What We Lost in the Dark

  And Rob did. He sat up and slapped on an expression that said: I’m committed. It didn’t matter if he really was serious, it only mattered that he acted like he was. I would settle for Rob being along for the ride, because Rob along for the ride was as good as most people’s complete commitment. An Oscar-winning fake could trump the real thing: Otherwise, why would half the people in Iron Harbor trust Garrett Tabor?

  “That’s where those girls’ bodies are, Rob. It’s like this was meant to be. Tabor hides them down there. Remember I started babysitting at the condos? Remember? And I saw him standing out on the lawn and he had something, like a sail, folded up on the ground. But what if it wasn’t a sail? What if it was a girl’s body, wrapped in a sheet?”

  “What if it was an old sail wrapped in a sheet?”

  When I’d called the police that time, they’d found the old door, a kind of hatch entrance to the long-gone boathouse.

  “But he disappeared, Rob! He went down that door that Dr. Stephen had nailed up later. What if he went back and pulled it apart? It wouldn’t be so hard. What if he uses that old door in the ground like his own trapdoor to hell? That book I was reading? About murder and geography? People would dump dead bodies in lakes all over Minnesota if it weren’t so hard to keep bodies hidden in lakes. But Superior’s different from other lakes.”

  “Wait,” Rob said. “Slow down. What book?

  “I told you about that book ages ago. Jesus! Whole civilizations have risen and fallen since I told you about it!” I’m not a patient person. You may have intuited that.

  “I don’t remember.”

  But I was thinking harder now, thoughts literally humming like notes on a big chord organ. What if Tabor actually brought victims—their bodies—to the actual medical examiner’s office? What kind of a pimp would that be? What if somebody walked in? He could just cover the body with a sheet or put it in the filing cabinet of death, those refrigerated drawers. I said, “Rob! He knows there’s no video cameras in that office. The only cameras are the Polaroids they use during an autopsy. The only recording devices are the microphones they use to describe autopsy findings, when they weigh and measure, you know, people’s parts.”

  “Allie! You’re spinning like the hubcaps on my dad’s old Camaro! Just slow down!”

  If only I had a dollar for every time someone has told me to slow down. Or even a penny. I’d be a freaking thousandaire.

  “Were you even listening?”

  “I was.”

  “Well, your buddy Wesley said Gary’s an expert diver. And you know that serial killers …”

  “You mentioned that. They want to revisit their … kills. The whole thought is beyond me, but okay.”

  “This would be a really unique way for him to visit his kills,” I said. “So we have to go down there. It can’t be too deep. Maybe thirty feet. The perfect dive.”

  “The dive is the point of the dive,” Rob said.

  “People free dive all the time to spear fish and stuff.”

  “We were going to do it for the dive itself.”

  “Oh, come on, we’ll do a dive that’s pure first, and … and then can we look?”

  “You’ll feel like it’s wasted time, won’t you?” Rob said.

  “Not really.”

  We both knew that I was lying.

  8

  CHILLING

  Without Garrett Tabor’s constant presence, life at the medical examiner’s office with Bonnie and Melissa, the technician, was pleasant—if you can say such a thing. Did I develop a callous on my sensibilities with regard to death, its sights and messages?

  I did.

  My experiences began to harden me—not my core personality, but a slice of my outer being, to a degree that shocked Rob and bugged my mother.

  To be honest, I also was actively trying to bug my mother.

  Maybe you can explain the psychology of this; I can’t. I wanted her to be mad at me because I was so afraid of this new sport Rob and I had undertaken.

  Little things about it kept shearing my nerves.

  For one thing, our first free dive should have been uneventful.

  Wesley had dropped a rope with an anchor to the bottom of a small, clear, familiar lake, The Little Cauldron. Holding the rope, he went down first, wearing scuba gear and a headlamp (we had on waterproof, mini miners lights over our hoods, as well). Next, all three of us made the slow descent, but only Wesley was breathing.

