Beneath the Lake Read online

  ‘It’s almost eleven and I’m almost drunk, so what can I do for you?’

  Gaspar pulls the collar of his white dress shirt as if finding the room ten degrees too warm. But he does not remove his coat.

  ‘It seems there’ve been a few snags in the adoption proceedings. I’m confident we can overcome them, but these things don’t solve themselves.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ray is alarmed but not surprised. ‘Did Simon pop out of the woodwork?’

  ‘I think we both know that’s never going to happen.’ Gaspar grins briefly. ‘I’m afraid the issue stems from something a little closer to home. How are things between you and Megan, by the way? Marriage-wise?’

  ‘Solid. Committed. And who’s asking?’

  ‘Social services,’ Gaspar says. ‘In a manner of speaking. And me. I care about my grand-niece a great deal.’

  Ray places his hands on the bar and strikes his best bouncer’s pose. ‘Look, Gaspar. We’re working hard to build a new life. We’re doing all the right things, for Sierra and ourselves. If there’s a problem, why don’t you let me sit down with these people? Better yet, bring them here. Show them what we’re building. I’m not afraid of social services.’

  Gaspar makes a tsk-tsk-tsk through his crooked yellow teeth. ‘We can’t go down that road. Too many questions. Think of this meeting as the next best thing. You allay my concerns, I’ll handle theirs.’

  ‘Sorry, but I think I’m done worrying about everyone else’s concerns. I’m grateful for your help, we all are. But that was family business. This is new business. And it needs to be our own.’

  ‘I understand,’ the counselor says. ‘There is a time to grieve and a time to move on. But I must ask, speaking of business old and new, how do you think this is possible? Who do you think rescued you from that sinkhole and has been rescuing you in one way or another every day since?’

  ‘Once again, you have our thanks for the ride home,’ Ray says. ‘And for looking after my father’s estate, without which there would be no Sisters.’

  ‘Your father’s estate, as you call it, is me. He liquidated everything to my offices.’

  ‘I see. And when did —’

  ‘Years ago, Raymond. Many years ago.’

  Ray is stunned but only for a moment, until he sees the next level of the darkness in his uncle. ‘You took it. You drained it all. Dried it all up, like the lake. My father didn’t give you anything.’

  ‘I am hurt you would ever entertain such notions,’ Gaspar says. ‘He saved my life in that mess of a war, gave me my first real major client – himself, the Mercer Corporation. I would never, on your mother’s soul, take anything from Warren Mercer that was not given freely.’

  Ray is almost tempted to believe this. ‘He didn’t think I was capable of managing my own future? You’re holding the purse strings for the rest of our lives?’

  Gaspar helps himself to one of the barstools. ‘Warren was a brilliant salesman, a deal-maker. But he made some very costly mistakes over the years. Some of them before we first stumbled upon Blundstone, before you were born. We both knew there was something magical out there, something that could be used to make our futures. But he was afraid of it. I was the first one to crawl into the tunnel. Same as in the war. Your father always preferred to let someone else do his dirty work, and I obliged. I let him have a peek, explained the potential windfalls, but he refused to listen. Said I was still banged up from Vietnam, not right in the head. But I kept his desk spotless, and we were a good team, until the last decade. It was terribly painful for me to watch them unravel, like watching my own family suffer, but my hands were tied. He refused my help, until I was the only lender left in town. I told him what needed to be done, explained the risks. I was a fool for believing he’d finally come around. He made his final gamble last summer, tried to bargain with it long after the negotiations had ended and it was time to sign the papers. Well, we all know how that turned out.’

  ‘Gaspar hasn’t fixed anything for a long time,’ his father said that afternoon, right after they had finished burying Leonard. ‘This is family business, no one else’s. Put the man out of your mind.’

  ‘You hated him because he was better than you,’ Ray says. ‘You crossed a line and he didn’t trust you anymore. Now that he’s gone, you need another Mercer to sink your hooks into. You’re still trying to win.’

  Gaspar’s face reddens. ‘The Mercer estate has several outstanding debts. Certain clients who need to be fed on a regular basis. When they get hungry, they have a way of becoming mean little tigers in the jungle. If we neglect to feed them soon, none of this will sustain. We will all lose. Everything will come down, and I do mean everything. That is what your father never understood, and in failing to do so, passed the burden onto you. The timing is actually quite convenient. Summer is almost here again, Raymond, and it appears to me that you and the girls could use another vacation.’

  ‘You can’t possibly be suggesting —’

  ‘I’m suggesting there’s been a little glitch,’ Gaspar interrupts. ‘The loophole your father left in the contract. The one that’s been keeping you awake at night, pushing Megan to the other side of the bed. You want to move on with your lives, find peace, feel love again. I want to stay in business. As it turns out, the solution to what we both want sits on the same stretch of beach. A good lawyer never leaves a loophole in the contract, and that is why I am here, to protect all of us.’

