Chapter 3: The Shelf

Maggie had warned her about the boat.

“It’s not a boat,” she had said the night before, not looking up from her homework. “It’s a metal tray with a motor. You’ll hate it. Bring the good gloves.”

Nora brought the good gloves. She also moved her morning appointments, which meant Deb spent ten minutes on the phone convincing Mrs. Trombley that the poodle’s recheck could survive until Thursday, and then told Nora to go before she changed her mind. It was the second slow week in a row and a Wednesday morning off cost less than it should have. Nora tried not to do that arithmetic and did it anyway, and then she got in Evan’s truck and let it go.

They drove northwest out of town with coffee going cold in the cupholders, past the last houses on Old Reservoir Road, past the stone walls running off into second growth, past a farm lane that stopped at a cable strung between two posts. Mid April had put a red haze on the maples and nothing on the oaks. The road got narrower and the woods got closer and then there was the gate, green steel, a state sign, a gravel pull-off with one other truck in it. Gate 17. Evan got out, unlocked it, drove through, got out again and locked it behind them, all of it with the unhurried economy of a man doing a thing he had done a thousand times.

The road on the far side was paved, which surprised her. Old pavement, frost-heaved and broken, with grass growing up the center line.

“This was a town road,” Evan said, before she could ask. “It used to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Under about sixty feet of water now.”

He said it the way you would say that a store had closed. Nora had lived here nine years and she knew the story the way everyone knew it, as a plain local fact you learned early and stopped thinking about. In the thirties the state came out and took the Swift River Valley for Boston’s drinking water. Four towns went under. Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott. They dug up the cemeteries and moved the graves and burned the houses and cut the whole valley down to stubble, and then they closed the dam and let the water come up over it, and now there was a lake out here bigger than some counties felt, and Boston turned its taps and never thought about it at all. You could still find the roads if you knew where to look. They ran along through the woods, ordinary as anything, and then they went down under the water and kept going.

The pavement ended at a small clearing on a cove. There was a locked equipment shed, a gravel ramp, and the boat, which was exactly what Maggie had said it was: fourteen feet of welded aluminum with a tiller outboard, two bench seats, and a state registration number on the bow. Evan handed her a life vest, an old orange one gone soft at the seams, and put on his own, and she understood from the way he did it that this was not a formality.

“Water’s about forty-two degrees,” he said. “In April the vest isn’t optional, it’s the whole plan. You go in, you’ve got maybe ten good minutes, and the vest is what buys them.”

“Noted.”

“Tomasz went in once. Two years ago, off the landing, in about three feet of water.” A small dry smile. “He describes it at length if you let him.”

The cove was glass. The open water beyond it was almost glass, just a long slow breathing in the surface that you felt in the hull more than saw. He ran the motor low until they cleared the point and then opened it up, and the boat began to slap along in a way that traveled up through the bench and into her back teeth, and Nora laughed once, out loud, at nothing, because Maggie had been exactly right and because the morning was cold and bright and enormous.

She had seen the reservoir all her life here, the way you see it, from the overlooks, from the causeway on the way to Ware, a blue-gray plate lying out beyond the trees. She had never been on it. Being on it was different in a way she spent the first ten minutes trying to name. It was the scale, partly. The shoreline ran off in both directions and folded itself into coves and points until you could not tell where it went, and every ridge of it was forested down to the waterline, unbroken, no dock, no cottage, no mowed lawn coming down to a float. Nothing on the water but them. The sound of the outboard came back off the far shore a half second late, like the place repeating you to itself.

But it was not just the scale. Lakes had docks. Lakes had somebody’s kid on a tube and a pontoon boat going nowhere. This had none of that and never would, and the lack of it did something to the light. It was seven miles from her clinic as the crow flew, she was fairly sure of that, and it felt like the far end of Maine. The map said one thing and the water said another, and out in the middle of it she found she believed the water.

Evan throttled down after a while and pointed with his chin, the way he did.

“There she is.”

Ahead of them the shoreline seemed to continue, a long wooded rise standing gray and red-hazed above the water, and it took Nora a moment to see that it did not continue, that there was water going away on both sides of it, that the rise was separate. It looked like any other hill. That was the honest truth of it and it never stopped being true the whole way in: Snake Island looked like every other hill around the reservoir, because that was what it was. A hill that had been standing in a farm valley minding its business when the water came up around its shoulders.