Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — The Lake
Celia Reyes kept the scorebook in the shed at the near end of the Hart Yard ground, on a shelf with the bases and a coffee tin of pencil stubs, and on Sunday mornings she got it out at about nine-thirty and had the lineups down before anybody had decided whose side they were on.
Sarah came up the yard road a little after ten with a bag over her shoulder and no intention of stopping.
“Bishop.” Celia had the book open on the folding table under the backstop and a pencil behind her ear. “Can you keep a book?”
“I’m going to the lake.”
“You’re going to the lake at eleven. Can you keep a book?”
“I can keep a book.”
“Properly, or the way people say they can?”
“My father put a scorecard in front of me when I was six and made me do the whole thing again if I got the fielder’s number wrong.” Sarah put her bag down against the table leg. “I can keep a book.”
“Sit down,” Celia said, and turned it round.
It was a real book, cloth spine, about a third used, soft along the outer corner where a thumb went, with a page in the middle where somebody had spilled something and Celia had ruled the innings back in over the stain. Sarah kept score for an hour and a half in the sun with a pencil that needed sharpening, and it was the least useful thing she had done since she arrived on this planet.
There were no fixed sides. Nine children and about six adults, the adults rotating out whenever a child wanted a turn, and twice a whole inning had to be reconstructed because two people were arguing about whether Ethan Pike had been forced at second. Ethan Pike was nine and had a firm view. Sarah read the book back and said he had been, and Ethan Pike looked at the page for a while, and went and sat against the shed with his back to everybody, and came back two batters later.
Grace Jones batted seventh and put one over the fence twice, and both times somebody had to go out onto the road for the ball, and both times it was not Grace.
“She’s back on the north channel from next week,” Celia said, in the gap while somebody found a glove. “Her father’s got her doing point nine by hand again. He says she’s better at it than the station is, and I think that’s a father talking, and I also think he’s right.”
“Does Peter say the second part?”
“Peter would never say the second part.” Celia marked something on a folded sheet beside the book, which was hers and was about batting order and not about anything Sarah had access to. “That’s why I say it for him.”
Mae Sutter came past in the sixth carrying a jar with three things in it and stopped at the table, on the grounds that Sarah was sitting still and therefore available.
Two small snails and a piece of weed.
“That one’s the big one.”
“That one’s much bigger,” Sarah agreed.
“Tomas says you have to put them back within an hour or it’s not fair.”
“Then you’ve got about an hour.”
Mae went off toward the road end with the jar held out at arm’s length in front of her, the way you carry a thing you have decided is full to the brim when it is a third full.
“You know Micah’s in the water,” Celia said.
“He said.”
“Kim cleared him.” Celia turned the page over. “He was in the water the same week she signed it, which is not what cleared means, but I’ve stopped.”
Out of the Lake Ward the shelf road went west along its spit of made ground, a steady four metres across with the rail on the water side, and Sarah got about forty paces down it before a woman coming the other way told her the shell along the edge cuts and she should walk the crown. Sarah said she knew. The woman said everybody says they know, and went on toward the ward with a child on either side of her, both of them barefoot on the crown of the road.
Lake Cormorant in March had nothing to do with the colour it went in July. Off the spit it ran a flat grey-green with the light lying on it in bands, and the north shore stood up out of that at a distance the eye kept getting wrong, low hills with the pale scar of the intake road across them and, further west, the white of the Tolliver buildings small enough to cover with a thumb.
The shelf itself was the wide pale shoulder that ran out from the end of the spit for the best part of half a kilometre, chest deep the whole way, and the people standing about on it at that distance looked like people standing on the water.
There were bags along the rail. Three upturned boats on the gravel at the root with the oars stacked under them, a folding table with stones holding the cloth down, and somebody’s grandfather asleep in a chair with a hat over his face at eleven in the morning.
Sarah had the fins in the bag. She had been carrying them around for eight months, in a cupboard and then in a locker and then in the cupboard again, and the grey tape down one blade had gone hard and yellow at the edges and had not lifted anywhere, because nobody had used them hard enough to lift it.
