The Other Side of the Lake

We went to the cabin in October. The trees along the road had turned and some of the leaves were on the ground already. Helen drove. I watched the lake appear between the trees on the right side, then disappear, then appear again. Each time it looked different because the angle changed, but it was the same lake.

“The Nelsons repainted,” Helen said.

I looked. Their cabin was green now. It had been brown.

“It looks good,” I said.

She slowed for the turn onto our road. The road was dirt and the rain had left ruts. I could feel each one through the seat.

Our cabin looked the way it always looked. The porch needed sweeping. There were pine needles on the steps and on the railing and packed into the corners where the railing met the posts. I carried our bags in while Helen opened windows. The air inside was the air of a place that had been closed. It smelled like wood and dust and something under the dust that was just the cabin being itself when no one was there.

“I’ll make the beds,” Helen said.

“I can help.”

“I know where the sheets are.”

I went out to the porch and sat in one of the chairs. The lake was there, through the trees, silver and flat. The far shore was a dark line. Beyond it, hills. I had looked at this view many times and I knew every part of it but I looked at it now as though I could find something new in it if I looked carefully enough.

I should say that this was the first time we had come to the cabin since everything changed. That is not quite the right way to put it. Things had been changing for a long time before we understood they were changing, the way the light changes in late afternoon — you do not notice until you look up and the room is different and you cannot say when it happened.

But I think what I mean is that this was the first time we had come to the cabin since we stopped pretending.

Helen came out. She stood at the railing and looked at the lake.

“The dock needs work,” she said.

It did. One of the boards had come loose and was hanging at an angle over the water.

“I’ll look at it tomorrow.”

“There’s no rush.”

“I know.”

She sat down. We sat there. The lake made no sound. A bird called from the trees on the left side and another one answered from further away and then it was quiet.

I keep thinking about what I want to tell you and then I go around it. I have been going around it for a long time. Helen says I do this — that I talk about the weather and the dock and the pine needles because those things are safe and the other thing is not safe, and she is right, but I think she does the same thing, only differently. She does it by being very organized. She does it by knowing where the sheets are.

We had dinner that night at the table by the window. Helen made pasta with the sauce she always makes, the one with tomatoes and olives. We drank wine. The window was dark and I could see our reflections in it — two people at a table, eating, which is what people do.

“Do you remember when the Berrys brought their dog?” Helen said.

I remembered. It was a retriever. It had run into the lake and come out and shaken water on everyone.

“Laura was furious,” I said.

Helen smiled. “She wasn’t furious. She loved that dog.”

“She pretended to be furious.”

“She was seven. She didn’t pretend anything.”

Helen said this and then she was quiet and I was quiet and the name hung in the air between us like smoke from a candle someone had blown out. You could almost see the shape of it.

I poured more wine.

“This is a good bottle,” I said.

“You picked it.”

“I did.”

We finished eating and I washed the dishes. Helen dried. We did this without talking, the way you do a thing you have done many times. Outside the window above the sink it was completely dark. The lake was out there but you could not see it. You could only know it was there because you had seen it before.

I want to tell you about the weekend the way it actually was. Not the way it felt, because how it felt is the part I cannot get to directly. I can tell you what we did. I can tell you that on Saturday morning I walked down to the dock and looked at the loose board and saw that two of the nails had pulled free and the wood underneath was soft. I can tell you that I went to the shed and found a hammer and new nails and a piece of lumber that was close to the right size. I spent an hour fixing it. The work was simple and it required my hands and my attention and while I was doing it I did not think about anything else, which was the point of doing it, though I did not admit that to myself at the time.

Helen read on the porch. When I came up from the dock she asked if I was hungry and I said yes and she made sandwiches. We ate them on the porch. The lake was blue that day, not silver. Wind came across it in patches, darkening the surface in shapes that moved and changed.

“It looks like something’s moving under it,” Helen said.

I looked. She was right. The dark patches moved the way something alive would move, just beneath.

“It’s just wind,” I said.

“I know what it is.”

There was a time when we would have been here with the Berrys and the Nelsons and their children. I keep circling back to this. The weekends when the cabins were full and the dock had towels on it and someone was always calling from the water. Laura learned to swim at this lake. She was five. Helen held her in the water, hands under her stomach, and then she let go and Laura swam. Three strokes. She came up laughing and coughing and Helen’s face — I cannot describe Helen’s face. I have tried. There is no sentence for it. It was the face of a person watching something she made move through the world on its own for the first time, and it contained everything she would ever feel about our daughter compressed into a single expression that lasted perhaps two seconds and that I have remembered every day since.

I want to be precise about what happened and I find that I cannot be precise because what happened is not one thing. It was a series of things that at the time seemed ordinary and in retrospect seem like a road that was always going to one place. Laura was bright. She was willful. She had Helen’s eyes and my stubbornness, which is not a good combination, Helen used to say, though she said it with pride. She grew up. She grew up and away from us, which is what children do, and we understood that. We had always understood that.

What we did not understand, or what we understood and chose not to look at, was that the distance was not the normal distance. There were phone calls that got shorter. There were visits that felt like performances. There was the way she smiled when she arrived and the way the smile was perfect and the perfection was the problem because real smiles are not perfect, they are lopsided and unguarded, and hers had become something she put on the way you put on a coat.

I am going around it again. Helen would say: just say it.

I cannot just say it. That is the whole point. If I could just say it, it would be the kind of thing that can be said, and it is not.

What I can say is this: there was a day, an ordinary Tuesday, when Helen called Laura and Laura did not answer. And then Wednesday. And then Thursday. And then the weekend and Helen driving to her apartment with the key Laura had given us for emergencies, and the apartment was empty. Not abandoned — empty. Her things were there. Her books and her dishes and the plant on the windowsill that she had asked Helen to help her choose. But Laura was not there and had not been there for some time, and the neighbor said she had not seen her in weeks.

