The doctor scrubs his hands. A nurse will be with them shortly to discuss care and cleaning, he says, then dries his hands and leaves.
Michael’s still on the table, lying down. His eyes are on her middle, as though he can see beyond her waist into her womb.
We’re keeping it, she wants to say, but doesn’t, not yet.
She’s not religious, but she is superstitious. It seems bad luck to fight about the pregnancy today, as though doing so might invite the spirit of the dead boy into her, might curse her with a baby born blue-lipped, without breath.
If fates are steered by thoughts, by words, the least Diane can do, on this day, is keep quiet. So she lets her husband hold her hand. She smiles. And there are many, many, many, many, many, many things she does not say.
5.
Three times Richard Starling has given the officer his statement. Three times he’s explained he didn’t know what happened until what happened was over, Michael in the water, head cracked open, the girl on the boat wailing in a way Richard hopes never to hear again.
The officer’s face is downy, lips pursed in a spittle-glistening pout. He turns to the others. They are the Mallory family. The father is Glenn, the mother Wendy, the daughter Trish. Richard misses the boy’s name and can’t bring himself to ask.
Glenn gives his version of the story, then Wendy. Trish won’t stop crying. Again, the officer asks for the daughter’s statement. Glenn stands. Richard stands.
Richard’s not a violent man. He was a hippie. He was at Woodstock. He turned twenty-one in 1969. A December birthday doomed him, but flat feet saved his life. Instead of Vietnam, he got to finish school. He’s never thrown a punch, but, before Cornell, he taught high school in Atlanta for fifteen years, so he’s broken up his share of fights. He knows when a fist and a face are a parabola away.
The officer’s young, the kind who drinks hard on days off and makes his wife iron his uniform each night. He has yet to know loss, can’t register the grief beside him on this boat.
Richard’s hand finds Glenn’s shoulder.
“Why don’t you let me take them home?” Richard says.
The officer frowns. They’re on Glenn’s boat, bobbing. Richard holds a seatback to stay upright. He looks to shore, but Lisa’s left.
Police boats circle. Divers dive.
The day Richard discovered his daughter dead in her bassinet, he believed she might yet be revived. Even in the face of facts, he assumed, for hours, some new cure would be found. That was years ago, and not a day goes by he doesn’t miss his daughter.
These parents, though, Glenn and Wendy. Has it hit? Or do they hold out hope their son will surface still, will wave and swim ashore?
“Sir,” the officer says, “I’m going to need you to sit down. Both of you.” He won’t look Glenn in the eye. That’s a start, a sign—if this young man isn’t ashamed of the tone of his voice, at the very least he knows he ought to be. Glenn doesn’t sit, and neither does Richard.
“Sir!” the officer says, but another police boat has pulled up.
The man at the wheel is older, and the eyes beneath his visored cap are pinched in kindness. “Brockmeier,” he says, “a word.”
“Corporal—” the young officer says, but the expression on his superior’s face cuts him off. He climbs from gunwale to gunwale and hands the visored officer the clipboard onto which he’s recorded the day’s statements. From behind the wheel, the older officer touches the brim of his cap. He looks each family member in the eye, saying, “Ma’am. Ma’am. Sir.” When he gets to Richard, he says, “Sir, I think we’ve got it from here. If you’d kindly remove your boat from the premises, I’ll see the family makes it home.”
“We’re not leaving,” Glenn says. But his wife’s hands are on him, face pressed to his shirtfront. “Okay. Get us out of here.”
The young officer extends a hand that no one takes, and into the police boat they go, first Trish, then Wendy. Glenn turns to Richard, and it’s only then he sees his hand is still on the man’s shoulder. He lets go, and the other father leaves his side.
Richard watches the police boat depart, then climbs aboard The Sea Cow. He crosses the bay and navigates into the boathouse. He cranks the lift, and the boat rises from the water. The boathouse, like the house above, is crumbling. Wasp nests paper the eaves, insects funneling in and out like copper drones. Richard’s fishing poles lean in one corner. They’re in rough shape. They need new line, new reels. He’s not sure they’re worth bringing to Florida. He’s never fished the ocean. He might need all new gear.
An ache in his stomach, thinking this.
Florida’s all right. He likes Florida fine. There will be birds for Lisa and libraries for him. He likes those Florida potboilers—Miami mysteries, murders on the beach—likes solving the crime in the first fifty pages, flipping to the end, and being right. Plus there are colleges down there, plenty of them. If he gets bored, he can always teach again.
But Florida’s not Lake Christopher. Florida was never in the cards. The plan was here, always. He doesn’t want to leave the lake, but given what he’s done, who is he to say no?
Why did he do it? Why, last summer, did he join Katrina at MCA in Montreal, not expecting anything to happen, but not putting up a single boundary to keep said anything from happening, save the thin wall between their adjoining hotel rooms? Hadn’t he gone so far as to leave the door on his side open, just to see?
What are you doing? he asked himself all week, as though watching, from a distance, another man do things he’d never do.
He never should have joined her at the club. He offered her a drink, but Katrina only wanted to dance. She danced. Richard watched. When she returned to the bar, she was sweaty, smiling. “These Canadians are nice boys,” she said. “Too nice.” It was forty years since he’d been with anyone but Lisa, but Richard knew, right then, what would happen next. Katrina didn’t have to wink. She didn’t have to run her hand down his arm.
Katrina was brilliant, a fellow full professor—Stanford, physics. Her interest in Richard was in Lie theory and exceptional groups, and in their application to mathematical physics. She needed more math, and he was the reason, she said, she’d picked Cornell for her sabbatical. Early in the new century, Richard had joined another mathematician and a physicist in debunking Lisi’s E8 theory. This made him briefly famous (by mathematician standards) and won him some grant money, job offers leveraged into course releases, and the contract for a book he wrote and which sold well (again, by mathematician standards). Though in the end, who knows? History might be on Lisi’s side. A grand unified theory could prove true. Perhaps there will even be a convincing theory of everything, though Richard doubts he’ll live to see the day.
In his time at Cornell, he had many genius colleagues, but never one so young as Katrina. She was in her thirties and already a full professor. She’d skipped grades in elementary school, she told him, finished college in three years, and defended her doctoral dissertation at twenty-four. This was more or less unheard of, and Richard found himself worshipping her for it.
“Relax,” she said. “It’s sex. It’s not a trap.”