Learning to Swim (2 page)

At one point the boy’s hands slipped from my belt, and I spun and grabbed him as he was sliding under. He opened his eyes halfway and looked at me dully. I cradled him in my arms as the water sloshed around us. “Just a little farther, just a little farther,” I pleaded, and his eyes flickered. Now maybe I was crying, but I was so wet and cold I couldn’t tell.

I could see details of the shoreline, rocks and a big tree that seemed to beckon to me, and damned if we were going to drown this close to land. I yanked the drawstring from my windbreaker hood, pulled one of his hands underwater, and lashed it to my belt. We swam on, in awkward tandem.

We had been carried well past the ferry dock, and reached shore in a rocky area. I swung my feet down to feel for bottom, and there it was, sandy and shifting and at tiptoe length, but there it was. I yanked my belt loose to free the boy and pulled him toward me, hoisting him to my hip. I staggered as we came out of the water, him clinging to my side like a baby orangutan, and sat down on the first big rock I came to.

We sat there for a moment in silence, sucking in air, both of us shivering. My inner voice was saying
Thankyouthankyouthankyou
, but to whom or to what, I don’t know. I was strangely conscious of the hardness of the rock I sat on and the fact that I was no longer being rocked by the water.

The boy stirred, and turned toward me, his dark hair plastered around his thin face. For the first time, I heard him make a sound.

“Merci,”
he whispered.

H
E WAS THIN AND PALE, WITH A SLIGHTLY SNUB NOSE AND
huge, long-lashed dark eyes with deep hollows under them. He was small, maybe five or six years old, wearing a snug, long-sleeved striped pullover and jeans. He watched me placidly, then sighed like a tired puppy and laid his head against my chest.

I felt a rush of emotion so strong it jolted me. For one crazy moment it seemed this boy was mine, sitting here in my lap, delivered to me by the lake.

We sat there awhile, my arms around him—how long, I don’t know. Water, clouds, sky, and shoreline seemed like something out of a movie, and time had a different dimension, as if it were thick and moving slowly. Suddenly I was aware of the breeze against my cold skin and wet clothes. “We’d better get moving,” I said, shifting him from my lap onto his feet. The instant he stood, warmth began to dissipate where he had pressed against my body.

I squeezed water from my ponytail and wrung out my windbreaker. The boy still wore his sneakers, and I still had on my sports sandals, so light I hadn’t wasted time unstrapping them when in the water. I held out my hand.
“Viens,”
I said. I grasped his small cold hand, and started clambering over the rocks.

This was like a dream, a bad one. Walking felt like trying to slog through quicksand. After a few minutes the boy started to cough, then gag, and fell to his knees and threw up lake water on the scruffy grass we’d reached by then. I held him by the waist as he retched, and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of my windbreaker.

I thought of my Subaru in the parking lot, with the bag of emergency clothing and sleeping bag I’ve carried since a sudden snowstorm left me stranded overnight in a friend’s chilly cabin. In the Adirondacks, people say,
If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes
. I’d moved here to cover sports for the local newspaper, and discovered that you can be at a baseball game on an April afternoon enjoying the sun on your bare arms, and by the fourth inning have snow falling on you.

By the time we reached the road, the sky had begun to darken and the mistiness had turned to a light drizzle. I pulled up my windbreaker hood and plodded on. When the footsteps beside me began to lag, I swung the boy up onto my hip.
Right foot, left foot
. A car surged past, and not until I watched it disappear did it occur to me that I could have tried to wave it down. “Gotta get to my car,” I thought. “Gotta get to my car.” I heard the words before I realized I was speaking aloud.

Now I could see the parking lot and my blue Subaru where I’d parked at the back so I could exit quickly. My brain cleared enough to realize the significance of the fact that nothing was going on. Like the curious incident of the dog in the night-time in the Sherlock Holmes story—curious because the dog had done nothing.

There was no hubbub at the dock. No police. No Coast Guard. No frantic parents of a small French-speaking boy who had disappeared off the side of a ferry. If it hadn’t been for a small wet child clinging to my side, I could have convinced myself I’d dreamed the whole thing.

The boy began to shake, in tiny tremors.

Keys
. I slapped my pocket.
Damn
. My key ring apparently was now on the bottom of Lake Champlain. But Thomas, the guy I’ve been dating, had given me a hide-a-key box I’d stashed under the car, primarily because I knew he’d ask me about it. It had seemed an odd gift, one that suggested I couldn’t take care of myself. And I at least halfway wished I was the sort of person who received less practical presents.

But right now I was grateful it was there. I groped under the car and found the little box, far back atop the greasy undercarriage. With cold fingers I fumbled it open, then unlocked the car and pulled the bag of spare clothes from behind the front seat. I swung open the hatchback door and lifted the boy to the edge, where he sat, legs dangling, watching me.

Now I was remembering some French. I’d studied it at university, and living this close to Montreal, where people can get irate if you try to speak English to them, I practice with CDs from the library, reciting French phrases and getting odd looks from people in nearby cars.

“Comment t’appelles-tu?”
I asked him. Something flickered in his dark eyes. Then they were empty again, unblinking and carefully blank.

“Je n’saispas,”
he murmured, running the words together. He didn’t know his name.

“Tu ne parles pas anglais?”
I asked. He shook his head. No English.

