Chapter 11 Peggy
The sound of your child screaming is a horrific thing. What is worse is the sound of him hyperventilating, shrieking, desperate to speak but unable to form coherent words.
“What is it?” I yell, sprinting through from the kitchen. “Are you hurt?”
I step off our boat onto the towpath.
He is panting.
“Deep breaths, Sammy.”
He leads me by the hand toward Jeff Turner’s boat.
Down in the water.
The flannel material of his shirt, a collar tip floating on the surface. One sock on, one sock off.
I pivot to shield Sammy from it all, too late, far too late, and Drew walks up behind and immediately jumps into the water.
“Be careful.”
He says nothing. Time slows. I turn my head to watch. Sammy wants to do the same but I hold him back. Drew lifts Jeff Turner’s head and then, grimacing with exertion, drags him over to the bank.
“Peggy,” says Drew, calm yet strained. “I need you to hold him.”
I release Sammy and bend down to the water’s edge. Drew pulls Jeff Turner’s lifeless hands up to the towpath level.
“Go on, take ’em.”
“I… do you mean?”
Sammy appears at my side and he holds on to Mr. Turner’s hands so he doesn’t slip back down under the water.
The contrast of their fingers, their wrists.
My God. Drew pulls himself out from the canal, shivering, covered in weeds, his breath steaming into the cold morning air.
Eventually he manages to heave Mr. Turner out onto the towpath.
No pulse. Gray, wrinkled skin. Cloudy eyes.
I pull Sammy close to me again and Drew, out of breath, says, “You did well, Samson.”
Amber circles Jeff Turner.
She is silent now.
I step back on board our boat, numb and distant, to collect a clean bedsheet.
When I drape it over Mr. Turner the water saturates the fine material in seconds and it turns near translucent.
Drew says, “Sorry you had to see that, Peggy,” and then he puts his hand firmly on Sammy’s shoulder and says, “I know he was your friend. I’m sorry, boy.
” He tells us he will change into dry clothes.
As soon as he has gone I inhale like I have been holding my breath for minutes, like I have been trapped beneath the dark, oil-slicked waters myself.
“He’s not in any pain,” says Sammy, to himself, trembling, tears rolling down his cheeks.
The little dog sits by her owner and moans solemnly. I have never heard a sound like it.
I look up the canal one way and then back the other. Nothing but comatose fields, and the reflection of clouds, and bare lichen-pocked trees. We are so far from the rest of the world it feels like this is the world. Like we will have to deal with it all on our own.
Drew asks me and Sammy to walk to the small farmstead off the country road and use their phone to call the police.
It takes us half an hour to reach it. Muddy fields churned and hardened with frost. Thickets of prairie grass and elderberry: bleak in this harsh, wintry light.
Sammy is mute. I rub his arm periodically and he pauses to scrape dirt from his shoes.
The farmer’s wife looks at us suspiciously, but she lets us make the call.
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
“We’ve found a body in the canal. It’s Jeff Turner. We knew him. He’s drowned.”
“Where are you calling from?”
I tell her.
“Have you checked for a pulse? Any sign of breathing?”
“No,” I tell her, still numb. “It’s past all that. He’s been gone for a while.”
I look out through the old, rippled glass of the farmhouse window and Sammy is shivering out in the yard. He would not come inside.
We walk back to the canal.
A formation of geese flies high in the sky above us, a pointer leading us away from all this to some other town, some other future, but we deviate from their chosen path and head back to our floating home.
The sheriff’s deputies are already there when we arrive.
Others join them.
Three men, two women, and one small white tent.
Tape runs from a sapling to a spindly river birch. Flickering in the breeze; twisting this way and that.
Drew is being questioned. They question me and they talk to Sammy.
It takes hours. They ask me what I did last night, where I was, what time I went to sleep, whether or not I heard anything unusual.
They take notes. One of the deputies says there might be an inquest and in any event we may need to answer further questions.
They ask about Jeff Turner and who his friends and acquaintances were.
His next of kin. Sammy knows far more than we do.
We are allowed onto our own boat to warm up and make coffee. Sammy heads for the LEGO box he used to play with so much in the bungalow. He told me once how rummaging with his hands deep inside the box made him feel good. The smell of the old plastic bricks: memories of simpler times.
Drew tells them he has to go to work. I let the deputies know I will not take Sammy in to school today, not with what he has seen.
They explain how we cannot step foot on Mr. Turner’s boat until they say so.
We decide to let Amber stay on our boat until his family claim her.
I put a bowl of water down for her and Drew gives me a five-dollar bill to take Sammy out for some food in town.
Mother and son. Blank-eyed, exhausted from shock, riding the bus. Senior citizens and young mothers embark, shivering, showing their passes, taking their seats. The washed-out landscape scrolls by our picture windows and the stale air smells faintly of diesel.
“Do you want to talk about it, Sammy?”
“Not here.”
My memories are unreliable. They are wavy and vague, and sometimes they are difficult to pin down.
Last night Drew took a bottle of bourbon over to Jeff Turner’s boat, a peace offering of sorts, and then he came back to write.
And then, I suppose, he came to bed and we…
Only, I’m not sure I remember it that way.
It did not feel like we did anything. In fact, I am absolutely sure we did nothing.
The sheriff or the coroner will likely conclude an old man like Jeff Turner slipped from his boat. I know I have almost fallen in a dozen times, especially when it’s icy.
Sammy places his hand on mine. We both look straight ahead. He squeezes tight and the bus’s engine drones beneath us.
An old man mumbles to himself from the seat in front of ours. He comments on the weather. He complains about potholes, the VA, and the vice president.
It was not long after Sammy was born that Drew told me for the second time about the fire.
He looked relieved to share his childhood secret.
A problem shared is a problem halved, and although I was shocked, I was also glad he had confided in me.
But then, like only Drew can, he turned it upside down and inside out.
Did I mention this already? He said I had misremembered on account of me being so tired from night feeds.
It’s true that I was exhausted at that time, like any new mother.
Truths and mistruths: tangled. He talked about our family being a flawless triangle.
Three sides. He explained, as I was folding laundry, how if one side was to ever break away for any reason, or become damaged, or lost, then the triangle would collapse in on itself.
He kept repeating how we were a nuclear family.
Drew emphasized, with Sammy fast asleep behind us in his crib, that it was us against the world.
He said that is the way it is and that is the way it will always be.
He did not tell me explicitly he would hurt Sammy or me if we ever tried to leave, but he did not need to.
It was clear from the intonation of his voice.
The look in his eye.