lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean
The police came like they do in the movies, and when Ingrid answered the door they asked to speak with me. I suppose Ingrid was scared, and worried for me, so she went to Dill’s room and asked him to wake me up. It was after midnight, and when he came into our bedroom and gently shook my shoulder, the first thing I thought was: Where is Hetty?
It had been seven days since I’d seen her at the Eaton Centre and I’d heard nothing. I had planned to go to the police to tell them she was missing but I didn’t know when I should do it, and whether it would be something I might regret when she inevitably resurfaced.
As I walked slowly down the stairs towards the front door, I tried to prepare myself for something bad but I couldn’t seem to hold the possibility. My brain felt fat inside my skull, and in the corners of my eyes there were chunks of sleep so big that it almost hurt when I blinked.
I realised near the kitchen that Dill was still beside me and that he was holding my hand. Whitney was at our feet, getting in our way, making peeping sounds. Robin and Clark were in the living room—I saw their long bodies bent against the couch, and I held my breath.
There were two police officers: one woman, one man. Their faces were lit up by our front-door bulb and they weren’t smiling.
The female officer asked me if I was Vanessa and I said yes. She asked me if I knew Hetty and I said yes, but the word got caught in my throat from the fear that had arrived inside. I paused, and said it again so she could hear me, hoping the two of them could give me time. That was all I knew, then. That I needed time.
Later, in our bedroom—my bedroom, just mine now—Dill told me what the officers had said, because I’d collapsed in the doorway after they said it and I needed to hear it again.
He told me that Hetty had drowned, that she had been found dead on the shore of Cherry Beach that evening by a couple on an after-dinner walk, and that her body had been waterlogged and fully clothed, her eyes shut. The police didn’t know much more yet—they were trying to find out why she had been in the water.
‘But I know why,’ I told him.
Dill waited, watching me.
‘Because she was swimming,’ I said, and he nodded. ‘She was trying to find the sea.’
In the morning I was still awake. The policewoman had told us the night before that I would need to come to the station as soon as I could, to identify Hetty’s drowned body—though she hadn’t said drowned; I had added that bit in my head because it was true. I don’t remember where it was I went, but I walked there in the early dark and had to bang on the door to be let in when I arrived too early.
Hetty’s body was under a covering like the bodies in BBC crime shows, and I remember the colour of it—a pale yellow, like a dying cat’s sick—and when they lifted the sheet I saw her grey forehead and the jump of her nose and my body ripped apart and I was screaming. I had to say that it was Hetty, and I did, but then I needed to vomit and they ordered a taxi to come and get me and I was back at Marjorie before I knew it, blinking to try to get rid of the image of her face, so still and dead.
Later, Dill gave me a valium and took me to Cherry Beach in his old green Honda Civic, and we stood on the shore. Through the loud thrum in my head I thought about how it was so unfair that I’d never even been to this beach with Hetty, that we had never even talked about how sweet the name was, that we would never come here together to laugh at the lake waves and wonder at the sand. I couldn’t let myself feel anything more than that unfairness, because if I did I knew I would die too, and so I let Dill cuddle in to me, and when he asked if he should call Faith I said yes in a voice that seemed separate from me and strange—like an echo.
He took my phone and left me to stand nearby, and I wondered if I was swaying as I heard him speaking, asking Faith to come, telling her softly what had happened. It made me angry, that he could share something so private with everyone, just because it was true.
When he finished the call I asked him in a loud voice, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do?’ and he shook his head with tears swishing out from his eyes, wetting the sand around us.
‘Is this even real sand?’ I yelled. ‘I never even bothered to find out for her,’ my voice said, watery with tears, my nose bleeding snot.
Hetty had been sick and I hadn’t helped her at all, I told him. He shook his head but I asked him to let me have that truth, and after a while he nodded and we sat on the cold tiny crumbs of rock. Then Faith was there and I drank from the bottle she gave me and closed my eyes in the circle of their arms, and the wind felt like the passionate kisses I’d never been able to give Hetty and I knew I’d never love anyone else again.