Learning to Swim

The story made the front page of the paper, with a sidebar on Madeleine/Marguerite—the death of a prominent faculty member’s wife, who hadn’t been his wife at all. Philippe had talked to Alyssa, figuring that if he gave one interview the press might leave him alone. Alyssa had written the pieces well, but even handled with restraint, they were lurid. The wire service picked them up and they ran nationwide, and in Canada as well.

Alyssa had given me advance warning that the stories would be hitting the wires, so I called Simon for help with familial damage control. He said he’d alert our parents and sisters so they wouldn’t go berserk, and asked if I wanted him to come up. I said no. He didn’t say a lot, but I thought he knew pretty well what I was feeling. Philippe called Zach and Baker for me; I wasn’t up to talking to them yet.

By now I’d acquired a shiny cast, and I was glad I’d been faithfully paying my monthly health insurance premiums. My shoulder wound had avoided getting infected—washed clean by the cold water of that glacially formed lake, I supposed. The doctor pronounced me ready to leave. I had one last brief interview with the Burlington police, and Jameson stopped in before he headed back to Ottawa.

He told me the accomplices seemed stunned by the murder. They had been the ones who had driven Paul across the border, curling his small body inside their wheel well—and that image made me shiver. But they’d thought he would be turned loose eventually. When Madeleine had ordered them to get rid of him, they’d moved to another apartment instead, and sent a ransom demand of their own. But she’d seen one of them at a McDonald’s—buying a kids’ meal—and had confronted him.

They fled town, planning to abandon a drugged Paul on the New York side of the lake. But she’d followed them onto the ferry and taken Paul from the van’s backseat. They insisted that’s all they knew. No one could prove if Madeleine had been on the ferry, and it could have been them who dumped Paul overboard. But I thought I knew the truth. I’d seen it in Madeleine’s eyes.

Jameson promised he’d keep me up to date, and left.



Philippe wouldn’t hear of my returning to Lake Placid. I would go back with him to Ottawa to recover, and he would have my car brought up. I didn’t object. For now it felt good to have someone else making decisions.

Philippe drove me to Thomas’s apartment, and loaded the bags Thomas had packed for me. I couldn’t hug Thomas goodbye because of my injuries, but he patted my good shoulder, awkwardly, and knelt to pat Tiger before she jumped in the backseat.

“Thank you, Tommy,” I said. His expression was blandly pleasant, as usual. But as if watching the scene from afar, I saw from the twist of his mouth and how his eyes didn’t quite meet mine that his feelings for me had been more intense than I’d ever imagined. It was a shock, as if he, too, had had a secret identity.

I couldn’t have spoken again if I’d tried. This was like losing something I’d never had. Maybe my near-death had jolted Thomas enough to let his feelings show. Or maybe I was only now truly paying attention—and this was an even more unsettling thought.

Through the windshield I saw Thomas and Philippe cordially shaking hands. Then Philippe got in and we drove off. I forced my mind into blankness and closed my eyes.





FOUR HOURS LATER WE WERE PULLING INTO THE DRIVEWAY of the Tudor house.

Paul had filled out; he seemed taller and his cheeks plumper. He danced around the room and presented me with a huge get-well card Elise had helped him make, signed “Paul and Bear,” with an accompanying muddy paw print.

I blinked back tears when a beaming Elise served dinner, a steaming pot roast surrounded by vegetables, along with her homemade rolls.

So this was what home felt like.



Philippe and I told Paul only that I’d had an accident on a boat. Perhaps we would later tell him more, when he was older. Somehow I thought he would take the news calmly; he had to have known his mother hadn’t loved him.

For now, we told him only that the bad men who had kept him had been caught, and that Uncle Claude had taken money that wasn’t his and had to go away for a while. For now, we let him continue thinking the body in Montreal had been his mother’s, although it had been officially identified as the woman Claude had been seeing. Somewhere, a woman’s parents were weeping at the news their daughter was dead.

I called Baker and filled her in, and even she was shocked. We’d known the world wasn’t what we wanted it to be. We just hadn’t realized it could be quite this bad.

