The Lake House

Pip

The Doppler had been a mistake. Pip knew it the moment she took it from the bag.

It was a small gray handheld unit, the kind they used at the clinic on Tuesday afternoons for the girls who came in frightened and in the second trimester, and she had signed it out on Wednesday under a patient’s name she had since forgotten, in the same handwriting, with the same pen, as she had signed out the vial. She had told herself it was a precaution. A woman who had been sedated, and starved of sunlight, and locked in a room for eight weeks was a patient, and a patient ought to be examined by a person with the right instruments. That was all it was. She was a doctor, doing what a doctor did.

Corinne lay asleep on the daybed by the window with Desmond’s coat over her and her mouth a little open, and her left hand under her cheek. Pip knelt on the braided rug. She had warmed the gel between her palms. She folded back the green sweater, an inch, with two fingers, as she would have folded back a sheet; and laid the probe against the low curve of that small, firm, astonishing belly; and waited for the static to clear.

It cleared.

Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

One hundred and fifty-six, said the little green display. It was quick and fluttering and absolutely certain of itself, like someone knocking on a door at the far end of a very long house. It did not hesitate. It did not wonder whether it was wanted.

Pip put her free hand over her mouth.

She had heard that sound perhaps ten thousand times. She had heard it through stethoscopes and monitors and the thin wall of a labor suite, in the small hours, in the cold flat light of three in the morning, and she had thought it the best sound in the world, and she’d never once been afraid of it. She was afraid of it now. It came out of the little speaker and filled the camp, the knotty pine and the stone hearth and the cold blue light off the lake, and it said, in its plain urgent way, here, here, here. Her granddaughter. Her son’s daughter. A bit of that boy’s quick dark blood, turning and turning in the black. And she thought: Oh, God. Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry. You were never meant to be afraid of me.

She turned it off at once. She sat back on her heels and let her breath out.

In the bottom of her bag, under the blankets and the thermos and the bolt cutters, lay a white envelope with the Maine Medical return address and her own name on the front. It had come on Tuesday. She had put it in the bag unopened. She would go on not opening it for as long as she possibly could, because she was a doctor, and she had a fair idea of what it said, and a woman who knows what is in an envelope has no business reading it before she has finished the work she has set herself to do.

After, she told it. After.

She rose, rather stiffly, and went into the kitchen, and found a legal pad in a drawer that had held legal pads since 1994, and began to write.

* * *

By six the light had gone from the lake and she’d lit a fire, a real one, with split birch and a rolled-up copy of the Conway Daily Sun from the summer of 2019. She’d found a tin of chicken soup in the pantry, and some saltines, and a quarter-bottle of Desmond’s Scotch, which she did not drink. She stood at the window with her arms folded, watching the dark come up the hill.

The daybed creaked.

“What day is it?” said Corinne.

“Still Saturday.” She did not turn. “You slept nine hours. How do you feel?”

A pause while the question was evidently considered. “I feel as if I’ve been dropped from a height,” Corinne said. “And I’m hungry. That’s new.” Another pause. “Is it all right to say that? I’m so hungry I could cry.”

Pip laughed, and was horrified to find that her eyes had filled. She went and heated the soup, and watched Corinne eat the whole bowl and a second one, and half a sleeve of crackers, in silence, with her hair in a tangle and her face scrubbed pale as paper and the firelight running along the line of her jaw. She ate like a woman at the end of a fast. When she’d finished she sat for a minute with the bowl in her lap, and then she lifted her eyes.

“All right,” she said. “You said at dawn you’d tell me what it costs.”

“I did.”

“Then tell me.”

“There’s a legal pad,” said Pip. “I wrote it all down. I tend to, when I’m afraid. But I don’t want to read it to you. I want to say it, and I want you to hear every word before you answer, because I’ll understand if you answer no. I’ll understand, and I’ll do what I can anyway.” She sat down on the other end of the daybed and pulled the pad onto her knee, and did not look at it. “I’d like to begin with something I’ve never told anyone. It isn’t about you. It’s about me.”

* * *

She told it badly. She had never told it at all.

She told her about a Thursday in April, six years ago, when a deputy from the Cumberland County sheriff’s office had stood on her front step in the rain holding a folder, with his hat in his hand, and she had thought, for one dizzy second, that somebody had died. She told her about the kitchen of a house in Portland, on Brackett Street, with a plastic cloth on the table and a lawyer’s legal pad and a man in a wrinkled blue suit who kept saying, over and over, Dr. Wolcott, we don’t want trouble. She told her about the front bedroom upstairs. A woman in a hospital bed with a tube taped to her arm, who had said nothing at all, and had watched Pip through the doorway with an expression of such steady, unshowy understanding that Pip had wanted to climb out of her own skin.

