• A Lake in Wisconsin

    Alix Ohlin

    Fall 2024

    In later years, we’d grow accustomed to seeing each other at funerals, almost—almost—greeting them as reunions. James and Ming were lost to cancer; Wendy to a single-car accident caused, we all knew, by the drinking that had ravaged her life for years. But Eunice was twenty-seven, and most of us, at that time, had been spared too close an acquaintanceship with death. She was the first of us to cross over.

    She died at a train crossing in fact, in a forested area ten miles from her parents’ home. She had been out for a hike, and wearing headphones. We speculated that she had the music up too loud, that she hadn’t heard the train coming, hadn’t turned in time to see it bearing down upon her. But it’s impossible, some of us said—in the looping conversation we had across texts and emails and calls in the days following the news—that she didn’t notice anything. Inevitably, some of us believed it must be suicide. Others protested: nobody was as indecisive as Eunice, who couldn’t commit to a boyfriend or a job or a region of the country she wanted to live in. Even her despair, when she spoke of it, seemed migratory and unfixed. So what? She could have done it impulsively, James said, and Wendy chided, Let’s stop gossiping, none of it matters anyway.

    To which I responded, in the group chat: Our gossip is a form of love. I meant that all the theories and opinions and questions were spinning threads, a collaborative web in which Eunice, for a time, remained suspended, still close to us, still present.

    No one answered me and the conversation moved on to the details of the funeral, who was arriving when, who would share which rooms.

    We traveled to Eunice’s hometown in twos and threes, some by car and some needing to be fetched at the airport an hour away. Eunice’s parents lived in northern California, in a semirural area formerly known for logging, now for pot farming, though the family was in neither business. They wrote books, Eunice had told us, and we had for a time pictured a scholarly home, with built-in bookcases and stacks of papers cluttering end tables. This image seemed to fit Eunice’s absentmindedness and dishevelment, her air of always being somewhere else in her mind. But over the years we knew Eunice, we learned the books were how-to manuals, mostly self-published, that sold in small quantities to niche audiences: a guide to woodworking; best practices for small-business accounting; a low-acid cookbook. The books barely turned a profit and Eunice’s parents were forever on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. If this doesn’t work, they’d tell each other over dinner about some new project, we could lose the house. The house had belonged to Eunice’s grandparents; the cherry tree in the front yard had been a birth present for Eunice’s mother. The house was everything to their family. The threat of having to sell it, to use the funds to start over somewhere else, loomed over Eunice’s entire childhood. Once we learned this, we began to interpret Eunice’s vagueness as a form of fragility, as if, like the house, she was always on the precipice of disappearance.

    The house, we discovered upon our arrival, was small, squat, and plain, set back from the road by a long gravel driveway. The yard was wild with weeds. Eli, with whom a few of us had hitched a ride, stopped in front of the place and let out a sigh. “I just need a minute,” he said. From the back seat, I could only see his dark hair curling out beneath his baseball cap. In the years following Eunice’s death, it would be Eli whose life was most upended by her loss. He’d quit his job, move to Los Angeles, fracture one of his vertebrae in a car accident, develop an opioid addiction that took years to kick. He’d loved Eunice, we knew, and she hadn’t reciprocated, had even claimed not to notice it—when people brought up the way he looked at her she’d shrug and say, Oh, he’s a romantic or He’s like that with everyone, neither of which were true.

    If I’d known what would happen to Eli, and also what he would mean to me later, in the house we shared by the lake in Wisconsin, perhaps I would have given him more time. But we’d pulled over on the barest shoulder of the road, and there was a surprising amount of traffic. A pickup truck had honked at us as it passed, the driver’s scowl visible in his side mirror. Wendy and I exchanged glances.

    “Eli,” I said, and my voice was sharper than I intended. “We should go in.”

    The service was held at a funeral home in town, twenty minutes away. We’d taken over Eunice’s bedroom with the thoughtlessness of youth, doing our makeup in the mirror over the dresser, comparing outfits. I’d visited Eunice once before, during spring break of our sophomore year, so I was familiar with her quilted bedspread, the pictures of her teenage friends, her swimming trophies. It was funny to think of Eunice swimming—she’d quit after high school, and had confided to us she’d always hated it, doing it only to please her parents. And yet she’d been good at it; a medal from the state championships hung from the shelf.

    We had the house to ourselves. Eunice’s parents—she was an only child—were at the funeral home already. They’d left a key under the mat for us. Some of us would sleep in Eunice’s room tonight; her parents had said that they would welcome the company, and hotel rooms nearby were hard to find. Now that we were here, though, we felt our presence as a transgression, and we raised our voices to compensate. Georgina had come from farthest away. She was living in Monaco, which seemed very glamorous—Georgina had always been glamorous. She’d grown up in Manhattan and, from the start, had outstripped us all in sophistication. During her junior year, she’d gone to study in Italy and fallen in love with an aristocrat. None of us knows what has since happened to Georgina. She stopped answering messages, never posted on social media. On the day of Eunice’s service, she was tender with us, maternal. She checked zippers, straightened ties, gave advice on earrings and shoes. She herself looked immaculate; she wore pearls, her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. I wonder now if she knew it was the last time she would be with us, if she was particularly affectionate for that reason. Whenever I look her up, which I still do, I find a police officer in New Hampshire who has the same name, and I imagine Georgina living a new life there, having left her husband the aristocrat and started over.

    At the funeral home, we sat in the back, until the funeral director came down the aisle flapping his hands as if parting the seas—he wanted us to fan out, to distribute ourselves more evenly. He seemed worried that the room would not fill, but by the time the service began the rows were completely occupied except for the front, where Eunice’s parents sat stonily, staring ahead. They were the kind of couple who’d grown to look alike: both slender, their brown hair wavy with gray. They still ran marathons together, heading out early in the dark mornings to train. They worked together in the home office just off the kitchen; Eunice’s mother did the writing and marketing, and her father took care of accounting and distribution. Ming’s parents, who were divorced, communicated only through lawyers, if that, and she’d once said to Eunice, Don’t your parents get sick of each other? Eunice laughed and said, No. It’s disgusting. When Ming went up to read a poem during the service, she noticed they were holding hands. Not just holding hands, she told us later at the reception, but gripping them, elbow to elbow, as if they were about to jump off a cliff together.

    It was at the reception that we met Eunice’s high school boyfriend and her swim teammates. We didn’t recognize the Eunice they talked about—a party girl, kinetic with mischief, who’d organized bonfires and had once suggested they break into their school at night to swim. Our Eunice was nothing like that—she was dreamy, unreliable; if you made a plan to meet up with her, there was only a fifty percent chance she’d show. Sometimes Georgina treated her like a doll—dressing her in Georgina’s own clothes, braiding her hair at parties—and Eunice would sit still with her eyes closed, arms clasping her knees, and we were never sure whether she was listening to the talk around her or just waiting for the next thing to happen.

    Eunice’s friend Stacy, helping herself to a cookie, said, “Eunice told us you guys were all very serious,” and we laughed and said it wasn’t true. For a while, we kept comparing these versions of Eunice, trying to resolve them, as if the discrepancies were enormous, as if it were important to render a final judgment on the person Eunice had become, or as if Eunice might return to us if only we talked about her enough. She would give in and materialize, pour herself some coffee from the percolator, take a lemon bar from the buffet. But eventually the conversation petered out, and it was into this thin and baleful silence that Stacy offered to take us all on a hike the next day, to the place where Eunice had died.

    Alix Ohlin is the author of six books of fiction, most recently the novel Dual Citizens and the story collection We Want What We Want. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia.

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