I will not describe what came after. The calls, the reports, the waiting that became its own kind of life. I will say only that it has been three years and we do not know where our daughter is and we do not know if she is alive and we have learned to carry this the way you carry something very heavy — not by being strong but by never putting it down, because if you put it down you may not be able to pick it up again.

What I want to say, what I have been trying to get to this whole time, is that there were signs. There were signs and we saw them and we called them something else. We called them growing up. We called them independence. We called them the natural order of things because the alternative was to call them what they were, and if we had called them what they were we would have had to do something, and doing something would have meant admitting that the life we thought we were living — parents of a daughter who was finding her way — was not the life we were living. And we could not admit that. Not then. Not while there was still time.

This is the part I cannot forgive. Not Laura — Laura, wherever she is, had her reasons, and I do not know them and I may never know them and that is a different kind of pain. What I cannot forgive is how easy it was to look away. How natural it felt. We had built our life on the understanding that things were fine, and the understanding was so complete and so comfortable that when things stopped being fine we simply maintained the understanding. We were complicit. We agreed, without speaking about it, to not see what was in front of us, because seeing it would have broken the life we had and we loved the life we had. We loved it more than we loved the truth, and by the time we were willing to love the truth instead, the truth was an empty apartment and a phone that rang and rang.

On Saturday afternoon Helen suggested we walk to the other side of the lake. There is a trail that goes around, through the woods, about three miles. We had walked it before, years ago, when Laura was small and rode on my shoulders for the last half-mile because her legs were tired.

We walked. The trail was narrow and Helen went first. I watched her back, the blue of her jacket, her hair which she keeps short now. She walked steadily, the way she does everything, with a kind of determination that is also a kind of refusal. She was not going to stop. She was not going to say she was tired. She was going to walk to the other side of the lake because she had said she would.

The woods were quiet except for our feet on the leaves. Sometimes a branch cracked. Once something moved in the brush and we both stopped and looked and it was nothing or it was something small that we could not see.

“I keep thinking she walked somewhere,” Helen said. She was ahead of me and she did not turn around. “I know that doesn’t make sense. But I think of her walking. Going somewhere on foot. Choosing to walk.”

I did not say anything. What Helen was doing — I recognized it. She was building a picture she could live with. She was placing Laura on a road somewhere, walking, alive, choosing. It was not true and it was not false. It was the story Helen told herself so that she could get up in the morning, and I was not going to take it from her.

“Maybe she’s somewhere like this,” Helen said. “Trees. Water. Quiet.”

“Maybe.”

“She always loved the lake.”

“She did.”

Helen stopped walking. She stood on the trail and I came up beside her and we stood there. Through the trees I could see the lake, our side of it now, the cabins small in the distance. Ours was the one with the dark roof. I could see the dock I had fixed that morning, the new board pale against the old ones.

“I want to believe she’s all right,” Helen said.

“I know.”

“Do you believe it?”

This is the question. This has always been the question. Not what happened to Laura but what we believe happened, and whether what we believe has to be the same thing, and whether two people can remain together while believing different things about the one thing that matters most.

“I believe she’s somewhere,” I said.

Helen looked at me. I saw her face and it was the face at the lake again, the one from when Laura swam, except reversed — the same intensity but pointed in the other direction. Not watching something move into the world. Watching it go.

“That’s not what I asked,” she said.

“I know.”

We stood there. The lake was below us, perfectly still. From this side you could see how small the cabins were. How small all of it was. The whole life we had lived there, the summers and the swimming and the dog that shook water on everyone — from here it looked like something you could hold in your hand. Something you could close your hand around and when you opened it again it would be gone.

Helen turned and walked back the way we had come. Not forward, around the loop. Back. I followed her. We walked through the same woods, past the same trees, over our own footprints in the soft parts of the trail. Neither of us said why. I think it was because completing the circle would have meant arriving somewhere new, and we were not ready to arrive anywhere new. We were only ready to go back to where we had been.

When we reached the cabin Helen went inside and I heard the faucet run and I sat on the porch and looked at the lake. It was getting late. The light was the light of late afternoon, the kind I described before, where you do not notice the change until it has already happened. The lake was darker now. The far shore was losing its detail, becoming just a shape. I sat there and watched it go.

That night we sat on the porch with the blanket over our legs the way we used to. We did not talk about Laura. We talked about the Nelsons’ new paint color and whether the winter would be cold and a book Helen was reading that she said was good but not great. We talked around the silence the way water moves around a stone — smoothly, naturally, as though the stone were not there, as though the water had chosen this path and was not simply going where the stone forced it to go.

At one point Helen reached over and took my hand. She held it. Her hand was cold. I held it back. We sat there holding hands and looking at the dark place where the lake was, and I thought: this is what is left. This is what we have. Two people on a porch holding hands in the dark, looking at something they cannot see, knowing it is there because they have seen it before.

On Sunday we packed. Helen stripped the beds and folded the sheets and put them in the closet where they go. I swept the porch. We closed the windows. I checked the dock one more time. The board held. The nails were good.

We drove home. Helen drove. I watched the lake appear and disappear between the trees, the way it had on the way in, except now I was watching it leave instead of watching it arrive, and I understood that these were the same thing.

Helen turned onto the main road.

“Same time next month?” she said.

“If you want.”

“I want.”

She said this simply, the way you state a fact. The road straightened out and the lake was gone, behind the trees for the last time, and Helen drove and I sat beside her and neither of us said anything else. There was nothing else to say. There was everything else to say. We drove home.