Philip was tall for his age then, and strong.
To Ann he’d been a giant. They lived in a giant house by a giant lake, with their mom and their dad and their dog, all giants too. There was a town nearby but it was small, or that was what Philip kept calling it. Littleton, he called it, even though it was really called Fenlan.
Viewed from a certain angle, however, it too was giant-sized.
Ann had turned ten only a month before they came there. She wouldn’t remember much about that house for long because it was very boring. There was a little yard with a plastic slide in it. She had a little room in the back with a window too high up for her to see out of without climbing on the top bunk. Her dad hated the kitchen. Her mom hated the basement. She hated that window.
As far as Ann knew, Philip didn’t hate anything. Not there, anyway.
Ann would remember the house at the lake for a long time—first, because she watched it being made. Her dad was a structural engineer and when she was little he started his own company. He was good at it and soon he was making buckets of money. The first bucket went to buying the old lot on the lake. The second bucket, to buying a beautiful sailboat to tie up there. The third, to figuring out the best house for them. The money they got from selling that other house went to building it.
It was built of cedar logs, mostly, with some concrete and stone around the foundation and slate for the roof. That summer, the summer they went there, it wasn’t finished yet. The foundation was in and the walls were up, but it was a hollow box: a maze of two-by-fours and plastic sheets, conduits and copper pipes all exposed—open holes where windows would go. So they couldn’t live in it. But the last place there had had a nice dock and a boathouse next to it, and that was where they stayed, while the crew their dad had hired finished the job.
Philip thought the boathouse was worse than the old house. It was small, shaped like a shoebox, and it was damp, and in the night the water from the lake lapped under the floorboards.
“I think it’s nice,” said Ann as they lay on the air mattresses at the far end of the little boathouse from their parents, and Philip said, “It makes me want to pee.”
“So pee,” she said.
“You first.” Philip knew the one thing that Ann didn’t like about this place was the facilities, as her dad called them: an orange outdoor toilet that got emptied weekly and smelled… well, of pee, of course.
“You don’t need to go there,” she said. “You can just go outside.”
“I can go right here,” he said, and Ann rolled over and gave him a kick.
“I would,” he said. “I’d pee all over you.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah. It would be gross,” he said, slowly so as to emphasize each word.
“Quiet time,” said her mom from behind the sheets they’d hung at the far end of the boathouse, for privacy. She was there alone with them that night; their dad, down in the city taking care of a contract with some condo dwellers. Philip pulled his headphones over his ears and changed CDs in the blue Discman he’d brought with him. He rolled over and opened the book he was reading. It was an old spy book by Len Deighton. Yesterday’s Spy. There was a picture of a rusted automatic pistol on it. Ann wanted to read it next.
When he turned the page, Ann got up and tiptoed over to the window. It was an old-fashioned wood-frame with nine panes. The glass rippled like tree gum. Outside, night settled over the lake, but she couldn’t see it, for the reflection of Philip’s reading light.
She squinted, and put her thumb on the lower left pane, and traced the crack there. When they’d arrived, it had only been as long as her middle finger. Now, it was long as her hand, heel to fingertip.
She didn’t care what Philip said: even though it was small, and temporary—and it smelled like lake, and she didn’t yet have her own space—she liked this little boathouse better than the old house. The window was just her size. And as far as the lapping water went: it was nice.
It sounded like home.
They had a beautiful boat.
She was a sailboat, made of rich brown wood—oak, and mahogany—and although even Ann could tell she wasn’t very big, she was big enough, with a long cabin where you could cook a meal and sleep overnight and use the bathroom if you needed to. That was half the reason they were here in the summer before the house was finished—their dad was in love with the boat, which he’d named the Bounty II. The first Bounty being the boat he’d owned for a while when he worked in the Caribbean, back in the day. He was in love with that one, he was in love with this one too—or so Ann’s mom said.
“That’s your true love, Bill, right there in the water. Children, say hello to your new mom.” And everybody laughed.
But even young as she was, Ann thought her father’s feeling toward the boat was more complicated than love, and maybe not as nice either. Her father bought the boat in February from a dealer he’d met when they all went to the Boat Show the month before. Their parents had agreed a small power boat made the most sense. They might use it for errands to the marina across the way, or visiting other cottagers, or fishing, or water-skiing.
When they got there, it was a different story. Ann didn’t notice anything strange about her parents at first—she fell under the spell of the fancy booths and the music, the smell of beer nuts and the pretty women who stood at all those booths, and all those boats. There was a stage show with dancers in the middle. They had scuba divers too, in a big glass tank. You could knock on the glass and the diver would knock back.
