The Drowning Child. Alex Barclay

       5

      Shannon Fuller gripped the edge of the bar like she was about to do a push-up, her head bent over the newspaper, her broad back hunched. She stared at the photo of Caleb Veir under the headline MISSING FROM TATE. Her chest tightened. She thought of her son, Aaron, and how he had been in the lake in the pitch-black all night. But his body had gotten lodged in a shallow spot, where the water was clear, so he was found. He wasn’t MISSING. She was lucky.

      Lucky … her only child, found under an icy, glassy surface, like a sleeping beauty who might wake up. But it was better than being down in the grim depths, rock bottom, decomposing, flesh falling from his bones. A shiver crawled up her spine. She reached out to grab a cloth, a pen, a beer mat, anything to take her mind along a different path – another useless pursuit. So many useless pursuits.

      She’d replayed that evening on a loop ever since. Aaron had been at his middle school dance, she had been in The Crow Bar alone, feeling sorry for herself, drinking herself into oblivion, crying into beer after beer after beer. She had chased it all down with a row of shots to remind her of times when a broken heart was something other people got. She had staggered into the house behind the bar, fallen asleep on the sofa, never knew her baby hadn’t made it home.

      She sucked in a breath, stood up straight, shoulders back, head high. She figured all bars were a desolate place in the early morning, but when she bought The Crow, she thought that would change. It didn’t. And, now, without Aaron, the desolation had seeped into every cell of her body too; she felt a part of the bar, as worn as the timber, as faded as the drapes, as stained as the surfaces.

      She remembered walking into The Crow Bar seven years earlier, with four-year-old Aaron, and sixteen-year-old Seth, who she could feel was already pulling away from her, already worrying her with his behavior, and his friends, and his recklessness. Her sweet, handsome, loving, affectionate little nephew had turned into someone she couldn’t understand. He had effectively been her son since he was eight years old, when her sister, Jessie, was killed in an instant by a brain aneurysm. Seth’s father had OD’d when he was six months old, and the only family he had left was Shannon who had always adored him, and adored him still, even in this troubled teenage incarnation. She wanted to give Seth everything her sister had dreamed of for him.

      Shannon hadn’t known that Jessie had been saving for years, and along with her insurance policy, had left Shannon quite a large sum of money. Shannon had added to it, and by the time the battered and abandoned thirty-five-year-old Lake Verny resort was put up for sale, at its knock-down price, she could afford to buy it. It made sense to her: she had spent time there as a child, she worked in a bar, Aaron loved the water, and Seth used to love it. He used to be a champion little swimmer, and Shannon wanted to reintroduce him to what was once his passion. She also wanted to employ people in town, bring business to Tate, she wanted to do good in Jessica’s honor. That day, she said yes to the real estate agent, yes to the Lake Verny Resort with its twenty brokedown cabins, yes to The Crow Bar, and yes to years and years of struggling to make ends meet. But she also said yes to something that brought her joy … until now.

      In the six weeks since Aaron had died, along with thoughts of beautiful boy, along with her tears and her paralyzing grief, she was struck with hot stabs of shame when she thought of how she must have looked to Pete Ruddock and Gil Wiley that morning, captured, as she was, like a shabby Polaroid with Bad Mom scrawled on the white strip underneath – hanging out of the doorway of a bar, puffy-eyed, messy-haired, liquor-soaked, unaware of her only child’s whereabouts, neglectful, undeserving, trash.

      Tears slid down her face. She thought of her pain, she thought of John Veir’s, she thought of Teddy’s. She pictured Gil Wiley and Pete Ruddock walking up to the Veirs’ front door, as they had walked to hers, with their white faces and their terrible news.

      Then, for a guilty moment, Shannon thought of John Veir and how his hands felt on her body, how his lips felt against hers, how she loved him, how she feared she always would.

      They had gone their separate ways before, found their way back to each other, until the last time – the time that sent her diving, heartfirst, into an alcohol haze. Now here they were, through tragedy, entwined again.