Aley

Right now, in the midst of this late summer afternoon in 1988, the air pressed against Aley's skin. The coolness testified to the depth at the centre of the lake, where light did not reach, and man did not go, at least not willingly.

          She removed her sandals.

          The heat hoarded by the rock burnt Aley’s soles. She jumped on her tiptoes in a miniature rendition of a rain dance, and spread her blanket, finding refuge on a corner. She knelt, reaching down so that her fingers touched the surface of the water. The water accepted her hand, and she lowered it further.

          "Ain't found that Cole boy."

          "They'll find him when the lake decides," Aley said.

          Her personifying the lake angered him. She felt his anger without looking. Fenton hated to think of anything having volition or perception unless it walked upright on two legs. Spirit was a nonentity, belonging to the world of outdated native myths and old-lady superstitions. She hoped he was angered enough to go away.

          "Got nothing to do with the lake," Fenton said.

          Aley knew she should ignore him. The man meant nothing to her. He was simply a neighbour in the technical sense, someone who erected fences to keep her off his property - or to keep himself inside. How like a man to busy himself erecting things, she thought.

          A better person might have kept her mouth shut, kept her words to herself, but she didn't pretend to be a better person. Words held power. Incantations, spells, magic: such were words carefully chosen.

          "At least a week since they found the boat," Aley said.

          She spoke casually, lazily.

          In reality, Aley was acutely aware of her voice, her cadence, her timing, and equally aware of the surroundings. The loon calling for its mate, both birds diving, surfacing. A dragonfly hovering over its reflection in the mirror-top of the water. Small fish idling, the lake still and quiet.

          Fenton grunted. She heard him walk away, felt him leave, too. He knew the facts as well as she did. Two weeks had passed since the boat had been discovered, turning endless circles, pushing wave upon wave from its centre, motor insistently droning against the backdrop of quiet.

          Plenty of time for searchers to find a body if either chance or skill had a say in the finding. The area had been combed thoroughly. Twice. Old boots, motors, tires, and a woman's bikini, but no body - not of the woman, or the boy. Even the weekenders who invaded the area from Friday to Sunday with their barbecues and noisy boats and obnoxious offspring kept up-to-date about the search. Read about it in the local newspaper, gossiped about it with their dinner guests, watched it from their cedar decks with a beer in one hand and binoculars in the other.

          Two long weeks of weather perfect for searching, which proved her point. The lake was keeping the boy until the moment was right. Fenton banged nails into wood, erecting something again. Aley smiled. She had gotten to him. Pierced through his self-confidence, his damn certainty that the world was exactly the way he perceived it.

          The pounding stopped.

          Footsteps, then silence.

          Aley knew Fenton stood impatiently on his side of the fence, trying to figure out a way to get her attention without appearing as if he had walked over to say something to her in particular.

          "Thirteen days he’s been missing," he spoke.

          Aley looked up from the blanket. The sun blinded her, and for a moment Fenton’s voice boomed from nothingness. She shielded her eyes until shape returned.

          "Thirteen days," Fenton emphasized, as if the fact of the correct math was a victory of some sort.

          Aley stood, faced the water, stretched her arms above her head and began to chant in low tones. It worked. “Crazy bitch!" Fenton muttered, back-stepping to his cottage, slamming the door shut when safely inside. The noise reverberated across the lake, and the turtles sunning themselves on the rocks disappeared underwater.

          Aley imagined she could enter the water without a splash, absorbed through a single point, the water pulling her into it rather than her body displacing the water. She dove, surfaced using eggbeater kick. Eggbeater was a kick few people used, except lifeguards and water polo players and synchronized swimmers, people who knew water intimately, did not struggle to stay afloat but swam with ease. Maybe they had made a covenant with the water. How else could one explain the ability to swim? Not simply to dogpaddle or do a fair front crawl, but to swim, really swim, as if the action were second nature, first nature even.

          The manuscript of Aley’s book waited for her, words without shape or flesh or life until she gave it to them. Aley sank; creation could wait. Water now, here, this moment, could not. She held her breath until her lungs needed air, kicked to the surface, floated motionless on her back, eyes closed. Rolled to her stomach, swam breaststroke across the mile of open water toward Turtle Island.

          Lake streamed past Aley’s forehead and shoulders, rushed to fill the spaces created by the power of her motion. But swimming is not simply a matter of a solid muscling through liquid. At the right moment, Aley streamlined her body, lessened the resistance, worked with the water rather than against it. Power and passivity, knowing when to use each so that one complemented the other. That was the magic.

          The exhaustion from the swim felt good. Aley pulled herself up on a rock, perched herself at the edge, sunned herself like one of the turtles. Let her mind wander, thought about her latest story, wondered if her characters lived somewhere. She hoped not, didn’t want the responsibility of what she made her characters do. The virtual world of the imagination was enough for her.

