The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

Not Mark’s phone. Not the one the county had returned to me in a plastic evidence bag six years earlier, water damaged and dead. This was Mark’s old phone, the one he told me he had lost at the feed store almost seven years before the accident, the one we had argued about mildly because a new phone at the time was two hundred dollars we did not really have. I remembered that argument. I remembered being annoyed with him for a full week over a lost phone.

So why was it sitting in a tax box in our garage the whole time.

Emily was already thumbing the power button before I could ask the question out loud. It should not have held a charge after all those years. It should have been a dead brick of plastic and glass. But some cheap knockoff charging cable was coiled around it in the box, and out of nothing but her own dogged curiosity, my daughter plugged it into the wall behind Mark’s workbench, and twenty minutes later, while I was inside washing my hands at the kitchen sink, it lit up.

“Mom.”

I turned around and she was standing in the kitchen doorway holding it out in front of her like it was something that might bite her.

“Mom, you need to see this.”

“Honey, see what.”

“There’s a video. In the gallery. It’s dated the day before they left.”

My stomach did something I have no good word for. I dried my hands on my jeans and took the phone from her, and my own fingers were shaking so hard it took me three tries to press play.

The video opened on Mark’s face, lit blue by the dashboard light of his truck, parked somewhere I did not recognize at first, and then I saw the dark shape of Comfort Lake behind him through the windshield and I understood he was sitting in the parking lot at the marina, the night before he took the boys out. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had not slept.

“If anybody ever needs to know what really happened,” Mark said to the phone, so quietly I had to turn the volume all the way up, “start with what I saw tonight.”

Then he turned the phone around, out through the windshield, toward the dock.

And the very first person who appeared on that screen, moving fast along the dock in the dark with a flashlight, kneeling at the stern of Mark’s own boat where the outboard motor housing sat, was the same man who had spent every single day of the last six years standing in my kitchen telling me to stop asking questions.

Jerry.

I sat down hard on my own kitchen floor. Emily dropped to her knees next to me, and we watched the rest of it together, twice, then a third time, because the first two times neither of us could make our brains hold what we were seeing.

Mark’s voice, off camera, low and furious in a way I had truly never once heard from him in twenty four years of marriage. “Jerry. What in the hell are you doing to my boat.”