Free Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

told me about them; she had said there were four children, three boys and one girl. They were all older than Bo and me, but she said they were nice. But she wouldn’t really know if they were nice, you would only know that if you were a child yourself. Matt had said that I must look after Bo, but he must know that I couldn’t. I was too afraid. I was much more afraid than Bo was.
    I focused hard on a small boat out in the lake and made myself concentrate on it. I knew whose boat it was—Jim Sumack’s, a friend of Luke’s who lived on the Indian reserve.
    “That’s Big Jim Sumack,” I said loudly to Bo. I wanted to talk, to drown out the thoughts.
    Bo sighed and sucked harder. Nowadays her thumb looked all waterlogged, and it was getting a big white callus on the top.
    “He’s going fishing,” I said. “He’s going to catch a fish for dinner. He’s called Big Jim Sumack because he weighs more than two hundred pounds. He doesn’t go to school any more, but Mary Sumack’s in grade three. In the winter she didn’t come to school, and they went to see her mum and it was because she didn’t have any shoes. The Indians are really poor.”
    My mother had said we should all be ashamed. I hadn’t been sure what it was she thought we should be ashamed of, and I’d felt obscurely to blame. I thought of my mother. I tried to summon up her face, but I couldn’t get it to come clear. Bo had already stopped asking for her.
    A loon popped up out of nowhere twenty yards out from the shore. “There’s a loon,” I said.
    Bo sighed again, and the loon disappeared.
    “Uke?” Bo said suddenly, taking her thumb out and looking at me.
    “He’s not here.”
    “Att?”
    “He’s not here either. They’ll be home in a while.”
    I looked around for something to distract her, to stop her winding herself up into a rage. A spider was heading toward us across the sand, dragging a dead deerfly. Or rather he was tailing toward us, moving backwards, holding the fly with his jaws and front legs and scrabbling hard with the rest. Once Matt and I had watched a small spider trying to drag a mayfly three times his size out of a hollow in the sand. The sand was dry, and every time he got his burden halfway up the slope the sides of the hollow caved in and he slid to the bottom again. He tried again and again, never varying his route, never slackening his pace. Matt had said, “Here’s the question, Katie: Is he very very determined, or is his memory so short that he forgets what happened two seconds ago, so he always thinks he’s doing it for the first time? That’s the question.”
    We’d watched him for almost half an hour, and in the end, to our delight, he succeeded, so we decided he was not only very determined but also very smart.
    “Look, Bo,” I said. “See the spider? He’s got a fly, and he’s dragging him home to his nest, see? And when he gets him home he’ll spin a cocoon around him and then later, when he’s hungry, he’ll eat him.”
    I wasn’t trying to share my fascination with her as Matt had shared his with me. My goal was less exalted. I merely hoped that she would be interested, instead of angry, because I didn’t feel up to coping with one of her rages.
    It didn’t work, though. I thought it was working, because she leaned forward and watched the spider intently for a couple of seconds, but then she took her thumb out, got to her feet, staggered over to him, and stamped on him.

chapter
SEVEN
    Matt got home just before six. I was waiting for him on the steps of the veranda. He asked if Luke was home yet, and when I said no he didn’t say anything. He just walked straight down to the beach, stripped off everything but his underpants, and plunged into the lake.
    I’d followed him down and I stood silently on the shore watching the ripples spreading out from where he had disappeared. When he broke through the water again, he looked like a seal, wet and sleek. His body was broken into blocks of light