Hazel locked up and followed Childress and Eldwin to the car. She could swear Childress was walking taller now. She folded herself into the driver’s seat and waited for Childress to belt Claire Eldwin in. “One more thing, Claire,” she said.
“What?”
“Brenda Cameron wasn’t pregnant. She lied.”
They turned back onto Highway 79 and headed for Mayfair, Claire Eldwin’s last stop before the city of Toronto.
37
The girl lay utterly still in the boat, her hands laced together in her lap. She had closed her eyes and her head felt like it had doubled in weight on Claire’s leg. Her jaw fell open. She’s so drunk. Her face was peaceful, her eyes shuddering under her lids. What was she dreaming of?
They were going to the island to confront him together, to find him and make him choose. She’d believed Claire; she was a creature of faith. But when the ferry put in, the girl was too drunk to walk and she’d ranged up the little streets looking for a couple of bikes to borrow, still pulling on a bottle of red wine. Coming down behind 6th Street and looking into backyards, they’d seen the boat and Claire knew what they would do. It had been a challenge getting the little vessel out of the gate without making too much noise, and when the girl dropped her end on the sidewalk and collapsed laughing, Claire was sure they’d be caught. But no lights went on and they made it to a concrete launch at the bottom of the residential streets and slid the boat into the water. The girl lay on her back, cradling the bottle against her belly, and murmuring. “You’re good… you’re good to take care of me,” she said, and she raised the bottle to her lips and emptied it. “Crap,” she said. “Another dead soldier.” She put the bottle down as Claire navigated the boat into the dark channel that ran into the centre of the Islands.
The moon slid along the curve of the bottle as she angled into the thin waterway with small sailboats and motorboats moored along its edge. She rinsed the bottle out in the water. When it was half full, it bobbed on the surface like a buoy, but if she filled it to the rim, it began to sink. She watched the bottle begin to vanish into the black water, but then she plunged her hand in and pulled it out. She put it down on its side in the hull. The water gurgled out of it, running into the lowest parts of the boat and filling the little channel in the middle. She filled the bottle and emptied it out eight more times. There was a long, two-inch-wide puddle running down the middle of the boat’s hull, but nothing was going to wake the girl now.
She shifted her body and cradled the back of the girl’s head in her hands. As she lowered her to the floor of the boat, she turned her face so her body would follow onto its side and the girl adjusted and turned into a fetal position, as if she were in bed. The boat bobbed with the shifting weight of the two women. The oars hung in their locks, the paddles dragging in the water as they drifted slowly up the channel between Ward’s and Algonquin islands. Claire kneeled down and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and pulled it gently toward her. Slowly, receptive to the pressure, the girl turned on her belly, sighing. With one more nudge, her face was centred over the runnel that ran down the middle of the boat, and Claire could hear her blowing bubbles in the inch of water she’d emptied out into the bottom.
Leaning down, she could see her own face in the thin line of water, her long, sad face, full of knowledge. Because knowledge was the problem: if she had known nothing, if she had remained blissfully free of what he’d been careless enough to let her find out, she could have gone on. Welcomed him home in the evenings joyously ignorant, shared her meals with him, his bed, his stories of his work, those stories she knew also to be lies, but she would believe them just the same. It was all she wanted: to remain in the dark. But he could not even do that for her, the women he destroyed found their way to her, full of sorrow and anger and spite, and she could do nothing for them. But this one, this one she could help.
The sky above was clear but empty: all the stars that hung above the city were devoured by its light and the only light in the sky came from the moon. It was a half-moon now, a drowsing moon, and it was as if nothing knew they were here, no mind, no heart knew her heart or mind. She was alone. In some ways, she’d always been alone, victim to a helpless love, but now she was more alone than she’d ever been, decided on an action that she knew would change nothing.
Where were the people who loved this girl, who could have preserved her from herself? These people had failed her when she needed them most, and here she was, alone and insensate, in the dark, with the wrong kind of person. For a moment, Claire felt protective of her, as if, for that moment, she was her mother, trying to show her the error of her ways. But such a love could smother. You could not make other people’s choices for them, you could only suffer along with them and hope they would survive their mistakes.
Claire straddled the girl’s lower back, letting her weight press down. Then she leaned forward, her fingers interlaced, and pressed the girl’s face into the bottom of the boat, her nose and mouth in the water.
At first, nothing happened. Then Claire felt the girl go rigid and resist, her animal self alert to the threat even as her human self was already drowned in drugs and brandy. She bucked, lifting Claire off the bottom of the boat, but Claire kept her tenacious hold, pressing the girl’s forehead hard against the boat’s bottom, keeping her face in the channel, keeping her out of the saving air.
The girl began to thrash now, but even as her body struggled more and more desperately, Claire kept her in place, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Go, she urged the girl. And then the power of the girl’s will and her bodily strength began to run down, and the sounds of choking diminished, the girl’s force began to leak out, and the kicking of her legs became more and more involuntary, until, at last, she lay inert. Claire waited another minute, counting the seconds, and then gradually lifted her hands away from the girl’s skull.
Nothing. No movement at all.
She would have to move quickly now. She lifted the girl off her belly by putting her arms under her shoulders, but as Claire tried to tip her into the water, the boat teetered perilously and she knew both of them would go in. Then someone would see a drenched woman crossing back to the mainland on the ferry. She laid the girl back down and thought for a moment, alert for sounds from the shoreline. Then it came to her. She pulled the oars from their locks and laid them crossways over the gunwales, as if she were going to sit on them.
With effort, she turned the girl over on her back. Her long black hair fell away from her face and the wet skin on her cheeks shuddered a little, as if she were fearful of what was about to happen to her. Her eyes were open, distant, a look of faint surprise on her face. Claire leaned to her left and gripped the heel of the girl’s left foot, lifting it over one of the oars. Then she lifted the other as well, moving the oar into place under the girl’s knees. The torso would be more difficult. She stood behind the girl’s head, her knees braced against the other oar and, balancing herself as carefully as she could, she leaned over the oar and lifted the girl’s head and then shoulders and, with her knees, nudged the oar forward beneath her. The little rowboat shook with the repeated jolts, but it quickly stilled, and then the girl was suspended there, the backs of her hands still resting against the bottom of the boat, as if she were levitating.
Claire rested a moment, but she would have to be done quickly now. She slipped crosswise under the girl, her knees bent up against the side of the boat, and pulled the thin ends of the oars together over her head in a V. The black canopy of the sweater hung down in front of her face.
Then there was a voice, a murmur in the distance, someone on the shore of one of the islands, calling out to her. She lay as still as possible, her heart pounding. And then she realized it wasn’t a voice coming from the island: it was coming from above her.
It was the girl.
Quietly, she was moaning. Words, unintelligible, although she thought she heard her name. Claire reached up and covered the girl’s mouth with her hand, the cold lips brushing against her skin, slowing down, and then stopping. Then Claire braced her feet hard against the side of the boat and, straining, began to push the oars into the air. They curved heavily with the weight on them, but slowly, the girl’s body began to slide toward the opposite thwart. Claire could hear the sound of her sweater rubbing down the wood. She pushed the makeshift slip higher into the air and the girl began to slide faster and faster and now Claire had to hold the ends of the oars down to keep them from flipping into the water with the girl’s mass sliding toward the paddles. Her body flipped once onto
