THEN ONE SUMMER DAY, WHEN JOHN THOUGHT HE WOULDN’T hear from her, two years or more after the crisis on the reserve, she and Bobby appeared again. People said she was now erratic like her mother had been—obviously scatterbrained. And as crazy as an eel.
Even her old friends, and she had few, felt she was very different now. She communicated with no one.
She pulled the teakwood motorboat out, and began to repair it. She spent half the summer doing this. She had a friend of hers, Packet Terri, lift the engine out and place it on the big side table in the barn and there she worked, all day long. She had been taught enough mechanics by those people who loved her, taught how to cast a fly rod, hand-tail a salmon, shoot a buck on the run across the field. She did this not because she wanted to compete with men but because to her, this was a natural thing for her to do.
That teakwood boat, bought in the late forties, was going to be her escape. She and Bobby would go to their small cottage across the bay, where her grandfather used to go to hunt duck—they would stay there together all August. She would fish and dig oyster and clams.
That is what she told John in a phone call. The teakwood inboard motorboat was what could save her and Bobby. It was the only thing she had seen during her birthing pains. So the engine was worked on, manuals were brought out, people were consulted about the crankcase, about gaskets, about replacing the spark plug wires, and new piston rings, but she was determined to do the work by herself. And then one late night, about eleven o’clock, there was from across the grand manicured lawn the sound of the engine starting.
“Eureka!” she wrote.
And the next day she had that name put on the front of the boat.
She left a note, which said:
“Don’t worry—Bobby and I know what to do to make this right.”
And:
“If Doc wants his flip-flops, mail them to him COD.”
But she did not get away until late, after four, and the swell had started.
They said the air was cold—the spray froze her face because the windshield had broken—and that she had a catatonic stare. (Or those who said they saw her, days later when people were questioned, did.) She put a blanket over Bobby and placed him up against the engine housing to keep him warm. It all looked to observers as if she needed help, and there was no one in the world to help her. So people gathered at the wharf to watch her go. Just as people have always done to those eccentrics during the cottage months when all people seem to have a more tenuous grasp on reality.
Yes, a great adventure to her grandfather’s old duck-hunting lodge, where they would roast marshmallows, and he could bathe on the beach, and make sandcastles without being looked at.
She stood up at the wheel, looked over her handiwork, smiled and waved to those seeing her off.
“Bon voyage,” she shouted to herself.
She was not much more than a child herself; Bobby hidden from everyone so no one would make fun of him. She had plastic pails and shovels, a beach towel, ten packets of Kool-Aid, hot dogs and hamburgers.
She arrived across the bay to the small family island about ten that night, and waded the boat in. The wind was from the south, the last bell-buoy light was faint, another five kilometres away.
She unlocked the small cottage door and unloaded the box of groceries and the beer and gin. Then she went to get her son, but couldn’t wake him. His face was pressed toward the engine, and his arms had not been strong enough to move away. She called his name many times. She stroked his face.
There was no response. She looked at him strangely. The stars were now out, and it was August and meteors fell and dazzled the black night air.
She tried to find out what was wrong. Perhaps this sickness caused him to go to sleep.
“Bobby?” she said. “Bobby, dear Bobby?”
But he did not wake up.
Ever again.
There had been a leak in the engine that she had worked on, to get the boat in the water. She had been too stubborn to ask for help from one of ten mechanics she could have phoned. Yes, in her own way she had been too stubborn—too silly to think she must do it all by herself. As Packet Terri said later:
“The lady needed a good kick in the rear.”
But that was for another time.
Bobby had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He had just gone to sleep of a sudden—just like that, lying up against the engine she had worked on all that summer. She had put him aside the housing in order to keep him warm.
“Bobby died,” she wrote. “I put him near the engine and he fell asleep. I held him in my arms for nine hours. I sang the Big Rock Candy Mountain to him, I am sure he will go there now.”
Then in agony she was furious with herself—two dozen times people had asked her to let them help, and each time she was too stubborn—oh yes, she was going to do it all—and she hated herself now! And worse, the boy had trusted her, trusted her to know what she was doing when she really did not know.
That was the sting that in fact would never end.
But then there was another sting—so it became a triumvirate of stings—and it was this: Bobby knew in his own way that she did not know what she was doing, and yet was loyal to her to the end.
She placed him in the water and watched him float away from her. And then, lying on the floor of the boat, she remembered the Scottish writer who said:
“The cheapest way out of Glasgow is a bottle of Bols gin.”
So she opened the pint up, and drank and cut her wrists.
She lay in the dark floating over the River Styx, right into the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Cape Tormintine.
She spent two days in ICU in Saint John. When she came out, she was driven to the police station. Why? Because it was obvious to everyone she had committed murder—and then tried to take her own life. Impossible not to think otherwise.