During the days, life was good. Paul was loving his summer classes; he had friends over and went to their houses, like a normal, happy boy. Bear was growing fast, and gradually learning a few manners. Philippe was working hard, but often came home early, and laughed more often. He got down on the floor to play with Paul, something I realized I’d never seen him do. Zach and Dave took a trip to Burlington and brought my car to Ottawa, and stayed for a raucous dinner before heading back to Lake Placid.

But at night I lay awake. I thought about the brothers who had kept Paul captive, but in a way had treated him decently, getting him Happy Meals and little cartons of milk. I thought about Claude, who had lost both girlfriend and sister, all because he had tried to break free of Madeleine. I thought about the woman who had made the mistake of loving Claude and trusting his sister enough to drive down a deserted road with her. I thought about Madeleine, so warped that her brother’s perceived defection had triggered a deconstruction this complete and awful.

When I did sleep I dreamed of being in the lake, unable to breathe. Sometimes I grasped Madeleine’s hand and saved her; sometimes she pulled me down with her. And sometimes I held her under.

Always, I awoke gasping for air.

I told Baker none of this; I didn’t want her to share my nightmares. Alyssa I told a little more.

It was Jameson I talked to the most. We met every few days for lunch, takeout on a bench in a park overlooking the Rideau Canal. Some days we just ate. Some days he told me about developments in the case. Some days I just talked, and he just listened.

Claude had been the one who had embezzled from Philippe’s company, which at this point seemed almost innocuous. The misdelivered ransom demand had been just that, courtesy of Canada Post: a mail carrier had stuck it in the wrong box. And it was the watch under the body that had led the police to suspect that Philippe was being framed—it was one touch too many. Madeleine had tried too hard.

I asked Jameson if he thought Claude had ever suspected that the body might have been his girlfriend’s. He shrugged.

Maybe, I thought, it had been easier for Claude to have believed it was Madeleine—because otherwise, he would have had to realize whose body it was, and that his sister had killed the woman who happened to resemble her.

It was an overcast afternoon when Jameson told me that Madeleine had been nine weeks’ pregnant when she died. Vince hadn’t known. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the math: when she knew she was pregnant, she had decided to get rid of Paul. And maybe in six years or so, she would have gotten bored with her current life or angry at someone, and started the cycle over again.

Jameson knew my brain would go to the unborn baby that had drowned with Madeleine. He spoke before I could: “Who pushed you into the water, Troy? Who shot you? Who broke your arm?”

Of course he was right. Would I have done anything differently had I known she was carrying a child? I could never know. But I did know that if I had hesitated at any point during our struggle, I would have been the one who ended up dead, not Madeleine.

I told Jameson, and only Jameson, how it had been on the boat with Madeleine, that the evil emanating from her had been nearly tangible. I told him about agonizing over having failed to guess that Marguerite wasn’t who she pretended to be, to sense the dichotomy of someone living a life that wasn’t theirs. It was true I hadn’t warmed up to her initially, but I’d assumed that was my usual discomfort around immaculately groomed and dressed women. But I had recognized her appeal; I’d watched her charm people and make them feel important.

Jameson took a long breath and launched into the longest speech I’d heard from him. “She fooled everyone, Troy. Her friends, Philippe, Vince, even her brother. She was a pro—a professional psychopath, a professional liar, a professional actor, a professional killer. Don’t be egotistical enough to think you could possibly have recognized or comprehended that.” He turned my face toward him. I blinked tears back. “And, Troy, you stopped her. You won. You saved Paul. You saved yourself. You gave all these people the chance to begin to put their lives back together. Even Claude. You did a good thing.” Without seeming to realize he was doing it, he reached forward and tucked a strand of loose hair behind my ear.

And then my tears did fall. I felt shaky afterward, but better.



I stayed in Ottawa six weeks. We hiked in the Gatineaus. We saw every new movie suitable for Paul, and occasionally left him with Elise and went to some on our own. We tried out restaurants, and laughed when Paul made faces at foods he didn’t like. We sorted through his clothes again. We selected an iMac for him, one with games even better than the one with the little round men—and let him know that when I recovered, Tiger and I would be returning to my house in Lake Placid. Baker and family came up for a weekend, and all the boys insisted on staying in Paul’s room, cramming two to a bed and giggling much of the night.

