By the Tuesday we had done the garage and two bedrooms and about eleven bin bags for the church.
And about twenty people were coming to this house on the Sunday, because that Sunday was six years to the day, and that is what this family does now and has done four times.
I was in the kitchen on the Tuesday evening when she came in holding a phone.
She was white. Properly white, with the phone held out in front of her in both hands like something hot.
“Mum.”
And I knew what it was before she said anything else, because I recognised the case.
It was Roscoe’s old phone.
The one he told me he had lost.
About two years before the accident. He came in one evening in the autumn and said it had gone, and he was annoyed about it in a mild way for about four minutes, and then he was not.
We turned this house over for four days. The truck. The boat. I rang it about eleven times from the kitchen and we stood still and listened.
And then we gave up and bought him another one, and I never thought about it again until a Tuesday evening six years after he died.
And it had been in this house the entire time.
Her hands were shaking.
“Mum, you need to see this.”
“See what, love?”
She looked down at the screen.
“There’s a video in the gallery.”
“What video?”
And when she looked back up at me, something in her face had changed completely.
“It’s the last thing Dad recorded.”
PART 4
We watched it at this kitchen table, with the back door open and the light going, at about half past eight on a Tuesday.
Neither of us sat down. We stood over it with our heads together like two people reading a map.
It is four minutes and eleven seconds long. I know that the way you know a telephone number.
It is not from the lake.
That is the first thing and it needs to be the first thing.
It took the floor out from under both of us inside about four seconds — because we had both braced for water, and for noise, and for my sons’ voices, and for the worst four minutes of either of our lives.
Minna had already watched the first eleven seconds of it upstairs. She had not watched any more. She came straight down.
He is in his own truck.
At night. Parked somewhere with a streetlight behind his left shoulder and the engine off and the window down about four inches.
I have been able to work out roughly where from the sign behind him and I have not driven out there and I am not going to.
It is dated the eleventh of July.
Eleven months and four days before that weekend on the lake.
He is wearing the blue shirt. The one I put in a bag for the church about four days before Minna found that phone and then took back out again.
He looks tired. Not in the ordinary way. In a way I did not notice at any point during that entire summer and that I can now see about four seconds into a video.
And he holds the phone up and says his own name, and the date, and he says it twice, the way you do when you are making a record rather than a video.
And then he says a second name.
Garrison.
Just the name, on its own, with about four seconds of nothing after it.
He talks for four minutes.
He is not angry. He does not raise his voice once. That is the part Minna has not been able to get past and I understand why.
He is completely level the whole way through, the way he was at the hospital when Ned broke his arm — like a man reading a meter out to somebody on a telephone.
He says that about fourteen months before that night, he had started finding things in the books of the yard he and his brother ran together.
They had run that yard since 2011. Eleven years. Four men on the payroll and the two of them.
Not large. That is the phrase he uses, twice.
It’s never large. That’s the point of it.