“I knew,” Pip said. “I stood in that kitchen and I did arithmetic. They couldn’t afford a lawsuit. They couldn’t afford a lawyer. They could barely afford the chemotherapy. And I looked at that man’s hands on that tablecloth, Cor, and I thought, a check will do it. And it did. Sixty thousand dollars. I wrote it with a ballpoint pen from the sideboard, and he signed a paper, and an eighteen-year-old girl went upstairs and shut her door.” She drew a breath. “I’ve always called it making a problem go away. That’s the phrase I used, in my head, for six years. I made a problem go away. And it wasn’t a problem. It was a person. It was a girl who said stop six times, and was heard each time with perfect courtesy, and was not stopped.”

Corinne said nothing. She had set the bowl on the floor. Her hands were folded very still in her lap.

“I rang her on the sixteenth of October. Did I say? Tessa. She teaches eighth-grade science in Eugene, Oregon. She’s married and has a daughter, and she was very gracious to me. She told me what to look for. She said, If there’s a key, there’s a lock. She said, Go in already knowing.” Pip’s mouth twisted. “She said I’d end by apologizing. And I did. I did, Cor. I stood in that kitchen last night with a syringe in my sleeve and told my son I was sorry. It’s why I was able to do it. I’d already said it, and I meant it, and it was the only way to get my arms round him.”

“Pip.”

“Let me finish. It’s the part you need.” She put the pad down. “I’m not telling you this to be forgiven. I haven’t earned it, and I’m not asking you for it. I’m telling you so you’ll understand what I’m going to propose, and why I’m the one who has the right to propose it. I have been this boy’s mother for twenty-three years. I’ve failed him. And I love him, still, I love him as I love my own hands. I’ve sat in the room where it’s decided, Cor. I’ve been the witness. I know exactly what the law does with a boy like Emory. And I’m going to tell you, so you can choose.”

She told her.

She told her she could drive her to the state police in Augusta that very night. She would walk in with her on her arm, with Tessa’s file and her own handwritten statement and Desmond’s keys on a ring, and she would sit in a gray room under a fluorescent light and say it all, every word of it, to a woman with a laptop. She would give evidence against her son. She said it plainly. She would stand in a courtroom in Rockland and say it to twelve strangers, and end her career, and lose her license, and be known till she died as the woman who testified against her own child; and she would do it, if that was what Corinne wanted, without a moment’s hesitation, tomorrow.

“But it won’t work,” she said. “Do you want to know why? I asked a lawyer on Wednesday. A hypothetical, in a restaurant, in Portland. A man I’ve known for fifteen years. He listened to the whole thing, and he put down his fork, and he said, Pip, what’s the evidence?”

“The window. The boards. The bar —”

“Which are on a house he owns, in a town where he is the man who pulled the Pratt boy out of the water last night. Where Mrs. Dunphy has a casserole for every day of the week and Ned Pratt will swear on his mother’s grave that you were happy. The texts he sent as you are in your own voice on your own phone. The doctor’s appointment he cancelled was cancelled by a pleasant young woman on the telephone, and nobody can say who she was. A man like that has a recorder. You told me there was a camera in the lantern room, Cor. If there is one frame of July on it —” She saw it land. She went on, gently. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But he wouldn’t need to play it. His lawyer would. Twelve strangers from Knox County would watch a woman of thirty-eight, in a lamp room, say I love you to a man of twenty-three, with her whole face, and then be asked how she came to be a prisoner in the house where she said it.”

The fire cracked. Out on the lake a loon cried, lonely and quavering, one long falling note.

“He’d be out on bail by Monday,” Pip said. “And then there would be a trial. Months from now, a year perhaps, and you’d be on the stand with a newborn at home in a borrowed crib, and every day he’d be in the second row, in a good suit, with that face. He wouldn’t say a word. He’d just look. And you’d know exactly what he was thinking, and you’d watch him be kind to you across a courtroom for twelve days, and I know you, my darling. You’d hear Cor, in your head, in that voice, and you’d go home at night to a motel and think: what if I’m the one who’s wrong?”

Corinne’s face was quite white.