But once that magic wore off, Ann started to pick up on things. Her mom was talking constantly—more than usual, in fact. Philip hurried ahead of them, almost too far to shout. Her dad, meanwhile, became very quiet. He stopped for a moment, in the space underneath a parasail that dangled from the ceiling and stared into the fabric until Ann nudged him. When they paused at a dealer’s show space, it was usually at their mom’s suggestion. He jammed his fists into the pockets of his coat and nodded while she asked him what she thought about this, or that, and he hurried them along.
Ann was starting to wonder whether her dad really wanted to buy a boat. He looked like he just wanted to leave.
But after lunch, they stopped at a booth from a North Bay company called Clinker. There weren’t any boats here—just photographs that were wrapped in plastic, of sailboats for the most part, and a stack of three thick binders. The booth was being run by an old woman who wore a white Clinker sweatshirt and a sun visor. Her skin was wrinkled and brown as leather.
Their dad stopped, and looked at the photographs, and said to their mother: “Go look at the jet skis. I’ll catch up.” And as they went off, mom shaking her head, Ann watched as their dad stepped uncertainly up to the booth and introduced himself to the woman there.
The next month, as they sat in the tidied-up kitchen of the old house waiting for an appointment with their realtor, it emerged that he had bought them a boat. The Bounty II. Not, he admitted, exactly what they’d discussed. It had a motor on it, true, but that wasn’t the point of it. The boat was made for sailing. It was made, really, for sailing on bigger water than the lake. Twice, he said, the previous owner had sailed it down the St. Lawrence River and out into the Atlantic Ocean, south as far as the Caribbean Sea. That was where the photograph had been taken—on a bright day in the Caribbean, no land in sight. The water was a deep green, the sky uninterrupted blue. The boat was still, its sails down, mast stretching above the top of the frame. Someone—an old man, with a baseball cap and a white beard—sat in the cockpit, right hand frozen in a cheery wave.
Yes, their father said, in fact it had cost more than they’d planned to spend. “But she’s a beautiful boat,” he said, and their mother looked at the photograph, and then at him, and said nothing.
Were it not for the boat, they would not likely have moved to the new property so quickly. Their dad wanted to sail—wanted to make up for lost time, he said. And he wanted his children to sail also, and he was very keen not to waste the summer. So when school finished in June, they moved most of their possessions into storage, the family into the boathouse, and the Bounty II alongside the dock beside the boathouse.
They didn’t take the Bounty II out every day. But it quickly began to feel as if that were the schedule. Their dad was an enthusiastic sailor, and was also pretty good at it, or so it seemed to Ann. He could find wind on a still July morning and he knew about sailors’ knots and he could read a nautical chart.
They crossed the lake and back again, explored what little there was to see, waved at cottagers, and spent two nights on board, crammed into a space even smaller than the boathouse. Their mom knew how to play guitar, and the second night out their dad persuaded her to bring it along. They all sang old songs: “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and “Let It Be,” and most of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (until they cracked up laughing and had to stop).
They didn’t go out every day. But they got in quite a lot with the boat in the time they had with her.
It was July 19th, and a Tuesday. The sky that morning was a clear blue bowl, and even on the lake, it was hot. Ashore, the contractors were putting up drywall between the master bedroom and the second-floor hall. The LeSages were out, on the Bounty II.
Philip and their parents were up top in the cockpit, and that was fine with Ann. Their dad was intent on teaching him how to run the boat, so Philip was stuck behind the wheel while his dad swung the boom around and hollered for anyone topside to duck.
Ann wasn’t topside. She was below, just out of sight of the companionway, making her own fun. She didn’t have a lot to work with—most of her toys were shut up in storage. But her mom had bought her a Barbie doll in town. And she’d finally had a look at that Len Deighton novel.
So she did what she could.
At 11:22 a.m. (by the clock over the stove), Barbie awoke: trapped in the hold of a big steamer bound to Egypt with a shipment of bomb parts that the master-spy Mr. Champion was sending to terrorists. Barbie was wearing her tennis outfit, because the last thing she was doing before the bad men had stuck her with a needle was getting ready to meet her spy handler Ken for a double set of tennis and a briefing. She wobbled back and forth unsteadily, coming to herself by degrees.
“Don’t panic, girl, just figure this out—before they come.”
“Panic and you’re through,” said Ann aloud.
