Providence Island. Gregor Robinson

      For Linda

      When I was a boy, I played with imaginary people and feared haunted places. The people were a father and mother and children — always lots of children — whose parts were played by the stuffed animals in my room: dogs and lions and wolves.

      Outside my bedroom window, my real parents would talk quietly below, snatches of conversation and the clink of the ice in their drinks wafting up from the stone terrace. I thought of my father as remote, even austere. My mother was nervous (highly strung, people said).

      I was an only child. I imagined noisy gatherings, parades, and games in a rambling house with lawns and gardens: a green paradise, far from the woods and ravines and lonesome swamps that haunted my dreams. Especially the swamps, the wide, ragged marshes, the stinking muskeg where there was nowhere to hide, and the abandoned railway line, and that awful swamp: And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child in; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.

      PART I

      | CHAPTER 1 |

      I came home to bury my father and to see the big house on Providence Island for the last time. The Millers’ house. I supposed it was because I had no family of my own and was an only child that I was so interested in the families of other people. Or perhaps it was atonement — if you believed in that sort of thing. If you thought it meant anything other than regret.

      My father and I were “the last of the Carriers,” as he used to put it. The Millers, on the other hand, were everywhere, even Hollywood and the United States Senate. How was it that families like theirs kept going, generation after generation, always with money, and even a certain noxious fame? I was beginning to agree with my father: he’d always said that it was because they were corrupt.

      I was driving back to Ketchum, Idaho, when my aunt called with the news. She had waited a day before phoning — no doubt meaning to teach me a lesson of some sort (we were Presbyterian), although she had already mailed her letter, she said.

      The evening sky was mauve. The plains were patchy with snow between the sage and tumbleweed. My truck was a cocoon on the empty highway.

      “Dead?” I asked.

      The dials on the dashboard shone green.

      My aunt had moved to the village of Merrick Bay to look after my father after his second heart attack, almost ten years before. Her move was a rebuke of sorts, since I would not come home.

      Her letter was full of the details of my father’s last days. The lakes were the lowest they had been in years. The weather had been fine all fall and exceptionally dry through the winter; there had been little runoff from the forests when the warm weather came. What water there had been was needed in the Musquash to keep the turbines turning; engineers in the capital made those decisions; the integrity of the local electricity system and the flows to the lower lakes were more important than the life of those small resort towns, fading in the off-season.

      My father, out for his morning stroll to Ault’s General Store to pick up the morning papers, turned and walked out from the shore, through the dead cattails, and into the sucking muck of the bottom of the bay that was usually covered by water. He walked beyond, into the dirty waves, as though hypnotized. I imagine the sky as grey and cold, a glazed look in my father’s eye. He stopped dead in his tracks, the water slurping about his ankles, pulling at his grey woollen pants.

      A boy from the hotel noticed him: my father was looking at something, something skeletal. He was pointing.

      He had spotted the gunwales of the boat the Millers had used to haul garbage to the mainland once a week before they removed the engine and it became just an unwieldy, beamy rowboat. The green rowboat. It had been a leaky wreck even before the “disappearance” of John D. Miller.

      My father and the boy from the hotel pulled the boat free. They dragged it, some of the ribs by then disintegrating, along the mud of the lake bottom to the mouth of Sucker Creek.

      I see my father as he pauses to wipe his brow and catch his breath. He is panting and pale. He replaces the white handkerchief in his breast pocket and lies down in the damp new grass ...

      There he had the heart attack, the third and last of his life.

      In the morning Katie and I made love. Afterward, I got up early to help her with the hay.

      “This is a first,” she said, “you helping with the horses.”

      Katie boarded horses. She ran river-rafting expeditions during the summer. It was how we had met, after my marriage ended and I moved west. We had been together for almost two years. On and off, as Katie would say.

      “I’ve come across men like you before — men who don’t want to get involved,” she would say.

      “I’m involved with you,” I said.

      “How do you feel about children?”

      “They grow up and turn out to be like the rest of us.”

      “I meant do you want children?” she asked.

      I didn’t know what I wanted. The notion of children remained to me a fearful swamp.

      After breakfast she drove me to the airport. A company plane would take me as far as Salt Lake City where I would transfer to a regular flight for Toronto.

      The terminal smelled of kerosene.

      “I love the smell of jet fuel,” she said.

      We walked toward the row of private jets lined up on the tarmac.

      “Will you be seeing that woman?” she asked.

      “That woman?”

      “That rich one you used to talk about.”

      “That was twenty-five years ago.”

      She shrugged.

      “It’s just about my father, his funeral,” I said. “The way he died.”

      “I wonder if you’ll be back.”

      “Room and board,” I said.

      “How do you get rid of a cockroach?”

      “Ask for a commitment,” I said.

      You could tell from the way she strode away that she was annoyed. We were friends who had become more. She wanted an answer.

      “Katie,” I called across the tarmac from the stairs to the plane. She turned and gazed at me from the open door of the terminal. “I’ll be back.” She couldn’t hear, but it seemed important. I yelled over the rising whine of jet engines. “I’ll be back.”

      She shrugged, turned, and was gone.

      On the flight from Salt Lake City, I dreamed of rattlesnakes in the cracked, dry mud of the pump house at the Applewoods’ farm. Marjorie Applewood’s warm hands on my neck while she whispers poetry and sex, her breath hot in my ear.

      I saw my parents golfing on a sunny afternoon at the Bellisle Club, the lake behind them sparkling like cut glass, my father thirty years younger — younger than I am now.

      If it was true that a person didn't grow up until his parents died, did it follow that the loss of one parent left you suspended in a state of arrested development? My mother had been flying to Montreal for her twenty-fifth university reunion. Taking off, the plane failed to become airborne. The pilot tried to abort, but the plane hurtled off the end of the runway, skidded down a ravine, and burst into flames. I was twelve years old. In the pictures in my head, instead of burning, the plane would hit the ground and shatter like a china cup. People