The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

They searched for three weeks. Boats, divers, a helicopter from the highway patrol, forty volunteers a day walking the shoreline in orange vests. Half the town showed up with waders and thermoses and their own johnboats, men who had never met Mark personally but who came anyway because that is simply what Loon Lake does when a family goes missing off its own water. The volunteer fire department ran a command tent at the boat ramp for three straight weeks, and I remember Jerry standing at the edge of that tent every single day, handing out coffee, directing traffic, making himself useful in the particular, visible way that people later remember and thank you for at funerals.

I stood at that boat ramp every single one of those twenty one days, because I could not make myself do anything else. Emily was sixteen that summer, and she stood there with me most afternoons after school let out, and neither one of us said much of anything, because there was nothing left to say that either of us could bear to hear out loud. Eventually the investigators sat me down at my own kitchen table and told me, as gently as anyone can tell a woman a thing like that, that they believed all four of them had drowned when the boat capsized in a sudden storm that had rolled through that Saturday night, and that the current in Comfort Lake, which runs stronger and colder than people from outside ever expect, had likely carried their bodies somewhere the divers could not reach. Accidental drowning, four counts. Case closed.

I became a thirty nine year old widow with one daughter left standing in my kitchen, no husband, no sons, and a folder of paperwork from the county that used the word “presumed” so many times I started to hate the word itself.

Grief like that does not look like what people expect. I did not scream. I did not fall apart on the kitchen floor, not more than the first week, anyway. I got up. I made Emily’s lunch. I paid the mortgage. I went to the grocery store and stood in front of the cereal aisle unable to remember whether Ben liked the cereal with the marshmallows or whether that was Luke, and then I put both boxes in the cart because I could not bear to be wrong. You keep breathing because the one child you have left needs you to keep breathing. But some part of me stayed standing in that driveway with the coffee mug in my hand, and it never once, in six years, let go of the question that investigators had already closed the file on.