Jonah’s body
—the rowboat her father had bought shortly after purchasing the lake house.
In Kris’s memory, in that scrapbook of yellowing images from her childhood, the rowboat was a single, curved piece of sleek, shiny metal with freshly painted red-and-white oars resting in steel rowlocks. What she saw as she stripped away the black tarp vaguely resembled that recollection, but time had taken its toll on the boat, just as it had with the lake house and the dock. The vessel’s once-pristine hull was rough with rust and riddled with dents where the wind had knocked it against the side of the dock. The floor was covered in rotting leaves from so many autumns past. Black ants scurried across the slick surfaces, and a fat black beetle attempted to crawl up the curving side of the hull, only to fall onto its back as it must have done countless times before. Wet, torn leaves clung like leeches to a set of oars, their red-and-white paint flaking away to reveal the splintered gray wood beneath.
Kris felt Sadie hug closer to her.
“It’s just some leaves,” Kris assured her.
Grasping the lip of its bow, she dragged the small boat across the short stretch of shoreline to the water’s edge. Rocks screeched as they scraped across its metal belly.
“Help me push.”
Sadie obeyed, falling in beside her mother as they shoved the boat the rest of the way into the water.
From the corner of the boat, Kris dug out one of the oars and used its flat head like a shovel to scoop and toss clumps of wet leaves into the water. She watched as they drifted away like the dead bodies of strange, misshapen fish. It wasn’t long before the mud-streaked metal floor began to reveal itself.
When she was done, she tossed the oar aside and climbed up onto the dock. She crouched down, tipping the side of the boat toward the surface until water slipped over its edge. It filled the hull like a flooded river breaching a dam. With a grunt, she lifted her side high enough for the water to pour over the opposite edge, carrying with it a wash of mud and the last remaining leaves, as well as ants and millipedes and a few wolf spiders. They stretched their spindly legs out as far as they could and remained perfectly still as they floated helplessly out into the lake.
Kris repeated this action several times until the inside of the boat was wet but clean.
She held out a hand to her daughter, who pinched her bottom lip between her teeth and eyed the boat with trepidation.
“Come on, give me your hand. I’ll help you in.”
Sadie sat on the forward thwart, her hands gripping its front edge tightly. Flecks of white paint clung to her skin, the contrast bringing out a pinkish warmth in her flesh.
Kris took the bench at the center. She slipped the mooring rope from the last piling and pushed them away from the dock. Carefully, she lowered the oars into the rowlocks. She lifted the handles out level with her shoulders and let the ends dip down into the cool water. Then she pulled them close to her chest, her biceps tightening beneath the sleeves of her T-shirt. Soon the dock behind them became smaller and smaller until it disappeared from sight.
Kris fell into a steady rhythm as she guided the boat out of their cove, toward the center of Lost Lake, concentrating on the soft lap of the oar cutting through the surface. The sound was hypnotic. The muffled whoosh as its flat head caught the water beneath and pulled against it. The gush of oar emerging once more into the air, droplets falling like rain from the cracked wood and splashing back into the lake.
They sat in silence as the familiar shore behind their lake house fell into the distance, revealing what they had thought to be the entirety of the lake as only one of several coves that jutted off in irregular shapes from a much larger body of water. At the edge of the cove, the hangdog arms of willow trees swayed lazily in the warm summer wind, and then they were away from the forest and out into the lake—into the honest-to-God lake that seemed to stretch an impossible distance to the blue horizon.
With each pull of the oars, Kris felt the fear and dread that had been building up inside her slip away. Each breath was a little bit slower, a little bit deeper, until her respiration mimicked that of pleasant slumber.
Every now and then, the shadowy form of a fish would cut silently through the water beside the boat. Each time, Kris noticed that Sadie leaned a little closer to the edge in hopes of catching a glimpse of the darting creatures. Sadie’s grip on the edge of the thwart loosened until only her fingertips grazed its side.
“I used to take this boat out all the time when I was just a little older than you,” Kris said suddenly, breaking the silence.
“By yourself?” Sadie asked.
Kris nodded.
“Did you ever fall in?”
Kris grinned. “No.”
“Could we fall in?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I won’t let that happen.”
To their left were the usually red hills, now a burnt orange in the bright light of the sun overhead. To their right, on the other shore, was a low wall of bulrush and cattails that quivered like a single, shuddering beast as the breeze swept through. About a half mile down, the emergent plants came to an abrupt end, and the rocky shore smoothed to a stretch of blond sand. A white-and-blue braided rope cut a perpendicular line into the lake, dotted every twenty feet or so by an oval buoy. This was the designated swimming area just off the man-made beach at the far end of Jefferson Park. The roofline of downtown could barely be seen peeking over the top of the park’s sloping lawn.
When they reached what felt like the center of the lake, Kris lifted the oars from the water and swiveled the rowlocks until the oars rested along the top edge of the boat. They drifted a bit farther before slowing to an imperceptible crawl. On the very tip of the bow, a powder-blue dragonfly landed and watched them with eyes like gilded armor.
A comfortable fuzziness enveloped Kris. It was the same sensation she usually needed two or three glasses of wine to experience. But not here. Not out on this peaceful lake with her perfect little girl. Out here, the things on land could not bother them. Out here there was no “Back home,” there was no “I’m so sorry to hear about Jonah,” there was no “In this town.” There was only Kris and Sadie and the summer breeze tousling their hair and the water softly lapping against the side of the boat like the gentle licks of a friendly hound.
Out here, they were safe from everything.
Kris leaned back and closed her eyes, turning her face toward the sun. It warmed her freckled cheeks. She knew they shouldn’t be out long. They both burned easily in direct sunlight. Like a couple vampires on vacation, Kris thought with a soft chuckle. But they were okay for a little bit longer.
“We can go fishing one of these days,” Kris said, her eyes still closed, her face to the sky. “And we could get a few board games or puzzles from the toy store in town. Do one of those thousand piece monsters on the floor of the great room. Take as long as we want to finish it. And there are plenty of trails to hike. You still haven’t been into the hills. There are caves on the other side.”
In the distance, seemingly beyond that place where the water and the horizon met, she heard the cry of a bird.
A small hand gripped Kris’s wrist.
“Mommy. Look.”
Kris opened her eyes.
Somehow, in that short amount of time, they had drifted to the mouth of another cove, a horseshoe tucked away on the east end of the lake. The other side of the lake, their side, looked as though it were a hundred miles away.