Page 35 of The Deepest Lake
Maybe Rose did see this video before, way back when Jules first went missing. Her temples are pounding. The internet here is maddeningly slow. Never mind. She gives up trying to play videos with the slow Wi-Fi and pushes her phone back into her laptop bag.
The rest of the group is more interested in figuring out the schedule for the days ahead, including how the workshops will be organized. Evidently, there’s a public session for each participant, but also a private one.
“I just hope we all get enough individual attention,” says Diane from behind her big black lenses. “How many of us are there? Someone’s still missing.”
“Maybe the heroin addict with the vomit essay,” Isobel says.
Rose remembers. Five pages, one long scene—an alcoholic, drug-addled, stomach-curdling fugue.
“She lost custody of her children . . .” Isobel drops her voice as a woman with stiff steel-gray curls slowly mounts the two stairs leading to the open-air verandah and pauses to rest, attracting the attention of the waiter.
“Her name is Rachel,” someone whispers.
Rachel wrote about a binge the day after she nearly killed her children in a car accident. She lost custody of them both—a teenage son and daughter—before recovering her own sobriety. The woman in front of them has started talking to the waiter, but she seems to have a speech defect. She stammers. She keeps one arm tucked across her chest, like it’s damaged. This woman looks anything but recovered.
“I’ll give her my seat,” Rose says, rising to leave, still gripping her coffee cup and hoping the final slugs will quell her headache. There’s a patch of clean grass just past the verandah. “I’m going to spend my last bit of free time reading.”
Rose is only pages away from finishing Eva’s second memoir. She’s riveted, but the last few chapters have been harder than the first ones. Rose has lived vicariously through Eva’s many complications, both physical and emotional. When Eva decided to have a baby at midlife, she already had a grown child, Adarsha, the same daughter who doesn’t talk to her now. One of their conflicts began with an essay Eva wrote for the New York Times column Modern Love, reliving a fight Eva had with her daughter when the thirty-something found out that her future sister would be named Adhika—more or extra in Hindi.
Adarsha thought the names were too similar. She resented being yoked to this “extra,” afterthought child, a product of privilege and naivete. Adarsha thought Eva was being selfish, refusing to take genetic tests that would offer previews of any serious abnormalities. Eva’s choice to hash the disagreement out in public was the last straw for Adarsha, a fact Eva candidly reports.
“Algo más?” asks the waiter standing over Rose’s shoulder, gesturing to her coffee cup.
“No, thank you.” Rose turns and smiles, handing him the empty cup. In Spanish she adds, “I’m reading a good book. I want to know how it ends.”
“Con una muerte, o una boda,” he answers. With a death, or a wedding.
Rose laughs. “You’re right. I think that’s the rule.”
What would Jules have thought if Rose had decided to try for a baby in her late thirties or early forties? Rose was an inexperienced mother, made even more anxious by Jules’s premature birth. Then she was blindsided by a profound case of baby blues, just as her own mother had been—proof of how little accumulated wisdom we manage to pass down, generation after generation.
Of course, Rose knows that a second baby could have been every bit as hard as the first, but somehow, she doubts it. Is it unreasonable, wanting to do it one more time? Is it just a pipe dream to long for that soft, fuzzy scalp cradled in your hand, that warm little body tucked into yours? She imagines Jules would have judged her for it, but maybe after Jules read this book and saw Eva’s side, they could have had a mature discussion.
Rose feels it again: the question caught in her throat, the yearning ache in her chest for missed conversations. That, coincidentally, was what this memoir seemed to be about, too. The things we try to hold on to too tightly. The chances that slip away.
Rose has only two pages left when Lindsay crouches down next to her on the grass.
“You want to catch a boat with us, or are you going by tuk-tuk?”
“Tuk-tuk,” Rose says, “the moment I finish this. Eva’s second memoir. Did you read it?”
“Oh, yes. Horrible ending.”
“Don’t ruin it for me!”
Lindsay winks and leaves, fresh as ever in tight white jeans and a satin-blue blouse with a bow at the collar.
In the memoir, the baby, Adhika, is born—apparently healthy—to fifty-year-old Eva. The second-time mother, bold enough to venture into the world of online dating while pregnant, carpe diem, has gotten involved in a serious relationship with a handsome lawyer named Jonah. He is a prince, especially during those first blurry, blissful days home from the hospital. Eva writes a newspaper essay about how much she revels in this babymoon, in a way she simply couldn’t with her firstborn, a difficult infant. (That essay, too—published in the following year, ahead of the finished memoir—will annoy Adarsha.)
Then, a week after coming home from the hospital, sometime after three in the morning, Eva dreams of a gray, misshapen stone falling out of the sky and plunging into a lake. Eva has always loved lakes, and swimming. Her dreams are often filled with water images. But the weight of this stone dropping leaves no doubt. It’s a dark omen.
Eva checks the clock. Adhika hasn’t woken to nurse. It’s well past four. Eva goes to lift her out of her crib. Adhika is cool to the touch and strangely heavy. Eva lifts her, rocks her, lays her back down. The baby is gone—simple as that. Dead. Ten days old. Eva cups a hand around the baby’s smooth, cold skull. Impossible.
The boyfriend, Jonah, has not moved in yet, though he will later. They will marry within two months. Una muerte y una boda.
Eva, stunned and alone, knows what will follow: if not a standard investigation, at least public recrimination. In her heart she already knows that an autopsy will find some genetic abnormality or disease casting the blame back on her, the middle-aged mother. It’s just what the naysayers predicted: you can’t have it all. Even if you are fifty, white and financially comfortable, with a great team of doctors. Many will say she shouldn’t have dared to try.
Rose doesn’t lift her head because she doesn’t want any passerby to see the tears streaming down her face.