Lake Overturn (22 page)

“I was wondering if I could borrow a T-shirt to sleep in.”

“Of course. Come in. I’m almost done.”

Wanda perched herself on the side of the big tile bathtub, which had steps leading down into it, like a swimming pool. She watched Melissa lift one toe away from the others and . . .
tick
. . .
tick
. . .

“You know,” Wanda said, “Hank was the first person I ever saw cut his nails inside.”

“What do you mean?”

Wanda felt like telling her stories, as if she could again make the magic she had at dinner by telling the truth. “Growing up, it was just something you’d do outside, off the edge of the porch. The boys would pee off the porch if the bathroom was full.”

Melissa laughed.

“When I caught Hank cutting his nails over the kitchen trash I asked him, ‘Don’t you wanna go outside to do that?’ He called me a shit-kicker.”

“A what?”

“A hillbilly.”

“Do you miss him?” Melissa asked.

“No. He’s not as good as I made him out to be.” She stopped herself from admitting he hadn’t moved to Washington, DC, but to Chandler, fifteen miles away.

Melissa folded the nail clippers closed and set them on the counter. “Let’s get you a shirt.”

They walked around the corner—there was no door—into the bedroom. Melissa opened a drawer. “Will this one do?”

The dogs rushed in, grazing Wanda’s leg with their wet fur. Then Randy appeared in the doorway.

“Mind if I loan Wanda one of your shirts?” Melissa asked.

“Not at all.”

Wanda took the shirt. “Thanks for everything, you guys. I’ll leave you alone. Good night.”

Wanda closed the door behind her and walked down the hallway. Beyond her door, the hallway curved, then ended in a window that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Wanda stood looking out on the pine trees, hairy with moss and lit pale by the moon.

. . . .

L
IZ ARRIVED HOME
and went into the darkened kitchen for a snack. No sooner had she opened the refrigerator, though, than a voice made her jump: “Good news, sis.”

“Winston, what are you doing here in the dark?”

From the window seat he tossed an envelope toward her, and it slid across the tile floor. “You got in.” Winston held a beer can, and there were two more crushed on the windowsill.

“Why are you opening my mail?”

Winston shrugged and looked out over the lights of the back walk, haloed by the steamy window. “Figured you wouldn’t mind. Congratulations.”

With a thrill, Liz picked up the envelope and thumbed through its contents. Since Abby had gotten her acceptance letter, Liz had dreaded the humiliation of not getting in, too. They had made a promise,
Both of us, or neither
, but it was still a relief.

“Are you gonna go?”

“Of course. That’s been the plan all along.”

“Yeah? All along?” There was a tremor in his voice that surprised her.

“What’s wrong?”

Winston shrugged, tipped his head back, and emptied the can into his mouth. “I always kinda figured you and me would stick close, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Why?”
Winston mimicked her with a sneer. “It’s not like we’re brother and sister or anything.”

Liz shook her head in confusion, and returned to the refrigerator. “Don’t go telling everyone at school, okay?” she said. “I don’t want all the talk yet.”

“Like anyone gives a fuck, Liz. Jesus.” He crushed the can and slid away.

F
OR THE REST
of the evening, Connie thought about nothing but what had taken place between Bill and her. Even in her hour of prayer at the end of the day, she continued to wrestle with her mistake. But now she told herself to put it behind her. They would go to Marsing on Wednesday; she would continue this important work, careful not to overstep her bounds again. She tried to banish these thoughts from her mind and concentrate on that day’s scripture, but they would not leave her alone. She prayed to the Lord to deliver her from them. Then she closed her Bible and prepared for bed.

As she lay waiting for sleep she realized why she could not get over it. She was angry at Bill—nearly as angry at him as she was at herself. “Showmanship,” he had called it. It wasn’t showmanship, thought Connie. It was a lie, and a lie was a sin. A great sadness came over Connie with the knowledge that Bill, like so many others, wanted to stretch and test God’s law.

She thanked Jesus for showing her this, Jesus, who had overturned the tables at the temple because of just this, “showmanship”—lies.

“Lord Almighty, help Bill. Be with him, and guide him in the one true way.”

This put Connie at ease and allowed her to sleep.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the night, Wanda’s door creaked open. She woke with a start and lay with her eyes wide open, afraid to move. She wasn’t in her own bed. Where was she? In the foster home? Of course not. They had talked about it at dinner, was all. She was at Melissa and Randy’s. “Hello?” she said.