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ Ray lies. ‘But only if you tell me what’s really behind this. Who do you work for now? You’re talking like a lawyer, but I want to hear you say the name.’

  ‘Who do I work for!’ Gaspar leaps from his barstool as if the football game has reached an exciting overtime. ‘That’s good! Yes! How about, the man upstairs? The man downstairs? The man with a clock for a face? There’s really only one man, Raymond. I work for him. Your father worked for him. You work for him. Everyone works for him. He has many names, but I like to think of him as another father. I call him Father Time.’

  Gaspar turns and scurries over to the doll house and peeks inside the windows, hopping from one to another as if searching for a lost child. He stands, whirling back to the bar. His eyes are dilated to impossible proportions and, for the few brief seconds Ray is able to look into them, the black pools inside them seem to be swirling.

  ‘What gives him such power – you will love this, Raymond. It’s brilliant, the corner he has on the market. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, wants more of it. More time. More time with loved ones. More time with friends. More time to think deep thoughts. More time to eat and drink and frolic and take pictures of the fleeting moments. More time to create a spreadsheet. More time to eat the drive-thru cheeseburgers, more time to fatten in the cubicle, more time to sit in the den watching the ball game telling your wife nothing’s wrong. More time to shop in the stores, more time to click the blood-filled news links, more time to look at all the naughties on the devices, more time to steal and wage war and short the stocks and take the drugs and cheat on the taxes and fuck the little children in the ass and dig the tunnels in the earth to fill with more brown bodies. And that’s all right, that’s the way of the world. The world spins. Time marches on. We play our part and we always could use a little more. Time. More can always be arranged. That’s why I’m here, Raymond. To help you buy more, as much as you want.’

  Ray is in the presence of evil. That is all he understands. Evil has invaded his home and soon one of them must die.

  ‘What would you do with more, Raymond? Hm? Would you like to live to be a hundred and twenty-eight? Two hundred eleven? Run some marathons? See the world? Make four hundred million dollars? Meet the celebrities and go to the parties and experience it all? All of it, the rest, not your boring life, but the good stuff only the healthy happy pretty people get to do? Or is it simpler for you? Perhaps you only want to see your family again. Eat brunch. Swim. Tell them how sorry you are, this year will be different, you promise. Maybe you can go back i
n time and save Colette and Leonard, pull your mother back from the cliff, tell your father not to give his middle finger to the storm and try to turn partly-cloudy with a chance of thundershowers into an amusement park, because the water isn’t safe. Or better yet, stay home, stay away, don’t take that vacation. Vacations can be dangerous, and someone might get hurt! Stay inside, be a hermit, home-school your children so they don’t get shot in the halls, make them wear helmets when they ride their first bicycle and do not ever let them pedal past the end of the driveway! Is that what you want? To keep them safe? Because that can be arranged too. You can go back to the Big Lake. It was an annual tradition, it can be one again. Every summer, not for a week, but for a month, all summer, ENDLESS SUMMER!’

  ‘Are you done yet? I need to check on Sierra,’ Ray says, thinking of his father’s M1911. If he hadn’t thrown it in the lake, Gaspar would be dead by now.

  The lawyer sighs. ‘It’s what one does. My mother understood that, wicked old bitch that she was. My, how I miss her. But no matter. I’ll see her in August. So…’

  And speaking of the girls, why hasn’t Megan come down yet? She must have heard them arguing, Gaspar’s ranting. Something’s wrong. Megan’s hair. Sierra’s nails. They brought something of the lake home with them. It’s in them now, the way it was in Andie and her ranger granddaddy. The way it’s in Gaspar.

  Which means, Ray thinks, it must be in me too.

  ‘I guess all I need to do is pick one,’ Ray says. ‘Which one would you recommend? Young and innocent is best? Or the one who’s dearest to me?’

  Gaspar scowls. ‘Don’t be flip. He was our last ranger and a cherished member of the community. And his granddaughter? You all but water-boarded her before your father gunned her down. There’s a balance to these things, kiddo, and now your family are suffering. What, you think they just passed away? You tell yourself they are at peace? Didn’t you learn anything in the sandbox? It’s not over. Your family are waiting for you. You know that. They will always be there, suffering in the heat, and you know that too. Suffering the way Megan’s family suffered. They’ll all be suffering until you go back and do what you were supposed to do the last time around. Don’t you want to put an end to their suffering?’

  ‘Get the fuck out of my house, old man.’

  Gaspar yawns, looks at his watch. ‘Very well. I’ve offered my advice. You have your priorities. My last duty is to inform you that tonight has been our final meeting. Once I leave, you will never see me again. Say the word, and I will book your vacation, your future will be secure, your family will suffer no more. Say the other word, and I will leave you and your new family to manage your own affairs as you see fit. You will no longer have to answer to old Uncle Gaspar, only to time, like the rest of the civilians. What’s it going to be, nephew?’