          Something in the shallows drew Aley from her thoughts. She stared without putting the parts together to make the whole, without letting what the parts were in unison register in her brain. Shape slowly took on meaning and context. The body of the Cole boy.

          Held within the arms of the weeds.

The night ate the world around the campers so that there were no other people, no other thoughts, no other places but their own. The campfire ate a hole, too, but in the fabric of the night, the way a moth eats wool stored in a trunk.

          The fire offered a circle of comfort. The children huddled closer. Aley moved closer, too, although she was not fooled. Ulterior motive: fire gives warmth and light, but in turn insists that it be involved in mood. Won't stand by and idly watch.

          "Do you think he'll ever come back?" Willow asked.

          “Jason Cole? He’s dead now, baby. He can’t come back,”

Aley spoke gently to her daughter.

          The discovery of the boy’s body had shaken Willow, and Aley had hoped the campfire would provide a distraction. She had been wrong. The night opened up more questions.

          “Not Jason, I mean Daddy. Do you think he’ll ever come back?”

          The words lay against the darkness. Flicker of the campfire, interplay of shadows and light. No, Aley didn't think Willow’s father was coming back. Samuel was dead, whether they had a body for proof or not. For a long time, she had held out hope that Samuel would contact them when he was able, that he was ill in a remote South American village and would return when he regained health, or was taken hostage by a fringe political group that would release him when a ransom was paid, or was captive in a prison somewhere. Her imagination had run rampant, creating explanations and scenarios. 

          "He would have gotten us a message long ago if he were still alive, baby."

          Willow wasn't stupid.

          If Samuel wasn't alive, he was dead. If only the body had been recovered, they could have buried him. Visited his grave, put flowers on it, mourned. But instead, they were left hanging, a book unfinished. No body, no death certificate, not even a broken camera discarded in a scuffle, or a wallet, or a roll of film to show his last days. It was only through stories that Willow could build for herself a concept of her father. Through photographs, too. Not so much photographs of Samuel, although they helped, but photographs he had taken. Aley had a box somewhere of newspaper and magazine clippings, would search the box out and give it to Willow. But was nine years of age old enough to see through the eyes of her father?

          Willow’s friend, Ruth, spoke.

          "You'll see your Dad again in heaven. If he didn't go to, uh, hell."

          Ruth paused. She looked fearful, as if uttering the word could summon up the demons harboured in its name. Funny, the effect of words, Aley thought. Letters strung together. In themselves, they had no power. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. Neither could ideas nor thoughts nor beliefs, Aley believed. She didn't understand why people grew upset because someone else spoke or wrote a certain word, or thought differently, or called God by another name, or worshipped him in a different place, or didn’t worship him at all. Making hard and fast rules about forbidding the use of a word gave the word more power than saying it in the first place. She held words in high esteem, and for that reason wouldn't damn any of them to a life sentence in a hell of silence. The trick was to use the word effectively, craft its presence. Couch it within other carefully chosen words, and unleash it at exactly the right moment. A well-placed obscenity had more impact on a reader than a string of curses hung like Christmas lights throughout the span of a book.

          "He’s not in hell," Willow said.

          "Some people don't believe in hell,” Aley answered softly.

          Ruth looked intrigued. It had never occurred to her that the existence of hell was debatable.

          "I believe in hell," Ruth said.

          "I don't," Willow countered.

          Stalemate.

          "Do you believe in it?" Willow asked her mother.

          Aley answered truthfully.

          “No.”

          "If there's no hell," Willow pushed, "does that mean there's no heaven?"

          Aley winced. She knew the step-work that Willow had laid out in her mind. If hell didn’t exist, what did that do to heaven? And if there wasn’t a heaven, did that mean she’d never see her father again, in this world or the next?

          Ruth's eyes were round and awake. She had never known such a process, this thinking aloud, this mixing of ideas to produce new ideas, a fluidity of thought that allowed one idea to move into the next without the attachment of creed. Up until tonight, all her ideas had been given to her cemented into fact, ideas so jealous that they did not allow others to exist. To debate, even to wonder, had meant to invoke hellfire and brimstone.

          "Then there’s the Big Bang theory,” Aley offered. “The universe won't last forever. Eventually, the force of gravity will be greater than the force of the expansion. Everything will be pulled back into the centre."

          A look of horror crossed Ruth's face.

          "We're talking billions of years, Ruth. The universe is about ten billion years old. It’s middle-aged, so that means it'll take another ten billion years before everything starts in reverse."

          The explanation arrested Ruth's immediate fears but added another element: confusion. God created the world in six days, right before the time of Moses, six thousand years ago.

          Aley saw the confusion.

          Time to end the bedtime story.

          "Maybe that Big Bang centre is heaven, and all things, all people, all matter, even thoughts, and memory, and events return there. Who knows?"

          Aley did know that Willow would mull the ideas about in her mind, come to her own resolution, if not now, then in the future. Maybe far in the future, but that was fine. Some things take a lifetime, and some things longer.