Salvage (2 page)

"What's the big idea?" Lori grumbled, having retrieved her hat and waded back to where Owen now stood. She looked back out over the water, following his troubled gaze toward the man standing in the lake.

"That man," Owen said. The dark grin on the man's vaguely familiar face widened. "I think he's dangerous."

Lori shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted out at the lake. Owen was certain she was looking right at the man, but Lori turned back to her brother with a look of curiosity in her blue eyes. "What man?"

"Right there! You don't see him?" Owen jabbed a finger at the man, whose grin widened even further as he began to stride toward them, his brown leather shoes splashing on the surface of the lake, dampening the cuffs of his pants. "He's
right there
!"

"Who's right there?" Gerald said, approaching the children with a smirk. Owen turned to face him. Gerald stopped just in front of Owen, and planted the hand not holding a can of Old Vienna beer on his hip, in a posture of obstinateness with which Owen was all too familiar.

"Nobody," Owen said to him, still feeling the presence of the man behind them, wanting to turn and look, as he would have when retreating from a darkened basement. Watching for the monster. Sensing its approach. Finally, he couldn't stop himself from turning back to look. But there was no one. The surface of the water was clear, flat, empty. The man was gone.

Owen turned to Gerald, not comprehending. His mother approached then, and stood behind her husband wearing a disapproving scowl under her mass of brown curls. Owen felt tears begin to well up as a wild urge to defend himself overcame him, despite his reluctance to admit what he'd just seen. The man had been
there
. He'd
seen
him. A man walking on water. It wasn't possible… was it?

Seeing things
, he thought.

Lori peered up at him sympathetically.

"There was a man," Owen said, his voice starting to quaver, his lower lip quivering: the telltale onset of weeping. "He was… he was standing on the water. He was
right there
!"

His mother and Gerald made a show of peering out at the bay where Owen pointed, but it was obvious they didn't believe him. Owen wouldn't have believed himself if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

"I don't see anyone," Gerald said.

"That's because he's
gone
now. He must have… he must have gone underwater."

"Owen, don't be silly," his mother said.

"I
saw
him, Mom."

"It was your imagination," she said, scowling off toward the water herself.

"You don't know what's in my head."

"Don't sass your mother," Gerald said.

"Shut up,
Gerald
!"

"Owen!" his mother scolded.

Gerald crushed the beer can, his face expressionless. Gerald with his pale legs and potbelly, with his lame jokes and stupid crumpled Panama hat. "All right," he said calmly. "This has gone on long enough." He let the crushed can fall from his fingers into the wet sand, then made toward Owen. Lori saw it coming and stepped out of their way.

"Gerald…?" Concern like broken glass in his mother's voice.

Owen backed away from Gerald's reach, glancing cautiously at the water behind him. "What are you doing? Get away from me!"

"No more phobias," Gerald said, snatching out at Owen, who quickly sidestepped out of his reach. The fear Owen had seen in his mother's eyes caused tears that had been standing in his own to brim and fall. "You're going in that
lake
!" Gerald growled. His long fingers nabbed Owen's right arm, squeezing so hard the flesh around them went stark white. Owen swung with his weak left fist, pounding feebly at Gerald's ribs while the much larger man dragged him toward the water.

"Let me go! Let me
GO
!"

Tears streamed down his face. Lori followed their progress with wide, fearful eyes. The older boys stopped playing to watch the spectacle.

Baby. Crybaby. Little loser. I deserve this.

Owen stopped fighting and let Gerald drag him in, shoes and all, up to his knees. He wept silently as the cold water filled his shoes.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," Gerald yelled, his face red, raised veins zigzagging his temples, the tendons in his neck stretched taut. "See?" He dragged Owen farther in, up to the cuffs of his shorts. Owen came along like one of Lori's stuffed animals, held by the arm, his muscles lax. Gerald shook him until his teeth clacked. But the cold had numbed Owen; he felt far away. "
See?
"

"GERALD!"

