And no sign at all of any of the four of them.
For about five weeks there were boats.
Divers, on four separate days. A helicopter twice. And volunteers — people I had never met in my life, in the rain, in lines, walking miles of shoreline with sticks.
A woman from the next county came for eleven days running and I have never found out her name.
They found nothing.
Not one thing in five weeks. Not a vest, not a cooler lid, not a rod, not a shoe.
That is not normal. I have been told since, by somebody who would know, that it is not impossible and that it is not normal, and nobody has ever gone further than those four words with me.
In the end the investigation concluded that all four had drowned, and that the current had most likely taken them, and that was the phrase. Most likely.
In a single weekend I became a widow raising three daughters on my own.
I am not going to try to describe that, because every attempt I have made in six years has made it smaller than it was.
What I will say is that you go on functioning.
The children who are left still need breakfast. Lifts. Clean uniforms. Bills paid, forms signed, a parents’ evening about four months later at which I sat in a plastic chair and nodded at a man talking about coursework.
And a mother who can produce a smile when the situation calls for one, which it does about four times a day.
And some part of you stays standing in a driveway in slippers on a Saturday morning, permanently.
PART 3
Six years, and I never once stopped wondering what actually happened on that water.
Because Roscoe was careful.
Not ordinary careful.
He was the kind of man who filled the tank before it dropped below half. Who checked a forecast four separate times between Thursday and Saturday and once more in the driveway.
Who kept a blanket, a torch, a litre of water and a first-aid kit in the truck in the middle of July, and who was laughed at for it by his own sons about four hundred times.
He had been fishing that same lake for three years. Four or five weekends a season.
He knew where the shallow side was and he knew which end the weather came from.
He made those boys wear vests on a flat calm day in August and took abuse for it from all three of them, every single time, and never once gave in.
I could not make it fit. Six years on, I still cannot. A man that careful does not make one mistake large enough to cost four lives.
And every single time I said that out loud, Roscoe’s brother Garrison said the same thing to me.
“You need to let it go.”
Garrison was there from the second day.
Not the first. The first day he was on a job four hours away and drove through the night, which I have told about forty people and which is true.
He drove me everywhere for about eleven weeks because I could not be trusted in a car.
He sat with the girls. He fixed the back door, the boiler, a fence panel, a tap, the garage light, the bath.
He did all the things that fall over in a house when the man who did them is gone — and he did them without ever once being asked, for six years, and I want that on the page before anything else in this account.
He also told me, gently, repeatedly, in that voice, that going back over the accident was the only thing standing between me and getting better.
So eventually I stopped saying it to him.
It took about four months. He never told me to stop. He simply had the same four words every time, in the same voice, until saying it in that kitchen became more trouble than thinking it on my own.
I did not stop thinking it. I simply stopped saying it, which is a different thing, and which he may have counted as progress.
Then one afternoon in the spring my oldest daughter decided it was time.
Minna is twenty-three now.
She was seventeen when it happened. She has been about forty for most of the six years since — she does the car insurance, she knows when the boiler is due, she rings me on a Tuesday.
That is a thing I let happen, over about four years, by being grateful for it. I will answer for that somewhere else and not in this.
For six years I had left almost everything. Folded clothes in drawers. Boxes of tackle in the garage. Roscoe’s jackets at the back of my own wardrobe where I had to move them aside every single morning.
Some part of me had decided that touching any of it was the same as agreeing they were not coming home.
Minna did it the right way. She did not push. She said we could keep whatever mattered and let the church have what somebody could actually use.
We started on a Saturday morning with the smallest room.