The click of a dog’s claws against floorboards put her at ease. She turned on the light and saw Simon gazing up at her and wagging his L-shaped tail. “Do you want up?” Wanda lifted the dog onto the bed and looked into his black, soulful eyes. He had a long nose for a small dog. He must have been part dachshund. “You’re one of those special dogs, aren’t you?” When she was little, before her mother had married Alan and stopped going to church, Wanda had had a Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Kray, whose lessons always ended up being about dogs—maybe not
every
lesson, but that’s what she remembered: parables about Mrs. Kray’s own dogs (it seemed she had dozens); reports she had seen on the news about dogs saving their owners; and articles she had read in
Guideposts
or
Reader’s Digest
about angels in dog form who inspired their owners to be born again, or give up drinking, or become a better parent. Although these stories didn’t bring Wanda into any closer communion with the Lord, they did instill in her a belief in the mystical powers of dogs.

“You know Melissa and Randy,” she said to Simon. “Should I do this?”

The dog wagged his tail.

Wanda nodded.

Simon went to the bottom of the bed and lay between Wanda’s feet, facing the door. Wanda turned out the light and went to sleep.

In the morning, Randy insisted on sitting in the backseat as Melissa, elevated on her little pillow, drove. Wanda understood now: Randy didn’t drive.

The day was bright. Wanda put down her visor and, through the makeup mirror, saw Randy loosen the strap and take off his glasses. His eyes suddenly appeared huge. He pinched the bridge of his nose and gave the morning a few big blinks. Wanda could now see that Randy had been handsome before he lost his hair. He still was handsome, in fact. He had a strong brow and big, rich, brown eyes. Now it made sense that Melissa, who was so pretty, was with him. Also now, Wanda felt less squeamish about having Randy’s stuff inside her. This childish concern, which Wanda had been too ashamed even to think through, was put to rest.

When they reached the beach, there was a bright fog over the ocean. “Low tide,” said Randy. He and Melissa sat in the dry sand near the car while Wanda took off her shoes, rolled up her jeans, and walked down toward the water, which was washing far up the beach, then receding back into the mist, leaving tangles of seaweed like knotted hair. Wanda could hear waves crashing off in the distance. She walked onto the shell-littered sand, and the water returned to flow over her feet, numbingly cold. She hopped from foot to foot, giggled, and turned to look back at Melissa and Randy, who waved. A little frightened of stepping on a crab or lobster, Wanda walked gingerly toward the sound. It was the biggest sound she had ever heard, not loud, but all-consuming. She walked and walked and still the water, when it washed in, only reached her ankles. She knew so little about how the ocean worked; could a huge wave come and take her away? She turned back to Melissa and Randy, but they were lost in the whiteness.

In the years since Louis’s suicide, Wanda had never been able to wade in water without thinking of him. Such a weird way to go, giving yourself to the river when there was a shotgun in nearly every house. Maybe he had been in a rush to leave this world, and the river had been there. It was just a five-minute walk from the psychiatric hospital. Wanda knew this because she had met a man who had once worked as a porter there. He had been trying to pick her up at a bar. Wanda had grilled him about how patients spent their time, if the doctors were kind or cruel, and, especially, the distance of the hospital from the river. Then she had fallen into silent rumination and the man, surely thinking her a nut who belonged in Blackfoot, had scooted out of the booth.

Wanda imagined that Louis checked out of the psychiatric hospital and walked to the river quickly, as if late for an appointment. (She had heard that people became exhilarated after they made the decision to commit suicide.) But when he got there, did he sit on the bank for a while, wishing for a friend to talk to? Did he stand there, shin-deep, as Wanda stood now, and cry? Or did he trudge in, battling the water that impeded his walk toward death?

Wanda was about to go back to Melissa and Randy, when she saw a man, both his figure and his figure’s sliced-and-restacked reflection, many yards ahead of her, walking toward the waves. Seeing that he too was only up to his shins, and that he walked easily with his hands in his pockets, gave Wanda courage, and she went forward. Finally the surf came into view, and she turned away from the man. This is what she had expected the ocean to look like: a great swell that crested, then thundered down, sending spray high into the air.