The scream snapped Owen from his stupor. Gerald's grip loosened, but not enough for Owen to pull away. Gerald's hat fell off his balding head and he snatched it up, squaring it back on his head with a sheepish look.

Margaret Saddler had ventured into the water up to her ankles. The wind fluttered her curls and the hem of her sundress. In the shadow provided by a cloud, she was beauty and fury. "You let my son go this instant!"

Gerald held firm. They stood several feet apart, the water lapping at Margaret's ankles and at Gerald's knees, staring each other down. Behind her, Lori's fear was palpable.

He let go.

Owen splashed down onto his hands and knees. He stood up quickly, shaking off like a wet dog, and scurried to shore, blowing right past his mother. She watched him go. All of her rage had apparently vanished; she appeared deflated, weary.

They caught up to Owen at the parking lot, where he'd been mindlessly chucking gravel at the surrounding trees, enjoying the hollow, wooden
thock
. Gerald lugged the cooler, unnaturally quiet, sulking, while Margaret carried the knapsack and held Lori's hand. As Gerald and their mother loaded everything into the car, Lori sauntered up to Owen, who attempted to ignore her until she tugged on his shirt.

Owen hefted the small stone in his hand. "What d'you want, squirt?"

Lori reached out and took his hand, her small fingers squeezing his. "I believe you," she whispered. Owen looked down at her, certain she was messing with him. But the sincerity of her smile had his tears threatening to return.

He ruffled her hair, breaking the spell. Lori grunted and shook her head free of his grasp. "You're a good kid, you know that?" he said.

"So are you," she said.

"Nah." She was always saying stuff like that, making him feel good when all he'd wanted was to feel rotten, to feel like the jerk kid he was.

"Course, you are," she assured him. "You're the best older brother I ever had."

Owen smiled at this, mystified, as his little sister—so much older than him in many ways—scampered off to the car and got in the back seat.

After some time, he followed her.

SON

1

WHEN OWEN WAS FORTY
, the people of St. John's Norway Cemetery put his sister Lori in the ground. Had she lived, she would have turned thirty-two in a month.

The non-denominational minister, who had been provided by the funeral home, read the standard verses: the one about the deceased being not dead but merely sleeping, followed by a bit of Psalm 23, John 3:16's "only begotten Son," and then another about ashes and dust—nothing particularly inspired or personal. Owen saw his mother's jaw clench as she ground her teeth. Distaste for religious platitudes was one thing they still had in common, aside from their love of Lori, who was dead and soon to be buried.

Even Lori's headstone was just like the others beside and behind it. Speckled granite with too much polish, more like a jewel than a grave marker. The artificial grass was too green, sterile. Owen had expected to see dirt, a small sign of the grim business being done, but aside from a few specks along the too-smooth edges of the hole, there was none. What had been taken out—and subsequently covered by more green plastic shag—had been expertly removed, leaving a perfectly rectangular chasm in which Lori, Owen's little sister, would lay until time wore her bones to the minister's dust and ash.

Owen was glad for the few mourners who cried, because he couldn't seem to manage tears himself. Even when he thought back to the last time he'd seen his sister alive, and the bad way they'd left things, he felt cold, detached. The others, the people who smiled for her life instead of weeping over her death, he wanted to grab by their shoulders, shaking away their smiles, the way he'd shake away bad art on an Etch A Sketch. He wanted to shout in their faces,
She's dead! Stop smiling! Lori's
dead
, you maniacs, and she's never coming back!

He couldn't, though. Not because doing so would violate social norms he cared little about at the moment, but because he lacked the courage. Stewing in impotent rage, Owen shoved his hands deep into his pockets and watched the casket sink into the ground, sinking the way Lori had sunk in that lake up north—whose name he couldn't recall—before she'd finally begun to float again, not from the force of her own will, but from the gases of her decomposition.

Death is lighter than water
, he thought.

"For today we grieve the loss of a good soul," said the minister. "But rest assured, life will go on, and happiness will surely find us once more."