Outside, the weather was getting choppy, but Ann was okay with that. The steamer was going through a storm, crawling up huge waves and crashing down… lightning flashed between clouds blacker than… than, um, night. The darkest night! The men who’d captured Barbie were distracted, trying to keep the ship on course.
It all gave Barbie precious seconds, as she worked out where she was—explored the space around the spare gas tank, clambered over the wooden keel and looked for ways out.
“You’ll never escape, foolish girl.”
Ann tried not to giggle. Philip was doing voices, she figured; she could feel the coolness as his shadow blocked the sun on her.
And it was a great voice. She played along: “You can’t keep me here. My family will come get me!”
“Your family? What makes you think your family is in any position to get you?”
“My family has a helicopter,” said Ann (as Barbie). “It’s got a big machine gun on the bottom of it. And when it flies? It goes so fast!”
“Never faster,” said the voice, “than when it’s falling.”
“They have parachutes! Let me go or they’ll machine-gun you!” Ann made machine gun noises with her mouth: “CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH!”
“They can’t machine-gun me.”
“They can!”
“No.”
“Let me go!” shouted Ann, delighted.
“You don’t want to go.”
A blast of water hit Ann in the back of the head, and at that, she turned around, to give Philip hell. But he wasn’t there. The companionway was empty but for a dark, rolling sky.
Ann put Barbie down and climbed the steps.
Her dad, at the wheel, told her to stay down and make sure her life jacket was tight. The boat was rocking and rain was coming down hard, flying in all directions. They’d taken the sails down. The motor was on, chugging desperately. Philip and their mom were at the back of the boat, bailing, and looking away—
—to a huge spinning ribbon of water, climbing higher than the trees.
It was moving from side to side, twisting prettily under the fat, black clouds, like a towel spun tight between hands. It made a sound like a big waterfall, like Niagara Falls.
Her dad shouted something at her, and he met her eyes, and Ann froze. She had seen many things in her dad before, some of which she couldn’t put a name to. This was the first time she’d seen such naked fear. She had no trouble naming it.
The boat wheeled around and another big wave rocked them as she ducked back into the cabin. Water rushed in after her.
Ann grabbed onto the side of the steps as the water ran down the deck toward the bow and then came back again, a tea-coloured mix of lake water and the sand she’d trekked in with her flip-flops. It dragged Barbie along with it. She was facedown in the water. The storm had not been a lucky break for her after all.
The boat pitched and the water deposited Barbie at Ann’s feet. Still holding onto the ladder with one hand, Ann reached down with the other and grabbed Barbie by the hair. She pushed the doll into the crook of her arm and held it there as another sluice of water came through. It was freezing cold down her back, and she squealed.
“Hang on, honey.” Mom was on her knees. Hands gripping the hatch. Everyone was on their knees, because the boom was swinging wildly as the boat turned in the water.
“Close the hatch!” Ann shouted. Her mom shook her head: “No honey! I don’t want you trapped. Just stay there,” and Ann screamed, so that her breath steamed in the cooling air:
“Close it!”
And at that, the boat pitched, and her mother slipped back, and then Ann couldn’t tell anything, because the hatch was shut, and she was back in the hold of the steamer.
“Where is the girl?”
“She was knocked right out when we left.”
“Well she isn’t now, dumkopf. She has escaped. We must search the ship.”
“Who’s there?” The cabin—the hold—was dark as night. Ann held Barbie tight, and felt the deck pitch underneath her. A lash of rain and water hit one of the portholes and drew back. A latch clicked, and she heard one of the drawers sliding open. Then came a clattering—a sound of cutlery dumping onto the deck.
“Not here.”
“Philip?” The voice didn’t sound like Philip—it seemed deeper than he could manage, and… somehow foreign, and… it seemed to be everywhere.
Maybe at her shoulder.
“The little bitch is crafty,” it said.
“Only so many places to be crafty,” it said, “on this ship.”
Something covered the porthole then, for just an instant—and Ann felt a plastic bowl bounce off her ankle. When the porthole reappeared, Ann could see a rime of frost forming around its edges.
“Not there.”
Ann felt her stomach turn then, and the light shifted and shifted; the wooden hull moaned and the water that had gotten in sloshed frantically. Ann swallowed—tears of panic crawled from her eyelids. She held the Barbie tighter, and thought: We’re in the waterspout!
“Here?” Something snapped, and dishes clattered and Ann felt herself being pressed against the ladder now as the spinning grew quicker.
“Where is that little bitch?”
The boat was going to break apart!
“Give yourself up!”
“No please no!”
