of blood, diluted with lake water.

That part is painfully clear.

This next part is sketchy, but I know it happened. I got Ben into a life vest. I don’t remember doing most of it, but I have a nagging sense that it was panicky-hard. I just remember wrapping my legs around his waist from behind to zip it up.

After I let go, and his head stayed above the water, I know I screamed for my father. A lot. Enough that I had no voice the next day. But I can’t remember if I swam around and looked for him or just treaded water and screamed.

Then I was lifted into a boat by a man who said, ‘Take it easy, son, you’re OK.’

Part of me thinks that was the first I knew a boat or a man was even there with me. But I also remember seeing the flashing red light approaching on the water, like the light on the top of a police car, only in this case, of course, it was on a boat. So that’s where it gets contradictory.

I remember sitting on the boat, wrapped in a stiff blanket and watching two men receive Ben from a man in the water. They took off his life vest and turned him around and bent him over – the way you would if he were choking on his food. One of the men held Ben from behind and gave a big yank upward underneath his ribs, and what looked like a whole bucketful of water splashed up out of Ben’s lungs and splattered on to the bottom of the boat.

That’s the clearest and most haunting image. That was my moment of truth. Though I didn’t think it out in such precise terms, I knew in my gut that the one accomplishment I was so proud of – getting Ben into that life vest, keeping his head above water – had been of no use to him at all. His lungs had been filled with water the whole time. I could have left him with one
hand
floating on the water and looked for my dad, and it wouldn’t have affected his situation in the slightest – that is, if I could somehow have trusted him not to finish sinking.

It had never occurred to me to try to get the water out of his lungs.

So. Do I feel guilty for that? Do I blame myself?

No. Absolutely not. Except to the extent that I do.

The bottom line is this: even if I’d known enough to try to get the water out of his lungs, I would never have succeeded. There was no way I could have bent him forward, and even if I could have, it just would have put his head right back under the water again. I couldn’t have done it.

But I didn’t even try. I never even thought to try.

If I’d thought to try, that would have felt so different. I could have cried to the rescuers, and said, ‘I couldn’t do it, no matter how hard I tried. I wanted so much to get that water out of his lungs, but I couldn’t get him bent forward.’

And they would have said, ‘Hey. Hey. Son. Stop beating yourself up. It was impossible. But at least you tried.’

But I hadn’t tried. It hadn’t even occurred to me to try.

I yelped, ‘My father!’ for about the thirtieth time as the boat took off for shore, and a very patient rescuer told me for about the twentieth time that there was a diver in the water looking for him. This time he added that we’d best hurry up and get my brother someplace where he could get help.

The whole way back, I watched them work on Ben. One man gave him CPR while another held pressure on his head wound to slow the bleeding. More than once I saw them make eye contact with each other in a questioning way, and I knew instinctively that they weren’t sure whether or not there was any point continuing.

Here’s the last thing I remember, and I remember it very, very clearly.

I looked up at the patient man. He was sitting beside me with his arm around my shoulder.

I asked, ‘Is my brother gonna be OK?’

He said, ‘I’m not gonna lie to you, son, it’s not looking good for his situation, but you never know. They’re just going to keep trying to bring him back. Because you never know.’

He didn’t offer any comment on
which
Ben they were trying to bring back. Or
how much
of Ben. He didn’t point out that the answer to my question depended on your definition of the concept of ‘OK’.

Looking back, I realize that I really did save Ben with my actions that night. Because if I hadn’t put on his life jacket, he would have ended up at the bottom of the lake. Like my father. And by the time they found him, it would have been way too late to bring him back.

Ben’s survival is squarely on me.

So now the key question is, do I feel guilty about
that
?

ANAT LOOKED UP
at me, one triangle of dough hanging limply from her hand, stretching slightly from gravity.

‘Did they ever find your father’s body?’