Micah was out past the last of the bags, up on the rail where the handrail took over, boots off, towel over one shoulder, both feet in the sun.
He put a hand up when she was still a long way down the road.
“You brought them.”
“I brought them.”
“Eight months.”
“Nine, nearly.” Sarah got the bag up onto the rail. “You gave them to me in July.”
“That’s eight.” Micah took the fin with the tape on it and turned it over and looked at the repair, which had held, and put it down. “Right. Before you get in. The shelf’s chest deep the whole way out and then it goes over the edge, and the edge is about four hundred metres out and it’s marked by nothing at all, so what you do is you keep your feet down and you stop when the bottom stops. There’s a current runs north along the shelf face and it turns at the weed ridge. It’s not strong. It just means you come out of the water further up than you went in, every time, and everybody who’s new stands there being confused about it.”
“How far up?”
“Twenty, thirty metres. More if you’re slow.” He shrugged. “Swim at the third boat and you’ll walk out at the table.”
“What’s over the edge?”
“Nobody’s put a number on it that I’d repeat. It’s past where you can see the bottom and then it keeps going.” Micah put the mask down on the rail. “You’re not going near it today or any other day without me and a boat.”
Micah put the mask in her lap and the snorkel on top of it.
“Strap it so it sits on the back of your head, not up on the crown. It will still leak. Every mask anybody ever borrowed off me has leaked, so I don’t want to hear about it on the way home.”
“You told me that in July.”
“I’ll keep telling you.”
Sarah sat with it in her lap, holding it by the strap.
She could swim. She had learned in a municipal pool eleven hundred kilometres from any water that mattered, in a city where her mother mapped the corridors that carried it somewhere else, and she had passed the service competency on the second attempt at nineteen with an examiner writing something down at the side of the pool. Her arms were the problem. Nobody had ever told her what the arms were supposed to be doing instead.
“There’s about thirty people out there,” she said.
“Twenty-two. I counted from the game.” Micah pulled the towel off his shoulder and dropped it over the rail. “Every one of them learned this at four years old and thinks it’s the most boring thing a person can do.”
“That isn’t the same as nobody looking.”
“No,” Micah agreed, and got down off the rail, and went in.
Micah went in badly, which she had not expected. He went down the shell to his knees, stopped, said something short about the cold to nobody in particular, took two more steps and put himself under all at once, and came up making a noise that no part of his professional life would have survived. Two children on the bags found this extremely funny. Micah told them, from the water, that they were unkind people from an unkind family, and one of them told him what it was like at seven in the morning, and Micah said that was a different lake and a lie.
Then he stood up on the shelf with the water at his chest and turned round and waited without saying anything about waiting.
Sarah put the mask on.
The cold went through her in one piece, up the legs and across the back and out through the top of her head, and she stood in it to the waist with her hands held clear of the surface like a person carrying something.
“It’s worse standing there,” Micah said.
“I’ve heard that.”
“It’s true when people say it, which is annoying.”
She went under.
It was not better. For a few seconds she had nothing in her head at all, and then her chest let go and it was better, and it was ridiculous, and she came up laughing at nothing with the mask already half full of water.
“That’s the strap.”
“You said it would leak.”
“It’s leaking badly. That’s the strap.” Micah turned her round by the shoulder and did something to the buckle with two fingers. “Blow out through your nose while you clear it. Don’t lift the bottom edge and tip your head back — everybody does that and it just fills again.”
Out past the shell the bottom went to sand with old ribs in it, and the light came down through the green in long moving shapes that went across her hands and across the sand and across the taped blade whenever she looked at her own feet, which was often, because looking at her own feet was easier than looking forward. There were fish. There were not many of them and they were not interesting and they kept a distance she never got to close. The weed ridge stood off to the north with the current going through it one way, and past that the pale nothing where the shelf stopped being visible.
Micah swam like a person going somewhere and did it slowly enough to stay alongside.
“Your arms are fine.”
“My arms are not fine. I’ve been told.”