Her feet ached with cold. She ran back up the beach, arrived at where Melissa and Randy huddled together against the wind which whipped at their hair and clothing, and stood breathless, hugging herself and stepping from foot to foot.

Shielding her eyes, Melissa said, “We bring you to the ocean, and you can’t even see it!”

“I did see it, though!” Wanda insisted.

“I mean, the
ocean
,” Melissa said, with a sweep of the arm to indicate a horizon.

“I
did
!”

Chapter 11

I
t was a week later now, the night before the District Science Fair. Enrique had been forced to make the posters himself, since Gene, on their evenings together, had insisted on exploring several fat chemistry textbooks he had checked out from the library. “It’s essential to the project,” he had said when Enrique complained. That was so like Gene, to choose a one-sentence response and repeat it again and again, unaware that it sounded weirder and less powerful with every iteration. All the research that Enrique had been counting on Gene to do, he had done himself—shoddily. He had failed to find out how deep Lake Overlook was. On every zoning map in the library, it was just a wide, flat blob that wasn’t even labeled Lake Overlook, only
RESERVOIR
. Finally, at a loss, Enrique had called the City of Eula Water Department. “Welp, it’s purdy deep,” was the answer he got.

So the completion of the diorama was delayed until now, Friday night. Enrique begged Gene, “Please, just for tonight, work on the project we
have
. The science fair is tomorrow. Don’t you want to win?”

Gene said nothing.

“Here,” Enrique said, handing over the posters. “I did them myself. I’m sure the calculations are all wrong. Could you at
least
color in the drawings? You’re good at that.”

Gene took them and returned home.

Enrique was glad to have the house to himself. Jay was playing in a football game, certainly one of the season’s last, since Eula never made it into the finals, and Lina had gone to watch, as she had nearly every game, although she and Jay went and returned home separately.

Enrique took the bag containing the trees and houses from the closet and brought it into the living room. Each piece was twist-tied in position inside a box, which featured a miniature backdrop: green hills and a distant silo for a house, an orchard for an apple tree. Even though Enrique was rushed to finish the model in order to have time to practice the presentation a few times before bed, he removed each piece with the greatest care. He enjoyed observing all the tiny details, but more important, he intended, after this and any subsequent science fairs, to put the pieces back in their boxes and return them to Mr. Hall. At the bottom of the bag he found two pieces he hadn’t yet seen, as before tonight he had only let himself dig halfway down: a schoolhouse and a church. The tiny schoolhouse bell actually rang, and the church had stained-glass windows with panes of colored cellophane separated by black wire. He set these pieces down with the rest, carefully stacked the boxes back into the bag, and returned it to the closet. Then he looked down at his jumbled little village. What would it be like, he wondered, to live in a cottage with a pine tree blocking your front door and the church doors right outside your window? Slowly, using only the tiniest blobs from the glue gun, he put the pieces into the model.

At nine o’clock, before it got too late, he took a break. As he dialed the number, a queasy feeling stirred in his belly. What would he say if Mr. Hall answered the phone? But it was Abby who answered.

“Hi, Abby. It’s Enrique.”

“Hey!” she said.

“Um, I wanted to make sure you knew that the science fair is tomorrow, in Chandler.”

“Oh, Enrique, I’m sorry. I can’t go. I’m leaving for Salt Lake really early.”

Enrique was so disappointed that he couldn’t speak.

“I’m really sorry, Enrique. Maybe you can show it to me afterward.”

He didn’t want to say it, but he couldn’t help it: “Didn’t you know it was tomorrow?” He felt silly, of course—why would a high school girl base her schedule on him?—but in all his science-fair fantasies, Abby stood solemnly at the back of the crowd in rapt attention as Enrique spoke, then gave him one of her funny thumbs-ups at the end.

“I have to go see my mom, Enrique,” Abby said gently. “It’s not something I can really put off.”

“Okay.” In his selfishness, Enrique let the wounded tone of his brief answer hang in the air.

“Enrique, my mom is sick. Like,
really
sick. She’s probably never going to come back home. So . . . I have to go there.”

“Oh!”

“So,” Abby ventured, “maybe you can show it to me afterward?”

“Of course,” Enrique said in a kind of cough. His face was burning. He was an idiot.

“I really hope you win, Enrique. You deserve it.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, have a good night.”

