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 bein
g 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.
Still, he was literally concave.
According to Rob, Wesley’s secret was that he didn’t eat on a regular basis, and what he did eat, he ate at Gitchee Gumee Pizza or at Sprouting Life, the natural food store. He lived in a cabin on the backside of Torch Mountain that was half ruin and half rehab. It had no electricity or plumbing. He had paid nine hundred dollars for it. He did, however, have great teeth (gift of a concerned mother, I would bet) and a great smile, which he turned on me as he held out one big hand.
“Last time I was diving, was with Gary,” Wesley said. “You know Gary Tabor?”
“Kind of,” I said, feeling electricity sizzle along my legs and pounce across the space between us to Rob. I could barely stand still.
Wouldn’t it be?
Wouldn’t it just be?
“A great man,” Wesley said, and I could almost hear Rob’s silent groan at the unsolicited endorsement of my future murderer. Still, Wesley seemed good-humored and genuine, and was not by far the first to be hoodwinked by Tabor. “It’s a coincidence that we went diving that day last summer, because you guys have the sunlight thing, right?”
“Yep, we’re from the dark side,” Rob said.
“Because Gary was telling me, there’s all new work he’s doing on XP. He’s at the head of that.”
“Hardly at the head of it,” I muttered. “He’s just a nurse who does a little lab work. His father and his uncle are the real researchers.” I sounded like a brat and couldn’t help myself.
“But he puts in the time,” Wesley said. “He really cares.”
“So you went diving? Free diving?” Rob said, in a fast attempt to diffuse the tension and slice through the rind of animosity coming from me. Wesley didn’t seem to feel it at all.
“Scuba,” said Wesley. “We went into some of those caves under the old boathouse where the condominiums are. Where Gary lives.” Serene with the power of the virtuous, I only smiled. Ah, the sweet irony: having promised not to speak Garrett Tabor’s name, only to have somebody do it for me. “And then we looked over the Gracie J., that old boat they sank when the part of the cliff went in? The boat and the old boathouse, that’s awesome structure for fish. About sixty feet down. You could make that a goal. It’s quiet there, with those two arms of rock making a cove.” He spread his own arms side. “We saw a sturgeon, must have been seventy pounds, man.”
I grimaced. “I sure did not sign up to see that,” I said. Sturgeons are huge, ancient creatures, pebbled all over like alligators. The thought of them cruising around under me, or worse, past me, made me want to jump back in Rob’s van and go back to his apartment and hide with him under the covers.
“They aren’t sharks!” Rob said, trying not to laugh.
“Do they know that?” I squeaked. He did laugh then. We all did.
“Let’s go for a dive, huh, kids?” Wesley said. “No sturgeons at the Y, I promise.”
A HALF-HOUR LATER, Rob and I were suited up and in the water, which was freezing. I couldn’t stop shivering, even though both of us wore body suits and scuba masks. Wesley wore cutoffs. He was chatty. Maybe he wasn’t used to being here all alone in the middle of the night, because he seemed to get a kick out of it.
He also told us that he’d gone to high school with “Gary” Tabor.
“I thought you were a lot younger,” Rob said.
“No, I probably just look it. It’s because I don’t have a mortgage or kids. If you sit light on the land, it’s usually pretty easy on you, too. I’m not like a professional man. When it comes times for me to fade back into the land, well, I won’t have much to leave or far to go.”
I hate it when people say shit like that. Still, Wesley had a kind of irresistible sweetness about him that overrode the eye roll that is usually my reflex response.
“Are you friends now?” I asked, trying to r
emember if I was supposed to pinch my nose or push down to clear my mask. I was sure that I was supposed to pantomime blowing my nose to depressurize my ears, and do this every few feet, even in the pool.
“We go way back. He’s a busy man,” Wesley said. “Very busy man.”
“I’ll say,” I agreed.
“He coached the Everson twins,” Wesley went on, referring to brothers from Iron Harbor who now skied on the Canadian national team. “And that poor kid, Juliet Sirocco.”
I resisted the urge to cry out. Murderous now on my own, I turned to stare at Rob, who kept his eyes on Wesley. I knew what he would say if I challenged him later, asking how Wesley, who had taught Rob his open-water diving skills at the same time Juliet died, didn’t know about us in relation to Juliet? He would say what he always said. Guys don’t talk about stuff like that.
Wesley walked away to get weight belts.
“You are an asshole for not telling me he knew our friend ‘Gary,’ ” I whispered furiously to Rob.
“Because I didn’t know he knew him? Guys don’t take out their phones and compare all their contacts to see if they match.”
“So what do guys talk about?”
“What’s in front of them,” Rob said. He grinned. “Like a hot girl. Or, like, kinds of beer.”
I scowled and turned away. Frustrated, I made the choice to wad up all the thoughts of resentment like damp paper and stow them.
“Now, the first recorded free diver did his thing maybe sixty or seventy years ago,” Wesley said, rejoining us at poolside. “In the Aegean, I think, there was this guy who dived for an anchor and everybody thought he was dead, when he came popping back up. With the anchor! He was submerged for something like six minutes. Nobody had ever really measured that, although sponge divers and pearl divers were familiar with it, of course. This guy had two busted ear drums and a heart about three times the size it should have been for a little-sized guy.”
“And?” I asked, puzzled. I wasn’t following.
“Well, large hearts pump slower, and the slower your heart goes, the less oxygen you use. Right?”