Emily crawled up the slimy rocks. She fell down against a willow tree. We were exhausted, shaking, breathing wrong. Out in the middle the canoe made slow circles. It might have been twenty minutes since Katie went under, but it might’ve been ten, too. Emily stared out at the canoe hugging herself with shaking lips and elbows and knees. When I helped her stand up her joints hardly bent. I forced her to run with me around the lake to the dock where we’d started. Every few minutes she’d stop and step out to the edge and check the middle of the lake. We eventually spotted both life jackets bumping against the rocks not far from the dock. Emily retched in the reeds. I grabbed Katie’s jacket, holding it in the air like some idiotic prize. The buckles were all unclamped. I threw it to the ground and then kicked it into the bushes, already understanding that I would never see her again.
Some small birds flew up out of the reeds and over the lake. When Emily sprinted for the car I immediately chased her and could hardly keep up. She seemed to grow stronger the nearer we got to the parking lot, where we discovered the rental hut shut down and no sign of the Eagle Scout. Emily continued running to the car and banged on the hood and shouted my name to hurry me along. The road back to the highway was covered in white gravel that eventually gave way to glistening black asphalt, then concrete.
“We’ve got to get to a hospital!”
Emily kept screaming, as though we had Katie in the backseat and might save her if we delivered her fast enough to a doctor. After three or four miles we came upon a Casey’s General Store.
“There’s been a drowning!” I yelled as I ran inside, scaring the young Native American girl behind the counter. “Call the police!”
The girl did as I asked but never took her eyes off me. I was shoe-less, shirtless, dripping wet. I could still hear Emily screaming at me to get us moving to the hospital. “She’s not
at
the hospital,” I explained, my voice trembling but relatively calm in the face of Emily’s increasing delirium. I couldn’t get her to change her mind. I wasn’t sure if I should. She shrieked as I stepped back into the driver’s seat.
“The hospital! Fucking shit, Katie! What the fucking shit!”
I put it in drive and sped for the highway.
Twenty
Emily dashed into the Mercy Frederick emergency room, demanding Katie’s location and her condition and screaming,
“Did you save her or not!”
The other patients stiffened in bright-eyed alarm, backing away from the triage desk, pulling their kids into their arms, shifting seats to the corners of the room. Of course the attendant nurse tried to calm Emily down and get more basic information. Emily claimed her sister had been in a boating accident. We were assured that there was no such patient in the emergency room. A second nurse who just arrived on the scene asked if we were under the influence of any controlled substances like methamphetamine or LSD. Emily stormed from one side of the room to the other, erupting with profanity. The nurse behind the desk checked her computer and made a phone call and then apologized, telling me we must’ve come to the wrong hospital.
“She can’t breathe!”
Emily screeched.
“She can’t fucking breathe!”
The second nurse speed-walked down the same hallway she’d just come from. I stopped Emily and gripped her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at me. “We’ll check her old room on the eighth floor,” I said, realizing this plan would lead nowhere, but figuring there was no point arguing after having brought her this far. The attendant nurse shot me a dirty look, shaking her head and turning to the other patients like now they all had
two
lunatics on their hands. Emily made for the elevator just as the second nurse showed up with a doctor (himself maniacal-looking, with sickly yellow skin), both of them banding together with arms spread to block Emily’s way. They ended up each grabbing a wrist and pulling in opposite directions as Emily raved and kicked and cursed, shivering now as she tried to shake herself free. As the nurse behind the desk grabbed her legs from behind and helped pin her to the floor, I shouted out that her sister had just drowned at Saylorville Lake. When they didn’t let go of her I pulled the doctor’s left arm behind his back, only to let go a few seconds later at his innocent and frustrated assertion that I was only causing more harm. I half turned as he removed a needle from his pocket and quickly plunged it into Emily’s thigh. She went quiet and limp, her eyes almost immediately rolling back.
