The Boy and the Lake by Adam Pelzman

Author:Adam Pelzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jackson Heights Press
Published: 2020-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

In early May, just weeks before the lake would be infused with the vital energy of the seasonal residents, the Rockaway Record ran an article about an “environmental incident” at nearby Hope Pond. According to the report, a stone quarry adjacent to the pond had released a toxic stew into the once pristine water.

My father was the first in our family to read about the accident, and he feared that the quarry’s harmful effluents might contaminate our lake. “That’s how we get most of our water, you know,” he said. “The little creek that lets out at Second Beach? You know the one … all that water comes from Hope Pond, feeds the whole lake.” I knew the creek, for Missy and I often caught crayfish and minnows there with a net, and sometimes even a towel. Abe continued to read. “PCBs, petroleum, ammonium nitrate fuel oil, unidentified chemical solvents, it says here … but says the quarry contained the leak and there’s no harm to people or wildlife.” He tossed the paper to the table and clenched his jaw. “That’s bullshit, you realize … total bullshit. They say that every time they screw up, all these corporations. Only a few specks and couldn’t hurt a fly. Next thing you know, everything’s dead.”

My mother snatched the paper from the table. “Don’t be so dramatic. You’re always making something out of nothing.”

“Something out of nothing?” he responded. “Don’t be so dramatic?”

“They’re hardworking people at the quarry, you know, and people make mistakes sometimes.”

“They shouldn’t make a mistake like this,” Abe countered.

Lillian’s smile was imperious. “You ever make a mistake?” She challenged him with a tone that signaled imminent cruelty. She raised her eyes to the ceiling, mimicking some deep reflection. “Ever misdiagnose someone?”

Stung by her implication, Abe turned red: we all knew that he’d been sued for malpractice once in his career, twelve years earlier when he failed to detect a malignant lump in a patient’s throat. Wounded, livid, he rose from the table and strode down to the dock, where he sat on a chair and smoked a cigar. As he puffed away, I imagined that the smoke gathering around his head and integrating into the dense fog might very well have been pouring from his ears.

Within days of the Record’s report, we learned that the spill had, as my father feared, infected our lake. The first sign that something was wrong was when Nathan Gold was puttering along on the Ark, from the clubhouse toward Split Rock. As Nathan described the encounter, he stood behind the wheel and saw something floating in the water before him. He cut the boat’s engine and glided toward this white thing, which he first thought might be a garbage bag or a tarp of some sort, only to realize that a mute swan was dead. As he recounted this story, I thought of Helen’s body and wondered why one’s natural instinct on seeing something dead in the water is to seek the most benign explanation.

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