  We went down thirty feet, not quite ten meters, into The Little Cauldron, where we sat on the bottom and mimed clinking champagne glasses.

  Then, at two minutes and fourteen seconds—despite all the yoga, despite the über-concentration on the Zen of thinking of absolutely nothing, despite all those apnea walks, despite understanding that my aerobic capacity far outstripped my reflexive urge to gasp, despite knowing that once I hit three minutes (as I had four times in training) I would experience a solid, eerie calm—I panicked.

  What you really experience isn’t the urge to inhale, it’s the urge to exhale. The carbon dioxide is intolerable. I couldn’t pull myself together enough to fight it. Bubbles burst from my lips; I wrenched away and kicked for the surface like a crazy person, and Wesley had to hold me down and let me buddy-breathe from his regulator so that I could settle down long enough to equalize the pressure in my ears. Rob looked up at me and made sure I signaled I was okay, then he completed, serenely rising.

  Wesley comforted me at the surface. He said this was normal. Then again, he would have said it was normal if I’d surfaced with my tongue wrapped around my ear lobe, too. “This is no reason to delay a deep dive,” he said. “I’ll be with you, and you will do just fine.”

  Except when that night came, I didn’t think we would do just fine. I thought I would die, and so I picked a fight with my mother.

  Later, I realized that I thought subconsciously that if she was mad at me when I died, she wouldn’t miss me so much.

  THE MOMENT I woke up, I knew something would go wrong.

  My mom’s brother, my uncle Brian, who’s a basketball coach, once told me that he could tell when he got out of bed if he was going to sprain his ankle. I got out of bed that night with a sprained-ankle feeling. I knew something bad would go down, but I thought it would be that I’d lose it again, or have ear problems. In the days before, I’d slept restlessly. I had the sick shivers of bad sleep, and, because you can never eat when you’re jittery, I was hungry and also semi-outraged at the thought of food, at the idea of even chewing and swallowing.

  I was stuck on all those stupid statistics, on the presence of a lake the size of a small nation. How prepared I was physically not only to survive but thrive in my dive was all pudding … until I thought about the Sears Tower with only a couple of floors sticking out. Even though I wasn’t going down more than fifty feet. Maybe not that deep. Why did people have to say stuff like that? Like, if you jumped to your death from the Golden Gate Bridge, it would take you seven seconds to hit? Seven seconds is a damn long time to think.

  There’s stuff you just don’t want to know.

  After that night, I knew for a certainty that there’s stuff you don’t want to know no matter how much you think you do.

  Moreover, I hated that I had nudged Rob to use our brief time underwater as a detective mission—to get a little glimpse at some of that structure and those caves Wesley had described. I figured that Rob could do some kind of computer simulation of the exact spot where we saw the lone diver, relative to the place Wesley had described the wreckage of the boat and the old boathouse. That way, we could move quickly.

  I brought this up a few nights before at a very propitious moment. “Remember, I said I thought that I knew where Tabor kept …”

  “Fine,” Rob said, standing up and reverse stripping. Playtime was over. Rob’s dad brought home team swag without respect for creed or religion, and Rob wore them that way, too. Tonight he was wearing a Patriots hoodie with Green Bay Packers pants.

  “Wherever t
hose girls are, those girls are Juliet,” I said. “I couldn’t find her but maybe …”

  “I’ll try to make a map,” Rob said. “I said I would.”

  THEN CAME THE appointed time. When I sat down for dinner, I started nattering about a suicide—the second suicide in less than a month.

  “It shows you what kind of mood people are in, in our picturesque little hamlet the week before Christmas,” I said. “Bet there are more suicides in Minnesota than in any other state.”

  “That would be Wyoming,” my mother said placidly. “That is the state with the most suicides.”

  “But what about the Norwegian temperament …?”

  “The top ten countries with the most suicides are not in Scandinavia. That’s a myth. The places with the most suicides per capita are all part of Russia or Eastern Europe,” said Jackie. “As for states, Minnesota is number … forty. No, I’m wrong. It’s forty-one.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I pay attention,” she said.

