Trudy sees the cars first. So many cars parked by the side of the road. There must be a dozen, all pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of the road. The ramp looks like it’s been hit by a meteor. A cop car is blocking traffic. Someone has put a sawhorse beside it. She can see Darren’s truck on the other side. “Close your eyes, Mercy.”
“Why?”
“Just close them until I tell you to open them.” Trudy slows down. There is an ambulance and a firetruck, and she can see Dr. Cameron’s car parked in Joe Davis’s yard. A white van with an Ottawa TV station logo on the side. She looks out across the water and sees the divers in wetsuits in the boat. A tiny boat with an outboard motor. Whose boat is it? Who are the divers? Trudy can’t think straight. She shouldn’t have brought Mercy here. She opens the door and gets out. “Stay here, Mercy. Lock the doors.”
“Trudy, don’t leave me!”
“I want you to lock the doors and lie down on the seat and close your eyes, Mercy.”
Mercy is whimpering, whining, no, no, no, but even as she says it she does as she is told: she locks the doors one by one and lies down on the front seat. She hugs her knees to her chest and closes her eyes.
Trudy starts to walk toward the shore but stops. She braces her hands against her knees and vomits onto the grass. She starts to cough and throws up again. That’s alright, she thinks. That’s fine. As if anything could possibly be fine. She straightens up and scans the crowd on the grass for Darren, but she can’t see him. Then she realizes he is in his truck. She can see him through the windshield, his head on his arms on the steering wheel. The small crowd of people is quiet as she walks by, staring after her. She doesn’t look at them. She opens the door of the truck and tells Darren to take Mercy home in her car. She will bring the truck home when she can.
“Will you be alright?”
“No. Never.” She says it with dead certainty. She will never be alright again. But she wants him to go and take Mercy with him. They trade keys and she walks back toward the shore. She sits on a cold rock and watches the divers tumble off the boat into the cold grey water.
Darren unlocks the door and starts the engine. He tucks Mercy tight against his side and drives away.
It is not a person. It is a body.
They lean down over the side of the boat and haul the body in. Trudy sees something bloody in the tangle of blond hair before she turns away. The sound carries across the water, the hollow sound of the weight hitting the side, the bottom of the aluminum boat. The splash and drip of water on the hull.
The diver is breathing heavily when he says it. He has to stop and catch his breath. “I’m going back down. There’s another one down there. There’s someone else.”