Crow Lake by Mary Lawson Read Free Book Online Page A

their breath back. Laundry had been the biggest problem, so she started there, and then cleaned the house and discreetly disposed of our parents’ clothes and dealt with unanswered mail and unpaid bills. She was efficient and tactful and made no demands on our affections. I’m sure that under different circumstances we would have grown to love her.
    On a Thursday, almost two weeks after the accident, she and Luke went up to town to see my father’s lawyer and the bank. Reverend Mitchell drove them up while Matt stayed with Bo and me.
    We went down to the lake after they’d left. I wondered if Matt would suggest a swim, but instead, after standing for quite a few minutes watching Bo stomp around at the water’s edge, he said abruptly, “Why don’t we go back to the ponds?”
    “What about Bo?” I said.
    “She’ll come too. It’s time we educated her.”
    “She’ll fall in,” I said anxiously. Unlike the lake, the ponds were steep-sided. I felt tragedy lurked around every corner now; I was afraid all the time. I went to bed with fear at night and woke up with it in the morning.
    But Matt said, “Sure she’ll fall in, won’t you, Bo? That’s what ponds are for.”
    He carried Bo through the woods on his shoulders, the same way he had carried me all those years ago. We did not talk. We never said much on these excursions, but there was a difference in the silence this time. Back then, it had been because there was no need to talk; now it was because our minds were full of things we couldn’t say.
    It was the first time we had been back to the ponds since our parents’ death, and when I saw them again, when we slid down the bank to the first of them, I felt my spirits rise in spite of everything. The first one was “our” pond, not just because it was the closest but because on one side there was a shelf four or five feet wide where the water was less than three feet deep. The water was clear and warm, and many of the pond dwellers congregated there, and of course you could see right to the bottom.
    Bo gazed around from her perch on Matt’s shoulders. “Dat!” she said, pointing at the water.
    “You should see what’s in it, Bo,” I said. “We’ll tell you the names of everything.”
    I lay down on my stomach, as I always did, and peered in. Tadpoles which had been hugging the edges of the pond swarmed away as my shadow fell over them and then gradually wriggled back. They were well developed, their hind legs fully formed, their tails short and stubby. We had watched them grow, Matt and I, as we did every year, from the very first day they began to move inside the tiny clear globes of their eggs.
    Sticklebacks were drifting aimlessly about. The breeding season was over so it was hard to tell the males and the females apart. When they were breeding the males were very beautiful, with red underparts and silvery scales on their backs and brilliant blue eyes. Matt had told me—it had been in the spring, just a few months ago, though it seemed to be in another lifetime—that the male sticklebacks did all the work. They made the nests and courted the females and fanned the nests to keep the eggs supplied with oxygen. Once the eggs had hatched it was the males who guarded them. If a baby strayed from the group, the father sucked it into his mouth and spat it back into the pack.
    “What do the females do?” I’d asked him.
    “Oh, laze around. Go to tea parties. Gossip with their friends. You know what females are like.”
    “No, but really Matt. What do they do?”
    “I don’t know. Eat a lot, probably. Probably they need to recover their strength after producing all those eggs.”
    He’d been lying beside me then, his chin on the back of his hands, gazing into the water, and all that had been on our minds was this small world lying so still before us.
    I looked around at him now. He was standing a few feet back from the pond, staring at it in the way you stare at something you’re not really