“Good night, Abby. And I’m really sorry . . . about your mom.”

“Thanks.”

Enrique hung up and, flushed to the tips of his ears, went back to gluing. He was careful now, not only with the delicate trees, but with himself. He felt as if a sudden movement would shake something loose, and tears would fly from his eyes. When he finished, he tied a string across the entrance to the living room, and hung a sign from it:
DO NOT ENTER
!! He didn’t want Jay to come in and kick his basketball into the corner, as was his habit, and ruin the model.

Gene burst in the front door. “Guess what,” he said.

“You colored them in?”

“I solved the mystery.”

“Where are the posters, Gene?”

“It wasn’t a poison gas that killed the people at Lake Nyos,” Gene said.

“It has to be. That’s our project.”

“It was carbon dioxide.”

“Carbon dioxide is already in the air, Gene. It doesn’t kill you.”

“It does,” Gene said, “if it’s the
only
thing in the air. The lake, down deep, was carbonated like soda pop. Then it turned over. All the carbon dioxide escaped at once, and since it’s heavier than air, it ran along the ground. Everything that breathed oxygen suffocated. That’s why there was no evidence. It didn’t smell like rotten eggs. It didn’t get gunk on everything. The plants weren’t affected. They like carbon dioxide.”

Enrique gave himself a moment. Such a long, sputtering string of words was rare and embarrassing from Gene, as if he had vomited. This new information was exciting, but Enrique wouldn’t admit it. It was far too late for changes and additions. He inhaled, then, realizing that what was about to come out was a whimper, checked himself, stood up straight, and deepened his voice. “You didn’t color the posters, did you?”

Gene bunched up his face and looked at his feet.

“We were supposed to be a team, Gene. I let you decide the project, when we could have done something a whole lot easier, and you know what you’ve done since then? Nothing but waste my time.”

“I made a poster,” Gene said.

“And you did a crappy job. Do you even
want
to be in the science fair, Gene? Do you even
want
to go there tomorrow?”

Gene now looked up at Enrique and said, with complete innocence, as if his answer might be of help, “No.”

Enrique stomped his foot. “
Good
, then! I don’t want you there either! This is
my
project! You can just stay home for all I care!”

Gene turned and quickly walked out.

Enrique followed him. “Give me my posters!” he yelled.

Gene stomped up the stairs and into his trailer and, a second later, returned with the posters, which he threw into the grass.

“My brother’s right,” Enrique said. “You
are
retarded!”

“I am
not
retarded,” Gene said.

Enrique picked up the posters and went back to his house, leaving Gene on that tiny aluminum box they called a porch breathing loudly, his arms folded tight.

Far too upset to color the posters, let alone practice his presentation, Enrique went straight to bed. He would rise early, finish, then go get Mr. and Mrs. Smiley, who lived at the far end of Robin Lane. They had a pickup truck with a shell and had promised to take Enrique and his project to and from the science fair if he fed their cats while they were in Wyoming over Thanksgiving. But then Enrique lay awake for a long time, thinking what an awful night this was, and how very wronged he had been.

For Lina, on the other hand, it had been a good night. She had sat with a group of mothers from church eating popcorn and gossiping, and Jay, who usually spent most of the game on the sidelines—basketball was his sport—had prevented a touchdown with a good tackle, at which point Lina had stood up and cheered and called his name. Still, Eula High had lost.

Now Lina walked into the house and saw the little sign. It seemed Enrique had gone to bed, so she untied one end of the string, turned on a light, and looked the model over. All of a sudden, it looked really good.

Her next thoughts came in rapid succession. How had Enrique afforded those little houses? They were Chuck’s train accessories. Had Enrique stolen them? No, of course not, Chuck had given them to him.

What was Chuck up to?

Fearful, suddenly, that Enrique would find her snooping, Lina turned out the light and retied the string. She slipped down the hallway quietly, like a thief in her own house. It was only when she was safe in her room that the rage took over. Chuck had crossed a line now. This was it. No more.

Connie came home too and sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes, allowing the wonderful mood of the evening to wash over her. “You are a blessing to me, Connie,” Bill had said when she dropped him off at the parsonage. He had paused, as if there was more he wanted to say. Connie couldn’t meet his eyes, so her gaze fell to his neck and then rested in the little notch of his sternum, which was framed by the collar of his oxford shirt, which, in turn, was framed by the V of his sweater. She could see by the dim interior car light that this notch was covered by a light coat of short blond hairs and traversed by a thin gold chain.

