“Should’a been out before now,” the guy said. “Too warm and bright for anything now. Muskies don’t much like a hot tub.”
The other man looked back out at the lake, bored. The mist had started to burn off, and I could hear the faint sounds of the summer camp around the bend from us, children laughing and splashing. Their canoes would come out into view soon. We usually hated the camp kids and their noise. Now all my hopes leaned toward them.
“Isn’t your guy Ray Levis?” the talkative one said suddenly.
He might know that Ray didn’t fish, but then the first rafts in the battalion of camp canoes nosed out into the lake. I felt the darkness—imagined, it seemed—pass and took a deep breath. “You friends with Ray?”
“Wouldn’t say that,” the first man said.
The other guy looked at him, a hint of a smile at his mouth. He mumbled something his friend thought was funny that I didn’t catch.
The first man looked up at the ridge to the house, but I didn’t think he could see much past the stairs and the deck at the top. The house lay a hundred feet too far from the water, tucked into the dark woods. We wanted to cut down a few trees, but then it wasn’t our place. We had no say in which trees lived and died. Ray sometimes walked among them and mimed an X on their trunks, choosing which ones needed to go.
“Would have guessed Ray’d be down for the count,” the first man said. “After what he drank up at the Clipper last night.”
My back went up again. I didn’t want to be nervous but it seemed like I couldn’t be anything else lately. I clutched the lifejackets to my gut.
Just weeks ago, that’s when I’d realized. That night I’d been a little slow to meet him at the door when he came home, and then I hadn’t wanted any dinner. Ray had big brown eyes, like bites of a rich dessert when he was happy, but like holes in his head when he was mad. That night, he had turned and watched me. “You’ve been sick for a while now.”
It sounded like an accusation, so it probably was. He didn’t know that I always felt sick, always, but had taught myself the trick of hiding it most of the time. To be discovered—to be noticed—was the surprise. “I have?” I said.
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry.” This was the best thing to say. I thought it over. “Are you sure?”
This was not the best thing to say, but I really couldn’t decide.
“Couple of weeks.” He looked me over, studying me hard while I wished he would forget it, think of something else to say or worry about. I didn’t have the strength to keep up my side of an argument, and sometimes not arguing was as bad as starting one. “You’re not pregnant, are you, Ell?”
It was best not to laugh until Ray had laughed, but I did. I was brittle, dead already. Such a thing had never occurred to me. “No way.”
“Good.” He turned his attention back to his plate. “You know what I’d do if you got pregnant.”
I thought I knew.
I hadn’t given getting pregnant any thought. But I was sick. I’d been sick a long time.
That night we’d spent the evening in front of the TV, but I didn’t follow a single thing happening. Inside, I nudged and poked at the idea until a tiny crack formed and a hairline fracture of light showed itself. I thought I knew what Ray would do if I got pregnant, but suddenly I wondered wildly, forgetting who I was for a moment, forgetting the person I’d let myself become, what would I do? Me, not him. What would I do?
The little crack of light was hope. I’d been prying at it ever since.
So: the boat, the oars, the jackets. If I set up the boat and had a nice lunch ready when he woke up, had the right kind of beer in the fridge, cold, if I just made sure everything was right, I could tell him.
There was a cold heavy stone in my gut that had nothing to do with the baby growing there. But what had he even said? He hadn’t really threatened anything, when you came down to it. He’d been in a funk that night, anyway. Now that it was getting warm and sunny, spring finally here, maybe it would all be OK. Maybe we’d be fine, all of us.
We’d be fine if these two men would just go. One of them, at least, had been at the Clipper to see Ray empty a few. “We were celebrating,” I said, blushing a little. I’d nursed a drink or two, to make sure Ray and the ladies at the Clipper didn’t notice I hadn’t. Nothing went unnoticed around here. Unless they didn’t want to notice.
“That’s a thing Ray Levis sure likes to do,” the second man said. This was the first time I’d heard his voice and I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the sound, the leering swagger that lived there, and didn’t like that I’d heard it, either.
“What were you clinking glasses over, then?” the first man said. I thought I recognized him now, and maybe the other one, too. We got strangers in town all the time, what with the weekly rentals all around the lakes, the fishermen trying out other waters, the summer camps, the flea markets. But this guy didn’t just know Ray by reputation or through the long history of small places with very few shoulders to rub up against. He drank at the Clipper, and if Ray was the kind of man to have friends, that’s what he’d be.
The lifejackets smelled like mildew but I hugged them tightly, afraid again. For a moment I couldn’t figure out why. I’d been afraid of something my whole life. My dad’s belt, looped. The back of my mother’s head, turned from me. Then boys, their hands fumbling and grabbing. Then Theresa and the only currency I cared about, which was her attention and her presence. Scared that I’d lose it, and then I had.
In my childhood, being near Theresa, I had realized that some people didn’t go around frightened the way I did. I admired them. Later, when I knew more, I hated them, envious. There was even a part of me that had grown to pity them. They were just babies, the way people cuddled and cared for them. Toddlers, unaware.
So I had been afraid, but this was different. I was not scared now of bruises, not of people seeing the bruises, not of what Theresa knew and couldn’t stand to watch, or whatever it was that Ray might do.
I was afraid of the mist burning off the lake and the wide sky opening up over the far shore. My teeth chattered. I could barely keep the lifejackets in my hands.
I was afraid that I could have changed everything, and hadn’t.
I was afraid that everything could yet change, or not, and I was the one who had to decide.
I was afraid of choices I had let go, of decisions I might never make. I was afraid I had turned down every opportunity to be someone other than who I was now. I was afraid I would never get back to someplace real, someplace on the map that would feel like a place to start.