  The answer is easy, but therein lies the problem. Ray knows that going back to the lake will only beget more suffering. His father tried that last summer, and the lake won, because the lake always wins. He does not trust Gaspar, but where does the alternative lead?

  ‘What time is it, Dad?’

  ‘What do you care? You got some place you need to be?’

  Ray wishes his father were here to help. Then, in a way, he is. It’s not magic, only a memory. The last time they went through the routine together, out on the Aqua Cat.

  ‘Whatever time it is,’ his father says, in a calm and heavy voice that walls out the storm, ‘must be the right time. Whenever it comes. I tried to understand that in the war, and here, so long ago. But I never fully understood it until this weekend. And it’s not the right time because God says so, or because men frame it in such a way they may take false comfort in the promise of Heaven. It doesn’t work that way. Not for me, and I hope not for you.

  ‘We choose our lives. Accept what we are given. We fight for more, and in the end we go with grace. There is beauty in that, regardless of duration. One good year in a marriage. One perfect sixty minutes on a football field. One night saving your best friend’s life in a sweltering jungle as the fire rains down. The morning spent watching your son being born. A week at a lake in Nebraska, with the only people who matter.

  ‘We are real. Our days are real. And that’s enough because a day can mean everything, Raymond. If we understand that all of it is a precious gift. One big vacation.’

  ‘We’re not going back,’ Ray says, wiping his last tear from the corner of his eye. ‘We had what we were supposed to have, and it was enough. It was ours. No one can take that away. My father knew what he was doing, and so do I.’

  The lawyer regards him with sad puppy eyes. ‘Believe it or not, I loved your father like a brother, and I respect what he was able to make in this life. He loved his family above all else. You’re all that’s left of his family now, and I only wanted to help you provide for them, the way your father provided for you.’

  Ray looks down at Gaspar’s coat pockets. ‘You never took your hands out, Gaspar. Not once all night. What’s the matter? Nails a little dirty?’

  The lawyer seethes for a moment, then smiles. ‘I’ll tell you one last thing about time, kiddo. Last summer, that fateful trip thirty years ago, what happened to Megan’s family, to yours. It really doesn’t matter which life you choose. Not in the long run.’

  ‘Yeah? Why’s that?’

  ‘Because there is no long run. No short run. No tomorrow, no today. Your old man called them spokes on a wheel, ten thousand million trillion movie screens projecting at the same time, the many paths unknown. They’re all meaningless, because there is no such thing as time. Time is an idea, a silly system created by humans to count meaning into their mediocrity. Our deaths are nothing more than a failure of imagination and a lack of courage. Once you accept that, you really can do anything you want, and there is no more pain. Only fun. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and…’

  Gaspar’s voice is still stuck in the needle groove as the front door closes behind him and his shadow lurches past the windows.

  Ray stands behind the bar another minute before walking up to lock the front door. Gaspar is gone. They are on their own now. Ray can feel it. They are free. He knows that may change some day. Next year, next month, tomorrow. The money from his father’s estate might disappear. Simon might come back, asking for his daughter. Sierra might grow up to be an addict, or a Wimbledon champion. Megan could have an affair with a bicycle courier, or be diagnosed with breast cancer like Andie.

  But whatever happens, it will be theirs. Life, with all the triumphs and tragedies, risks and hopes and fears, everything everyone else must contend with on a daily basis. That’s the deal. And it may not always be fair, but it’s true.

  ‘Daddy?’ Sierra’s voice calls to him from the back stairs.

  ‘What is it, sweetie?’ Ray can’t bring himself to look away from the windows, the density of darkness pressing itself against their home.

  ‘There’s something wrong with Mommy,’ the girl says, and starts to giggle.

  Sand

  Sierra is not at the stairs when he turns, and the giggle is already fading inward, like the ringing that comes around bedtime. It has no source. It is only the sound of the ear drum adjusting its dials, clearing out the day’s accumulation of obnoxious sounds in preparation for a good night’s sleep.

  Ray walks to the stairs and begins to climb, one hand on the sidewall, his feet heavy with dread but still moving, delivering him up through the main floor of the apartment. The loft’s single hall runs ahead to Sierra’s bedroom and the full bathroom, and behind him to the master bedroom, and then on to the open kitchen and living room. The hall light is on.

  Normally he would go to Sierra’s room first, to check on her before turning in, but when he looks at his watch, a blue Timex with a nylon band he cannot remember buying, and learns that somehow it has gotten around to twenty after one, he doesn’t want to disturb her. He is turning for the master instead when he notices a light coming from under Sierr
a’s bedroom door, and this gives him pause. Megan must have forgotten to shut it off.

  Ray decides to poke his head in and shut the light off, give her a quick peck on the forehead goodnight. Then he will return to Megan and apologize and tell her they are free. He’s made his peace and is ready to move on. She will know he means it this time. She will see it in his eyes.