“You’re a blessing to me, too, Bill,” she had said, then, shocked by the intimacy of her own words, added, “You’ve touched many lives in these churches we’ve visited.” She wished now she hadn’t panicked, but let her initial response stand. She felt the business with the upside-down slide was now over.

Enrique heard his mother come home, he heard Mrs. Anderson’s car pull up, and then, much later, he heard Jay go through the house to his room—and felt it, too, as Jay’s heavy steps caused the house to shudder on its stilts. He thought of ways that his mother and Jay had wronged him. The house fell silent, and still Enrique seethed.

I’ve got to go to sleep
, he thought,
or else I’ll do bad tomorrow morning
. So he curled up and imagined, as he often did when he was too upset to sleep, that he was sealed up in an egg made of a strong, transparent material that protected him completely from the surroundings. He could go anywhere in this egg. Sometimes he floated through the night sky into outer space, other times he settled onto the cold ocean floor. This time, though, he glided through the warm surface water of the Indian Ocean while great whales rose from the depths. One nudged him aside with its massive, blunt nose, sending him spinning away until his egg rolled up the side of another, great and flat as the wall of a barn. He reached the whale’s tail, which gently flicked him up and away toward the moon, jiggling at the water’s surface.

S
OME PEOPLE TRIED
to describe Eula’s relationship with Chandler, which lay fifteen miles away in the direction opposite Boise, as familial: Chandler was Eula’s big brother or little sister or lazy cousin or wicked stepmother. But none of those worked, as Eulans couldn’t quite assign a human character to Chandler. Going there felt like being sent to the office. Although smaller than Eula, Chandler was the county seat, so all the buildings to which Eulans were beckoned for unpleasant business—to renew their licenses, to argue tickets, to bail out brothers—were there. While going to Boise meant glamour, going to McCall meant leisure, going to Blackfoot meant insanity, going to Salt Lake meant matrimony, and going to Portland meant abortion, going to Chandler meant many things—drudgery at best, incarceration at worst. So the road to Chandler still bore the residue of those bothersome visits, even when one was going there for something more pleasant, say, to visit one of Chandler’s two attractions: the Oregon Trail Museum (located in Chandler although a seldom and, some said, only mistakenly used branch of the Oregon Trail had passed through), and the rodeo grounds. Chandler’s rodeo, the River Valley Round-up, was on the national circuit and drew crowds every July, their pickup trucks, livestock trailers, and RVs filling campgrounds and motel parking lots as far away as Boise. It was Chandler’s true claim to fame and the only thing Eula envied it.

The rodeo grounds, which were also used for the county fair every August, were vast and well-maintained, featuring lawns, stables, an outdoor stadium, and a field house. In the fall and winter this field house was used by the City of Chandler for its own events and rented out for functions—car shows, swap meets, and a Mexican dance every Saturday night.

The day before the Snake River District Science Fair, the field house had been used for the Rabbit Show, where breeders from around the state met to buy and sell rabbits and trade tips and recipes. The scent of rabbit—a musty combination of sawdust, mold, and urine—still hung in the air when Enrique arrived on Saturday morning. Anyone allergic to cats was doubly allergic to rabbits, or so claimed the Chandler High science teacher, who guided Enrique and Mr. Smiley to the assigned space. “Just set it down on the table, hon, it’s yours to use,” she said. Then she blew her nose with a honk. Her watery eyes were as red as a rabbit’s. Enrique and Mr. Smiley carefully eased the model onto the table. “I’ll be outside if you have any questions,” the teacher said.

“Well, I’ll see you at two, Enrique. Best of luck to ya,” said Mr. Smiley. And Enrique was alone, apparently the first student to arrive. A couple of men were setting up tables, and a woman in a white apron and hairnet was putting out coffee and doughnuts. A quick look around his row revealed Miriam’s name written on a card taped to a neighboring table, and a pile of rabbit droppings, small and spherical as peas, under his. He scooped these up into a piece of newspaper and considered switching Miriam to a table farther away. Then he thought better of it; there might be some confusion when Miriam arrived, she’d find out what he had done, and he’d seem the fool or, worse, the coward.