“Your arms are fine and your head’s too high.” He rolled onto his back for a stroke. “You’re keeping your face where you can see the shore. Put it in. The mask is the whole point of the mask.”
She put her face in.
There was her own breathing through the tube, and the water going past it, and the ribbed sand underneath with the light moving on it, and her hands coming forward into the green one after the other. She swam a long way out across the shelf like that. Somewhere past the middle of it she came up to work out how far she had gone, and stood, and the water was still at her chest, and the shelf road was well down to her left where it had no business being.
Micah was ten metres off, upright, water at his ribs.
“Told you about the current.”
“You did.”
“Everybody’s still surprised.” He turned and started back at a walk. “Third boat.”
Sarah went in on the third boat and walked out at the table, and it was somewhere out past the middle of the shelf, with her face in the green and her hands coming forward one after the other, that she had stopped checking where everything else was.
They ate on the rocks at the shelf end, warm on top and cold underneath, dragged into a rough half-circle years ago and left there.
Everybody put something on Celia’s table in the morning and nobody was allowed to take back what they had brought, which that Sunday had produced four kinds of the same bean and a long argument about which was the good one. There was flatbread. There was a jar of peppers out of Rhee’s ring with a label on it in Aaron Pike’s block capitals that Celia said had been on the table three Sundays running. There was a tin of something nobody claimed and everybody ate.
Sarah sat with a towel round her shoulders and her hair drying stiff, and got cold, and got warm again, and stopped tracking which.
“You’ll ache tomorrow,” Micah said. “Shoulders. Not legs.”
“Not legs?”
“Everybody guesses legs.” He was working through the flatbread methodically. “Shoulders, and it’s the second day, not the first.”
“There’s one on Earth goes that green,” Micah said. “Emerald, in Canada. Glacier lake. Rock ground to powder off the ice is what does the colour there, not anything living. I had a picture of it up about six years.”
“I never saw it.” Sarah pulled the towel up on her shoulder. “Closest I got was a pool with a lane rope down it.”
Down on the shelf a boat went out with three children and one adult in it and came back with four children in it, and nobody on the rocks remarked on it.
“Two out of the ward did the second module over the winter,” Micah said, after a while.
“Watershed?”
“Watershed. There’s a spring course and one of them asked whether I’d put in for it.” Micah turned a piece of bread over. “I said I’d look at the dates.”
“Have you looked at the dates?”
“I know the dates.”
Sarah left that alone long enough that a boat came in and somebody argued about the oars.
“It’s evenings up at the Civic Spine for most of two years and then a long stretch off the water at the end for the assessment,” Micah said. “And every time I get close to putting my name on it there’s something in the lake that has to be dealt with by somebody who can get in the lake.”
“There’ll always be something in the lake.”
“That’s what Celia says.” He looked out at the shelf for a while, at nothing in particular on it. “Is that bean the good one or the other one.”
“It’s the other one.”
Micah put it down and went back to the flatbread.
The light went long about five and everybody on the shelf started the slow business of leaving that takes an hour.
Bags came off the rail. The boats went up onto the gravel in an order somebody had explained to Sarah twice and which she had not retained. Ethan Pike was asleep in the folding chair the grandfather had been asleep in that morning, and the grandfather was awake and standing over him with the hat, waiting, in no evident hurry.
Sarah got the fins back in the bag. The tape down the blade had lifted about two millimetres at one end, where eight months in a cupboard had done nothing to it and four hours in the lake had.
“I’ll do that,” Micah said.
“I can put tape on a fin.”
“You can put tape on a fin. You’ll do the ends wrong and it’ll peel from underneath.” He took it off her and put it in his own bag. “Next Sunday.”
“Next Sunday I might have the berm.”
“Then the one after.”
They walked back down the crown of the road with the evening traffic, past the shell that cuts, into the low sun coming up off the water in a way that made everybody on the road put a hand up at about the same point, and at the root of the spit the six o’clock ferry came in and took a crowd off the landing and went back out with the deck full and low in the water.