The Long Way Home

She looked around at the deck, slick with water from the river. At the metal hull of the ship. At the heaving waves and the desolate shore beyond.

So different from the solid, gentle village. From their home. And their studios and their garden, with the two chairs, and the rings, intertwined.

She’d fought to think of it as “her” home now. To call it “my” home, in conversation. But it wasn’t. It was their home. Infused with them.

She missed him so much she thought her insides would cave in.

And she had to know. How he felt.

She was pretty sure she already had the answer. His silence said it all. Surely his absence should be enough. But it wasn’t. She needed to hear it from his own mouth.

Had he stopped loving her? Had he left her, and Three Pines, and made a home somewhere else?

The fucker wasn’t going to get off that easy. He had to face her.

Dear, beloved Peter. They had to face each other. And tell each other the truth. And then, she could go home.

Gamache got up and walked carefully to the window. He stood looking out for a long while, gripping the frames for support against the lunges and heaves of the ship.

“Can you join me?”

“I’m not sure I can,” she said, and timed her jump between waves.

He held her steady, his large hand on her back, practically pinning her to the window.

“See that cove?”

“Yes.”

“Those are the Graves.”

She braced herself and looked across to a bay that should have been sheltered, but was in fact a churning mess of eddies, of whirlpools. It was a different movement altogether from the relentless waves. They came straight at them. But the movement in the cove was as though some creature was writhing and swirling just below the surface.

“Rocks under the water,” Gamache explained, though she hadn’t asked. “They create that effect. Any vessel caught in them hasn’t a chance.”

Clara felt her skin grow cold, from the inside out. Felt it crawl. Felt it try to crawl away. From the killing eddies, from the bleak shore.

“Is that what sank the Empress of Ireland?” she asked.

Clara had read about it in school and knew they must be close to where it happened.

“No, that was another phenomenon. The fog around here is apparently like no other. The two ships got lost in it.”

He didn’t need to finish. They both knew what happened next.

In 1914 the passenger liner Empress of Ireland went down, rammed by another ship. In the dark. In the fog. In these waters. In fifteen minutes. With a loss of more than a thousand lives. Men, women and children.

Clara looked into the roiling waters. The river beneath them teemed with life, and with death. Those lost beneath the waves. Souls not saved.

“My grandmother raised me on tales of voyageurs condemned forever to paddle their canoe through the skies,” said Gamache. “They’d swoop down and pick up naughty children and bring them here.”

“To the Graves?” she asked.

“No. Further along the coast. To the ?le aux demons.”

“Demon Island,” said Clara. “This place is just one big fun park.”

Gamache smiled. “I didn’t believe her, of course. Until I came here myself.”

He looked across, at the shoreline. Barren. Without a sign of life.

But he knew that wasn’t true. Lots of things lived here. Unseen.

“I’d love to draw it,” she said. “If this ever calms.”

“I envy you your art,” he said. “It must be therapeutic.”

They lurched back to the bench.

“You think I need therapy?”

“I think everyone on this boat probably does.”

She laughed. “The Voyage of the Demented.”

Clara watched as Gamache reached into the innermost pocket of his coat. And brought out The Balm in Gilead.

“I found this by my father’s bedside,” he said, looking down at it. “When I was nine years old. The night my parents died. I was inconsolable. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did when I was frightened. I went into their bedroom. And I crawled into bed. And I waited for the nightmare to be over. To wake up, and there they’d be. On either side of me. Protecting me. But of course, there was no sleep and there was no waking.”

He paused, to gather himself. Wave after wave pounded the windows in front of them, as though the river was throwing itself against it on purpose. Trying to get in. Trying to get at them. Trying, perhaps, to shelter from its own storm.

“They’d been killed in a car accident. But not just an accident though, I learned later. When I first joined the S?reté I looked up their file. I don’t know why.”

“You needed to know,” said Clara. “It’s natural.”

“A lot of things are natural, but not good. Like asbestos. This was like asbestos. It burrowed into me. I wish now I hadn’t looked. My grandmother hadn’t told me that my parents had been killed by a drunk driver. He survived, of course.”