Surely
, Owen thought grimly. In his right pocket was a handful of dirt, smooth and without stones. Between his fingers, it felt something like ashes.

2

"You look just like him, you know."

Owen had faked civility through countless condolences, had worn a painful smile for every "Sorry for your loss," "She was such a spectacular human being," and "God has a plan for everyone." But when the old man had said
You look just like him
, Owen took a step back to evaluate the phrase and the man who'd spoken it, falling out of line from where he stood between his mother and Gerald Kinsman, who'd already been Owen's stepfather for a handful of years by the time Lori had been born.

Just like
who
?
Owen wondered.

The old man held Owen's hand firmly, his frail arm fully extended once Owen had stepped back. He was dressed in a cheap gray suit with moth-eaten cuffs, his white beard stained yellow-brown by what appeared to be cigarette tar. The handshake was palsied, his gray eyes quivering in their sockets as the old man struggled to maintain a nearly savage eye contact.

Owen turned to Gerald on his right: Gerald, with his ginger comb over, was tall to the point of being gangly, a full foot taller than Owen. Even their facial features were nothing alike. Gerald's nose was wide and flat, and as red as his hair from years of drinking. His chin was bulbous, and his potbelly was a round thing below his nearly concave chest. "He's not my fath—" Owen started to say, but the old man released his hand and moved on, briefly shaking hands with Owen's mother, who seemed to be obliged to fight back a snarl.

You look just like him
.

Owen shook the hand of another mourner, a woman he didn't know who offered another bland cliché. He looked down the aisle of shuffling men and women, all in black attire, but the old man was gone, lost among the crowd gathered to mourn the loss of Lori Jean Saddler, dead much too young at the age of thirty-two.

Owen's uncle Ralph played "Greensleeves" on the pub's upright piano, the instrument nicked and scratched from years of shattered glasses and dart playing. The dartboard hung very near Uncle Ralph's head while he played, mesmerizing his audience, most of whom had postponed their drinking for the song's duration after realizing the man was no novice piano player.

If there was ever a time to cry, it was then, and for a moment Owen thought he might be able to squeeze out a tear or two. But the song ended before he could conjure up the necessary emotion, and everyone who'd gathered around the piano was clapping and cheering. The moment had come and gone. His eyes remained dry.

Lori's death a little over a week earlier had shaken him, yet he hadn't wept then, either. The words "Your sister's had an accident" had struck him like a bulldozer. He'd felt her death as an aching emptiness in his chest—a feeling that should have brought tears in a functioning human being, popping the cork that held back the waterworks. On an intellectual level, he knew he was sad. Lori had meant the world to him—had
saved
him, really. He'd been shy before her arrival in the world, withdrawn. But, in many ways, having her in his life had helped him bloom. Without her courage to inspire him, he might never have come out of his shell to acquire the few friends he'd made (and subsequently lost) over the years. Without her encouragement to dampen his doubts and fears—of rejection, of failure, of never being quite good enough for anything or anyone—he might never have graduated high school or gone on to university to become an architect or built homes and hospital additions and green roofs on skyscrapers hundreds of feet in the air. Even the wind farm, his current project located a few dozen kilometers north of the city, owed itself to Lori's prodding.

Without having had Lori in his life, Owen might have been lost. Now, with her gone, he truly
was
lost. He felt untethered to reality, with only his mother left to keep him grounded. And still, the tears wouldn't come.

"Don't you just wanna knock the smiles off all these fucking people's faces?"

Trevor, one of Lori's childhood friends, stood beside Owen at the table of
hors d'oeuvres
. Uncle Ralph was playing an upbeat tune Owen didn't recognize. Mourners wore smiles and chatted again, raising glasses in toasts and moving their heads to the music. Owen chewed the mouthful of cracker and Hungarian salami—which he'd just shoved into his face before Trevor had interrupted—and swallowed it dry.

"It's nice they're smiling," Owen lied. "Isn't that what wakes are for? To celebrate life?"