Page 30

August 2017

Nagadon Lake lay in front of Sarah like a stain. The surface of the water was unmoving under a hot midday sun and summer-blue sky. The forest stood, just as it always had, a sentinel to the comings and goings on the lake. A pleasant breeze ruffled the treetops while a chorus of bullfrogs echoed from nearby lily pads. The scene had similar features but was unrecognizable from the image permanently affixed in Sarah’s mind. She stood on the dock, exactly as she had almost a year ago, waiting for Matthew.

Sarah had arrived early. The boat carrying Matthew’s remains wasn’t due to arrive for another hour. She wanted time alone here. To rage? To make peace? To mourn? She really wasn’t sure. She only knew that she and the lake needed to confront each other so that she could move on from this place.

When she arrived, it appalled her to see the bay so warm and welcoming. She got out of the car to the trill of sparrows and the faint buzz of a passing insect. It was fucking idyllic, and she hated it. It felt like an insult to Matthew’s memory, to the pain her family had endured. How dare the lake and forest look inviting and peaceful? It was a beast that had taken so much from her, putting on a show of false promise to lure others.

She had no idea how long she’d been standing at the end of the dock, squinting into sunshine and cursing the soul of this place. She watched dragonflies flit across the surface and fish dart around the dock posts. Her skin felt the caress of the sun. The smell of warmed wood, water, grass, and dirt reached her. She felt the warmth burn into the heart of her, her muscles tensed against the assault. A scream lodged in her gut, crafted of secrets and lies and loss. It pushed up, elbowing against bone and muscle, until finally Sarah released it into the summer sunshine. She screamed until her throat burned, until her joints ached, until bile had been expunged from her core and echoed against water and wood, and she fell to her knees in surrender.

As the echo of her scream died, Sarah heard a new sound emerge, one that should not be there. A rat-a-tat, like the fall of rain on leaves. She looked to the clear sky, but the sound continued; it expanded as if a rain cloud had emerged over the forest and moved across the lake, the dock, the hard-packed ground around her. Sarah closed her eyes, unable to reconcile the sounds with the heat she felt on her skin. Still on her knees, she willed the hallucination to quieten. It didn’t. She heard the fall of a hard rain, exactly like the one that fell the night they lost Matthew.

The rain intensified, and in the distance, Sarah heard the boom of thunder as she opened her eyes to a calm, flat lake. She covered her eyes with her hands as if in supplication, and that’s when she heard it: beneath the crash of water, a voice. Faint and distant, traveling on a nonexistent wind. Neither male nor female, the sound stretched and warped so that she couldn’t even be sure if she was hearing words. But then, Sarah thought as a wild laugh escaped her lips, why would she be entitled to speak to her hallucination?

Footsteps on the dock brought a crashing end to the storm cacophony. The relief Sarah felt kept her on her knees, though she knew she should stand and greet what was to come.

Boychuk called her name, softly. He thought he heard her laughing, but she was facing away from him, so the sound was swallowed by the lake. Calling again felt inappropriate. He waited.

Finally, she stood slowly and with care, as if the air was working against her. When she turned toward him, her face was rigid. She waved a hand but remained silent. He approached, cautiously, unsure of what to expect.

“Rob,” she said as he drew closer. She made the effort to shake his hand. “How are you?”

“Good to see you, Sarah.” There was no reason for her to be here. The Ontario Forensic Pathology Service would recover the body and confirm identity with DNA. Some people, though, wanted to be here. Call it closure or confirmation; Boychuk didn’t really worry about the particulars. It was a need, and he could respect that.

Sarah turned back to face the lake. Boychuk stood beside her. He kept his silence. The sound of the leaves, the birds, the gentle lap of water seemed like a fitting funeral dirge. The lake shimmered as sunlight reflected on imperceptible folds on the surface. Though it didn’t look like it in the stillness, the water was always moving, changing, flowing to someplace else. People were a little bit the same, Boychuk thought, time marching us forward and toward something else, whether we wanted to or not.

“Rob, do you believe that nature has karma?”

“In what way?” He’d heard the word before, but usually chalked it up to city folks reading too many self-help books.

“That the universe has balance. Something good will even out something bad.”

“I don’t know that the universe cares enough about us. Way I see it, we’re nothing more than fleas on the back of a bear when it comes to the universe. Nature don’t care about right or wrong. There’s no cosmic retribution. Good people make mistakes; bad people do good. It’s randomness and chance in my mind. Call it the universe, call it the hand of God, call it dust sprites, it’s all the same. Life does what it does, and there isn’t always a reason.”

“What happened, then?” Sarah said, her voice tentative, as if she were compelled to ask against her will.

Boychuk had wasted a few sleepless nights trying to answer that very question.