“And if he were convicted,” said Pip, “it would be eighteen months. Perhaps three years. He’d come out at twenty-six with everything he’d learned, and the child would be a toddler. And he’s her father. He is, in the eyes of a Maine family court, her father. There would be a petition. There would be a caseworker with a clipboard, and a psychologist who’d say he’d made enormous progress.” She spread her hands. “I have watched it happen. I’ve watched what a good lawyer does for a lovely, sorry young man with a trust fund and a mother who weeps. Nobody would be lying. That’s what makes it so terrible. He would be wonderful.”

“So that’s the choice.”

“No.” She drew a long breath. “That’s the one I’m not going to make you. The choice I’m putting to you is smaller and a good deal worse.”

* * *

She read it off the pad after all. She found she couldn’t trust herself to do it from memory.

“One. You leave the country. Not in a month. On Tuesday. I’ve booked nothing under your name, and I’ll tell you how in a moment, but you’ll be on a flight out of Boston before he’s a week older. Two. You go somewhere that has nothing to do with anything he can read: not a city you’ve written about, not a place you’ve once said was beautiful, not anyone he’s met. You take what I give you in cash. You don’t use a credit card, a phone, an e-mail address, or your own face on any account that can be searched. You give nobody your real name who doesn’t need it. You don’t post a photograph of the child, ever, anywhere, for as long as you both live.”

“Pip —”

“Three. You don’t contact me. Not by phone, not by letter, not by a friend of a friend. He knows my number. He knows my habits. He has my house, in the sense that he’s been in it a hundred times, and I’ll bet you a hundred dollars he has the spare under the geranium.” She smiled without humor. “Whatever I do, he’ll be reading over my shoulder. You can’t write to me and I can’t write to you. I’ll send you something, once a year, to an address I’ll learn by heart and never write down. It’ll be a postcard, and it’ll say nothing but the weather. If one comes, I’m alive. If it doesn’t come, you’ll know that I’m not, and you won’t come to the funeral.”

Corinne made a small sound.

“Four. You do not tell her.” Pip’s voice dropped, and steadied. “The child. You don’t tell her who her father is. Not at five, not at fifteen, not on her wedding day. She’ll ask. They always ask. And you’ll say that he died before she was born, which is a kindness, and she’ll have a ghost, which is better than a man, because a ghost can’t turn up on your doorstep. She mustn’t go looking. I know my son. If she goes looking, he’ll be waiting at the end of it like the sea.”

“A lie.”

“A kindness.”

“That’s what he said,” said Corinne.

It was very quiet. Her voice had no heat in it. She sat with her knees drawn up under the dead man’s coat and her eyes on the fire, and the light moved on her face, and she said it quite gently, as one points out a stain.

“The envelope. In January. He said it was the kindest thing he’d ever done.”

Pip sat perfectly still.

For a long moment she could not speak. It was true. It was so entirely true that she could feel it go through her, cold and clean, a scalpel entering at the exact angle. She had walked into that house with a crowbar to take a woman out of a locked room, and the first thing she had done, standing on the threshold of a shut door, was to prepare to arrange the truth in a better order for the benefit of someone she loved. She had made a telephone call at one in the morning in which she told a decent old man a thing that was not so. She was, God help her, her son’s mother. She had learned it from the same hands.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I know it is. I’ve been him for two days.”

“Pip —”

“No. You’re right. Let me just say it.” She put her hand over her eyes. “I haven’t got a better way. I’ve been looking since Wednesday. If you can think of one, if there’s any way to keep you in a country where I could look at that child on a Sunday and teach her to swim, I’ll take it, and I’ll thank you for it all my life. But I’ve been over it, Cor, all night, every possibility, and they all end in one of two places. Either he finds you, or I lose both of you. I cannot save you both and keep you.”

“What’s five?”

“Five,” said Pip, “is mine.”

She took her hand from her eyes. She found, to her surprise, that she was quite steady.

“I’m going to tell him the baby’s gone. I’ll tell him you lost her on Route 1, outside Wiscasset, at six in the morning, and that I took you to Maine Med, and that you came out on Sunday and asked me to drive you to a friend in Boston and said you could not see him. And he’ll believe it. Do you understand what I’m saying? He’ll believe it, because it has happened to you four times. He’s in your album. He’ll weep. He’ll want to see the room. He’ll go very quiet. And I’ll watch it, and I’ll hold him, and I will lie to my son’s face for the rest of my life, and there’s nothing in the world I’d less like to do.” She was shaking now, finely, all over. “That’s my half. You take the child. I take the boy. I’ll stay with him as long as I can, Cor, as long as I have. I think it may not be very long.”

