Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

me, tasting bitterness like metal in my mouth.
    “Kate?”
    I looked up at him reluctantly. He was frowning at me, looking puzzled. Daniel Crane, youngest full professor in the zoology department, standing in the middle of my living room looking puzzled, because there was one detail in his life that wasn’t quite perfect.
    I wanted to say, You have had it so easy. So easy. You may have worked hard, but luck has been with you all the way, and I bet you don’t even know it. You’re a clever man, I know that, I’m not denying that, but I have to say that compared to him, you’re nothing out of the ordinary. Not really. Not compared to Matt.
    “Is something wrong?”
    “No,” I said. “Why?”
    “You look …”
    I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He picked up his coffee and sipped at it, still watching me. I thought, I can’t do it. I just can’t. If he’s seen it—well, too bad. So be it.
    I said, “I’m nearly finished,” and went on with the marking.

chapter
NINE
    Not long ago I attended a conference in Edmonton to give a paper on the effect of pesticides on the life of still-water ponds. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant conference but on the way back we flew very low over northern Ontario, and that in itself made the trip worthwhile. I was staggered by the vastness of it. The emptiness. We flew over miles and miles of nothing, of rocks and trees and lakes, beautiful and desolate and remote as the moon. And then below us I suddenly saw a thin grey-white line, weaving about in the middle of all that nothingness, finding its way around lakes and swamps and granite outcrops. And up ahead, as if it were a balloon and that fragile line a piece of string attached to it, a small clearing appeared at the side of a lake. There were fields marked out in the clearing, and a scattering of houses and several more grey-white lines knitting them all together. More or less at the centre, identifiable by its squat little spire and by the neat square of graveyard surrounding it, was the church, and beside that, in the middle of a battered patch of playground, the school.
    It wasn’t Crow Lake, but it might as well have been. I thought, Home.
    And then I thought, Weren’t we brave!
    I didn’t mean us in particular; I meant all those who dared to live remote from their fellows in such a vast and silent land.
    Anyway, since then, when I think of home I often seem to see it from the air. I home in on it, so to speak, circling lower and lower so that more and more details become clear, until finally I see us, the four of us. Generally we seem to be in church, for some reason. There we are, two boys and two girls, sitting in a row, Bo not quite as well behaved as she would have been if our mother had been there, but not too bad, considering, and the rest of us quiet and attentive. It is possible that our clothes aren’t too clean and that our shoes aren’t polished, but I don’t get low enough to see that.
    It is odd that I always see the four of us, because we were four only for the first year. After that Matt was no longer with us. But of course that was the most significant year. It seems to me that more happened in that year than in all the other years of my childhood put together.
    Aunt Annie stayed with us until the middle of September. Having been brought forcibly to the conclusion that I might not survive the breakup of the family, she was obliged to accept Luke’s plan to give up his career in order to “bring up the girls.” She wasn’t happy about it, but there was no option, so she stayed until we were all safely settled into the new school year and then took her leave.
    I remember taking her to the station in our new (old) car. There would have been no need to go all that way—we could have flagged down the train as it passed the Northern Side Road—but I suppose Matt and Luke felt that wasn’t a sufficiently dignified send-off. I remember the train, how huge it was and how black, and the way