“I can spin you a yarn that might make you feel better, but the truth of the matter is, we’ll probably never know for sure. They’ll run an autopsy, but he was out there long enough and exposed.” Boychuk couldn’t bring himself to tell her that animals and insects had gotten to the body, leaving little but bones behind. “I imagine he got turned around; maybe he was hurt somehow, compromised. The autopsy might provide details, but it won’t tell the whole story.”

“Why didn’t they find him? He was so close.” The question was a murmur beneath the emotions Sarah’s voice carried.

“It can happen,” Boychuk said, knowing the explanation was devoid of comfort. “The search centered around the canoe on the other side of the lake. We sent searchers around the campsite, but they didn’t cover as much ground. There wasn’t much reason to think Matthew had left the campsite on foot.”

Sarah forced back a sob.

“What if he’d bumped his head?”

Being a cop meant spending time with people at the worst moments of their lives, when an accident, a mistake, or criminality brought them to their lowest point. Each person reacted differently, driven by thousands of experiences that came before, as unique to them as a fingerprint. Boychuk had shepherded hundreds of people through such moments in his career, and not once had one of them asked a question randomly.

He turned to Sarah then, his eyes asking the question as gently as possible so as not to spook her by saying it out loud.

Whispers. It was whispers Sarah had heard in her hallucination of rain on a cloudless, sunny day. She understood now, in the face of everything, on the shores of Nagadon Lake. The wilderness would never welcome her back. This was never a safe place. It had grace and beauty and an undeniable energy that could rejuvenate the soul—or save a marriage—but there were no bargains to be struck. The lake hadn’t broken its promise to her. There had never been one. The water flowed because it must, and it owed Sarah and her family nothing. The woods were savage, dark, and deep. And they kept their secrets.

Sarah had heard about Boychuk’s pending retirement. Some time ago, he’d called to tell her his cases were being transferred to a colleague and that he had been moved to paperwork status. She’d congratulated him, but she detected a rueful acceptance. Sarah looked at him now, at his calm, forgiving eyes. She took a deep breath and began.

“I didn’t know,” she said after she had told Boychuk about the damaged wet suit, Bella’s encounter with Matthew, and Sarah’s suspicion—realized too late—that he’d hit his head. She was out of words but knew there was more to tell. One final secret that needed to be released. “Bella woke me when she came back to the tent. I was barely awake; it was like I was in a dream. She shook me, said ‘Daddy fell.’ I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Bella, she’s amazing, but she’s a lot of work. She needs a lot. Do you know she didn’t sleep through the night until she was six years old? Six years of interrupted sleep and plodding to her room half-awake to utter comforting platitudes into a darkened room. Most nights, I just drifted off beside her.

“It really didn’t register for me at the time. Tripping, slipping, falling—it’s standard practice in the outdoors. And I was so tired. I chalked it up to Bella being Bella, stirring things up, needing attention and stimuli because that’s who she is. I ignored her and I fell back to sleep.

“In the morning, it was gone. Even through all the questions and exhaustion and searching, it didn’t come back. It was like it had vanished from my mind along with Matthew. It wasn’t until Bella told me her story, said that Matthew had fallen and pretended to be asleep, that I put it all together. He must have been hurt somehow, maybe even blacked out. But it was too late by then. I was scared. Scared what it would mean that I hadn’t said anything until then. And then, there was the wet suit. Mostly, though, I was worried for Bella. If she’d had any notion that her goofing around had harmed Matthew, she’d be devastated. I had to protect her.”

What Sarah couldn’t possibly describe to the man beside her now—this stranger who shared her family’s loss—was the blistering shame that had dogged her since she sat beside Bella, listening to her little girl’s account of that night. Sarah looked back on the long list of parenting mistakes in her life, all of which faded beneath the colossal failure of dismissing her inquisitive, difficult, and rambunctious child to fatal consequences. She may never know what exactly happened to Matthew or whether she could have indeed saved him, but what she would carry for the rest of her life was the pure, unadulterated knowledge that her dismissal of her child eviscerated any chance that the outcome might have been different.

Boychuk heard the motor seconds before the OPP recovery boat rounded the point. Even from a distance, they could see the body bag lying on a stretcher across the back. Sarah shuddered when it came into view, her voice spent after everything she’d just told him. He glanced at her. She looked smaller somehow, as if releasing the story had removed a part of her.

The Lussier family came to mind then. One loss erasing three lives. He hadn’t been able to do anything for them, had been a rookie, unable to comprehend the vast wounds that life could leave open. He closed his eyes and listened. Tuned his ears to the wind through the leaves and the water. There was no reason here. Only nature. And it would reclaim its lost sons and daughters regardless of what he did with the information in front of him.

He could do nothing for the Lussier family, but he could do something now. He turned his back to the lake. There were no words he could utter that would make any of this better, no actions he could take that would rewind what had happened here, no charges he could lay that would speak to justice. He put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder.

“Come on. Let’s get you back to your family.”