Ann squealed, as she felt something squirm under her arm. She reached in and pulled out Barbie, still soaking wet in her tennis outfit. She looked the doll in the face—and then turned her away, to face the dark—and (hating herself), she shouted to the dark hold: “Here she is!”
The boat pitched again, and Ann slipped in the water puddling in the bottom of the boat, and when she righted herself, she was empty-handed.
Something whistled—maybe the kettle they had for making tea….
Maybe Barbie, in the clutches of the bad men…
Screaming.
Whichever it was, whistle or scream—the noise cut short with a great crack! sound, and a sudden listing, as the Bounty II struck rock, and the spinning stopped for good.
Philip had scraped his hand raw on a rope. The Bounty II would need a new mast, a new propeller, and all or part of a rudder, and someone would have to come by to look at the hull just to be sure. But with those exceptions, no one was hurt, and dad’s precious boat had survived.
Later, that night, their mom would call it that: your precious boat, as a way to contrast the preciousness of his daughter, his son, his wife… himself.
When Ann opened up the hatch and climbed onto the deck, there were no harsh words. The boat had tangled in some water-rounded rocks that peeked out of the lake near a stand of pine trees on the shore. It was listing heavily to port, so the whole family was as much leaning against the deck as they were sitting on it. The whole deck was in shadow. The sky was brilliant blue directly overhead; to the east, towering thunder-headed clouds sped away. Her mom was there by the hatch, prying it up.
“My God, baby, you’re cold as ice!” she said as she drew Ann into her arms. “It’s like a freezer in there!”
Ann held on to her mom tightly as she pulled her into the sunlight. Their dad scrambled around them, and reached into the hatch. He unstrapped the first aid kit and hauled it to the wheel, where Philip hunched over his injured hand.
Her mom chided her for shutting the hatch, but gently. “It might seem safe to lock yourself in there, but it just traps you, honey. If the boat had turned over…”
“I didn’t shut myself in there.”
“It’s okay if you did this time. It was pretty scary up here.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Just remember not to do it again.”
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
There was pizza back at the boathouse. Dad bought enough for the family and the contractors too, and some beer besides—“to drink to our good fortune,” he said, which sounded like a funny thing to say, at first. But Ann didn’t have to think long to realize that it had been a lucky day all around, and as the sun set on it, they all sat around a fire pit on the beach, going over just how lucky.
Cal, one of the drywallers, had been taking a smoke break on the lawn when the storm came in and he’d seen the twister come.
“Never seen anything like it,” he said as he reached for another bottle. “I go out, and it’s clear and hot. Couple clouds in the west, but nothing to write home about. Not even a breeze when I’m lighting up. You were out pretty far by then, but I could still see you fine. I remember thinking you were going pretty good for how calm it was on shore.”
“Calm, and fuckin’—sorry—and hot,” said Luc, a carpenter in from Montreal.
“Yeah, until then. I’m not even half finished my smoke, and suddenly it gets dark, and cold. The wind’s picked up, and there’s a cloud—a black cloud—right overhead. Blacking out everything. Thing snuck right up.”
“Forecast didn’t say anything about it,” said Dad, nodding.
“Forecasters don’t know their ass,” said Luc.
“Not today,” said Cal, and clinked the bottom of his beer bottle with Dad’s.
“Did you spot the funnel cloud?” asked Dad, and Cal nodded.
“Didn’t know what it was at first. Never seen one of those before. But yeah. It was sort of dipping down toward the lake… and screw it, I thought. I pinched off my smoke and headed back inside. Figured we’d get hit. It was that close.”
“Fuck.”
“Luc!”
“Ah. Sorry. Hey kid! Sorry!”
Ann looked where Luc was waving. Philip had gotten up and was heading toward the boathouse.
“It’s okay,” Philip called back. “I’m just taking a walk.”
Ann had another slice of pizza and chewed on it as the workmen continued their tale: how they’d shut off the generator and headed to the basement, occasionally glimpsing the rising swirl of water from the lake. Cal insisted he’d said a prayer for the LeSages, and another workman who Ann didn’t know said he tried to get to his truck to radio for help. But the wind was too strong.
They started to talk about how best to fix the boat, then. It was still tangled in the rocks—tomorrow, their dad would hire another boat from the marina across the lake, to come out and haul it back—so the conversation was pretty theoretical. As it dragged on, Ann asked if she might be excused and her mother sent her on. “Go find your brother,” she called after her and Ann said she would.
It was, after all, what she’d been intending all along.
Philip was inside the boathouse.