Corinne looked at her. She looked for some time.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Nothing. It’s a figure of speech.”

“You pressed your back in the car. You’ve lost weight. You’ve been sweating through that sweater since you came in, and it’s not warm.” Corinne’s voice was level. “Pip. I’ve been a prisoner for eight weeks, not a fool.”

There was a long silence. A log fell in on itself.

“I’ve a scan I haven’t read,” said Pip. “I’m going to read it after. That’s all. That’s all there is to say, and I don’t want to say it tonight.”

“All right.”

“Please don’t —”

“I said all right.”

Pip nodded. She found she couldn’t speak. She picked up the pad and turned it over and laid it face down on the cushion, like a card.

“There’s one more thing. There’s no six. I want you to hear this clearly. Whether you keep this baby is yours. It’s the one thing I’m not going to touch. If you tell me tomorrow that you cannot, I’ll drive you to Boston on Monday, to a clinic I know, and I’ll sit in the waiting room with a magazine and hold your coat, and I’ll never say a word about it again. I’ve never told a woman what to do with her own body. I’m not about to start with you. And if you tell me you can —” Her voice cracked. “I want her so badly that I’m afraid of what I’d do. Which is why I can’t be the one to say.”

Corinne put out her hand. She laid it flat on Pip’s knee, and left it there.

They sat like that, with the fire, and the loon, and the great clear cold coming in off the water.

“Pip,” Corinne said at last. Her voice was very small. It was the voice of a girl of twenty with bare feet on a sofa in Providence. “Do you think he’ll let go?”

It was the question. It had been in the room all night.

Pip looked at the fire. She could hear her own heart. She could feel the two answers standing in her like two doors, one of them true and the other one kind; and she was a woman who had told patients the truth for thirteen years, because the alternative had never seemed to her a mercy. She opened her mouth.

“Yes,” she said.

It came out smooth as glass, and warm, and quite certain. And in the instant after it, in the silence that came down on the room like a lid, she heard the thing that had come before it. A hair’s breadth. A hitch. The smallest possible pause, before the lie, so slight and so familiar that she had gone through her entire adult life without once catching it in her own mouth, as one never hears one’s own accent.

She felt Corinne’s hand go still on her knee.

Neither of them said anything at all. The fire burned down and settled. The loon called again, farther off. And on the cushion between them, face down, in the neat small hand of a woman who made lists in the dark, lay five numbered items and a sixth line that she had begun and crossed out, three times over, until the pen had torn the paper:

If he finds you —

“All right,” said Corinne at last.

It was not agreement. It was merely the sound of someone taking up a weight. Pip heard it. She would hear it in her sleep.

* * *

She did not sleep that night. She took a blanket and the legal pad out to the end of the dock at two in the morning, and sat with her feet drawn up on the cold boards, and watched the stars come out over the water.

They were extraordinary. After a storm they always were. A sky scrubbed raw and hung with lamps, every one of them close enough to touch, and the Milky Way laid across the pines like a spill of salt. She looked at them for a long time. She thought of a boy of six on a quay in Gull Harbor with his father’s hand on his collar, looking up at the same, saying with total seriousness, Mom, they’re keeping watch. She thought about the word. Keeper. She thought about a lamp that turned all night over an empty house, because a clever boy had set it going and there was no one left to stop it.

In her coat pocket lay a phone that was not hers, switched off, and a steel ring with eleven keys. She took them out. She held them in her palm, and felt the weight, and the small cold bite of the brass against her skin. A man with one key has none, his father had told him once, on his fifteenth birthday, with a hand on his shoulder. A man with one key has none. And he had made, from that sentence, a house.

She thought of throwing them in the lake. She thought it through, all the way, as she would have thought through a drug interaction: the ring turning in the starlight, the small bright splash, the water closing over. It would do no good. He had a spare of everything. He would find the spare, in a coffee can, in a cedar box, behind a loose stone, and he would smile, in that sad private way of his, and understand exactly what she had meant by it.

She put them back in her pocket. She took out her pen. She uncapped it, and on a fresh page of the pad, under the starlight, in her clear small doctor’s hand, she wrote the first sentence of the worst speech of her life:

Em, I’m so sorry. She’s gone.

It was the truest thing she was going to say. She looked at it for a long time. Then she put the cap back on the pen, very carefully, and held her face in both hands, and let the cold come up out of the lake and take her.