  “What about the sub-zero cold, and the darkness, and the boredom, and the mosquitoes?”

  “They must build character,” Jackie said.

  “What about the fatness?” Angie put in. “Mrs. Haven says there are more fat people in Minnesota than in any other state.”

  “She’s wrong,” said my mother, the walking wiki. “That’s Mississippi.”

  I was tired of all this determined cheer. “So I was saying: last night we hosted an old married couple.”

  My mother knew I meant at the morgue. Jackie gave me the kind of warning look meant to be doubly threatening coupled with a paring knife. She was only slicing green peppers. But still. I was already committed to bugging her, so I went on. The couple, in their eighties, took an overdose of sleeping pills, mailing a letter to the sheriff’s office at the time they did it. The wife was dying of cancer. The husband died of the habit of loving her.

  My mother found this romantic.

  I found it absurd.

  “They had children,” I said. “It was rude to put themselves first.”

  “If they were in their eighties, the children were grown and independent,” my mother said.

  “It’s still thoughtless,” I said. “I’d be pissed at you.”

  “I’m not the type,” Jackie said. “But if you’ve spent an entire lifetime with someone …”

  The last time I’d visited my mom at the ER, she’d been flirting. She was flirting with a guy young enough that she could have been his babysitter when she was in seventh grade. Jackie was the kind of fit, sassy, almost-forty woman that men both a whole lot younger and a whole lot older found very attractive. She’d introduced me to the doctor she was flirting with as “my daughter, who’s a freshman in college,” and he made all the obligatory get-the-crash-cart-how-can-you-have-a-kid-that-old gestures, and his name was … Colby. Not his last name, either. This went down like fishhooks with me. My mother had a right to date, but she had a right to date guys named “Jim” or “Paul.” Not “Colby.” Colby belonged to the kind of generation—and, well, the kind of parent—who would have tats and name their kids Lee and Ryder, after kinds of jeans. Or Bevin and Bryce and Bella Roma or something, so they all matched.

  “Would you give your life for Rob?” Jackie asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t even think of it. Rob has XP. He’s time-limited, basically, even though he’s the most important person in my life.”

  Jackie said dryly, “Really.”

  I didn’t know if she was saying “really” about the time-limited part or the not-giving-my-life part or about his being my life’s only. I chose the latter. Your family doesn’t like to hear that your boyfriend is your breath. They want to still pretend they come first with you, like when you were six. That I sometimes did feel that way made me all the crankier.

  “Aside, obviously, from you guys,” I said. “I would give my life for you, Mom, or Angela, but I wouldn’t expect you to do the same …”

  “Oh,” Jackie said. “That’s droll.”

  I didn’t even know what “droll” meant.

  “But I have XP, too. It would be a waste of your … whatever. Your protective heroism.”

  Jackie slammed the salad bowl down on the table so hard that the salad dressings sloped to the sides of their containers like the water around those little ships in bottles. She clearly had been saving up for a fight since I’d flipped out in the street and stolen the poncho. If I went along with it, which I’d decided I would, it would be a doozy. How patient and gentle my mother could be with some smelly woodsy drunk who’d split his head open trying to light a cigar while standing on a fire hydrant. But with me … She said, “Pardon me for my naïve belief that even people with chronic illnesses are worth saving, even risking your life for. If you love them. I’m in a medical field, you see.”

  I shrugged. “I guess it goes with the territory.”

  “And as for those old people? They took vows. I’m not saying a healthy person should take his own life because his partner is dying, but they took those vows seriously. Most people don’t.”

  By most people, she meant my father.

  Sometimes it’s just satisfying to piss your mother off, so she doesn’t get the idea that because you have a handicap and need to be around her most of the time, you’re best friends or something. My mother and I already got along uncomfortably well—although all I would need to do was to tip my hand about free diving and all those special moments would swiftly be Xed out and, almost-college freshman or not, I would find myself confined to base camp.

