Maybe that’s how it went. I do know that I paddled as hard as I could, felt the entire lake alive under me. Soon I was skimming over it, my eyes on the horizon.

“No, no, no,” I muttered with each stroke of the paddle, with each pull.

The Point was where a rocky outcropping jutted out into the lake, a thirty-foot-high piece of granite that the lake could not wear away. There the lake was deep enough for someone to jump from the top, if they had the courage. I saw it long before I got there, that bony knob poking up out of the gray water. A cloud passed over the sun, and I could see its shadow move, turning the water from gray to green.

“Mary, where are you?” I whispered, my arms aching. I was gasping for breath.

That’s when I saw it: her kayak, all alone, drifting away from The Point, toward the middle of the lake.

Desecrated

I pull myself away from the view of the water. Why did I bring us back here, really? Was it to find you a new home, a new set of parents, a future? Or did I really return to Nysa to find out what happened to Mary? To find Mary? Was that what brought me here, this tumor and a desire for closure after all these years?

We can never trust ourselves, never know our true motives. There is always something deeper at work, something unseen pulling us along to hidden ends. We paddle where we think we want to go, but all along it’s the hidden current that takes us.

After more searching, more wrong turns, more empty rooms, I find myself finally in front of the door to your room. I feel like I should knock, which is a first, because at our house in the city I never felt the need to knock. In fact, I don’t know that you ever closed your door, and I start to feel a strange sense of foreboding. Why is your door closed? Did you close it? Are you hiding something?

I don’t knock. I simply push the door open, and it swings in. There you sit on the floor in the middle of the room, on the rug. The beautiful red oriental rug that Tom had purchased to furnish this special room. My breath is taken from me because the rug is ruined, cut into pieces, and you hold a knife in your hand. What hasn’t been destroyed, which is most of it, is covered in muddy footprints.

I can’t even say your name. I can’t speak. I am too shocked and disappointed, and anger simmers, begins to boil.

You stand and run to me and fall into my arms, weeping. “Grampy, oh, Grampy,” you say.

I’m still not sure what to say. Your name finally comes to me, and it contains all the questions I want to ask but don’t know where to begin. I stare at the rug. The word that comes to mind is desecrated.