Forty Words for Sorrow

Bump, bump, bump. She ignored the thump of Gram's cane on the ceiling, willing the icy branch to turn green once more. The whole summer had been rich with color, saturated with a million different shades of green and blue, drenched with the rapture of getting to know Eric. From boredom and nothingness, Eric had created passion. From emptiness, excitement. From misery, thrills.

I am a conquered country, she had written in her diary. I am Eric's to rule as he sees fit. He has taken me by storm. The words put her in mind of another storm, a stupendous blast of wind and rain that had come whipping across the iron gray of Lake Nipissing, last September.

They'd killed the Indian kid. Well, Eric had killed her, technically speaking, but she'd been in on it, she'd helped him pick her up, she'd kept the kid in her house, she'd watched him do it.

"Do you see that look in her eyes?" he'd said. "There's nothing like the look of fear. It's the one look you can trust."

The girl was tied to the brass bedstead, gagged with her own underpants and then a scarf tied round on top of that. All you could see was the tiny little nose, the brown almost black eyes widened to their limit. Deep pools of terror from which you could drink deep and long.

"You can do it just like that," Eric had said a few nights earlier. They had been talking by candlelight in the living room, Gram fast asleep upstairs. Eric liked to come over at night and sit with her in candlelight- not eating, not drinking, just talking or sharing long silences. He had been telling her his ideas for weeks, giving her books to read. He had leaned forward toward the coffee table, the candlelight deepening his sharp features, and snuffed the flame with thumb and forefinger.

And he did it just like that: with a little pinch of the nostrils. Snuffed her little life out with a delicate pinch of thumb and forefinger. It wasn't in the least violent, except for how the girl struggled.

Edie's knees had wobbled, and her stomach had turned over, but Eric had held her, and made her a cup of tea, and explained that it took a little getting used to but that eventually there was nothing like it.

He was right about that. Virtue was just an invention like the speed limit: a convention you could obey or not, as you saw fit. Eric had made her understand that you didn't have to be good, there was nothing forcing you to be good. A realization like that was pure jet fuel in your bloodstream.

That day had been weirdly hot for September, and when the girl was dead the room seemed suddenly full of birds, singing with delicious sweetness. Sunlight spilled through the window like gold.

Eric packed the body into a duffel bag that he could sling over his shoulder, and they set off in his Windstar for Shephard's Bay where he had rented a small boat. He'd even rented fishing rods, thoroughness and foresight being just two of the qualities Edie admired in him. Eric barely crossed the street without first writing out a detailed plan of action.

The boat was a twelve-foot aluminum thing with a thirty-horsepower Evinrude clamped on the stern. Once he had started the motor, Eric was content to let Edie steer. He sat in the prow by the duffel bag, the wind ruffling the soft spikes of his hair.

The wind seemed to tear right through Edie's thin nylon jacket. And it was suddenly colder when she steered out of the bay into the expanse of Lake Nipissing. The clouds fused into a somber landscape, and before long, it became dark as evening. Edie stayed near the shore, and soon they were passing Algonquin Bay, the limestone cathedral white against the charcoal sky. The city seemed tiny from out on the lake, hardly more than a village, but Edie was suddenly afraid that someone on the shore would sense something wrong about the boat- sense something odd in the couple heading into the teeth of a storm. Then a boat would approach, and police would demand that they open the duffel bag. Edie twisted the throttle, and the waves smacked louder at the hull.

Eric pointed west, and Edie turned the motor so that the town hove round behind them. Across the whole vaporous landscape, there wasn't another boat in sight. Eric grinned and gave her the thumbs-up sign, as if she were his copilot on a bombing run.

Soon, the island took shape on the horizon, the shafthead rising into the sky like a sea monster. Edie steered toward it and lowered the throttle. Eric made a circling gesture, and Edie took them slowly round the tiny island. There was nothing else besides the mineshaft, there wasn't room. They scanned the lake for other boats, but there were none in sight.

Edie steered around a rocky point and nosed the boat in. Waves rocked them wildly, and when Eric stood up he had to clutch the gunwale, nearly pitching over the side. He jumped onto a flat rock with the rope. He pulled the boat the rest of the way onto the pebbly beach, the stones screeching against the hull.

"I don't like the look of those clouds," he said. "Let's get it done fast."