  Parkour was one thing. The previous night, Rob and I had watched a documentary about free diving in which divers sawed through foot-thick ice in Greenland to erect a little teepee thing that they used as their dive platform. Since she’d personally held together the edges of bellies torn out by the actions of people who actually had gone ballistic, Jackie didn’t appreciate that term much either, so I used it.

  I said, “Don’t go ballistic. That kind of love just seems obsessive.”

  “You’re not a mother,” said my mother in a voice that was too quiet.

  “And those old people, they … you know, they left the heat on. Which, why would you do if you were going to off yourself? They semi-decomposed and wrecked the whole cabin. Now their kids will never even be able to go there and remember the happy times. They’ll have to burn the place.”

  “You’re all heart, Allie,” Mom said. “And I don’t know that I appreciate this level of dinner conversation with Angela here. In fact, I’m not that hungry anymore either.”

  She got up and went upstairs to her office, slamming the door.

  I got up and grabbed my backpack, filled with diving gear. I called Rob to pick me up and slammed the door experimentally a couple of times to see if my mother noticed. I’d won, but I felt as though I’d lost. Angela got up gratefully because she hated tofu and pea pods.

  I went outside to wait. We were to meet Wesley at ten o’clock, when he finished Pilates or Sufi dancing or whatever he was teaching that week, so we had time to kill. Rob finally showed up, shortly before my lashes froze and broke off in little black commas of ice.

  We drove through town, all festive for Christmas, just four days away, looking as though someone had salted the whole place with a gigantic shaker filled with white twinkle lights.

  We went to Gitchee Gumee Pizza to eat a meat lover’s with extra onion—and the thought of how much it would piss off my mother was as much of a delight as the chopped steak, hot sausage, and pepperoni. For Jackie Kim, exercise and nutrition were sacred, like the Stations of the Cross were for my devoutly Catholic Grandma Mack. She wanted to instill her religious vegetarian fervor in her hedonistic daughter. No chance at that, though. I was born carnivorous and got meat on the street whenever I could.

  As we ate, Gideon Brave Bear, Gitchee’s owner, brought us underage draft beers and sat with us for a round. Except for Juliet’s funeral, we hadn’t seen him, since
he’d fired a gun into the air in Garrett Tabor’s direction last summer after Tabor chased me from the cemetery right into the middle of town. Then, I thought he was trying to kill me. I still thought he was trying to kill me, but he was taking his time.

  “Are you doing good enough, Allie?” Gid asked me, exactly the right question in exactly the right way.

  “Good enough, Gid. Thanks,” I said, laying my shockingly white hand over his own.

  After Gid went back to the bar, I told Rob about the suicides and my mother’s typically overboard reaction. “I just said, no offense, but to me that kind of love is borderline.”

  Rob rolled the foam on his beer around the top of the tall glass. “No offense, Allie, but that was a pretty shitty thing to say.”

  At first, I thought I hadn’t heard him right. Then, I couldn’t believe that Rob would just cut me loose like that when it came to parents and their default smothering. “Shitty? Of me? It is obsessive! Your parents do the same thing!”

  “But why wouldn’t they? Of course, they’re obsessed with their kid, especially the way things are with us. Do you blame your mom for wanting to keep you healthy and to be with you every minute she can? You’re acting like she holds you down and she won’t let you out of the house.”

  “She wouldn’t let me out if she could get away with it.”

  Even I knew that was a lie.

  “That’s unfair, honey. We kind of owe it to them to cut them a little slack, Allie. Or the reverse of cutting them a little slack. They give their whole lives for us and it has to suck for them.”

  I sighed, and said, “Okay.”

  “You can be confrontational, Allie.”

  “I am not,” I said, getting up and getting ready to walk out on him. Which was pretty confrontational. “I guess … I guess I am. Lately anyhow. I didn’t used to be this way. I woke up tonight all freaked out, Rob. I don’t know why. I’m freaked out about free diving. I never felt like that about Parkour.