On Mystic Lake

She’d laughed, that soft, trilling laugh that always made his heart ache with longing. You’ve got to think bigger, Nicky-boy. You don’t know what you want yet. Once you start college—

No college for me, smart girl. I won’t be getting a scholarship like you.

He’d seen it dawn in her eyes, slowly, the realization that he didn’t want what she wanted, and that he wouldn’t reach that far. He didn’t have the courage to dream big dreams. All he wanted was to help people and to be needed. It was all he’d ever known, all he was good at.

But Annie hadn’t understood. How could she? She didn’t know the gutters he’d crawled through in his life.

Oh, was all she’d said, but there’d been a wealth of newfound awareness in the word, a tiny unsteadiness in her voice that he’d never heard before. After that, they had lain side by side on the scratchy green blanket, staring up at the clouds, their bodies an infinitesimal distance apart.

It was so simple to him back then. He loved Annie . . . but Kathy needed him, and her need was a powerful draw.

He’d asked Kathy to marry him just a few months before graduation, but it didn’t matter by then, because Annie had known he would. They tried, after the engagement, to keep their friendship together, but inevitably they’d begun to drift apart. It had become Nick-and-Kathy, with Annie a bystander. By the time Annie left for college, amid a shower of promises to keep in touch, Nick had known there would be no lifelong friendship, no gruesome threesome anymore.

By the time he got back from Lurlene’s, it was almost nine-thirty. Well past a six-year-old’s bedtime, but Nick didn’t have the heart to put her right to bed.

Izzy sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the cold, black fireplace. It had always been her favorite spot in this house; at least, it had been in the old days when there was always a fire crackling behind her, always a wave of gentle heat caressing her back. She was holding her rag doll, Miss Jemmie, in one arm—the best she could do since she’d begun “disappearing. ” The silence in the room was overwhelming, as pervasive as the dust that clung to the furniture.

It shredded Nick into helpless pieces. He kept trying to start a conversation with his daughter, but all his efforts fell into the black well of Izzy’s silent world.

“I’m sorry about what happened at school, Izzy-bear,” he said awkwardly.

She looked up, her brown eyes painfully dry and too big for the milky pallor of her tiny face.

The words were wrong; he knew that instantly. He wasn’t just sorry about what had happened at school. He was sorry about all of it. The death, the life, and all the years of distance and disappointment that had led them to this pitiful place in their lives. Mostly, he was sorry that he was such a failure, that he had no idea where to go from here.

He got up slowly and went to the window. A glimmer of moonlight skated across the black surface of Mystic Lake, and a dim bulb on the porch cast a yellow net across the twin rocking chairs that hadn’t been used in months. Rain fell in silver streaks from the roofline, clattering on the wooden steps.

He knew that Izzy was watching him warily, waiting and worrying about what he would do next. Sadly, he knew how that felt, to wait with bated breath to see what a parent would do next. He knew how it twisted your insides into a knot and left you with barely enough oxygen to draw a decent breath.

He closed his eyes. The memory came to him softly, unintentionally, encoded in the percussive symphony of the rain, the plunking sound of water hitting wood. It reminded him of a day long ago, when a similar rain had hammered the rusty hood of his mother’s old Impala . . .

He was fifteen years old, a tall, quiet boy with too many secrets, standing on the street corner, waiting for his mother to pick him up from school. The kids moved past him in a laughing, talking centipede of blue jeans and backpacks and psychedelic T-shirts. He watched enviously as they boarded the yellow buses that waited along the curb.

At last, the buses drove away, chugging smoke, changing gears, heading for neighborhoods Nick had never seen, and the school yard fell silent. The gray sky wept. Cars rushed down the street in a screeching, rain-smeared blur. None of the drivers noticed a thin, black-haired boy in ragged, holey jeans and a white T-shirt.

He had been so damned cold; he remembered that most of all. There was no money for a winter coat, and so his flesh was puckered and his hands were shaking.

Come on, Mom. That was the prayer he’d offered again and again, but without any real hope.

He hated to wait for his mother. As he stood there, alone, his chin tucked into his chest for warmth, he was consumed by doubt. How drunk would she be? Would it be a kind, gentle day when she remembered that she loved him? Or a dark, nasty day when the booze turned her into a shrieking, stumbling madwoman who hated her only child with a vengeance? Dark days were the norm now; all his mother could think about was how much she’d lost. She wailed that welfare checks didn’t cover gin and bemoaned the fact that they’d been reduced to living in their car—a swallow away from homelessness.

He could always read her mood immediately. A pale, dirty face that never smiled and watery, unfocused eyes meant that she’d found her way to a full bottle. Even though he went through the car every day, searching for booze like other kids searched for Easter eggs, he knew he couldn’t stop her from drinking.

He rocked from foot to foot, trying to manufacture some body heat, but the rain hammered him, slid in icy, squiggly streaks down his back. Come on, Mom.

She never came that day. Or the next. He’d wandered around the dark, dangerous parts of Seattle all night, and finally, he’d fallen asleep in the garbage-strewn doorway of a tumbledown Chinese restaurant. In the morning, he’d rinsed out his mouth and grabbed a discarded bag of fortune cookies from a Dumpster, then made his way to school.

The police had come for him at noon, two unsmiling men in blue uniforms who told him that his mother had been stabbed. They didn’t say what she’d been doing at the time of the crime, but Nick knew. She’d been trying to sell her thin, unwashed body for the price of a fifth of gin. The policemen told Nick that there were no suspects, and he hadn’t been surprised. No one except Nick had cared about her when she was alive; no one was going to care that another scrawny, homeless drunk, turned old before her time by booze and betrayal, had been murdered.

Nick buried the memory in the black, soggy ground of his disappointments. He wished he could forget it, but of course, the past was close now. It had been breathing down his neck ever since Kathy’s death.

With a tired sigh, he turned and faced his utterly silent child. “Time for bed,” he said softly, trying to forget, too, that in the old days—not so long ago—she would have mounted a formal protest at the thought of going to bed without any “family time. ”

But now, she got to her feet, held her doll in the two “visible” fingers on her right hand, and walked away from him. Without a single backward glance, she began the long, slow climb to the second floor. Several of the steps creaked beneath her feather weight, and every sound hit Nick like a blow. What in the hell was he going to do now that Izzy was out of school? She had nowhere to go and no one to take care of her. He couldn’t stay home from work with her, and Lurlene had her own life.

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What in the hell was he going to do?