A minute later they propped her onto a gurney and tucked a blanket over her before wheeling her down the hallway. The doctor looked around at the blood marks on the floor, keeping his distance as he pointed at my bare feet. By the time security showed up he was handing me a blanket like the one they gave Emily, asking a nurse with red hoop earrings to bandage my foot. I sat down and waited for the police. There were two of them and they sat on each side of me, asking detailed questions about the drowning. I only answered the older guy. More than once my voice cracked and I felt like I was turning circles, floating in my chair. I imagined a brown trout dragging my fishing pole along the bottom of the lake. I pictured my shoes and tackle box sinking into the weeds. The younger cop kept prompting me for the color of Katie’s life jacket. His ruined little frown gave me the feeling there was worse news to come, that perhaps while I was fishing, a gas explosion had decimated my house and family, or that Smitty had been sideswiped by a drunk. I kept waiting for the doctor to return and tell me that whatever drug he’d given Emily would blur her memory and she wouldn’t have the slightest clue what went wrong out at Saylorville. I tried to guess how much she’d remember when she woke up, whether she’d have any idea who to blame. Before I realized what I was doing, I was already posing these questions to the cops.
Part
Two
Twenty-one
The funeral was held at a brick manor house with a wooden balcony and white banisters on a wooded square of land off Eighth Street I’d probably passed a thousand times and never noticed. Its sign was etched with a chubby Celtic script that hinted of Irish merriment and street parades and Katie Schell hopping out of her casket completely undead. The first thing I noticed as we pulled into the lot was the new bumper sticker on Mr. Schell’s Beemer claiming him a PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT AT WHITFIELD PREP! My parents flanked me along the path and up the stairs, apparently as a gesture of protection. Zach was the first to step inside, or hobble, I should say, as he was wearing an old pair of penny loafers that barely fit. (I didn’t know yet that the ceremony would be closed-casket and kept picturing Katie’s bluish face on a white silk pillow, her painted lips and fingernails, a Snow White corpse with a mouth molded into a lollipop grin. I considered an illusionist act even more grotesque than her death, a Huckleberry Finn episode ending with Katie revealing herself as the pissed-off hag in the wheelchair at the back of the room.) I attempted a prayer as we walked along the main hallway. In the obituaries the Schells “politely requested that students attend the burial but not the wake services.” Deep down I knew I was making a mistake, despite thinking that the easy choice of avoiding the Schells couldn’t possibly be the right one.
There were two funerals that day at the Cohen Funeral Parlor, one Jewish and one Catholic, demarked by small rings of mourners in loose lines along the left and right side of the main entranceway. My family was gestured into the appropriate line by a gangly funeral director with moussed bangs perfectly straight across his forehead, his goody-goody altar boy appearance only increasing my fears about Katie’s cosmetology. The hallway was filled with St. Pius parishioners in their best jewelry, teary-eyed teachers, men in yarmulkes, frail Jewish women in all black, Wakonda Country Clubbers with golf tans, the fat and stern, the saintly and sorrowful, even a pockmarked man weeping in bright rubber-ducky suspenders and pin-striped pants. I recognized a few of Emily’s aunts and uncles, a cousin perhaps a year or two younger than Katie but hanging on her mother’s arm like she was five years old. I guessed Mrs. Schell’s Tennessee crew to be the group of loud ruddy men huddled near the bathrooms, spouting platitudes for the rest of us to overhear and benefit from. One of them kept glancing at me with a sour expression that gave me the feeling he was privy to every terrible, sick thing I’d ever done. (It’s possible I only imagined this, that he hadn’t notice me, and he wasn’t even Emily’s uncle.) Those who knew me gave me sad little smiles. Others averted their view, not sure what to say or do.
Eventually I stepped out of line to search for Emily, hoping to find her somewhere other than front and center next to her parents. After a fast survey of Katie’s funeral room and the two adjacent hallways, I hadn’t spotted any of the immediate Schell family. I decided to wait outside the Jewish service, guessing they’d secluded themselves in the private grieving room around the corner. Peeping through the double doors, I saw a middle-aged woman with pigtails strumming a guitar and singing: “You watched me take the stage and fall . . . and cheered when I caught the fly ball.” It was an awful song, but something about her discordant howls and the bad reception she was given made me love that stubborn-looking father of hers. I wanted a yarmulke of my own, and a long black coat. Most of the elderly folks in the front row were staring at the floor, one of them with a numerical tattoo on her arm. Soon the veins in my neck were swelling and pulsing and I didn’t know if I was crying for Katie or myself or the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. I escaped to the bathroom where I threw myself against the locked door of a corner stall and bawled. It took some time to recover. I waited to come out until I was sure the bathroom was empty, which made it all the more surprising to find one of the urinals occupied by a guy who looked big enough to play lineman for the Chicago Bears. He was a middle-aged guy in a flannel shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. Thankful that I didn’t know him, I took my time throwing water on my face and drying it, only to find that after washing his hands, the man continued to wait around, apparently in order to introduce himself.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, his accent calming and countrified, his expression neither hopeful nor pained in conciliation. It was an ordinary expression, recognizing of an emotional bridge that needn’t be crossed. “I was gassing my truck where you and yer friend called the
poh-leese
. Then I read about you all in the paper. Just wanted to say I’m real sorry how it all turned out.”