Not the second floor, where they were living, but the bottom—a garage, basically, where you might actually house a boat or two, if you bought the right size of boat. He wasn’t hard to spot; he’d turned the light on, and was sitting inside, along the dock and in a torn old canvas chair that had been left by the last owners. The light reflected up off the lake and made everything seem underwater.
“I peed in the lake,” he said when she came in. “So don’t go swimming.”
“Ew.” Ann sat down on the edge of the dock beside him and peered into the water. It was black. It wasn’t quite still enough to see her reflection. Philip tapped his heel on the dock. “How’s your hand?” she asked.
“Good. Better.”
Tap-tap-tap, went his foot. Ann looked out the front of the boathouse, which was open. The sun was pretty much down, but she could see the distant line of trees at the lake’s far side against the slightly lighter horizon. Soon there would be all kinds of stars out; since the storm, the clouds were all gone.
“Were you talking to me?” she asked. “Right before the storm hit?”
He was silent.
“And after? When the hatch closed? Were you talking to me then?”
“No,” he said.
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
“Because I thought you were,” she said. “I heard you talking. While I was playing. With my Barbie.”
“I was kind of distracted,” he said. “Big storm. Remember?”
Tap-tap.
She nodded. “I remember,” said Ann. “And…”
Tap.
“What?”
She leaned back and put her hand on his foot.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think it was my fault.”
Philip pulled his foot back and kicked a little. She let go.
“Fuck off.”
It was the worst thing you could say to someone, but Philip said it in a way just then that made her want to hug him.
He drew his feet underneath the chair and he looked at her.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s Dad’s.”
“What?”
“This never would’ve happened if we’d just stayed at home. If he didn’t buy that boat. And make us go out in it.”
Ann turned around so her back was to the water, and she could face him directly.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Swear. You didn’t say anything to me when I was down below? You weren’t, like, fooling around?”
“Fuck.” He held up his bandaged hand like he was taking an oath. “Piss. Shit. Goddammit. That good enough swearing?”
Ann rolled her eyes, and swung back around to look at the water. She pulled off her shoes, and dipped her feet in. It was freezing, but it felt good. It was numbing in its way.
Feet still in water, she lay back on the dock and looked up at her brother. This was how Barbie would see things, she thought.
“Good enough,” she said.
“Someone was talking to you?” he said after a while. “During the storm?”
She nodded.
“Think it was a ghost?”
Ann shrugged. “I thought it was you.”
“Did it sound like me?” He tapped the side of her head with his toe, but gently.
“At first. But then—”
He nodded. “A ghost.”
“On a boat?”
Philip leaned forward so his face loomed over hers, upside down. “It’s an old boat,” he said. “Remember that picture of it? With the old guy, sitting at the wheel, waving?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’s dead. And maybe he doesn’t like being dead. And maybe he came all the way up here, to get—”
His toe tapped again, against her ear.
“—his—”
“Ow!” It was harder this time, and Ann sat up fast.
“—boat back!” he shouted, and leaned forward, started tickling under her arms, yelling “Bwa-ha-ha!”
Ann’s feet came out of the water in a spray, and she kicked so more water came up, soaking them both. She squealed. He rolled out of the chair and onto his knees and dug in, tickling her waist. “Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” he said.
Ann brought her knees up from the water and gasped, “No no no!” And at that, he relented, fell back on his haunches, looked down at her with a grin.
“I hate you,” she said, grinning back.
“I hate you more,” he said, and slapped her on the shoulder.
“No I hate you more.” Ann rolled over and got up. Her ribs hurt from laughing, and she was wet, and freezing cold.
“I’m going to get changed,” she said, and stuck her tongue out. Philip gave her a pro-forma middle finger, then nodded. Made a show of shivering.
“We’re both soaked,” he said. He got up too, and together they went outside and climbed the stairs to their temporary home in the boathouse. They paused at the door. On the beach, one of the workmen had just tossed another log on the fire, and the sparks climbed high over the roof—nearly as high as the roof of the main house, which towered tall and black behind them. The storm, the tower of water it made, hadn’t touched the house. It hadn’t touched anything here.
But for the evidence of the boat on the rocks tonight, and Philip’s rope-burned hand, it might never have come at all.
Ann heard a sob, clawing its way from her belly. She shut her eyes.
Philip put his arms around Ann then, and hugged her close. She hugged her big brother back. She didn’t know if he was crying, then, but she sure was. He let her finish before he opened the door and took them both inside.
“I don’t think it was a ghost,” said Philip as he turned the light on, “for what it’s worth.”