I rooted in the bag, passing over a sweatshirt similar to the one that had been wrapped around him, and pulled out a T-shirt that had shrunk too much for polite wear and an Adidas jacket with a broken zipper.

“Lèves les bras, s’il te plaît,”
I said. He obediently raised his arms, and I peeled off his wet shirt. As the shirt came off, as if watching a miniature movie I saw myself in the lake yanking that sweatshirt over his head, and could see clearly what I’d blocked from my mind up until now: the sweatshirt sleeves, wrapped around his body and tied in a tight, dark, wet knot.

On that long swim to shore I’d imagined a set of parents for him: a well-dressed and attractive man and woman who had left him peacefully napping in the backseat of their late-model car—something boxy and safe, a Volvo, perhaps—while they’d gone up to the lounge for a cup of coffee, never suspecting their child would slip out of the car and fall overboard. I’d imagined them at the dock, surrounded by police and Coast Guard and dive team, mother frantic, tears rolling down her
cheeks, father gruff and angry in his grief and fear, both of them hysterically grateful for their son’s safe return.

But the dock was empty. No parents, no police, no Coast Guard. And I could no longer pretend I didn’t realize that someone had tied a sweatshirt around this child and thrown him in the lake to drown.

I
BEGAN TO CHATTER, AS I WOULD TO A DOG THAT WAS INJURED
or scared, a mix of English and French, whatever I could think of.

I pulled my old T-shirt over the boy’s head and manipulated his thin, white arms into it and then into the jacket, as if I were dressing a doll.

I pried off his soggy sneakers and pulled my heavy wool socks up over his jeans to anchor them, my fingers thick with cold. I had no shorts or pants that would fit him, so I wrapped a towel around his bottom half and carried him to the passenger seat. I pulled out the fiberfill sleeping bag I’ve carried since the night I spent shivering in my friend’s cabin, and tucked it around him. He didn’t say another word. I didn’t let myself think.

No one was around, but I was so cold I wouldn’t have cared if the entire Saranac Lake football team had been watching. I yanked off windbreaker and T-shirt in one quick motion and pulled on the hooded sweatshirt, then stepped out of my shorts and into a pair of old track suit bottoms. The dry fabric felt wonderful against my skin. I tossed our wet clothes in the back, jumped in, and started the engine. The boy seemed even smaller with my sleeping bag fluffed around him, and he just watched me. As if waiting to see what I would do next.

The car engine hummed. I cranked up the heat.

What do you say to a small boy who has just been tossed off a boat and isn’t crying or telling you what happened?
“Je m’appelle Troy,”
I said at last. I hadn’t realized how tense he was until he made a tiny movement of relaxation, one I sensed rather than saw.

“Trrroy,” he repeated softly.

It’s an odd name for a girl, I know. My sisters had suitable southern belle names of Suzanne and Lynnette, but by the time my brother and I came along our mother had run out of child-naming energy. So our father named us after characters from his favorite mysteries—Simon from The Saint series by Leslie Charteris, and me from the Ngaio Marsh books about a policeman and his wife, Troy. I liked the character I was named after: slim, thoughtful, graceful, a talented painter and a watcher of people. Although I’ve always wondered if my mother would have liked me better if I had been a Christina or a Sharon or Jennifer.

Not in a million years did I believe this boy didn’t know his name. He just didn’t want to tell me.

“Qu’est-ce que s’est passé sur le bateau?”
I asked.

He gave a little shrug, but didn’t speak. It didn’t surprise me. If he had wanted to tell me what had happened on the ferry, he would have told me by now.

“Tes parents?”
I asked.

I don’t think I’d ever seen such a completely blank expression on a child’s face.

During college I’d volunteered two afternoons a week at an emergency children’s home, where police and social workers dropped children off, sometimes in the middle of the night. One thin blond girl named Janey had begged me to adopt her. I’d tried to explain that nineteen-year-old students couldn’t adopt anyone, let alone a nine-year-old—but when you’re desperate for a happy home, you keep asking. I kept having to tell her I couldn’t. Each time she returned to the shelter, she was increasingly hollow-eyed, thinner, and more withdrawn. Staffers at the center weren’t allowed to tell us details of children’s cases, so I could only guess at what was going on at home. And then she was gone. Maybe she went to foster care or a group home, or her family moved away, out of the reach of Social Services. I never knew what happened to her.

For years, whenever I’d catch sight of a thin blond girl, I’d look to see if it was her.

Our breath was fogging the car windows. I tried to force my brain to work. The ticket seller booth was empty. The passengers were long gone; the boy’s ferry was probably halfway back to Vermont. The ferries had no passenger list; you just paid your fare and drove or walked on. But the police could meet the boy’s ferry when it docked and ask for descriptions of anyone who had boarded with a small boy.

My cell phone was dangling from its charging cord where I had forgotten it—which was the only reason it wasn’t sitting on the bottom of the lake. It wouldn’t pick up a signal here, but there was a pay phone just uphill, next to the Amtrak station. I pulled the car closer and took a fistful of change from my ashtray, gesturing toward the phone so the boy would know what I was going to do. As I leaned against the phone stand, I leafed through the pages of the phone book, my cold fingers turning more than one page at a time.

People don’t want to believe bad stuff—they work hard at not believing it. They don’t want to think that teachers can be demons, that priests abuse children, that the apparently pleasant boy next door could be systematically molesting all the neighborhood girls, one by one. They ignore the evidence as long as they can.