In the first few seconds I hardly understood what he was talking about and thought he’d confused me with someone else. My instinct was to thank him and leave, until his gaze caught mine (not only were his eyes crystalline blue and abysmal, but his gaze, too; I’d never known such time-transcending depth) and remained caught until I more or less remembered a big bruiser of a guy hunkering his way around the Casey’s General Store when I’d sprinted inside.
“You were there?” I asked, filling in the details, trying to decide whether he was comparing different brands of motor oil or perusing the bin of discount CDs. The man nodded, scratching at the hat-head ring in his hair before apparently deciding that I was a man and he ought to just come out and say it. He shoved his hands in his pockets and kept nodding to himself, his thumbs sticking out of his jeans in a way that seemed to express everything about his passivity and the unpredictability of life.
“It was like you’d both got shot, ’cept there wasn’t any blood. I was reading the paper again out in the lot. Nothin’ good about it. Nothin’ good at all. So that’s all I meant to say. I’ll be on my way now.”
The man back stepped toward the door, awkwardly pausing for a beat before doing as he’d said. I figured he’d wanted to shake my hand but, considering the venue, decided against it. When I turned to the mirror again I found myself not only checking my eyes for evidence of unrestrained emotions, but probing them for the explanation of my role in the unfolding events, the karmic logic of Katie’s drowning, the subconscious reasons for my decision to attend a wake, knowing in my heart that the parents of the deceased, and perhaps others, would hardly welcome me.
By the time I returned to the main hallway, I’d set my mind on finding my family and leaving. But then Emily was suddenly at my side, pulling at my wrist and leading me around the corner. Everything about her stride and expression let me know she meant business, as though her superiors were currently out of commission and she’d been left in command. In only three days the scare of death had drastically thinned her, and even peeled the tan from her skin.
(With her jaded porcelain cheeks and combed eyelashes, she looked the way I now imagine the real Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova would have looked if she’d actually survived the Bolshevik bullets and reappeared—many years later, without a physical mark of injury or aging—to reclaim her identity.)
“What are you doing here?” she asked, hawking over me.
“I don’t know. I thought you might want me to be here. I came to find out.”
“You didn’t read the obituary?”
“I’m sorry. We’re leaving now. You want me to leave, right?”
“You can go to the burial,” she said, straightening up, suddenly conscious of her posture. “Just promise me you won’t stand right up front. Let’s not make a scene or anything, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, confused by what sort of
scene
she had in mind. She glanced over at the line and sighed as though this were all a big headache that would end soon enough if she could only keep those mourners moving. I tried to kiss her cheek but she was already thanking me and walking away, like I was a valet attendant to whom she’d handed her ticket.
Twenty-two
My dad took the long route to Tillis cemetery, then waited in the car until the majority of the funeral procession had gathered around the burial site near the top of the hill. We found our place in the shade of a big hickory tree at the edge of the circle, at least twenty yards away from Emily and her parents, the inner sanctum of family and priests surrounding the casket that was now propped open like the upper casing of a grand piano. The main celebrant was Katie’s religion teacher from her elementary school days, but judging by his stale metaphors on the delicacy of human life, you wouldn’t have guessed he’d ever known her. Throughout the service I was confounded by Emily’s professional composure. Her killer keep-it-togetherness reminded me of Mrs. Schell during doctor’s meetings at Mercy Frederick, especially with her hair pulled at a strict angle over her scalp, bobby-pinned behind her ear. Later on she appeared no more than cynically bored, as though she found it so ridiculous to drag someone up from under the weeds and muck only to dig them a hole in a fancy lawn. I imagined the sort of scene she requested we avoid—me parting my way through the crowd, taking her hand and squeezing it just before her knees gave out and I caught her and held her up as she cried and groaned.