Crow Lake by Mary Lawson Read Free Book Online Page B

seeing. Bo was craning forward on his shoulders. “Down!” she said.
    I said, “Aren’t you coming to look?”
    “Sure.”
    He set Bo down and she staggered to the water’s edge. Matt said, “Lie down, Bo. Lie down like Kate and watch the fish.”
    Bo looked at me. She squatted down beside me. She was wearing a little blue dress and her diaper hung down beneath it, so when she squatted it bunched up on the ground and made her look as if she had an enormous behind.
    “Luke’s not very good at diapers,” I said. Aunt Annie had offered to take over the task of changing Bo, but Bo would have none of it, so that was one job Luke and Matt still shared.
    Matt said, “I did that diaper, thank you, and I’m proud of it.”
    He smiled at me, but when I looked at his eyes there was no laughter there. I saw suddenly that there was no happiness in him now. No real happiness; just a show, for my sake. I turned my head quickly away from him and stared hard into the water. The fear and dread lying inside of me rose up like a river, like a flood. I stared into the pond and pressed everything down hard.
    After a minute Matt lay down beside Bo, so that she was between us. He said, “Look at the fish, Bo.” He pointed at the water and Bo looked at his finger. “No, look in the water. See the fish?”
    Bo said, “Ooooh!” She stood up and jumped up and down, yelling with excitement, and the fish vanished as if they had never been. She stopped jumping and stared into the water. She looked at Matt in disbelief.
    “You scared them all away,” Matt said.
    “No fish!” she said. She was incredulous and grief-stricken, and her face caved in and the tears started to roll.
    “Cut it out, Bo. Just stay still and they’ll come back.”
    She looked at him doubtfully and stuck her thumb in, but then squatted down again. After a minute, while Matt talked to her to keep her still, a small stickleback drifted toward us.
    “There he is,” Matt whispered.
    And Bo leapt up in excitement, stepped on the dangling tail of her diaper, and fell in.
    On the way back along the railway tracks, we met Marie Pye, carrying a bag of groceries in each arm. The Pyes’ farm was back beyond the gravel pits—in fact, the land the pits were on belonged to them—and the tracks were a shorter route to the McLeans’ store than the road. Matt slowed down as she came toward us, and Marie did likewise, and then she stopped and let us come up.
    “Hi, Marie,” Matt said, shifting Bo a little on his shoulders.
    “Hi,” Marie said nervously. She glanced past us in the direction of the farm as if she expected her father to come raging up the path from the gravel pits to tell her off. My mother had said once that Marie was the only normal member of that whole sorry family, but she looked just as twitchy as the rest of them to me. She was big-boned and strong-looking, but pale, with a halo of fine pale hair and wide anxious eyes. She and Matt must have known each other quite well—or at least for quite a long time. Marie was a year older, but Matt had skipped a grade, so they’d been in the same class at school. And they’d have seen each other, if only from a distance, when he was working for her father.
    This was the first time they’d met since the funeral though, and neither of them seemed to know what to say. I couldn’t see why they needed to say anything. I was tired and wanted to go home.
    “Bo’s been fishing,” Matt said at last, jerking his head back against Bo’s belly.
    Marie looked at Bo, who was soaking wet and covered in pond weed, and smiled uncertainly. Then she looked back at Matt, and flushed, and said all in a hurry, “I—I was really sorry about your parents.”
    “Yeah,” Matt said. “Thanks.”
    “Do you … do you know what you’re going to do? What’s going to happen?”
    “Not yet. We should find out—” He stopped, and though I wasn’t looking at him, I knew that he had nodded at me.
    “Oh,” Marie said.