The Boss Said My Father Drowned His Brother, So He Took Me to Stand in the Water novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: First Light

On the sauna stair above the frozen lake, Stellan tells his version of the night and admits his mother alone saw the body.

The stair down to the lake was cut into the face of the bluff.

It had a hundred and ten wooden steps and a rope rail furred with frost.

At the bottom a small cedar sauna stood on a ledge of rock, and a plank dock ran out over the ice.

I had not slept.

I lay on top of the quilt in my scrubs with the key in my fist, listening to the house breathe.

At six Stellan knocked once and said through the door, "Light's coming."

When I opened it he was in the hall with his back to me, looking out the window at the gray.

He handed me a black wool coat that was far too big and smelled of cedar.

I put it on.

We went down together.

Joel stayed at the top of the stair and stood very still, where he could see us.

The lake was white and flat to the horizon.

Far out, a line of black water showed where the shipping lane stayed open.

"There," Stellan said.

He pointed past the end of the dock.

"That's the channel. Lauri crossed from the Park Point side in the launch your father ran."

"On the ice?"

"A tug launch on a sled," he said. "Men did it every March to reach the open lane when the edges froze. Your father did it a hundred times."

"What happened that night?" I asked.

"A hundred and fifty yards out, the ice went and took the launch," Stellan said.

"And Lauri was in it."

"He was twenty-six," he said. "He asked your father to take him out to meet a boat at first light."

I stood with my hands in the sleeves of his coat and looked at the line where the white turned to black.

I did what I do at a bedside.

I let the quiet sit.

When someone is ready to say the true thing, they say it into a quiet, not into a question.

"Your father came back alone," Stellan said at last. "He walked off the ice at four in the morning and went to ground."

"How do you know he walked off?" I asked.

"My mother saw him from her window," Stellan said.

"Saw him come off the ice?"

"She saw a man in a gray jacket cross to the Park Point lot," he said. "Three days later they found his truck there with the keys in it."

"And the ring?"

"What ring?"

"My father's wedding ring," I said. "My mother wrote that he never took it off."

"It's never turned up," Stellan said. "So he wasn't taken by the lake. He ran."

I had met a great many families who told me a story in the same words every time.

Usually they had told it to themselves so often they no longer heard it.

"Did anyone find your brother?" I asked.

"No."

"Not a body?"

"There was a funeral," he said. "There's a casket in the family plot, and it was closed."

"If nobody found him, what's in it?"

For the first time since the lot, he looked straight at me.

"A body came up in the shallows two days later," he said. "My mother went to the county morgue and said it was Lauri."

"Your mother," I said.

"She wouldn't have me see what the lake does to a man."

"You never saw him," I said.

"I saw a closed box," Stellan said, and his jaw set. "You think I didn't ask?"

"I don't think anything," I said gently. "I ask questions. It's my job."

"You sit with the dying."

"I sit with people. The dying are just more honest."

He turned his face back to the lake.

The sun had come up red behind the haze, and it laid a long copper stripe across the ice.

"A man told me, that first spring, he saw your father on the ice road with a bag," he said. "I never learned his name. He's dead."

"Convenient."

"It's a harbor. Men die."

I said nothing.

I looked up at Joel Rautio at the top of the stair, with his canvas coat and his broken nose.

He had not come down a single step in an hour.

His back was to the lake.

He had turned it when we came out, the way you turn from a wound you were told to leave alone.

I took a step backward on the frozen planks, and my heel went out from under me.

Stellan caught my elbow.

His hand closed hard and certain through the sleeve of his own coat.

He held me for the length of one breath.

I felt his thumb against the bone of my arm.

Then he let go as if the wool had burned him, and stepped back with his hand open at his side.

"Ice," he said.

"I know what it is."

"Watch your feet."

I watched them.

My elbow burned where he had touched it, and I told myself it was the cold.

"Miss Lahti," he said.

His voice had gone rough, and he looked at the water, not at me.

"I don't want you to think I enjoy this."

"I don't think you enjoy it," I said.

"Then what do you think?"

"I think you buried a box, and you want it to be somebody's fault."

He did not answer.

A door banged above us, and Pirjo's voice came down the bluff, cheerful and carrying.

"Kulta! Come up when you're done. I need your hands in the kitchen for the Sunday table."

Stellan was still looking at the black water.

"Go," he said. "She doesn't like to be kept."

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