Eventually we told Paul, casually, that his mother hadn’t died last year as he had thought, but had died not long ago, in Burlington.

“When you were there?” he asked.

I nodded. He thought a moment and then said, “Well, I am glad you are here now,” and went off to play.

His psychologist told us this wasn’t an unusual reaction at his age, especially since Paul hadn’t been close to his mother and she had been absent from his life so long. She advised us to answer other questions as they arose, as honestly as we could without being brutal. I privately wondered how much Paul would ask, and how much he had already figured out. I hoped he hadn’t seen the face of the person who had dropped him into Lake Champlain.

Eventually while we were walking around the neighborhood after dusk, I told Philippe the details of what had happened on the boat—I didn’t want to talk about Madeleine in the house and I didn’t want to see his face as I told him. He listened, and when I finished, he pulled me toward him and held me tightly. And then we walked on, and never mentioned it again.

We did have several talks about us, late in the evening after Paul had gone to bed. We’d been through too much to be coy with each other, but we both had things to work through. I wasn’t the person I’d been at the start of all this, but I wasn’t quite who I wanted to be yet either. Philippe had spent years living with a wife who had turned out to be a murderer, and I suspected he was having bad dreams of his own.

Maybe someday I would transplant myself into a new life, but it would have to happen when I was ready, and I wasn’t yet. And I wasn’t going to leap into Paul’s life full-time and let him consider me a permanent fixture, then have him lose me because Philippe and I had jumped into something too soon.

I didn’t know if I belonged in Lake Placid any longer, but it was my home for now.

It was time to go.



I hugged Elise, and then Philippe. “Come back when you can,” Philippe said, and folded me in his arms. I hugged back, hard. Then I knelt and gathered in Paul and held tight, and shushed him as he sobbed.

“I’ll see you soon,” I whispered to him, but he wouldn’t look at me.

I was having trouble getting enough air. I felt dizzy, as if at high altitude, and had to concentrate to move my body into the car. I put a half smile on my face and waved goodbye. I knew this was what I had to do; I knew this was right for me, for all of us.

I drove away, seeing Paul in his father’s arms in my rearview mirror until I turned the corner. A mile or two away I stopped the car and cried, great gasping sobs, until my breathing evened out and I could drive. Tears trailed down my cheeks until I reached Cornwall and started across the bridge into New York.

Sometimes you know you’ve made the right decision, simply because of how hard it is.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



THANKS TO:

Meg Waite Clayton and Mac Clayton for their help and encouragement; early readers Dee Dee O’Connor, L. K. Browning, Kimberly McCall, and the now-defunct Nashville Writers Group; Mike Modrak and Linda Yoder for their support; Linda Allen for telling me to rewrite the middle.

Michael Carlisle, Ann Close, Leslie Daniels, Sands Hall, Sue Miller, and others from the Squaw Valley Writers Conference; readers Sandy Ebner, Carole Firstman, Cat Connor, Bevan Quinn, Amanda McGrath Anderson, Robert Smolka, Persia Walker, Steph Bowe, and Reed Farrel Coleman.

Jamie Ford, whose quiet assurance that I would do this was more help than he knew; Michael Robotham, who had me change the title; Persia Walker, who helped give me insight into the mind of a small child; Reed Farrel Coleman, who saved me from my worst writing instincts.

The RCMP, Ottawa Police Service, and Québec Police Service; Celine Temps, Gisele Grignon, Gaël Reinaudi, and Inga Murawski for translation help; Luke Ringrose, who breathed life into Paul simply by existing; Patti Gallagher, for being there; SFC, who titled this book and believed in it.

And my wonderful agent, Barney Karpfinger, and editor, John Glusman.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR


SARA J. HENRY has been a columnist, soil scientist, book and magazine editor, website designer, writing instructor, and bicycle mechanic. Learning to Swim is her first novel.