Real Life(8)

The small boats had come in and been set on their racks, draped for the night. The larger boats were taken out farther down, near the boathouse, where Wallace sometimes took walks in the other direction, to where the grass grew wild and the trees were denser and heavier. There was a covered bridge and a family of geese living there. Sometimes, he saw their big gray wings spreading out beneath him as they glided across the water. Other times, he saw them lazily and confidently striding in the shade toward the soccer fields and picnic grounds, like stern game wardens. But at this time of the evening the geese were away, and the gulls had returned to their nests, and Wallace had the edge of the water to himself except for the other anonymous watchers nearby. He glanced at them briefly and wondered what shapes their lives held, if they were content, if they were mad or frustrated. They looked like people anywhere: white and in ugly, oversize clothes, sunburned and chapped and smiling with large, elastic mouths. The young people were long and tan, and they laughed as they pushed on one another. Farther back, the great mass of people spread out over the pier like moss. The water beneath him splashed up a little, wetting the edges of his shorts. The stone was slimy and cool. A band was starting up behind him. Their instruments twanged as they whirred to life.

Wallace hugged his knees and put his chin on his arms. He slid his feet out of his canvas shoes and let the lake wash up to his ankles. It was cold, though not as cold as he had expected or would have liked. There was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling around under the surface. There were stretches of days when the lakes were closed because of the algae. It sometimes secreted neurotoxins that could be fatal. Or harbored parasitic organisms that clasped on to swimmers and sucked them dry, or gave them diseases that caused their bodies to tear themselves apart from the inside. The water here could be dangerous even if you didn’t know it. But there were no warnings posted. Whatever was in the water was not yet at a level thought dangerous to people. The water stank more now that he was close to it, like alcohol, powerfully astringent and chemical.

It reminded him of the black water that had stared at him from the drain of his parents’ sink all those years ago. Black and round, like a perfect pupil gazing up at him, smelling sour, like something gone bad. His father had also kept buckets of still water. I’m saving that, he’d say when Wallace tried to pour it out. Saving it the way one saved old clothes or bottles or pens with no ink or broken pencils. Because you never knew what might happen that would make the trash worth keeping. The water in the buckets was as dark as tar because leaves had fallen from the roof into it and had broken down. Sometimes, he saw the frail brown remnants of the stalks, after all the green had been eaten away. At the right angle, it was possible to see the writhing forms of mosquito larvae as they flitted just along the surface. His father had told him once that they were tadpoles. Wallace had believed him. He had cupped his hands in the slimy water and had squinted close, trying to discern the tadpoles. But of course, they had only been mosquitos.

Dark water.

There was a knot of tension high in his chest, something hard and coiled. It felt like a black ball stuck to the inside of his lungs. His stomach hurt too. He had eaten nothing but soup all day. The surface of his hunger was rough, like a cat’s tongue. Pressure gathered in the backs of his eyes.

Oh, he thought when he realized what it was: tears.

In that moment, there was a body next to him. Wallace turned, for an instant expecting to see his father’s face, conjured up out of memory, but instead, it was Emma, who had come at last with her fiancé, Thom, and their dog, Scout, a shaggy, happy thing.

She put an arm around his shoulders and laughed. “What are you doing over here?”

“Taking in the sights, I reckon,” he said, trying to match her laugh. He hadn’t seen Emma in a week or more. She worked two floors down, in a lab situated at the end of a long dark hallway. Every time Wallace had visited her—to go to lunch, or to drop something off—he had felt like he was passing out of the biosciences building and into some forbidden place, as if he’d gotten lost and had been sucked into some curious adjacent dimension. The walls were empty except for an occasional bulletin board where yellowed fliers and posters from the 1980s hung as though the opportunities they offered were still new. Emma and Wallace had become friends by virtue of the fact that neither of them was a white man in their program. It had been four years of shared looks over the tops of the heads of tall boys with their upright, sturdy confidence and loud voices and brash propositions. It had been four years of quiet conversations in that long dark hall, moments when it seemed that things might get easier for them. She smoothed her dark curly hair from her face and looked at him. He felt as thin as Cole’s napkins in that moment.

“Wallace, what’s wrong?” she asked. Her palm was soft on his wrist. He cleared the wet from his throat.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said. His eyes stung.

“Wallace, what happened?” Emma had a small face with large features and an olive complexion that sometimes led people to think, in certain lighting, that she was not white. But she was white, if of an ethnic variety. Her grandparents on one side were Bohemian, or Czech, as it was called now. On the other side they were Sicilian. Her chin was keen like Yngve’s, but it lacked a dimple. Her hand didn’t fit all the way around Wallace’s wrist, but she held him tightly just the same.